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Jack Brown

Any opinions expressed are solely my own.

Testing the performance of a mounted drive on Ubuntu

To test the performance of a Network Attached Storage (NAS) mounted in Ubuntu, you can use various benchmarking tools and methods. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you get started: Install the necessary tools: * Open a terminal in Ubuntu. * Install the required packages by running the following command:sqlCopy codesudo

ConBee II USB Gateway on Ubuntu with Home Assistant (Docker)

Over the last few weeks, I have been researching what I can achieve with home automation. After browsing countless web articles and watching hours of various YouTube videos the first decision I made was what wireless protocol I would use for connectivity, I decided on Zigbee. For those who don't

Cisco DNA Center - LAN Automation

Cisco DNA Center has a feature known as 'LAN Automation' which is designed to automatically discover and configure your underlay network. This post assumes that you already have your 'Site Hierarchy' and various settings configured such as AAA, NTP, ISE and DNS, as well as your credentials. An IP address

Cisco SDA - The Underlay

An underlay network is the underlying physical infrastructure of a network typically built from a number of routers and switches with a layer 3 routing protocol. When building an underlay foundation for a SDA network the recommendation is to implement a routed access model. This prevents the need for protocols

Cisco DNA Center & SDA Resources

I will be updating this post with information and links out to Cisco DNA-C and SDA resources. Most of this information doesn't belong to me and is snippets of information I have found and pulled together onto a single page. SD-Access introduces several new concepts in enterprise network design that

RIB, FIB, LIB and the Adjacency Table

RIB (Routing Information Base) * Maintains the network toplogies and routing tables for each protocol. * Would include many routes going to the same destination. * Built on a per routing protocol basis. FIB (Forwarding Information Base) * Contains the best routes from the many routing protocol RIB's. * Stored in fast hardware tables on

SPAN, RSPAN and ERSPAN

Cisco switches have a feature that allow a copy of traffic from a source port or a source VLAN to be sent to a single port or IP address (over GRE). This feature, known as SPAN (Switch Port Analyser). Reasons you may want to use this feature may include monitoring

Basics of Switching

The job of a switch is to process incoming frames with the objective of getting them to their appropiate destinations based on the destination MAC address which can be found in the header. There are multiple decisions a switch can make for each received frame, which will differ based on

Using a DrayTek 130 as an ADSL Bridge

I have had several scenarios recently where I have needed to terminate an ADSL circuit onto a Cisco router that doesn't have the capability of an ADSL modem. In my specific scenarios this covers the Cisco 829 Industrial Router as seen below. There are several reasons we choose to use

Cisco Source Based Routing

Traditionally, packets are forwarded by routers based on the destination IP address within it's header. However, sometimes it is desirable to route packets based on the source IP address. An example of when you might want to do this is if you have two WAN links. Say you own a

Adding Network Devices to ISE 2.1

Adding your network devices to ISE is optional as you can create a default device profile however it is required for various ISE features and I always ensure my devices are added. Adding the devices allows you to specify the type of device and where the device is located which

Connecting Cisco ISE 2.1 to an Active Directory Domain (Windows Server 2012 R2)

Having recently just installed ISE 2.1 I want to use my active directory as an external identity source. ISE has a built in user store known as the internal identity source where you can create users however most deployments use active directory or some other LDAP source for authentication.

PiHole - One Week On

So I installed and started to utilise PiHole on my home network about a week ago, I documented the install process in a blog post here [https://jack.cloud/pi-hole-for-ad-blocking/]. I have now stopped using PiHole and have returned back to using plain DNS. I think that possibly in the

Cisco Trustsec - SXP

So continuing on from my first Trustsec post which can be viewed here I would like to make some notes on SXP, the Security Exchange Protocol which makes it more practical to deploy the Cisco Trustsec solution. First, we should go back to the fundamentals of Trustsec, Trustsec uses SGT's

Pi-Hole for Ad Blocking

I had heard of quite a few people using this with positive results and I quite like the idea of how it works so thought I would give it a try. The application is designed to be a network wide ad-blocker, once installed you can point DNS clients on your

What is Cisco TrustSec?

Cisco TrustSec is a network segmentation solution, like iWAN it isn't a physical piece of kit or a protocol, but a solution. So what is the problem? Typically in IP networks ACL's (Access Control Lists) are used to permit and deny access, for a small network this makes sense and

BT Infinity with Cisco Router

I recently setup BT infinity with a Cisco router, I was using the Openreach modem to terminate the vDSL connection and then the LAN port from this modem connected to the port on my router (Interface GigabitEthernetX) The configuration required on the router side was pretty straight forward and can

Adding LDAP Users to Group on Account Creation in PHP

I didn't do the research on this one but definitely worth a blog post as I can see it as something I might need to use again in the future. if (ldap_add($ldapConn, $dn, $ldaprecord)) { //Lets add the record add_user_group($dn, "CN=SSL-VPN-Access,OU=DMZ-Groups,DC=dmz,

EIGRP Notes

Hybrid Routing Protocol as it contains most characteristics of a distance vector protocol as well as some characteristics of a link state protocol. EIGRP offers many advantages over other routing protocols, including the following: * Supports VLSM— EIGRP is a classless routing protocol and carries the subnet mask of the route

Virgin Media Business Broadband - Modem Mode

Simply, it doesn't exist... how disappointing. I have been working on a network within student accommodation where I am staying during my final year of studies. Part of the new network system aggregates multiple WAN connections from multiple ISP's. The ISP's consist of Sky, BT, Plusnet and Virgin. I have

Sky Fibre with Cisco Router (or any third party router)

Getting this to work wasn't easy, mainly due to lack of information online and the fact that Sky doesn't want you to use third-party routers. I started with the SR101 Hub with the BT OpenReach modem, the original plan was to keep the modem and have a CAT6 cable running

SSH Tunnel in SecureCRT

* Create a normal SSH session and then go to the properties for that session and click on 'Port Forwarding'. The screenshot below show the information you need to input.

Active Directory

Ubuntu and LDAPS (LDAP over SSL)

I recently discovered a problem where I needed Ubuntu to interact with Active Directory using LDAPS, I had a requirement to use the secure version so I could change user passwords. A quick and easy way to get Ubuntu to connect without worrying about certificate security settings etc simply edit