James was singing to the melody of O.P.P by naughty by nature, “You down with UDP?” To which I didn’t answer, because UDP is connectionless. He then sang “You down with TCP?” and I answered “Yeah you know me.” This was a pretty lame joke. So to top that I asked “Does this make all UDP questions rhetorical?”
I love a good lame joke 😛
So UBNT has this great controller software/hardware compliment called Unifi
Along with the coolzies hardware is a great set of software.
As far as the hardware goes they have a standard range and a long range version of the hardware.
It looks like 400′ and 600′.
The software has map overlays and a guest system. What I like is the centralized administration of all of the APs. It will go out and discover them. You can then tell each one to blink to locate them and mark them on your map.
The only think that seemed missing was an outdoor option. My contention was why not let the Unifi software control one of the outdoor APs? Well, it has been announced on this forum thread that they are going to allow the control of the Pico’s! You will be able to load the PicoM2 with the Unifi firmware in version 2.0, though there is no timeline on it yet. This will allow you to easily administer outdoor deployments such as golf courses and such.
I think I might be doing a large deployment of these relatively soon…maybe. Any of you guys used the Unifi yet?
Since I work in a highly secured data center you become numb to RFID readers and biometric access points. My friend Brian sent me a link to some cat facial recognition project. He said “You need to implement the system and issue all customers their own cat.”…hehehe. To this I said “I’m installing kinects on all doors and you will have to dance your specific pattern to gain entry.” To which he said “The most complicated dances should be attached to the bathrooms.” I said, “Oh you mean the pee pee dance?”
Besides the joke, I think that would actually be pretty cool. With the plethora of kinect hacks out right now, I could actually make it happen without too much difficulty 😛
Well my fine feathered fiends, it looks like we have a new product announcement. I was bored for a bit this weekend and I was perusing the Mikrotik forums as I am want to do. I came across this:
Looks like they took the same design and gave us more CPU and a little more RAM. This guy is clocked at 1066Mhz, but they report stable performance up to 1500Mhz. I’ve even heard reports of some distributors ordering product already! If only some distributor were fool enough to send me one to demo?!?!
I had JJ ask me the other day how to pull a file down to the mikrotik via a script, and the fetch tool is the answer.
The fetch tool will pull via HTTP or FTP and as of version 5, it can also push.
Pulling the coolest site logo
1 | /tool fetch url="http://gregsowell.com/logolong.png" mode=http |
Ahhh, how I love buzz words. We hear these constantly at the data center. I heard someone ask the other day, “What’s the difference between 2N and N+1?” You generally hear it said like “We have N+1 cooling.” or “We are 2N on our UPS.”
Sooooooo, what’s the difference? It’s pretty simple. N represents the exact amount you need, whether it be cooling or power or donuts.
If you are N+1, then you have the exact amount you need + 1 spare. N+2 would be the exact amount you need + 2 spares.
If you have 2N, then you have 2 * exact amount, or double the amount of equipment you need.
Pretty straight forward, but for those of you lost like a babe in the woods, well now you know…and knowing is half the battle. The other half is shooting people and lots of explosions and stuff. Which means that the more we learn, the more blood and guts there is…so to that end, we just need to dumb everything down.
The idea of running a lite linux server on your Mikrotik router is quite appealing. I can think of many uses: Asterisk PBX, lite web server, haproxy load balancer.
Mikrotik’s official documentation is here.
Mikrotik was kind enough to compile and patch a version of OpenWRT, though there seems to be little documentation otherwise. I made a quick video on getting it loaded, changing the password and changing the IP/routing.
Configuration Files
1 | /etc/config |
Service Commands
1 | /etc/init.d |
Page on how to build the the above source for your router.
I don’t have time for much these days, otherwise I would do some compiling and testing. If you guys have precompiled files you would like to send my way, or if you have a repository somewhere, please let me know!