Binary Delusions

Stuff I saw on the Internet Today

Jason Myers — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:01:32 +0000

http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/so-you-want-to-be-a-developer-part-1

Pluralsight Training: The first two courses

Jason Myers — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:08:04 +0000

So, I’m working on getting my development chops back up to speed after a 6 month hiatus, althought I’ve done some Ruby on Rails and Perl during this time for small things. Also, learning ASP.NET this time since Nashville is a Microsoft market for development in my mind. So I signed up for Pluralsight’s training classes, and I’ve worked throught a couple of them and wanted to share my thoughts.

First, I took A Beginner’s Guide to the Microsoft Web Platform. I thought this class was good at showing off all the different types of projects that you can do in ASP.NET such as web applications, web sites, and MVC. It took the time to do the same 3 examples in each of the development types, which I thought was a great thing. The purpose of this class wasn’t to learn syntax or particular tricks. It was solely to focus on the .NET architecture, and to show off it’s flexibility.

Next up for me was Introduction to ASP.NET 4 WebForms. This was the first class that was showing me how to really build things, and I’m really enjoying it. The instructors in the videos are articulate, and see to have a good understanding of what they are talking about. This class is doing a great job of breaking down all the parts of a modern web application: WCF, AJAX, server and client side controls, and data connectivity.

Wrapping this up, I have to say so far I feel I’m getting a great product for my money.

Stuff I saw on the Internet Today

Jason Myers — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 02:02:09 +0000

Nice article about development machines at Pluralsight.

http://blog.pluralsight.com/2012/02/02/build-your-own-screaming-quiet-pc-just-like-pluralsights-dev-boxes/

2011 in review

Jason Myers — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:37:53 +0000

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 42 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Mac Lync 2011 Crashing on Sign-in

Jason Myers — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:48:23 +0000

If you’ve had a problem with Lync 2011 for Mac crashing when you click the sign-in button, check out this blog. It was a strange certificate, and this certainly fixed my issues.

F5 GTM: From Start to Datacenter Failover – Part 1

Jason Myers — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:13:03 +0000

Recently, my company decided to start down a more structure path to providing Highly Available applications to both our internal and external customers. We have a custom web application and email that are two initial focuses. This lead me to looking for a product that could make it simple to fail from one data center to another. You’re options to do this are pretty straight forward, and not easily understandable (or at least they weren’t simple to me, but I’m from Tennessee). You could try some BGP failover magic to move your public IPs between data centers, or you can pull DNS tricks to do that. The F5 Global Traffic Manager and the Cisco Global Site Selectors are two good devices to help with the DNS tricks. I picked the F5s because I prefer their interface; however, both systems will perform the task perfectly. Now both of these boxes will do all kinds of crazy things like geolocation based traffic redirection etc. But, I’m focused on a few things:

Setup the F5s as my public DNS Servers
Migrate my domain name’s DNS services over to the F5s
Setup the Web and Exchange applications with an active data center and a standby data center
Test the failover

Below is a map of the overly simplified architecture.

Initial Setup

So to get started take that primary data center F5 GTM out of the box and plug it in. Don’t do anything with the secondary data center GTM yet, as we will sync its configuration over to it. Connect the primary’s management port up to a switch not on your production network, and connect your configuration computer to that same switch. Setup your computer to have an ip address of 192.168.1.254. Now point your browser to 192.168.1.245. You should be greeted with a log in screen. (Make sure you have a way to get to the Internet, you’ll need it for licensing.)

Log in as admin with a password of admin. This should begin the setup wizard. The first step in the setup wizard is to activate the licensing. So click the activate button, and you will be given some test to copy and paste into the F5 website. Once that is done they will give you a another block of test to paste back into the F5 GTM device. Click continue, and the box will be licensed. Next you will be prompted to set up the basic management settings such as IP address, hostname, time zone, netmask, and gateway. This will be followed with the password changes for both the root and admin accounts. Remember in the hostname you can only use letter, numbers, underscore, dash, and period. Next, you will see a section to set up SSH access and the allowed ranges. Make sure you enable ssh, and set the allowed range to your management networks. Finally you will have the choice of Basic Network Configuration or Advanced Network configuration. I suggest that you do the advance network configuration later. So just click finish, and the network setup wizard will complete and apply all your changes. Make sure to set your configuration computers IP address to something that can reach the new management IP address.

After completing setup, it’s time to configure the resource provisioning. Go to System > Resource Provisioning.

Make sure GTM is set to dedicated. This helps make sure it’s never asking for resources. If you purchased any other licensed modules, I recommend setting both to normal. I just disabled everything for which I did not have or buy a license.

Network Setup

Finally, for this post let’s setup the networking. Click on Network >VLANs and click the Create button.

I decided to just have an internal and external vlan, each with two ports in them. So I put in my vlan name and tag (which is the the same thing as a vlan id or number) Then I choose to have my two ports untagged. Repeat this with the other ports for the interface vlan. When finished my configuration looked like:

If you need to set speed and duplex Click on Network > Interfaces. and click on the interface Name in the list and change the setting to your desired configuration.

Next, we want to set up IP addresses for the F5. We do this by clicking Network > Self IPs, and click the create button. Fill in the IP address, netmask, choose a vlan, and make sure to have the port lockdown at allow default. Repeat this for both the internal and external IP addresses.

Now you have an F5 out of the box and are ready to start building the failover configuration.

Post 2 will cover syncing the secondary, setting up listeners, and defining the network elements.

Post 3 will cover DNS setup and migration

Post 4 will cover Wide IP (DNS Failover) setup and testing.

F5 GTM Documentation: http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_gtm/versions.10_2_3.html

F5 GTM Configuration Guide: http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_gtm/manuals/product/gtm_config_10_2.html

F5 GTM Implementations Guide: http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_gtm/manuals/product/gtm_impl_guide_10_2.html

F5 GTM Getting Started Guide: http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/bigip_getting_started_guide_10_1_0.html

Ubuntu 11.10: What I do after Install

Jason Myers — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 19:19:58 +0000

This will be updated as I add new things onto my list.

Install VPNC for the networking menu

sudo apt-get install network-manager-vpnc

Remove Empathy IM

sudo apt-get remove empathy

Install Pidgin with Office Communicator Support

sudo apt-get install pidgin pidgin-sipe

Install Ubuntu One Indicator

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rye/ubuntuone-extras sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ubuntuone-indicator

Install My Weather Indicator

sudo apt-get install indicator-weather

Install Remmina Remote Desktop Client

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:llyzs/ppa sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install remmina

Install Dia and xchat
sudo apt-get install dia xchat
Download and install SecureCRT from vandyke.com remember this trick
Download and install VMware Workstation 8 from vmware.com
Build out Windows VM for Testing and File Conversion
Migrate Music via this post
Install Nixnote – An Evernote clone

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vincent-c/nevernote sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install nixnote

Setup a TFTP Server as illustrated here
Setup a FTP Server as illustrated here
Setup Firefox and Ubuntu One Sync Services for File and Apps

Installing SecureCRT on Ubuntu 11.04 or 11.10

Jason Myers — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:31:05 +0000

If you have downloaded the SecureCRT package from the Vandyke Website and used the software center to install it, you might have a problem with executing it from the dash menu or the command line. If you execute it from the dash menu, it will not return anything; however, if you run it from the command line, you’ll get the following:
jamyers@localmachine:/usr/local/bin$ ./SecureCRT ./SecureCRT: error while loading shared libraries: libpython2.6.so.1.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
You can fix this in one of two ways.

An Ubuntu 11.04 installer is available for SecureCRT. If you would like to try it, please send e-mail to Maureen.Jett@vandyke.com.
sudo apt-get install libpython2.6

I prefer the second version. After you have installed the python libraries, you are all set to execute the program however you choose error free.

Changing VMware vCenter IP Address Breaks Update Manager

Jason Myers — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 20:58:48 +0000

So… if you move VMware vCenter to a different subnet, and have Update Manager installed, you have to change the IP address listed in the vci-integrity.xml file. The process goes like this:

Stop the Update Manager service on the vCenter Server
Go to Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Update Manager. Remember if it is 64 bit to go to Program Files (x86)
Edit the vci-integrity.xml file by changing the vpxdLocation attribute to your new IP address.
Restart the Update Manager Service

Now you can connect to vCenter

Reference: VMware KB Article

Combining MP4 files on Ubuntu

Jason Myers — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 04:11:18 +0000

If you have a video camera or phone that produces video clips in mp4 format, you might be wonder how to just append a few clips together into a video with no other editing.

The simplest way is to use MP4Box

Install the gpac library and applications

sudo apt-get install gpac

Change to the directory with the Video files
Run MP4Box to concatenate your files and output to a new file

MP4Box -cat 2011-09-23_17-45-54_71.mp4 -cat 2011-09-23_17-46-23_580.mp4 -cat 2011-09-23_17-47-44_121.mp4 -cat 2011-09-23_17-48-19_57.mp4 -cat 2011-09-23_17-48-54_74.mp4 -cat 2011-09-23_17-49-45_974.mp4 -cat 2011-09-23_17-50-36_569.mp4 -cat 2011-09-23_17-51-16_703.mp4 -cat 2011-09-23_17-52-20_932.mp4 -cat 2011-09-23_17-53-55_188.mp4 -new MooreCountryHomecoming2011.mp4