Monthly Archives: July 2012

Tail Cat and Grep Your Log Files

Posted on July 12, 2012 by

I recently treated myself to a long overdue syslog server for our network devices. The system is on a Linux system (I would have it no other way) and has been instrumental to troubleshooting and auditing these past few weeks. You can read this article for some log parsing tricks ranging from basic to a bit more advanced. Cat, Grep and Tail are the commands that truly set Linux based syslog servers apart from one running on windows. Don’t get me wrong, there are other decent alternatives but it’s hard to beat a typed command and an instant result. There … Continue reading →

Posted in Networking | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Redirecting Cisco Show Command Output

Posted on July 11, 2012 by

Have you ever issued a diagnostic command on a Cisco device and wish you could keep the output to review off line at a later time? There actually is a way to do this! (without copying and pasting, etc). I recently was asked to send the results of “show tech-support” to Cisco’s TAC to get help with an issue. To my dismay the result of this command overran the length of the terminal window’s buffer. Rather than changing things on my side I knew this was the opportunity I needed to make my life easier. To send output directly you … Continue reading →

Posted in Networking | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Authenticating APC Network Management Cards with Network Policy Server

Posted on July 3, 2012 by

Working in a large environment with 100% power availability as a requirement I have had the experience of working with many APC UPS systems.  We typically monitor the UPS remotely and from time to time have to log in to check statuses or review errors.  Our environment frowns upon shared credentials as do I so authentication to these systems had to be updated.  I knew we had options because I had seen RADIUS authentication listed in the specifications for the management card. Initially I created a fairly vanilla policy and was able to log into the APC’s.  The issue, however, … Continue reading →

Posted in Networking | Tagged , , | 14 Comments

SSH Tunneling and Proxying

Posted on July 3, 2012 by

Today I want to talk about the flexibility, security, and convenience of using SSH Tunneling and Proxying to connect to your remote network devices. The SSH tunnel will act as a VPN of sorts to get us inside the network where remote access is otherwise not available. These examples will also wrap the traffic in a layer of security since all SSH tunnel traffic is encrypted. To get started let’s have a look at the diagram below: The laptop is our remote user and the network on the right is the network with some devices that we could like to … Continue reading →

Posted in Networking, Security | Tagged , , | 6 Comments