B. I. T.

New site launching in December

ggreenlee — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:06:19 +0000

We are launching a brand new site in December. The site is going to include a free to join social networking component called “BITNet”. It will allow members to create professional profiles, upload videos and pics as well as link your profile to your Twitter account. Members will also be able to connect to other members by adding them as friends. BITNet will enable users to have their own blog site and create groups that can be used as study groups. Blacks In Technology will also begin posting audio and video podcasts that will include a variety of topics such as network security, the latest trends in technology as well as personal interviews with other African Americans in technology. Stay tuned and follow our progress on twitter @blkintechnology

Greg

PDR (Pride)

ggreenlee — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 19:22:09 +0000

Pride
Determination
Resilience
I love when I watch an inspirational movie, especially one that gets me thinking. Today I watched the movie “Pride”. It’s an inspiring story about Jim Ellis, a swim coach who coached an inner city community center swim team (PDR) to a swim meet championship. He inspired the minds of the young African American boys and girls in that community to be more than what the world expected them to be, more than what they initially expected of themselves. At times I feel we have lost that PRIDE and that some how, some way we must find a way to regain it. We must find that determination. What do we need to do in order to regain that lost sense of PRIDE? The first thing we must do is learn to care again. Not just for our own children but for all children. Second thing we must do is lead by example. We must be a beacon of light for our kids. They need to see hard work and work ethic in everything we do. Lets start showing them the PDR way, lets start teaching them how to have PRIDE.

Going ape over Rackmonkey

ggreenlee — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:19:36 +0000

Hey all:
As you all know I am a fan of open source software. I happen to stumble upon a pretty neat piece of software called Rackmonkey.
Rackmonkey is a web based rack and asset tracking/management application. It allows you to keep track of what is in the racks of your data center as well as view detailed information about the devices in that rack. Rackmonkey also allows you to add different types of equipment along with vendor specific descriptions. You have the ability to specify what slot in the rack the piece of equipment occupies. When adding different types of equipment you can specify how many U high the equipment is so when its time to add it to the rack you specify the U number and the software knows automatically how many other U it should occupy. You can enter in the serial numbers , purchase date, manufacturer, OS version and license, and the role the device plays. This makes rackmonkey a one shop stop for finding out information about what’s in your datacenter. Hopefully my job is as enthused as I am about it and maybe integrate it into our customer portal. Exciting stuff. The install was pretty simple. I downloaded the tarball and read the README file. It walked me through setting it up step by step. I use Ubuntu linux to set it up on but there are instructions for setting it up on RedHat based distros as well. That’s all for now. See ya next time.

Greg Greenlee

Documentation, Processes and procedures…oh my!!!

ggreenlee — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 23:58:13 +0000

Hello friends:
I want to talk about the Big O. No, not Oscar Robertson, I mean organization. Organization is key to being a great systems administrator. Documentation, processes and procedures all fall in the category of organization. Now, I know some of you grumble when you hear the word documentation. Sure it’s tedious and cumbersome but eliminates headaches in the long run. Whether its a documented procedure on how to perform a necessary action or just a document on the physical/logical layout of your network infrastructure, documentation can keep you from pulling your hair out.
Processes and procedures are extremely important as well. Anarchy can strike any I.T. organization without proper processes and procedures in place. It helps form cohesion within your team but at the same time, also creates a form of independence. Knowing that you have clear and concise processes and procedures, and the documentation to back it, in place, allows you to let your I.T. personnel work independently at times when it is needed and also allows for ease of accountability. You are able to pin point who didn’t do what and what procedure and or process was not followed.
There are times when you may scream out “Why me?”, when filling out a change management for, just know that documentation, process and procedures are beneficial to the smooth operation of any I.T. organization. Oh my!!!!!

Greg Greenlee

Wacky day at work

ggreenlee — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 04:05:02 +0000

Today at work turned out to be quite interesting. I am involved in a setting up an HA (High Availability) environment for a client. It consists of several web servers, several database servers, Cisco switches (configured as a stack) a couple of firewalls (active/passive) and a couple of load balancers. Since I had never configured Cisco switches in a stack configuration I was basically learning on the fly. One huge thing to remember when you are configuring Cisco switches in a stack configuration is that, the IOS must be identical. If they are not identical the stack will not operate correctly, which happened to me today. My first step in resolving this issue was to tftp the most current image from the router to the tftp server then copy the image up to the other routers. The first problem I ran into was my laptops. I have a personal and a work laptop. My personal laptop is running Linux and my work is running Windows Vista. Neither of them have serial ports so I have to use a serial to usb converter. This works well with my Linux laptop but doesn’t work at all with my Vista laptop, so what I do is console in using my Linux laptop to whatever piece of equipment requires it. Usually this works fine but for some reason my tftp server on my Linux laptop was being problematic, so I had to employ the help of my Vista laptop to rescue me. I installed Solar Winds free TFTP server program onto the Vista laptop, connected it to the switch that I was consoled into using my Linux laptop, and tftp’d the image down to the Vista laptop. Confused yet? Once I had the image on the Vista laptop, I began uploading it to the remaining switches. All was well until I accidentally (I-D-10-T) erased the flash from one of the switches. Uggggggghhhhhh!!!!!! I was in bit of a pinch. Although I could access ROMMON, there was no options for the 3750 to boot from an image on a tftp server. My only option…..xmodem. Yes you heard me xmodem. This was actually my first time ever using it myself (thanks Vom) but a fellow CCIE turned me on to it. The process is this, connect to the switch through a console , issue the following command on the switch [switch# copy xmodem] , then from hyperterminal go to “Transfer” > Send File > choose Xmodem as the protocol, then browse to the image and bingo. Now here is where it gets more complicated. Remember that Vista laptop I referred to earlier, well, the image file was located on it. I had to borrow a flash drive, copy the image onto the flash drive, boot my Linux laptop into Windows, copy the image to it and then connect to the switch using hyperterminal. Now I am done, right? Wrong!!!! Usually the baud rate when connecting to a Cisco switch is 9600, which when copying a 6MB file, is estimated to take 2 1/2 hours. Yeah, I don’t have that long to wait. What do I do now? Solution…..set the baud rate on the Cisco switch to 115200 using this command [switch: set BAUD 115200]. After it is set, you must disconnect Hyperterminal and reconnect using the baud rate of 115200, then you can do the rest to get the file copied. Amount of time to copy file…25 minutes. Much less than before. Now am I finished? No. Once the file was copied up to the switch and I had to reset the baud rate back to 9600, boot to the new image, then set that image to be the main boot image. Whew. All in all it was a good learning but frustrating experience. No one told me learning would be so painful. Good news is I got all the switches current and using the same IOS so the stacks are now working. Yayyyy me. Tune in next time for the great adventures of “Wacky Day at Work” (echos and fades out).

Greg

Arhe Network

ggreenlee — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 05:35:56 +0000

Greetings,
Although this is an I.T. oriented site, there have been a few times where I have previewed web sites that are not I.T. related. This is again one of those times.
A good friend of mine, along with an associate of his, has started a web site that is a huge repository of information about African American athletes. Everything from athletic statistics to charity organizations they are involved in to video highlight reels. It’s a very impressive and intuitive site. The site is called ARHE Network.
ARHE (pronounced air) is a network database that displays unbiased, accurate and up-to-date information about African Americans in the realm of sports. It has been created to instill a sense of pride and healthy admiration for the accomplishments of these individuals, and offers an arena of marketing, exposure and entrepreneurship that has never been seen before in this capacity.
Please stop by the web site and check it out!!!

Greg

Free IT Athens

ggreenlee — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:54:23 +0000

Hi everyone, Its been a while since I last posted.
Over the weekend I attended the Southeast Linux Fest located in Clemson, South Carolina. It was a fun time. I got to meet some great people and learned about some great organizations. One of those organizations is called Free IT Athens. The person I met from the organization was Jane. She explained to me that the purpose of the organization was to provide IT services, computers, and training to inner city and lower income families and kids in Athens, Georgia. I thought, what a great organization and I felt I should put up a link to their website. It’s always nice to see people and organizations reaching out to the less fortunate to try and help them become better prepared for dealing and working with new technology in today’s society.
Great going guys. Keep up the excellent work.
Free IT Athens Link

Greg

Make it Plain Consulting

ggreenlee — Wed, 20 May 2009 03:15:26 +0000

A good friend of mine has launched a website as well as a business that aides in helping people grow personally and professionally so I wanted to post some info about his services.

Make it Plain Consulting offers Talent Management Services, Leadership Development, and Diversity Solutions for personal and business growth. MIPC seasoned consultants have partnered with leading companies and forward thinking individuals to improve performance while driving out cost. Learn more at www.makeitplainconsulting.com

Greg

Tunneling HTTP traffic using an SSH proxy

ggreenlee — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:48:04 +0000

This is as cool as much as it is secure. This is a great tool to use whenever you are out in a public wi-fi hot spot. Surfing the internet over a public and open internet connection is the not the most secure thing you can do. Anyone with a sniffer application can see your information. What can you do? How about sending all of your traffic over an encrypted tunnel? This makes your traffic undecipherable to anyone trying to sniff it. There are a couple of things you need to have: two computers running linux, the openssh client installed on the computer you are proxying from and openssh server installed on your remote Linux computer, and also a browser that supports SOCKS proxying. Here is how you do it.
Using OpenSSH you can set up a local SOCKS proxy on your computer opening up whatever port you designate to tunnel your traffic over.
This method will work in Linux, I will post a windows alternative later.
at the bash prompt type the following
#ssh -D 12345 (or whatever proxying port you would like to use) username@remote_ssh_server

This will open up the port you designate (in this example port 12345) on your local machine as a SOCKS proxy so that you can tunnel all of your HTTP traffic over the SOCKS proxy tunnel and out the remote ssh server on the other end.
Once that is set up you can set up your browser to use the proxy server.
In firefox you can go to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings , there you want to specify that you want to use a Manual Proxy, localhost, port 12345 and SOCKS v5.

You are now set up and ready to browse the internet securely.

Greg

Trixbox video tutorials

ggreenlee — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 02:10:51 +0000

I have been messing around with the open source PBX solution called Trixbox. I have it set up in a lab environment and I am using an Astara 480i VoIP phone. I found a really nice site containing video tutorials on installing, configuring and running your own PBX. The site is here.
Enjoy.

Greg