September 9, 2008
Don’t have much time due to work obligations but I wanted to quickly drop this one out there for any who have followed my install guides. I was always ragging on and on about making the install somewhat portable by putting it into the /opt/ directory and now I’ll give a good example why.
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August 6, 2008
I’ve been trying to get this one out for weeks but have not had a whole lot of time to do so. I’ve decided to drop what I have completed out there for those who may be interested. Simply put bridgetun is a convenient way to create tun interfaces and to bridge them (and other interfaces) together. I’d give it a once over and see if it helps with any of your dynamips labs. I’ll try to have a quick howto and explanation of why it would be useful as soon as I can but I give no promises 
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July 11, 2008
Setup SMART Disk Monitoring
If your disk is going bad no one going to tell you about it until you start hearing it. And if you start hearing issues with your drive it may be too late to backup your data or do anything else you need to do to not be driveless. I’m uncertain why some of this is not available as an install option for more distros but a good warning before the storm can save your data and your sanity.
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July 7, 2008
Ok, so far we have gone through the hoops to get GNS3 with dynamips/dynagen working nicely in an (almost) fully contained directory in /opt. We then went through choosing an IOS image that is right for you, if you actually have multiple legal images to choose from of course. Now lets setup a pix firewall. The PIX is out of life as far as Cisco is concerned and had been superseded by the ASA line of security devices. But, there are still a lot of the PIX around and the concepts haven’t changed too much between them. So let us go through the motions already!
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July 6, 2008
Here is another one that you may find useful to do after a default install of probably any Linux server, Disabling extra stuff from loading at startup. Ubuntu loads a ton of them and many I do not use at all. Since when do you need joystick or sound support on a server anyway? Anyways, here are some I disable and how I disable them.
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July 3, 2008
OK, I promised a friend some time ago that I’d post all of my post-install procedures and I’ve not quite followed through with that so I’m doing a few before finishing up my three part post on the “Home Hacker’s Network”. These are all just little hacks I’ve come across and modified to suit my needs. I like this one a bunch as it gives me a nice shell prompt when I login as well as when I use screen (although the gnu screen configuration part is mutually exclusive to the shell modification part).
So lets get started…
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July 3, 2008
On a headless server that you have at home or for testing I like to make sure that all security updates and trivial updates are done automatically. A good sys admin will shy away from this practice for a good reason, updates can mess things up. In a production environment or where the server setup is very complex I can understand the need to manually run updates. For me, well I’m lazy when it comes to my home machines and generally don’t have too complex of setups. Also, in my experience, I’ve hardly ever seen an apt security or trivial update cause any harm (desktop linux I have seen issues though). That being said, I like to force security and trivial updates to happen daily.
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July 1, 2008
In my last post I discussed pros and cons of setting up a managed switch between your firewall and the Internet. Here I will finish the rest of the switch configuration.
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July 1, 2008
I think that a hacker mindset is distinguished by an insatiable need to understand how things work and what is going on around them. It is with this mindset that I approached the setup I currently employ. I’m no elite hacker by any means, I just love networking and want to know more on what is happening on the outside of my network. I also have a lot of thoughts and to-do projects that require either direct sniffing of traffic prior to going through my firewall or direct access to a real Internet IP address.
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June 12, 2008
As promised here is the post regarding choosing and using an IOS image that will fit your study needs.
If you followed the first post in this series you are technically now ready to start loading up images and making labs of your own. You will need to get your hands on some IOS images (legally of course).But which IOS should you use?
Filed under: Cisco, Linux, Networking, Ubuntu | Comments (4)