I haven’t been posting much lately, mainly because I’ve just been so ridiculously busy. I’ve recently shifted gears in my job, moving from network engineer to software developer.
I’ve done some programming in my time. Lots of administrative-type scripting, some utilities, and even some web applications. This project is a little bigger, however, and I’ve actually got someone to work on it with me, which is new for me. I’ve always been on my own, so it’s going to be a change to have someone else involved. I’m looking forward to it.
I expect the project to be primarily PHP for the front-end, maybe some straight Perl for certain back-end tasks, Javascript for things like error-checking forms before submission, and MySQL on the backend for the data storage. Really the only option in all this was whether to use MySQL or MS SQL Server, which we have access to, but I prefer the openness of MySQL.
We’ll also be using something that I haven’t dealt with a lot, which is style sheets. I know, there’s nothing magical about them, but they’re new to me, ok?
But first, I need to get the tough parts going. The data dictionary and data relationship diagram for this thing are going to be pretty big. I’m trying to decide whether to focus on one aspect of the project at a time, or whether to design it all first and then start coding. Either way, it’s going to be a challenge, but that’s what makes it fun!
Had a small glitch today in a Cisco router config that I had to figure out. The main router had a couple static translations of public IP’s to privates for incoming connections to go directly to internal servers, as well as for outgoing connections from those servers to be translated as well.
Problem was, outgoing connections were also being translated for those servers when the connections were going to Cisco VPN clients.
The fix I ended up with was one we’d used before – apply a route-map to the internal interface, directing all the traffic destined for the VPN client to a loopback interface without the “nat inside” statement, effectively causing the packets to skip the NAT process entirely.
I wonder, though, if there might not be a cleaner solution. After all the normal NAT overload command allows for a route-map to specify what traffic to translate and what traffic to pass untranslated, why not the static NAT commands?
I’m not sure if I’ll get a chance to research this anytime soon, but if I do, I’ll be sure to post what I find.
I’m at a crossroads of sorts. I have a new project to work on – rewriting a subscriber database that tracks subscribers, services, circuits, equipment, ip addresses, etc…. The original system is written in perl with a MySQL database backend, all running on a CentOS Linux server.
My inclination is to write the new system in PHP with Javascript for dynamic HTML forms, perl in the background if needed, using MySQL like last time.
Any opinions?
Finally, I took the time to put this together. This is a quick-and-dirty guide to replicating a project that I did for someone. It’s not going to tell you every detail of what to type, but it should get you going in the right direction if you’re needing some guidance. Continue reading »
We’ve had one of these for a couple weeks, evaluating how it might fit into our product and services portfolio. The UC520 is basically a router/firewall/VoIP system all in a single package. Without getting into long descriptions of features, Cisco basically took the most common features of their ISR routers, Call Manager, and Unity Voice mail and combined them into a reasonably-priced package for small businesses. As it was explained to me, it’s pretty much the 1861 with dynamic routing and advanced firewall stripped out, CPU boosted up to support more call control features, and integrated voice mail. Built-in wireless is an option. Integrated POE switch to power IP phones.
Cisco has tons of info on their site about the UC520 and their whole Unified Communications line, and there are even 3rd-party sites dedicated to the UC520 itself, so I’m not going to spend much time here talking about specific configurations. Instead I’m just going to try to give some opinions of the product as time goes by and we start deploying them. If we DO come up with some interesting custom configurations, I may post those for anyone interested.
Today should be a good day. I’ve got some customer work to do first thing in the morning, moving them from one type of service to another, which involves IP changes and therefore tunnel changes on all their remotes. After that, I’m doing manager-type stuff – status reports, email on projects – mixed with research [...]
