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  • Mikrotik Videos

    Check out TikTube. This is Mirkotiks’ area for instructional videos. Right now, it looks like they only have videos from the last MUM up, but I’m sure they will expand. I’ve only watched one thus far, the “Using 900 Mhz in local neighborhood cells.” I work with Steve-O, so I needed some new material to hastle him with; he called Mikrotik Microsoft in his presentation…heh. My only beef is that it is ssssllllllooooowwwww. I had to pause the video and wait until after lunch to watch it. So, if you have patience and don’t mind watching the videos a couple hours in the future, then checkem out.

  • Mikrotik Hotspot EULA Redirect

    You are running Mikrotik in hotspot mode for a customer, but don’t allow them connect to the device. They update their EULA(End User License Agreement) semi-regularly. Rather than wasting time updating their login.html constantly, you want a more flexible solution.

    My proposal is to simply use an IFrame. An IFrame is a piece of html that allows you to add a frame to your page that contains a completely seperate web page. So in effect, you will have a web page imbedded in your web page.

    Click below for PAGE CODE!
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  • Cacti Tutorial – Using CDEFs to Change Graph Data

    Cacti has some built in methods to manipulate data for display with your graphs, CDEFs. They allow you to do mathematical computations on your information. I recently made one to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit.

    I’ll show you my steps below; click read more to see the video!
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  • IPPlan and RWhois Integration Script

    Pull all of your records from IPPlan and insert them into your RWhois server automatically.

    If you are an ISP or large enterprise you will need to keep up with your addressing and assignments somehow, right? There are only a handful of products out there that will do this. The company I work for is an ISP, so my favorite address manager is IPPlan. It is really tailored to ISPs.

    It’s:

    • Web-based
    • Opensource/Free
    • Easy to use
    • Ugly graphics, not that I mind!

    If you are an ISP, in the USA, then you own a chunk of addressing from ARIN. When handing this addressing out, you are required by ARIN to add an entry either to their Rwhois server or your own for every allocation that is larger than a /30. So, if you hand someone a block of 8 or larger, you have to have an entry. On top of that, they want you to have the updates in within 7 days of the allocation. Keeping up with this can be cumbersome. IPPlan can generate Swips to email to ARIN for updating, but you have to create a new “customer” in IPPlan every time you want to do an allocation for the swips to work properly…a HUGE pain.

    ARIN has a nice little RWhois server you can run on your own server to manage your reverse records. It is all command line and there is no convenient way to administer this guy.

    My solution:

    I wrote a PHP script that queries the IPPlan database for each allocation that is larger than a /30. It takes the allocation and the description field and builds the text files necessary for the RWhois server and saves them to a folder on itself. Rather than creating a new customer for each allocation, I just use the description field; this cuts down a two minute process to about 10 seconds. Then, it deletes the old RWhois files on the RWhois server and FTPs the new ones over. The RWhois service is then restarted and it indexes all the new information. I schedule all this to run once a week to be in compliance with ARIN.

    For all the code and details, click below!!!
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  • Hidden Internal VLANs on a Cisco 6500

    Something interesting about a Cisco 6500 is that it uses hidden internal VLANs. Most people will never be aware of this because the assignment starts in the extended VLAN range. An internal VLAN is created for every port in your chassis that is not an access port.

    The command to view these VLANs is “show vlan internal usage“.

    6509-router#show vlan internal usage

    VLAN Usage
    —- ——————–
    1006 online diag vlan0
    1007 online diag vlan1
    1008 online diag vlan2
    1009 online diag vlan3
    1010 online diag vlan4
    1011 online diag vlan5
    1012 PM vlan process (trunk tagging)
    1013 Control Plane Protection
    1014 L3 multicast partial shortcuts for VPN 0
    1015 Egress internal vlan
    1016 Multicast VPN 0 QOS vlan
    1017 IPv6 Multicast Egress multicast
    1018 GigabitEthernet5/1
    1019 vrf_0_vlan0
    1020 GigabitEthernet6/2
    1021 FastEthernet9/7
    1022 FastEthernet9/6
    1023 FastEthernet9/28
    1024 FastEthernet9/25
    1025 FastEthernet9/13

    So, when beginning to do VLAN allocation planning, be sure to take this into account. It is best to begin your extended range VLANs at 1300 or above.

  • Mikrotik MUM 09 Presentations

    Looks like they have posted up PDFs on the presentations. Most seem to have pretty good information, with one in particular peeking my interest. Mikrotik API. They have a dll version and a compiled version you can use with batch files or a script of any kind to call it. They also have a Linux version and the C++ objects. I’ll have some scripts out using it soon 🙂

    Update on this: The interface to the API referenced above is proprietary and requires licensing. I’m working on making a windows interface that requires no such licensing, and should have it out shortly.

  • Failover DNS Change Script

    So, as promised, here is my DNS change script. This is written in php for a BIND DNS server. Right now it is very simplistic; it is made to change a single A record, but can be adapted to do multiples at once.

    This is designed to be used in conjunction with Webmin. Setup a remote monitor in the “System and Server Status” section under “other”.

    Webmin will monitor your web server and ensure they are up and returning a webpage that matches a regex statement. If it does go down it runs our php script with the command line parameter of “down”. The script will then change the A record in the bind file to the secondary server’s IP and then restart the bind service. Once the server comes back up, the script runs again with “up” on the command line. The up command sets the a record back to the main server. This is meant to be run on the DNS server itself. This could be adapted to issue the rndc command to reload the single zone if you so wanted.

    You will want to set the TTL on the A record down to like 60 seconds.

    Click the link below for Webmin setup and the PHP script!
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