More of my tools.
Quick Mailer– I use this to test sending emails through open relays and the like. You can kick out a quick email from some ridiculous source to your coworkers 😉
Putty– I used to use tutty because it added serial support, but now putty itself does serial support. This allows you to telnet/ssh/serial into any of your devices. I use this for all my connections, router or server.
Proccess explorer– Another sysinternals prog. This allows you to find some hidden running progs and smite them…at least, that’s what I use it for.
mstsc.exe – This is the windows remote desktop client. I keep this on my thumb drive just in case. I have hit a few machines that didn’t have it.
LDAPAdmin – My favorite LDAP browser/administrator. I’ve used this a LOT, and it has been a real life saver!
Angry IP Scanner– I use this regularly to scan subnets for active hosts. It also has port scanning capabilities, but I seldom use these.
IPerf – Bandwidth client/server testing tool. You can test from one laptop to another across a link to see what kind of BW you get. Be sure to test straight from laptop to laptop with a crossover cable first. Windows machines can be a little strange at times.
Here we go. This adds syslog and SNMP to your Cisco switches and routers. This also includes steps on adding an access list to only allow the cacti server to poll via SNMP. Click the link below to see the video!
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Here’s another product I couldn’t live without as an engineer. I am a network engineer, but I’ve been doing server admin since the beginning of my career. I also have my degree in computer science, so…I still like to program occasionally. I am an efficient programmer, or lazy, however you want to look at it. I want to be able to go start to finish on a script or program as quickly as possible. This is why I latched onto VB6 back in the day. I could start a new project, click save, and I had a working program. Autoit is much the same, only better in some ways…did I mention it is completely free!
Autoit began life as a way to automate tasks in windows. Say if you wanted to have it auto install a program and click a few buttons for you. It has gone WAY beyond those humble beginnings. It has com support, can use tcp sockets, has decent gui capabilities, can pack in files and has basic like syntax. If you know and love the VB6 command structure, you will be right at home. The help file is your first stop for anything, second are the forums. The example code in both is phenomenal.
So, what have I used Autoit for:
- Backup folder retention – keeps one week’s worth of files in it.
- Serial LCD control
- Parsing through a few hundred bind9 configs and updating them
- SNMP polling of various kinds of devices
- Stick adding for fantasticcontraption…I like to make catapults
- FTPing files on a schedule
- Checking IIS SMTP relay – send test email, check queue folder
- Parse an LDIF from an LDAP server
- Make a soundboard
- Connect to all our L2 devices and pull configs, then parse and arrange all vlans on all devices
- Parse the admin script from a WoW Mangos server and email all admins specific actions…Keeps admins from using .die all the time.
You will see me post my scripts from time to time.
Adding your first host. This also shows creating graphs and a tree structure. Click below for video tutorial!
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Configure SNMP on windows so we can poll with Cacti. Click below to see the video tutorial!
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Big announcement, for me anyway, is a new router board, the 450G. I was a big fan of the 150, which is a 5 port 10/100 series mikrotik. I believe the proc was a 130Mhz. Then they came out with the 450, which is a 5 port 10/100 series with a 300Mhz proc. NOW they have the 450G which is a 5 10/100/1000 porter that has 256 megs of ram which can hold the full Internet route table(my routers are currently using about 160MB to hold the table with about 272K routes) and a 680Mhz proc! No numbers yet, speed testing or price, but the 150/450 could both be had with a case for ~$90, so perhaps we can hope for the same!
This is the first in my series of cacti tutorials. I’m starting at the start. Once you have CactiEZ loaded, the first thing you need to do is set a static IP on your server. I present you with two command line methods to do so. Click below to see the video tutorial!