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Showing posts with label Cisco. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cisco. Show all posts

Thursday, 23 January 2014

64-bit Linux, 32-bit Chrome & Cisco AnyConnect

Obvious when you think about it but 32Bit Chrome will fail to connect to make the initial the SSL/HTTPs connection and so download/prompt for the client.

Switch to Firefox (Other 64Bit browsers are available) and you'll be good.

Wednesday, 28 July 2010

UCS TACACS bug caused hardware reset

One of our Cisco UCS Fabric interconnect 6100 switches reset itself for no apparent reason.  A call to Cisco TAC, which progressed to dev found a problem caused by too many TACACS authentications causing a memory fault.

We use Zenoss for NMS which authenticates pretty frequently using TACACS .. and so pushed it over the limit.

The only fix is to switch back to local authentication until a patch is released.

Monday, 24 May 2010

iPhone Cisco VPN 3030

The iPhone has a default MAC OS VPN client which I easily got connected to the corp VPN appliances we have.  Cisco 3030.

Trouble was I could'nt seem to get the proxy settings to kick in on Safari.  When connected on the VPN I could browse external sites but nothing internally.  I Installed a few more network apps, ping, ssh etc and narrowed it down to DNS not working.  And not working only for some apps ! ie Safari !

A Quick Google and I stumbled across a post advising to set the local domains in the split DNS names part of the IPSec group config, under the client config tab.  Did this and everything works a treat ..


 
 


Official Apple support for the 3xxx series is vague, but it works fine ..

Update : 24/05/2010

Tested against ASA 5540 with IPSec VPN and it works fine.  The Same issue with DNS exists.  Add the domains to the ASA Group Policy assigned to the IPSec Connection Profile ...


Apparently the next release of IPhone OS supports SSL VPN .. If it does I'll try it ..

Sunday, 21 February 2010

IBM Lotus Sametime - Toy throwing

The company I work for are a Domino shop and I am a big fan of what Domino server and clients can do.  But when it comes to Sametime.  I loose the will to live.  


Its obviously written by a group of developers who want, and I think are completely outside the control of what's left of the Lotus team.  Other than having Lotus in the product description and that it allegedly 'runs' on a Domino server that's where the comparison stops.


So to my reason for this seemingly un-provoked rant.


We're in the final stages of upgrading our Domino environment from 8 to 8.5 and there are a few stragglers, our Sametime 8.0.2 standard server being one.


So I did the due diligence, found out 8.0.2 isn't supported on 8.5.1 but theres positive reports of it working.  Also found that ST 8.5 had been released, oh, that also doesn't support 8.5.1 - but wasn't it released way after ?  Yes it was, remember my rant at the top ..


So we took the chance and went with the 8.5.1 upgrade with 8.0.2.  Domino install went fine, ST server started, IM came up, web site, meetings etc all working.  Great.  Started to test and found that we'd lost the ability to setup an online meeting from the Domino calendar.  Now we had this when we first upgraded from 7.5 to 8.0.2 and worked with IBM.  It was found to be http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21407511 which we applied to our mail template and resolved the problem.  Now its back.  


The symptoms where exactly the same.  Make the booking and the process sends the message to the mailin db where the message arrives at stcs.nsf and gets 'processed'.  At this point the ST server adds the booking to the meeting centre and I think resource DB and then emails the chair back.  Its here that the process fails - again.


Got hold of the devs and they confirmed the code was still in place, so reverted my mail design to 8 and then further back to 7 and still had the problem.  We also tried upgrading the resources.db design to 8.5.1.  


So decisions decisions.  This isn't a massively used feature but if Sametime is to get any traction in the company other than an overly complicated IM service then it needs to work, also if it wasn't fixed it would have bugged the crap out of me.


The first thing was to roll back to Domino 8.0.2 and confirm the booking function did still work before we upgraded, it did - thank you VMWare snapshots !


Rolled forward again to 8.5.1 and started going through the debug options again ..


http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/stwiki.nsf/dx/sametime-%E2%80%93-notes-cs-integration
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27003646


All to no avail.


OK, no real choice so lets try 8.5.  We have snapshots, no big deal to roll back and forward.


IBM in their wisdom seem to have taken a simple if not detached application and turned it into a monster - I guess they are trying to keep up with Webex/Meeting Place.   There are now classic, meeting, proxy, WebSphere, DB2 - where does it stop.  None of which we need or want.  Its a small 200 user base who just need IM and some online meeting functions.


As always IBM's software passport site is useless.  I really hate this site with a passion.


Heres an example : Show me all German language Domino clients.  Click.  I'm presented with all English clients, no German.  Tried various ways and in the end needed to wait 4 weeks for IBM to send me the part code, which then miraculously produced a German language install.  And which still doesn't show if you select language filters.


Eventually I worked out that Standard has been renamed and is now Classic.  Then found a number of good blogs with file names .. and similar rants to mine.


http://www.d2k.nl/domino/blog4.php/2009/12/22/ibm-lotus-sametime-standard-v8-5-filenames


Downloaded and installed Classic 8.5, on the un-supported 8.5.1 platform .. :)


Fail


Server crashed.  Gave it more RAM, crashed.  Eventually it stayed up long enough to test the calendar function which still fails.  I also found a few other problems we'd had with 8.0.2 and fixed have come back.  One being when you try and assign policies to users and bring up the directory.  In 8.0.2 Sametime doesnt support Internet Site configs so needs a SSO Web Site doc to enable the single sign on in order to be able to run the java applet that runs in the policy assignment.  Great, another example of Sametime devs not talking to their co-workers.  This stopped working again in 8.5 but I could live with that.  Then some more server crashes and a great console error.


Some generated functions exceeded the JVM method size limit and were automatically split into smaller functions. You may get better performance by manually splitting very large templates into smaller templates, by using the 'splitli




Found some scary java documentation which made some sense - but to me another example of the ST devs going with something outside the Domino norm.  Whys it even in JAVA, thats always been a pain as it only runs on Domino, so why not something clever with the native app.


Gave up, rolled back to 8.0.2 and will see if we can get that online meeting working again ..


And finally, the brilliant Cisco Click 2 Call plugin stopped working with the 8.5 IM standalone client.  Voice-mail plugin still works and ST video still doesn't.  Meeting Place anyone ? !!!


or maybe the moral here is just let sleeping dogs lie.  Left the server well alone on 8.0.2 and everything working.  But I suspect it will still screw up with the same problems when we upgraded.  Maybe I'll try a fresh install some day, or by that time just switch to Google Wave when its ready ..

Tuesday, 2 February 2010

Kid in a candy store

This morning we took delivery of 7 Cisco UCS chassis, 51 blades, Netapp & a stupid amount of disk.

These are all part of a data centre consolidation project at work .. due for completion June 2010 with a follow up project of turning London into a standby site for New York..

Let the fun begin ..