rsdns – less typing

Robert (Jamie) Munro submitted a pull request yesterday which improves the way we can use the RSDNS tools.

RSDNS now has now a master rsdns script/command which can be used to call the other sub-scripts. For example commands like:

rsdns-a.sh -n www.linickx.com -i 123.123.123.123

… can be replaced by:

rsdns a -n www.linickx.com -i 123.123.123.123

sweet touch eh?

[nick@nickel ~]$ rsdns

Use the -h switch for details on how to use each sub command
e.g. rsdns a -h 

Available commands: 

 aaaa      Manage AAAA records, host records for IPv6
 a         Manage A records, host records for IPv4
 cn        Manage canonical name (CNAME) records
 dc        Dynamic DNS Client for rackspace cloud DNS
 did       Delete records by ID
 domain    Create & delete domains hosted by rackspace cloud DNS
 list      List domains and records hosted by rackspace
 mx        Manage mail exchange (MX) records
 ns        Manage domain name server (NS) records
 srv       Manage service (SRV) records
 txt       Manage text (TXT) records 

[nick@nickel ~]$

I’ve posted a run thru on ascii.io.

apc.php for rhel / centos

Note to self: The apc.php (script for monitroing apc performance) is stored in – /usr/share/doc/php-pecl-apc-3.1.3p1

rxalarm – Alarm Console (webhook) for Rackspace Cloud Monitoring.

When rackspace launched cloud monitoring I was really interested, especially since leaving AWS… I kind of felt a bit blind to what my servers were doing.

By default, the monitoring service sends you emails for up/down alarms… just what we need more emails! … So I have started to write an alarm console which is a compatible webhook for their API…. i.e. you can send alarms to it!

My Webhook is called [rx]Alarm… rx as in receive :)

The source code is on github (rxalam repo) and a working copy is on openshift (rxalam site).

This may end up being yet-another-project-I-don’t-finish … or it maybe not, only time will tell!

php basic twitter oauth example

Oauth it seems tricky, to help me understand I’ve attempted to code up an example which allows users to log into a php app with their twitter credentials.

The code has been pushed to a branch of my abandonware repo as I don’t plan to make on any future changes, checkout README.md for some info on how the code works.

https://github.com/linickx/a/tree/oauth

I found it quite difficult to find some simple code to do this, so hopefully ^that^ will help someone else :)

Making your WordPress.org/extend/plugin pages look cool!

Whilst browsing what is on offer at wordpress.org/extend I noticed that the plugins by automattic had fancy banners (e.g. jetpack & buddypress)… I wanted in!

Since the text on these pages is generated from the readme.txt in a given plugin’s repo I figured I’d take a look there and see if the automattic guys were doing anything different… oh yeah, there were!

These repo’s had a “assets” folder in the root, and in there was a banner-772×250.png. Simply by generating my own banner (772px wide by 250px high), creating an assets folder in each of my repos and committing did the trick – so secret sauce required! (NOTE:You have to wait a while for wp.org to update, I waited overnight)

I think these are looking rather groovy :)

RTFM: Aero in Virtualbox

Yes there are loads of “how to enable Aero in Virtualbox” posts out there, but they are all long too long ;)

  • Install VirtualBox > 4.1
  • Install Windows 7
  • Install Guest Additions
    • DURING the install, manually select 3D Support
    • Select Yes WDDM video driver
    • Ignore the warning about safe mode and continue
  • Reboot
  • In Control Panel, Personalise re-select the Window7 Default Aero Theme.
  • Done

References:

Speed, I am Speed

Recently I’ve been focusing on getting linickx.com not only available, but snappy too!

  1. HA Proxy distributes the load across two cloud servers
  2. Varnish Caches have a hit rate of between 30% & 49%
  3. WP Super Cache serves up static files to Varnish
  4. HypderDB distributes MySQL Requests across my two servers

My next step is to get some minification going, either with page-speed or a WP-Plugin.. they seem to be a bit tricky to troubleshoot tho!

If you are looking to measure your websites performance, I’ve been using pingdom for server response times and webpagetest.org for gathering client load speeds.

nd4spd

Gallery

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Need for Speed “Hot Pursuit” … Awesome!

Hacking Cisco ISE UDI

ISE Virtual Machine that thinks it a CAM
The back story… you’ve deployed your ISE appliance and the world is great! Your management need you to make a change “right now” but that virtual machine in the lab you have been using for testing is 91 days old and the eval no longer works. You raise a case to get budget and a PO over to Cisco for a lab ISE appliance or license but this change is critical, if only there was a way to use your appliance license on your VM?

Perhaps you should log into your ISE appliance and make a note of the Product Identifier (PID), Version Identifier (VID) and the Serial Number (SN).

What you might want to do now is shutdown your ISE VM and mount the disk… I always have a CentOS server kicking around for this kind of thing, so if I was to do this, I would mount the ISE virtual disk as an extra disk that CentOS has access to.

From within CentOS you can use fdisk -l to view the hard drive partitions… When you’re hacking a VM you mount as many of the ISE partitions as you can (some will fail) to see what’s there. On my test machine /dev/sdb7 was the partition of interest as it had an /opt directory (cisco always install stuff in opt).

Inside mount-point/opt/system/bin/ you might find a file called cars_udi_util, that’s the puppy that the license is bound to.

What you might want to do is rename that file and replace it with something that always gives the “right” answer. Attached is cars_udi_util.txt, a shell script I have been testing, edit the top of the file and insert the PID/VID/SN you found earlier.

Now save the cars_udi_util.txt to mount-point/opt/system/bin/cars_udi_util, that’s right remember to remove the .txt!

Unmount the disk, shutdown Centos and boot up ISE.

Now I’ve been hacking my machine and after this change the services wouldn’t start (show application status ise) to fix that I ran application reset-config ise from the ISE CLI Shell, rebooted and Voila! …The machine booted up with a blank default config.

After changing the default admin password (from cisco) it would now be possible for you to use your proper appliance license on your VM… of course this is only a temporary thing and I fully expect & recommend you undo these changes as soon as your new license arrives from Cisco.

Happy Hacking!