Binary Delusions

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

Setting up a Cisco ASA behind a Cradlepoint with IP Pass Through and Static Address

Jason Myers — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 01:06:17 +0000

This article will focus mostly on the Cradlepoint side of this setup, but will include the relevant parts of the ASA configuration to make it work. After these steps are followed you can configure VPN, NATs, and whatever else you normally do. This article assumes you have already used a PC to set the static address on the 3G/4G/LTE card.

The series 3 Cradlepoint routers that support IP pass through are the CBR400 / CBR450 / IBR600 / IBR650 Routers. IP pass through passes the IP address given by the modem through the router. I’m starting with both devices blank, but so long as your Ethernet ports are in LAN mode and no hotspot, VPN or GRE configuration is enabled.

First on the Cisco ASA:

Log into ASDM by default this is https://192.168.1.1
Run the startup wizard, and make sure to set the outside vlan or interface to DHCP
Click on Tools > Command Line Interface
Type show interface vlan 2. This is the default outside vlan. If you have changed the outside VLAN make sure to adjust the command for your vlan #
Copy the MAC address for the outside VLAN interface

Next on the Cradlepoint:

Log into the Router at http://192.168.0.1
Go to Network Settings / (WiFi) Local Networks
Check the box for Primary LAN and click on Edit
Go to Interfaces tab. Make sure Ethernet: Lan is the only port listed
Go to IP Settings, change Routing mode to IP Passthrough
Paste the ASAs outside VLAN interface’s MAC address into the MAC address location
Click on Submit. Once you do this you can no long the Cradlepoint without being cabled directly into it or in a switch between it and the firewall.

Finally on the ASA:

Log into ASDM
Go to the Configuration > Device Setup > Interfaces section
Choose the outside vlan/interface row, and click Edit
Click Renew DHCP Lease
Click OK

You should now see your modem’s static address listed as the address for the outside vlan/interface. You are ready to venture forth with the rest of your ASA configuration.

Ubuntu: What I do after install

Jason Myers — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 21:12:10 +0000

Install VPNC for the networking menu

sudo apt-get install network-manager-vpnc

Remove Empathy IM and Evolution Mail

sudo apt-get remove empathy evolution

Install Pidgin with Office Communicator Support and Thunderbird

sudo apt-get install pidgin pidgin-sipe thunderbird

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 Dia
sudo apt-get install dia
Download and install SecureCRT from vandyke.com
Download and install VMware workstation from vmware.com
Build out Windows VM for Testing and File Conversion
Migrate Music via this post
Install Wonderlist
Install Nevernote
Setup a TFTP Server as illustrated here
Setup a FTP Server as illustrated here
Setup Firefox and Ubuntu One Sync Services
Get Current Thunderbird and Pidgin via PPAs:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-stable sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pidgin-developers/ppa sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Install xchat

sudo apt-get install xchat

Ubuntu: Moving only MP3 files out of your iTunes Library

Jason Myers — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 15:02:16 +0000

So you decided to leave behind all that old iTunes baggage, and start a DRM free life. However, you have your iTunes DRMed content and your mp3 collection all in your iTunes tree. Using rsync and cleanlinks we can get around this.

Rsync will provide the file copy part of this migration; however, it leaves empty folders behind. Cleanlinks will scan for those empty folders and remove them. Rsync should be installed by default, but cleanlinks is not. So first we need to install that.

sudo apt-get install xutils-dev

There are a few other tools in xutils-dev, but cleanlinks is the most important one for this operation.

Okay now to copy the data to a good place. I have the data on an external drive just a direct copy of my Music folder from Winblows.

rsync -a --progress --include '*/' --include '*.mp3' --exclude '*' /media/ExternalDrive/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Media/Music/ /home/username/Music/

This will output something like the following:
blink-182/Take Off Your Pants and Jacket/13 Please Take Me Home.mp3 7430452 100% 9.87MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#2032, to-check=14/3559) iTunes U/ iTunes U/WWDC 2010 Session Videos - HD/ papercranes/ papercranes/VIDALIA/ t.A.T.u_/ t.A.T.u_/200 KM_H in the Wrong Lane/ t.A.T.u_/200 KM_H in the Wrong Lane/01 Not Gonna Get Us.mp3 10489372 100% 9.36MB/s 0:00:01 (xfer#2033, to-check=10/3559) t.A.T.u_/200 KM_H in the Wrong Lane/02 All the Things She Said.mp3 8566324 100% 26.10MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#2034, to-check=9/3559) t.A.T.u_/200 KM_H in the Wrong Lane/03 Show Me Love.mp3 10232548 100% 16.10MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#2035, to-check=8/3559) t.A.T.u_/200 KM_H in the Wrong Lane/04 30 Minutes.mp3 7899208 100% 9.00MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#2036, to-check=7/3559) t.A.T.u_/200 KM_H in the Wrong Lane/05 How Soon Is Now_.mp3 7833436 100% 7.07MB/s 0:00:01 (xfer#2037, to-check=6/3559) t.A.T.u_/200 KM_H in the Wrong Lane/06 Clowns (Can You See Me Now_).mp3 7689364 100% 26.19MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#2038, to-check=5/3559) t.A.T.u_/200 KM_H in the Wrong Lane/07 Malchik Gay.mp3 7578700 100% 14.40MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#2039, to-check=4/3559) t.A.T.u_/200 KM_H in the Wrong Lane/08 Stars.mp3 9924568 100% 12.07MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#2040, to-check=3/3559) t.A.T.u_/200 KM_H in the Wrong Lane/09 Ya Shosla S Uma.mp3 8583028 100% 7.95MB/s 0:00:01 (xfer#2041, to-check=2/3559) t.A.T.u_/200 KM_H in the Wrong Lane/10 Nas Ne Dagoniat.mp3 10486240 100% 30.21MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#2042, to-check=1/3559) t.A.T.u_/200 KM_H in the Wrong Lane/11 Show Me Love [Extended Version].mp3 12322636 100% 17.33MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#2043, to-check=0/3559)

sent 17202695150 bytes received 42974 bytes 26774689.69 bytes/sec total size is 20860754880 speedup is 1.21

Now we need to clean up the deadwood empty directories.

cd /home/username/Music cleanlinks

Now you should have a lovely directory structure full of your mp3s without any iTunes drmed music or content. I will not cover how to break the drm on those old itunes files, but many winblows tools are available. I suggest slowly getting what you can from the Ubuntu One Music store or Amazon!