HOWTO: Beat the Capture Portal to Get Your Gadgets Online

The average person has something like 1.5-2 wireless devices according to most studies.  I'm going to extrapolate that the average geek has more on the order of 3.5-4.  When we travel, our gadgets become our lifeline to our normal home life.

On a recent business trip, I left town with my iPhone 5, Nexus 7, laptop, and Chromecast (I only take the Roku on longer trips.).  This trip though was my first with the TP-Link WR-710N travel router.  I bought this on a whim when it came up for cheap on Lifehacker's daily deals.  My initial thought was that I could set it up identically to my home SSID and plug in the hotel's wired port.

At this particular hotel though, there were no wired ports so I had to use another feature of this router.  It has a WiSP (Wireless Service Provider) option for it to use for WAN/Internet.  After configuring the WiSP interface to connect to the strongest AP for the hotel's SSID, I hooked up my laptop to my home SSID and answered the captive portal once.  From there all of the rest of my devices jumped on with no problem.

Another feature of using my own router is that I was guaranteed that communication between my iPhone and the Chromecast would be supported.  Unfortunately there was one downside to the WiSP interface.  It insisted on being configured to connect to only one BSSID which meant if the AP went down it wouldn't roam automatically to a better signal.  I've looked into using DD-WRT instead of the built in firmware to get around this, but so far it seems that this particular model is not DD-WRT supported.  All in all, my solution worked and I look forward to giving it some more road tests.

Panduit Blanking Curtain

Panduit dropped off a new toy... err tool today.  It's a sample of their new blanking curtain.  Instead of a slew of 1U or so panels to attach to a rack, it's 4U that expands up to 45U.  Of course it only works if you are blanking contiguous areas.

It was a breeze to install and it is supposed to work in both square and round hole racks.  Changing the size as you add servers to the bottom of the rack is a tool less 10 second procedure.  All in all, I think it's a great new product for data center air containment.

Installed!

Deployed!

How to Explain "the Cloud" to a Non-Techie

Tonight my cousin called me to ask for help with his business computing class.  The topic was the cloud or blah blah cloud.  He wanted to know what exactly the cloud is.

This really got me thinking.  I work with both private and public clouds daily in my personal life and career, but I couldn't at first define what exactly a cloud was in non-technical terms.

The best analogy I came up with was an apartment complex.  Renters don't need the space or resources of a whole house.  But the landlord could take on the infrastructure (ie the structure, plumbing, electrical) and the maintenance and rent units of housing to the renters.  

Anyone have a better way of explaining it?  How about the differences between public, private and hybrid clouds?  

Update... or Did Ben Fall Off the Face of the Earth?

I haven't written much since June 2013.  The first few months I can blame on a project at work.  I finally got approval to replace the aging Rolm phone system at the hospital with a shiny new Cisco phone system.  After months of planning, training and worrying we went live November 1st.  Being that the old system couldn't support a T1 to bridge to the new system, we did the cut over as a flash cut having staged the phones earlier in the week.  Overall things went well except for under estimating how long 400+ analog lines take to move and a glitch with the telco.

After the phone project had settled down, I turned back to taking care of my family.  My wife, dogs and I had been rather unhappy for some time in our current house and town.  So that led me to put out my resume and find a new job. 

This spring I changed jobs to a multi-state hospital system headquartered in the next town down on the Interstate.  It's been a great career move and I'm getting to work with a lot of technology that I would never have had access to in my previous position (UCS, Nexus, OTV, and others).  Unfortunately the house has been harder to sell than we thought, but we're hopeful that by next year that too will pass and we'll be moved down the road.

So now my plans for the rest of the year.

1. Pass TSHOOT before the exam changes.
2. Dive deep into datacenter technologies.
3. Figure out ways to make my commute productive time. 

Neuron: Using grep to return the matched text

I'm working on retiring an old 3080 Cisco VPN Concentrator.  As part of this I'm trying to figure out which L2L tunnels are still in use.  I have the device logging to syslog so it's just a matter of doing some analysis.

One of the things I wanted to do was to return just the part of the syslog that looks like this:

(L2L: <L2L Tunnel Name>)

Obviously I could grep '(L2L: .*)' filename.txt and get all of the lines that have that matched.  But that still left a lot of gunk I didn't need.  Thankfully grep has an answer.  Adding the -o switch to grep results in just the matched text being returned.  I was then able to pipe this to sort and then uniq to get my list of tunnels that had been accessed.

grep -o '(L2L: .*)' filename.txt | sort | uniq

Now comes the hard part of getting contact information for the old tunnels. 

Neuron: Batch File + Excel FTW!

Excel is every network engineer's favorite way to organize lists of IPs for documentation, even though they wish they had a better solution.  Have you ever needed to add a large amount of IPs that happen to be in order?  There is a better way than typing them by hand.

So let's say you need to list out 10.10.10.1 - 10.10.10.240...

C:>for /l %i in (1 1 240) do echo 10.10.10.%i > outfile.txt


This produces a text file with an IP per line.  Copy and past that into an excel column and you're done.  If you need something more fun like say 10.10.10.0/30 - 10.10.10.252/30 you can change the first number in the parentheses to 0, the second number to 2 and the third to 252.  The syntax is that the first is the start for %i, the second is the amount to increment and the third is the stopping point.