In da Wok ……

Well i have’nt updated this blog in a real long time, lot of things occured in that period

i finally got a newer laptop, the older one which i repaired started having problems with the LCD, i gave up and got a new one, the lenovo g450, labs work fine in them, have stopped using slitaz completely, its just too much pain too handle office where i continue need to use ms office and visio, dont have time to keep rebooting, im totally on windows 7 right now, as long as the labs work fine i wont go into linux or openbsd till the exam is complete, ya , i paid up on Aug 11 and my lab date is Nov 9th, and i am not at all confident about it, im preparing using a donated old ine workbook in pdf format , the ccie-sp mini scenarios and the cisco website. and reading and re-reading books, once october arrives ill put up the money and buy the ine oeq questions to practise and read. im not so worried about the oeq’s as i feel no amount of preparation can guarantee anything, i intend to just be confident about it, if i dont clear the oeq’s then it should be genuinely because i did not know it, not because i forgot the answer, what i am really worried about is blanking out or not having enough time to clear the lab, that would be real sad.

Already my wife has begun grumbling about the late nights and i have to keep reminding her that it was she who pushed me into giving the lab, as she pushed me into clearing me earlier certifications, the fact is since the payment occured, i have been acting strange even according to my standards, like i drift of into inter-as scenarios in middle of conversations. i think what i need to do is clear my head from the fear of failure, i think its because of my indian mentality and i keep thinking of the cost, the cost is huge, but the exam is seeming to be worth it now, because once you get to studying and labbing you get to see so many additional smaller topics and the bulb lights in your head when you understand a once ignored topic, what i have always done, is be strong in my work related areas and have a general idea about the rest, but having more knowledge about the other stuff is becoming fun now.  the one mistake i feel i’m about to do is , not take a leave from my office before the exam, i can’t afford to do it, there is so much exciting and important stuff going on in my organisation right now, that i can’t afford to be left behind. Let’s see, i had thought it out before taking the decision and i dont want to go back now, the CCIE certification right now is just a personal quest, not a career enhancing decision,  since my boss changed, my new boss has been heaven sent, a technical person himself, work has become like the old days when i joined this organisation, fast, challenging and exciting.

76 days left , today is raksha bandhan, seems like such a short time, i havent actually completed one lab from the workbook yet, just been doing smaller labs with focus on particular topics, will keep that on for another 16 days more, all topics according to the blueprint should be covered till then, then im going to for the workbook, should take me two to three days to complete one lab.

I think i should keep a daily update on this blog as to what all i have done, but thats easier said than done.

well 4.7 is out, i finally found the src.tar.gz file , mpls here i come.

That’s where we were since last Saturday, in landour Mussourie, today evening we will be returning back and I’m kinda feeling sad about it, might write a series of long posts regarding this vacation and will definitely put up a lot of photos.

If your in working on slitaz and want to use the graphviz package, first thing you need to do after installing graphviz is , as root, type in dot -c , or you’ll keep getting errors.

I’m using the acer aspire one D250, and as mentioned before the current snapshot is the only which detects the network card fine, but along with that even the Wireless card and Display card are detected fine. OpenBSD installs fvwm as the window manager for X, which is good not enough to get started and install stuff like firefox, let me show you how to do the same.

you start X by typing startx, and you are brought on to fvwm window manager, which already has a xterm window open. In the xterm window become root by typing su and then your password. Now we will use the pkg_add command to download and install firefox from openbsd ftp server’s, for this you need to set up the PKG_PATH variable, type in the following in the same xterm window.

export PKG_PATH=”http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/packages/i386″

If you are going to downloading via a proxy then setup the proxy variables in the following manner in the same xterm window

export ftp_proxy=”http://your.proxy.ip.here:port”

export http_proxy=”http://your.proxy.ip.here:port”

and now you should be good to go, type in

pkg_add -r firefox35

this will download firefox version 3.5 and install for you on your machine. to start using firefox just type in firefox35 in any xterm window and your good to go, i.e if you dont use a proxy server to access the internet. If you you will face  the problem i had, i clicked on edit–preferences and found that i could not go to the advanced section as the window was larger than this tiny laptop’s screen. So i knew i had to change the window manager, ( i was too lazy to reboot into slitaz and search how to solve this problem in fvwm), and i did not want any gnome.kde,xfce as i wanted to keep the base very small. also i was not looking for lxde. I just wanted something to firefox and xterm and be able to access then easily, and for that best description fit was xmonad and dmenu, i had just tried the same combination a few days back on freebsd and was ok with it. So next step was

pkg_add -r xmonad

& then

pkg_add -r dmenu

then i added nano editor as i’m not comfortable with vi ( i hate it )

pkg_add -r nano

Now to see to it that startx begin’s xmonad, exit from root in your xterm window, or just open another xterm window and type in

nano .xinitrc

dont forget the dot, in this file type in

exec xmonad

type in ctrl-o to save the file and ctrl-x to exit , and then reboot, you will become root again to reboot. I could exited fvwm and then done a startx , and in fact i did it, but was not cleanly shutting down, i did’nt think too much about it, just went to another console, by pressing ctrl-alt-f2 logging in and then rebooting. Once rebooted type in

startx

and xmonad will start, to start a xterm window, type alt-shift-enter .  to start dmenu type in alt-p, this time you can firefox using dmenu, just type fire and it will auto-complete to firefox35 and press enter and firefox starts. If you don’t like the tiled window option, keep pressing alt-space till one window takes up the whole screen and then shift windows with alt-tab.   For me as of now this setup is enough, ill be reading now the spacebugs.nl website for further trying out mpls on openbsd. Don’t know how long that will take. but i am going to keep updating.

Finally Easter, turned out to be the first i really enjoyed, i guess fast does that you, as a mumbai catholic i must be of the very few who must have never fasted before, but now i’m glad i did it, the thought came to me when my ex-boss mentioned it one day over lunch, that he’s been fasting for lent for 15 years + , and anyways i thought this would be a good way to show my thanks to Jesus for all the good in my life, or atleast appreciating that whatever we get in life is good, we just have to look at it the right way. I have spent too many years looking at life the wrong way and even now many times i do, but of those many times there are few times that i remember to look at it differently and then things do work out.
So thank you Jesus for that. once i have begun my silent prayers to you, my life has changed immeasurably. Thank you for my family and friends they are the best a man can have. Thank you for making me really understand what is the meaning of patience, and thank you for still being with me for the times i forget.
Thank you for everything.

P.S - i lost 6.5 kilos on a 45 days fast, and my version of the fast was a mix of warrior/fast-5 diet. google it. now im going to go on the johnson alternate day diet, recommended by patri friedman.

I decided to setup dokuwiki, to use as a documentation and network diagram database, ( if you think any other open source tool is better for this purpose , please tell me so ) , anyways the install is super easy, and as usual my server is slitaz, just do a
tazpkg get-install php
which should install lighttpd too as your webserver, if it doesnt, install it separately,
tazpkg get-install lighttpd
Download dokuwiki’s latest version here http://www.splitbrain.org/projects/dokuwiki
extract it
copy it to /var/www and rename the directory to whatever you wish, i named it doc, so the directory structure is now /var/www/doc .
start lighttpd if not already started .
/etc/init.d/lighttpd start
then open up your browser and point to
http://localhost/doc/install.php
and follow the instructions to install it, you might need to do a
chown -R www:www /var/www/doc , if you get some permission errors.
thats it your done,
you can access your wiki at http://localhost/doc or http://yourip/doc

Once that was done i immediately showed to my colleagues who liked the concept of keeping a common storage for network diagrams and did’nt waste time in beginning to upload it there, and that’s where i hit a snag, No diagra, above 100kb would upload, i would get a error 413 entity too large. I could not figure out what was causing this error, i checked the php.ini upload and post settings as i knew that could be a problem from past experience, but everything was fine there. Finally this guy –> http://peyotest.blogspot.com/2009/12/lighttpd-php-file-upload.html saved the day. Turned out to be a lighttped error.
So if your getting a error 413 error add the following lines in /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

server.max-request = "100000000"
server.upload-dirs = ( "/tmp" )
server.network-backend = "write"

Slitaz 3.0 is out, go get the coolest linux ever right now, –> slitaz

I know its not released yet, but i downloaded it from the snapshots, once i read that the alc driver from freebsd had been ported and installed it, installation was very smooth and easy, i actually booted it from a usb drive using a tool from pendrivelinux and then did a http install . not only did it get my attansic card it also found my wireless card.
Anyways i have been waiting a long time to learn OpenBSD just for PF and now Mpls ( including MPLS VPN) which has just been added in this release. So expect blog posts on mostly OpenBSD from now on , i will not be removing slitaz in any way. as i will still by my primary Work OS, but i will not be trying and network stuff on it, just concentrating wholly on OpenBSD, So if any of you people have a acer aspire one D250 , be sure OpenBSD 4.7 just works on it.

Taken from http://www.openbsd.org/47.html
OpenBGPD, OpenOSPFD and other routing daemon improvements:

* Update capability code in bgpd(8) to follow RFC 5492.
* BGP MPLS VPN (RFC 4364) support added to the bgpd RIB.
* In bgpd(8), implement the RFC4486 BGP Cease Notification Message subcodes.
* It is now possible to enable/disable specific BGP capabilities.
* Update bgpctl(8) irrfilter to support IPv6 and 4-byte AS numbers.
* Minimal router-dead-time of 1 second and sub-second hello intervals added to ospfd(8). Additionally it is now possible to specify sub-second SPF timers for faster route fail-over.
* ospf6d(8) is now installed by default. The RIB can be synced with the kernel routing table now. Support for AS-ext LSA has been added. This is still work-in-progress but testing is highly appreciated.
* ldpd — the MPLS label distribution protocol daemon — is now installed by default. A custom kernel with option MPLS is needed to use it.