The requirement was to have the Cisco 881 WAN port control the PPPOE connection, and have it's IP as the external IP of the connection. The Cisco 881 however does not have an analog telephone port so as to directly dial the connection. The CPE here that was provided was an Thomson Speedtouch ADSL router. The Cisco WAN port is connected to one of the Thomson ethernet ports.
If the PPPOE connection is configured on the Speedtouch as well as the Cisco 881, then there will be a fight between the two, to control the connection, the result being that the connection will keep dropping, expecting one of the two to dial.
What needs to be done is to setup the Thomson Speedtouch as a bridge, using the Easy Setup wizard on its web interface. This way, the only router that will dial the connection is the Cisco router and hence will receive the external IP of the ADSL connection on its WAN interface.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Fujitsu-SAN!
I got an opportunity to setup a Fujitsu Eternux DX 80 Storage with a Fujitsu RX 200 server. Once the storage was out of the box, it was just a matter of putting up the railings and slowly placing the storage onto the grooves. Since the hard disks come pre-configured, there was no need to install them separately. I connected a laptop to the MNT port for configuration and setup an IP in the default IP range of the MNT port ( 192.168.1.1). Logged on to the web-interface using the default u/p combo (root/root). Setting up the RAID config and the volumes was quite easy, thanks to the detailed but well thought-of setup wizard.
Now the MNT port is used only for management through a direct connection to a device like server/desktop/laptop and cannot be connected to a switch. For that there is a RMT port which can be setup for remote configuration. Also , the MNT and RMT ports can't be on the same subnet.
trust me, I tried!
Now comes the part of setting up the volumes so that the server can see them. This setting is know as host affinity where we can set up the volumes in such a way that they can be 'reserved' for certain hosts. Very useful in the case of when the storage is connected to a fibre switch. This is done by using the feature of the fibre card known as WWN or World-Wide Name. This basically identifies the fibre card installed on the server to which the volume has to be associated to.
Once the volumes are setup , we needed to wait until the formatting is done.This took a while because one volume was 4TB and the other was 2TB. I tried setting up the server to recognize the volumes but it wouldn't show up. The formatting took a while to complete. Im not sure how long because I came back the next day to check, and it was done.
My first misconception was that the Storage volumes would show up during the HBA scan that usually happens when the server starts up. But after a little bit of reading, I found out that only certain fibre cards support this feature whereby you can actually boot from a SAN!
So in this case, the server OS had to load the drivers for the Fibre card , only after which the volumes could be detected. This server was running Ubuntu Server 11.04, so drivers wouldn't really be a problem.
Once the host affinity was configured and the volumes had completed formatting, the volumes showed up under devices folder on the server.
Now the MNT port is used only for management through a direct connection to a device like server/desktop/laptop and cannot be connected to a switch. For that there is a RMT port which can be setup for remote configuration. Also , the MNT and RMT ports can't be on the same subnet.
trust me, I tried!
Now comes the part of setting up the volumes so that the server can see them. This setting is know as host affinity where we can set up the volumes in such a way that they can be 'reserved' for certain hosts. Very useful in the case of when the storage is connected to a fibre switch. This is done by using the feature of the fibre card known as WWN or World-Wide Name. This basically identifies the fibre card installed on the server to which the volume has to be associated to.
Once the volumes are setup , we needed to wait until the formatting is done.This took a while because one volume was 4TB and the other was 2TB. I tried setting up the server to recognize the volumes but it wouldn't show up. The formatting took a while to complete. Im not sure how long because I came back the next day to check, and it was done.
My first misconception was that the Storage volumes would show up during the HBA scan that usually happens when the server starts up. But after a little bit of reading, I found out that only certain fibre cards support this feature whereby you can actually boot from a SAN!
So in this case, the server OS had to load the drivers for the Fibre card , only after which the volumes could be detected. This server was running Ubuntu Server 11.04, so drivers wouldn't really be a problem.
Once the host affinity was configured and the volumes had completed formatting, the volumes showed up under devices folder on the server.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Shazam!
My brother bought a Nokia X3-02 recently, and he was going through the Nokia Ovi Store, and found an interesting app,called Shazam (www.shazam.com) they've got apps for mobiles and the pc. it's an online service, which can by listening to any song clip or part of a song, identify it and give you the song details.
The wiki article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(service) makes for interesting reading. Apparently there's something known as acoustic fingerprints for audio files.
The wiki article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(service) makes for interesting reading. Apparently there's something known as acoustic fingerprints for audio files.
Cisco 887 and VPN
I'm setting up a Cisco 887 ISR where the internet facing interface is ADSL and this router is the main router for the LAN
Configure the Easy VPN server using Cisco Configuration Professional
1.Create a Loopback interface with IP address 10.10.10.10
2. Configure a Group Name along with a Pre-Shared Key.
3. I'm using a local user database for authentication by enabling AAA logins, so the user authentication is taken care of by the router.
for those who want to configure domain authentication, here's a link a found, but haven't tried yet.
http://www.blindhog.net/cisco-aaa-login-authentication-with-radius-ms-ias/
4. Setup an IP range in your network which is not under the common DHCP pool for your vpn clients
I was facing a problem with getting a VPN client for this setup, because my CCO login doesnt have a technical agreement attached to it, and I couldn't find any pointers as to how i can add it.
So I googled and found a few links where I could download it from
http://helpdesk.ugent.be/vpn/en/akkoord.php
But this VPN client could only be installed on 32 bit systems, except for the AnyConnect client , but that supports only SSL connections, for which I would have to purchase individual user licenses.
One option to install the 32 bit client on a 64 bit Windows 7 system , was to run the client in XP mode, and then do a NAT to the host computer. A little complicated but, apparently it works!
http://blogs.nil.com/blog/2009/05/28/64-bit-windows-7-cisco-vpn-client-and-xp-mode-part-2/
After some more googling, I found that Cisco did release a 64 bit VPN client , even though it was in beta.
I'm sorry that I'm not able to paste the link for this client, because when I looked for the download link now, it's been taken offline. I tried to find it again, but all I could find were torrents. They should work too, but I haven't tried them.
The version number for this client is Cisco VPN Client 5.0.07.0290 x64
Once the client is running, you can configure the connection by giving your group name as Name and the Pre-Shared Key as your password.
Once the router has connected, you will be asked for your user login. This is where the user database comes in.
Once you put in the correct user details, you're logged in!
Configure the Easy VPN server using Cisco Configuration Professional
1.Create a Loopback interface with IP address 10.10.10.10
2. Configure a Group Name along with a Pre-Shared Key.
3. I'm using a local user database for authentication by enabling AAA logins, so the user authentication is taken care of by the router.
for those who want to configure domain authentication, here's a link a found, but haven't tried yet.
http://www.blindhog.net/cisco-aaa-login-authentication-with-radius-ms-ias/
4. Setup an IP range in your network which is not under the common DHCP pool for your vpn clients
I was facing a problem with getting a VPN client for this setup, because my CCO login doesnt have a technical agreement attached to it, and I couldn't find any pointers as to how i can add it.
So I googled and found a few links where I could download it from
http://helpdesk.ugent.be/vpn/en/akkoord.php
But this VPN client could only be installed on 32 bit systems, except for the AnyConnect client , but that supports only SSL connections, for which I would have to purchase individual user licenses.
One option to install the 32 bit client on a 64 bit Windows 7 system , was to run the client in XP mode, and then do a NAT to the host computer. A little complicated but, apparently it works!
http://blogs.nil.com/blog/2009/05/28/64-bit-windows-7-cisco-vpn-client-and-xp-mode-part-2/
After some more googling, I found that Cisco did release a 64 bit VPN client , even though it was in beta.
I'm sorry that I'm not able to paste the link for this client, because when I looked for the download link now, it's been taken offline. I tried to find it again, but all I could find were torrents. They should work too, but I haven't tried them.
The version number for this client is Cisco VPN Client 5.0.07.0290 x64
Once the client is running, you can configure the connection by giving your group name as Name and the Pre-Shared Key as your password.
Once the router has connected, you will be asked for your user login. This is where the user database comes in.
Once you put in the correct user details, you're logged in!
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