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Friday 31 December 2010

Routing a Cisco WLC 'service' port.

We have an almost 100% Cisco VoIP Wireless installation (apparently when it was installed the biggest in Europe) with 300 7921 handsets all hooked up to 4400 Wireless LAN controllers and a Wireless Control System.  Installed by TouchBase.


Once tuned this has worked pretty flawlessly and has pretty much been left alone.


We've recently started to implement Zenoss enterprise running out of our North American data centre and wanted to obviously add the WLC appliances.


Problem.  Our enterprise uses an RFC1918 10.0.0.0 subnet which is WAN routable.  The WLC's are configured as per the Cisco doc with the management port using a 172.16.0.0 subnet, not WAN routable.  or not a subnet we want to route.  The 172.16 was only ever intended as the isolated network for the WLC and AP's.



I looked into changing the MGT port IP - got scared as the AP's need to use it for the initial LWAPP b'cast, they then switch to using the AP-Manager port, also on the same subnet.  What about using the service port ?


The APs & Management interface are on 172.16.##.0/24.  The Service port on 10.##.##.0/24.  Reading the documentation the rules are: 'Management' port for in band and 'service' for out of band management.  The Service port is by default not routable.  Which is fine for London as the core switches route 172.16.##.0 and we've historically used that interface.  But not if we wanted to use Zenoss without routing 172 across the WAN and as that subnet was only ever designed to be isolated thats not an option.

I found in the doc that you can add static routes which the service port will use.  I first tried assigning this using WCS, which would only apply the route to one controller.  Claiming the route already existed when you applied to the second - gotta love Cisco managment software, it always does 'most' of what you need, never all.  So I static routes on EACH WLC (ie : not the recommended way).  But this works.  The service ports are now accessible across the WAN and so far work fine.

I've reset a couple of APs and they also seem fine.  Fingers crossed.

Saturday 25 December 2010

YLOD update 2

Acquired said heat gun and followed the videos but to no avail. I even repeated the process twice. FAIL.


Am now the proud owner of a PS3 Slim. And I must say its so much better. At least the contents of the room aren't sucked into the fan when it starts, in fact its almost silent.

Saturday 18 December 2010

Dynamic web page to display Picasa Web Albums

For a while now I've been uploading my vacation photos to the paulregan.co.uk site, in fact that's how it started.  Parents and friends wanting to see the recorded history of our  vacations ..


I've been using JAlbum with the Foto player template.  Which is great and worked really well.  Its slightly laborious to create a new folder but for the 3-4 times a year I needed it worked fine.


I then got hooked on photography and wanted to be able to upload some of my (in my opinion) better shots to the site.  JAlbum was too slow to just throw one or two shots up.  I needed something more dynamic.


I'd been using Picasa & Picasa Web Albums for a while which was a snap to sync between an album on the PC/MAC and the Picasa Web cloud.  Picasa does have a html generating tool with some funky templates but that was more the JAlbum model which I didn't want. 


If only Picasa Web had a pretty embed display, something like the lightbox or zoombox scripts .. before you comment picasa does, your right, it does but its pretty nasty.


I stumbled across www.paulvanroekel.nl ... He writes templates for both Picasa.  And more importantly for Picasa web !  The php code pulls the pictures from all or a designated online album.  Update your album, you site dynamically updates the changes.


Pick the template, download, tweak the config and upload to your site.  Simples.  Almost.


Not sure what causes it, maybe my providers PHP version.  But the template files are all .php.  trying to open them on the web caused :




Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_OBJECT_OPERATOR, expecting ',' or ';' in /home/users/web4831/html/paulregan.co.uk/gallery/index.php on line 97 




Some quick googling had me change the extension from php to php5 - job done


paulregan.co.uk/gallery/index.php5

Friday 10 December 2010

Wednesday 1 December 2010

To change the blog header link

How to link the header to another page

Goto design
Layout
Expand Widgets

Find the following code

<!--Show the image only-->

      <div id='header-inner'>

        <a expr:href='data:blog.homepageUrl' style='display: block'>


Change the last part to

<a href='your url' style='display: block'>

For example


<a href='www.google.com' target="_blank" style='display: block'>

Movember - Week Four