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!

I want to call the uploader in a shell environment I created one script for that (maybe with less effort than using ruby or other language) for that, it only needs Curl installed on system and standard Unix commands like grep, tr and sed.

Reference: http://www.pauloamgomes.net/blog/dropbox-shell-uploader
Download: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/885388/DropBoxSimpleUploader.sh

[root@georgia ~]# sudo /etc/init.d/httpd start
Starting httpd:
[root@georgia ~]# tail -f /var/log/messages
Jan  9 09:48:35 georgia kernel: [  474.259265] (httpd,1712,0):ocfs2_reserve_clusters_with_limit:1190 ERROR: status = -22
Jan  9 09:48:35 georgia kernel: [  474.259271] (httpd,1712,0):ocfs2_lock_allocators:2546 ERROR: status = -22
Jan  9 09:48:35 georgia kernel: [  474.259276] (httpd,1712,0):ocfs2_write_begin_nolock:1732 ERROR: status = -22
Jan  9 09:48:35 georgia kernel: [  474.259282] (httpd,1712,0):ocfs2_write_begin:1856 ERROR: status = -22
Jan  9 09:49:31 georgia kernel: [  530.660071] o2net: no longer connected to node amy (num 1) at 10.176.128.7:7777
Jan  9 09:49:31 georgia kernel: [  530.661856] ocfs2: Unmounting device (147,0) on (node 2)
Jan  9 09:59:46 georgia kernel: [ 1145.772174] o2dlm: Nodes in domain E9447DBE28154DAEA1B988CEC573EB64: 2
Jan  9 10:01:05 georgia kernel: [ 1223.911192] o2net: connected to node amy (num 1) at 10.176.128.7:7777
Jan  9 10:01:09 georgia kernel: [ 1227.933348] o2dlm: Nodes in domain E9447DBE28154DAEA1B988CEC573EB64: 1 2
Jan  9 10:01:09 georgia kernel: [ 1227.938693] ocfs2: Mounting device (147,0) on (node 2, slot 1) with ordered data mode.
Jan  9 10:02:35 georgia kernel: [ 1314.467741] OCFS2: ERROR (device drbd0): ocfs2_validate_gd_self: Group descriptor #419328 has bit count 32256 but claims that 45941 are free
Jan  9 10:02:35 georgia kernel: [ 1314.467754] File system is now read-only due to the potential of on-disk corruption. Please run fsck.ocfs2 once the file system is unmounted.
Jan  9 10:02:35 georgia kernel: [ 1314.467764] (httpd,2389,0):ocfs2_search_chain:1729 ERROR: status = -22
Jan  9 10:02:35 georgia kernel: [ 1314.467771] (httpd,2389,0):ocfs2_claim_suballoc_bits:1902 ERROR: status = -22
Jan  9 10:02:35 georgia kernel: [ 1314.467778] (httpd,2389,0):__ocfs2_claim_clusters:2185 ERROR: status = -22
Jan  9 10:02:35 georgia kernel: [ 1314.467783] (httpd,2389,0):ocfs2_local_alloc_new_window:1204 ERROR: status = -22
Jan  9 10:02:35 georgia kernel: [ 1314.467790] (httpd,2389,0):ocfs2_local_alloc_slide_window:1306 ERROR: status = -22
Jan  9 10:02:35 georgia kernel: [ 1314.467798] (httpd,2389,0):ocfs2_reserve_local_alloc_bits:695 ERROR: status = -22
Jan  9 10:02:35 georgia kernel: [ 1314.467803] (httpd,2389,0):ocfs2_reserve_clusters_with_limit:1190 ERROR: status = -22
Jan  9 10:02:35 georgia kernel: [ 1314.467809] (httpd,2389,0):ocfs2_lock_allocators:2546 ERROR: status = -22
Jan  9 10:02:35 georgia kernel: [ 1314.467814] (httpd,2389,0):ocfs2_write_begin_nolock:1732 ERROR: status = -22
Jan  9 10:02:35 georgia kernel: [ 1314.467821] (httpd,2389,0):ocfs2_write_begin:1856 ERROR: status = -22
Jan  9 10:02:36 georgia kernel: [ 1315.046965] OCFS2: ERROR (device drbd0): ocfs2_validate_gd_self: Group descriptor #419328 has bit count 32256 but claims that 45941 are free
^C
[root@georgia ~]#

What made this odd is that running fsck.ocfs2 as suggested made no difference, as the output said that the disk was clean.

[root@georgia ~]# fsck.ocfs2 /dev/drbd0
fsck.ocfs2 1.4.4
Checking OCFS2 filesystem in /dev/drbd0:
  Label:              linickxcluster
  UUID:               E9447DBE28154DAEA1B988CEC573EB64
  Number of blocks:   1048535
  Block size:         4096
  Number of clusters: 1048535
  Cluster size:       4096
  Number of slots:    4

/dev/drbd0 is clean.  It will be checked after 20 additional mounts.
[root@georgia ~]#

I learn that in fact the above output was a lie! For any future googlers seeing the same issue, run:

fsck.ocfs2 -fy /dev/drbd0

The f & y force a check and fix any found issues, the force on my filesystem found the errors and we appear to be back online

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of spreadsheet and sub-netting type stuff, whilst doing this mundane work I’ve realised that I can get scripts to work for me. I’ve started to post a few PHP network functions to github which I’ve been using.

Here’s an example: I have a nokia firewall, the routing table in voyager is shown in the following format -

Network / CIDR Mask , Gateway
10.0.0.0 / 8 , 10.0.0.1

I need that same routing in a Cisco ASA format -

Network , Mask , Gateway
10.0.0.0, 255.0.0.0, 10.0.0.1

Now this is not a problem for a few routes but the firewall I’m looking at now has 177 static routes, which I don’t want to convert manually.

Roll in PHP!
Save the original routing table as a .csv file. ColA = ip/mask , ColB = gateway.

Save this a route_conv.php

<?php

	/**

		Change the below to your CSV File.

	**/

	$firewall_csv = "./routes_cdr.csv"; 

	/**

		Function to convert CIDRs such as "23" to decimall dotted like "255.255.254.0"
		I've got more of these: https://gist.github.com/1309388

	**/

	function cidr2mask($netmask) {

		$netmask_result="";
		for($i=1; $i <= $netmask; $i++) {
		  $netmask_result .= "1";
		}

		for($i=$netmask+1; $i <= 32; $i++) {
		    $netmask_result .= "0";
		}

		$netmask_ip_binary_array = str_split( $netmask_result, 8 );

		$netmask_ip_decimal_array = array();
		foreach( $netmask_ip_binary_array as $k => $v ){
		    $netmask_ip_decimal_array[$k] = bindec( $v ); // "100" => 4
		}

		$subnet = join( ".", $netmask_ip_decimal_array );

		return $subnet;

	}

	ini_set('auto_detect_line_endings', true); // detect CR

	if (file_exists($firewall_csv)) {

		$file = fopen($firewall_csv, 'r');

		$counter = 0; // array counter

		while (($data = fgetcsv($file)) !== FALSE) {

			list($ip, $netmask) = split( "/", $data[0] ); // SPLIT Col A into IP & Mask

			$netmask = cidr2mask($netmask); // Covert Mask

			$gateway = $data[1]; // Col B

			/**
				This echo is the CSV style output, but you could change this to echo "route add $ip $mask $ gateway \n" for unix style output.
			**/

			echo $ip . "," . $netmask . "," . $gateway . "\n";

		}

		fclose($file);

	} else {

		echo "404: $firewall_csv \n"; // FILE NOT FOUND.

	}
?>

from your CLI run “php route_conv.php” and enjoy the output!

When I fist saw this product I had an instance light-bulb moment, I could stop paying for a dynamic DNS service and build my own private one. As a broadband (DHCP) user I have a very basic requirement of needing to regularly update an A record so that I can find my pc

To bring my idea into fruition I began researching; I need a cli tool which I could run from cron on my linux box (to send the DNS update requests to rackspace). In my research I found rscurl, a cli tool to control cloud servers, as rackspace have a standard API for all their products I have been able to use rscurl to develop rsdns.

rsdns is a series of cli tools to adding/deleting/changing rackspace DNS records, as part of the tool development I have created a script called rsdns-dc.sh to run on my machine, below is a short how to:

How to get free dynamic dns from rackspace.

Pre-requisit: This is for linux/mac, if you want to do this on windows you’ll need bash, curl, awk, sed & dig installed – google is your friend.

The instructions below assume that you (a) have a domain and (b) have already changed your NS records to point to dns1.stabletransit.com & dns2.stabletransit.com.

Download the latest rsdns from gitgub and unpack somewhere, I like ~/bin/rsdns.

Go to your rackspace management portal and grap your username & API key (It’s under “Your Account” -> “API Access”)

Create a config file for rsdns (~/.rsdns_config) with your settings.

RSUSER=linickx
RSAPIKEY=123456
RSPATH=~/bin/rsdns/

You need your domain created on rackspace, you can either use rackspaces GUI to do this (It’s under “Hosting” -> “Cloud Servers” -> “serverabc” -> “DNS” ) or you can use rsdns, like so.

[LINICKX@SERVER rsdns]$./rsdns-domain.sh -d www.linickx.com -e spam@linickx.com

Once you have a domain setup you need an A record, this step was a deliberate design to avoid any rouge cron jobs from creating a million records, the dynamic client will only update an existing record – not create a new one.

To create the a record you going to need an IP address, it can be something random like the below, or you can use http://icanhazip.com to get your actual current IP. Again to create a record, you can use the rackspace GUI (It’s under “Hosting” -> “Cloud Servers” -> “serverabc” -> “DNS” -> “yourdomain” > “Add”) or you can use rsdns….

[LINICKX@SERVER rsdns]$./rsdns-a.sh -n dynamichost.linickx.com -i 123.123.123.123 -t 3600

In the above the TTL is set to 1hr, this is so that DNS caches do not keep the record too long. That’s all the pre-work done, now lets get your dynamic host setup!

The script to update your a record is rsdns-dc.sh, and you run it like this…

[LINICKX@SERVER rsdns]$./rsdns-dc.sh -n dynamichost.linickx.com

Easy huh? The script uses icanhazip to get your current IP, it then update the A record with it.

I never switch off my router so I have create a created a cronjob to run that script every 2 hours, plus the 1hr TTL should mean that the record is roughly in sync with my IP without making unnecessary requests – You can run the script more often if you like, just stay under the limits –> according to the API guidelines you can make upto 25 changes per min / 2 per second.

I use redhat based linux systems, so I can simply drop the following file called rsdns-dc into /etc/cron.d/ with this…

* */2  * * *     linickx /home/linickx/bin/rsdns/rsdns-dc.sh -n dynamichost.linickx.com &>/dev/null

Now we are actually done! Free private Dynamic DNS on your own zone, what more could you want?

This Recovery example guides you through PhotoRec step by step to recover deleted files or lost data from a reformatted partition or corrupted file system.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

Something I discovered ages ago (so long ago that my trial license expired) but forgot to post is that you can get an LTM VE to work in Virtual Box.

To get started download the ESX image from the F5 VE Trial Page, when you get the download import the OVA into virtualbox.

The only thing I needed to tweak after the import was the interface settings, you need two intels and a PCNet, the PCNet is the management interface. Set the PCNet to host only networking, give your laptop/pc an ip address on the host only network a 192.168.1 address and you’re good to go!

You may experience HIGH CPU issues after boot, but since these boxes are based on linux, you can use the divider=10 centos trick.

Enjoy your virtual load balancing!

You can vote for your favourite name at https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting/about/relnamef16 but I can’t see how anything can beat the beef!

The advantage of doing this is that your host machine stays snappy, responsive and won’t get too over-loaded by jobs on your VMs!

#!/bin/bash
ps -xo pid,command | grep -v grep | grep startvm | while read line ;
do
        procID=`echo $line | awk '{print $1}'`
        sudo renice +10 -p $procID
done

The above code works on a mac; although I haven’t tested it, I recon to get it running on Linux you need to update the PS command, by swapping the x for an e… like this….

#!/bin/bash
ps -eo pid,command | grep -v grep | grep startvm | while read line ;
do
        procID=`echo $line | awk '{print $1}'`
        sudo renice +10 -p $procID
done

Have fun, suggestions and improvements welcome.