Recently I've been looking at CleverSafe's Storage Cloud product and as part of the research I noticed that a small scale DSNet provides more than enough IOPs for small scale mailbox installations. I took a selection of decommissioned mid-range [Pentium Dual Core / SATA I Disks etc] Workstations to which I installed CentOS 5.0 and the CleverSafe software. 4 IDE SliceStores and an Accesser provides enough IOP throughput for around 50 mailboxes. Ramping this up to 6 SATA SliceStores and there is enough IOP throughput for 70 mailboxes. We're obviously not talking about large scale ...

I as well as many others have been enjoying Valve's new game Left4Dead and whilst I was enjoying the Match Making system and general carnage the SysAdmin in me was thinking "dedicated server....". After grabbing a few more achivements (Witch and Hunter headshots ftw) I set up a dedicated server for Left4Dead and let it run on its merry way. Whilst investigating the cvar's and other server options I discovered the logging and thought to myself; "Well Valve are keeping track of the Acheivements but who keeps track of each and every kill?" 2 hours later and the groundwork for L4DStats was ...

When I heard the news that McColo had been pulled I wondered if we'd actually see a drop in Hostile traffic and Spam. Turns out that there has been a massive drop in Spam levels coming through some of the filters I have dotted around the place. C&C or Spam Hosts? I wrote a little script to see what percentages of machines that had made incoming connections that were then classified as spam were still alive. The majority of hosts were still contactable in some way shape or form but weren't listening on known SMTP ports, some were alive and actively listening on SMTP ...

So much so that he votes at 13:37!                               http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7700298.stm ...

With the initial tests over it was time to actually move over to 'real' IPv6 addresses. After applying for a tunnel from SixXS it was time to set it up. Unfortunately none of my JUNOS or Cisco IOS images have IPv6 support so rather than buying another 2600XM I decided to use the Windows Server 2008 server that performs IPv6 DHCP as the router. The advice for setting up a tunnel on the Wiki only covers up to Windows Server 2003 and is below: netsh interface ipv6 install netsh interface ipv6 add v6v4tunnel SixXS [Your IPv4 Endpoint] [PoP IPv4 Endpoint] netsh interface ipv6 add ...

We already know that disabling IPv6 on a 2008 & Exchange 2007 server breaks things but what if we go IPv6 only? IPv6 Only Domain Controllers: The installation didn't cause any trouble but after initially logging on and running a DCDiag we see this: It turns out that the install of the DNS Server had set the NIC's properties to be ::1 but the DNS Server was only listening on the Static Site Local address FEC0::2 and its self assigned Link Local. This of course caused all DNS reliant checks to fail and cause a whole world of pain.           Changing the ...

IPv6 is coming and I'm trying to stay ahead of the curve on this one so I'm moving the NAMOS LAN over to an IPv6 network [public services such as DNS, Web and mail are already running on IPv6] which means in the meantime I'm going to have to go through some of the transitional pains. Armed with a [now depreciated] netblock I set about the practise run for the Plan O' Doom. Configuring the scopes is easy and so doesn't really need to be covered but in order to split my /48 [SixXS subnets are /48] into more usable subnets I cheated on the calculations and used Rhys Koedijk's IPv6 Subnet ...

psFetch is my latest project and is a Powershell cmdlet that communicates with various Repositories on the Internet to find what you are looking for and easily download and install them to your machine. The cmdlet itself is written in C# and utilises a centralised LAMP backend as a repository and director. Upon install psFetch will create a custom shortcut on your desktop which includes the psFetch cmdlet as one of the default set of commands available without having to use add-pssnapin each time. Everytime you add a cmdlet or script they will be added to your console profile and ...

Just as I've finished consolidating all my Physical machines to HyperV guests Microsoft have announced Windows HyperV Server which is a free download. With the release of the HyperV Linux Componants I'm going to start moving some workloads away from my old ESX 2.5 servers and see if HyperV Synthetic devices work as well as ESX devices do. Not that I knew it at the time but Microsoft have also updated their Support policies to include Exchange Server SP1 when virtualized. The other good news is that there are reports that we'll have System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 (final ...

There was a post today on the Asterisk Users mailing list about needing a simple way to monitor if your Asterisk lines are working ok. As it turns out I had such a script in my little store of doom. So just in case the Asterisk Users post doesn't get archived here it is: <pre> <? /////////////////////////////////////////////////// // This is a quick script that allows the external // monitoring to check that all is ok. // // Gareth#NetworksAreMadeOfString.co.uk /////////////////////////////////////////////////// $s = ...