We have been working with one of our clients doing Check Point upgrades – applying jumbo hotfix accumulators (JHA) and also upgrading from R7x to R80. Check Point Deployment Tool (CDT) is a fantastic tool for making this process quick, easy and painless. What is it? Central Deployment Tool (CDT) is a utility that runs on […]
Check Point Deployment Tool (CDT) Read More »
There was recently a scenario we had whilst working with a client, where we had an ESXi host running version 5.5 using a single VLAN. All of the Virtual Machines were in a single port-group, and they were untagged, sending traffic to a neighbouring Cisco switch where the port was configured as an access port.
Converting a VMware vSwitch uplink from an access port to a trunk Read More »
GRE Tunnelling. It’s a tool that should be in every network engineer’s toolbox, but not one we like to use very often. But sometimes, it’s needed. Sometimes you need to just make something work, across somebody else’s network. This week’s task is to do just that, in support of an office migration for a client.
GRE Tunnels and VRFs Read More »
When designing a network, consideration should be given to separating traffic into VLANs. This is done for logical separation, security and performance reasons. This affects the convergence of a Layer 2 Network. Most Cisco switches running STP (Spanning-Tree Protocol) will be running an instance per VLAN. This is called PVST (Per VLAN Spanning-Tree), or RPVST
Design Consideration – The effects of VLAN ID’s on Spanning-Tree convergence Read More »
One of the challenges with managing any zone based firewall on a large scale is knowing which zone everything is in. We all know that the network should be well documented, but we also know that routing tables get unwieldy, and it’s not uncommon when adding a firewall rule to be wondering exactly which zone
Identifying which zone a subnet is in on a Palo Alto firewall – Script Read More »
I recently had cause to do some auditing of a pre-built AWS environment. The lazy guy in me tried out some free tools to speed things up. Security Monkey First up was Security Monkey. This was made by Netflix. It can be found on their github:Â https://github.com/Netflix/security_monkey. It’s actually really well documented, and I just followed
Scout2 and Security Monkey – AWS Security Auditing Read More »
I’ve recently been working with a client on magically spinning up entire environments in AWS. This means I’ve learned a fair bit about AWS on the way! Without going into too much detail (as it’s the clients work), we have been bootstrapping Palo Alto firewalls. This allows you to be able to stand up a
Automated Deployments of Palo Alto Firewalls in AWS Read More »
My client recently did a fairly big change to the edge network in their data centre, including a migration to 4-byte AS numbers. This wasn’t without it’s challenges. So here is a (long) post about the challenges we faced, and some explanations of some of the more advanced features of BGP such as local-as no-prepend
eBGP – ECMP in depth! Read More »
I recently bought a 4 bay synology NAS (DS416 Play). The main issue I had was off-site backups. It’s ok having 4 disks for resilience, but if my house burns down or gets burgled, I still lose everything. So I started to think up ways of doing an offsite backup, without having to remember to
Off-site backups for Synology NAS – using two raspberry pi’s, behind dynamic NAT IP’s Read More »
A few days ago I stumbled upon the python interpreter on the Nexus platform. It got me to tinkering. In the past, I have had a requirement to grab a list of all of the interfaces on a box, the IP’s, and the masks. The interfaces and IP’s can easily be obtained from a show
Python Scripting on a Cisco Nexus 7k Read More »
