How to

A client recently needed to be able to use PRTG to monitor the state of an IPSec VPN Tunnel that was terminated on their Palo Alto Firewall array. Palo Alto firewalls have a very useful REST API so I was able to modify a Power Shell script that I had created previously to get the job done.

Having an intelligent, scalable and easily searchable consolidation point for log files is a very useful capability. Graylog is an open source project that is able to ingest logs from a wide variety of sources and provides very useful visualisation, processing and alerting capabilities. This post will go through the details of how to install a single server instance of Graylog 2.3 onto Ubuntu 16.04.

I was recently tasked with changing the Master Key at a client site that had a pair of Palo Alto firewalls arranged in an active/passive HA pair. Unfortunately the Palo Alto documentation I consulted neglected to mention a rather important step and I ended up snotting the passive firewall. This post details the correct procedure for changing the Master Key on an active/passive HA pair of Palo Alto firewalls.

A quick post on how to define a static IP address and static persistent routes on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian Jessie.

There is a lot of literature available on configuring VXLANs using MP-BGP EVPN but they tend to focus on large multi pod service provider type topologies with lots of moving parts. This post covers a very simple DCI configuration for a two site topology using ingress replication and a collapsed leaf and spine.

I don’t really have much operational experience with NX-OS so was very happy to recently discover that Cisco has a freely downloadable virtual version of the Nexus 9000 software. Though the setup process was fairly straight forward there were a few gotchas so this post will detail the process I used to deploy the NX-OSv 9000 into my home ESXi based lab.

A site I work with uses PRTG for infrastructure monitoring and Zerto as part of the DR strategy. Unfortunately there are no native PRTG sensors available for monitoring Zerto. This custom script can be used to create a sensor that will indicate the existence of any errors and warnings for the Zerto Virtual Appliances, Virtual Protection Groups, and the Virtual Manager.

I like to secure the web interfaces of any network device I use with a valid SSL certificate. It costs nothing, significantly improves security and also helps to curb the bad habit of ignoring SSL error messages from web browsers. This post is a little cheat sheet of common operations that I perform using OpenSSL.

A few years ago I was working on a project where we had to provide a reliable and high quality free to air broadcast signal to 70 TV’s for the Melbourne Cup. It ended up being quite complex with lots of AV and IT integration work being done however the important part of getting the signal to the TV’s reliably was done using MuMuDVB. This post will cover how to install and configure MuMuDVB on a Raspberry Pi 3.

I have worked on a variety of projects where a Raspberry Pi was the perfect hardware platform to host various services. They are very cheap, easy to configure, and there is a vast array of add on hardware available. This post will cover a basic installation of Ubuntu MATE 16.04.2 LTS onto a Raspberry Pi 3.