08Oct 2016 by Curtis No Comments

Quickly Change Network Interface IP’s

Microsoft, Windows
I change my network card IP's all the time to connect directly to hardware for initial configuration. I've been manually doing this for 15 years now. I finally sat down and learned netsh, put it into stupidly simple batch files and now have a folder on my desktop with all the common IP ranges. Here's an exerpt of the script to change the interface from it's current state to 192.168.10.22. @echo off netsh interface ip set address "Ethernet" static 192.168.10.22 255.255.255.0 192.168.10.1 1 goto end :end end of script To set the interface back to DHCP use this one. @echo off netsh interface ip set address "Ethernet" dhcp netsh interface ip set dns "Ethernet" dhcp goto end :end end of script Note "Ethernet" in this case is the name of…
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04Apr 2016 by Curtis No Comments

Troubleshooting Network Performance Issues

Cisco, Microsoft, Uncategorized, Windows
This won't be a tutorial, however, the purpose of this post is to highlight some common TCP/IP issues that degrade network performance. Network Congestion - If your firewall/router graphs your network usage, use that or obtain your current throughput (up/down) to your ISP. Use the current usage and then run a few speed tests in order to determine if your hardware is capable of hitting your maximum download/upload speeds you currently pay for. So if you have a 100 meg fiber circuit and your firewall is showing you are currently using about 60 megs at any given time, you should be able to get somewhere close to 40 megs on a download test from speedtest.net. If not, either your provider is not giving you the bandwidth you are paying for…
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18Mar 2016 by Curtis No Comments

Faster XenServer VM Exports

Uncategorized
I am migrating a few XenServer VM's between AMD and Intel pools for a customer and stumbled across a faster way to do the export than through XenCenter. From the Windows host where XenCenter is installed, run the following command: C:\Program Files (x86)\Citrix\XenCenter\xe.exe -s x.x.x.x -u root -pw xxx vm-export vm=SERVERNAME filename=C:\users\user\folder\SERVERNAME.xva --nossl The trick here is that part of the slowness of the export is SSL encoding/decoding happening within XenCenter. By using the --nossl option, you are bypassing that abstraction? application layer. Also making it less secure but let's not dwell on the facts.
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17Mar 2016 by Curtis No Comments

Process Automation with IFTTT

Uncategorized
I've used this tool for quite some time but after talking with a number of people, have discovered that most have never heard of it.  It's a web service that automatically does tasks for you based on whatever rules you give it (they call them recipes).  Here are some examples of processes you can automate with ifttt.com. The recipes follow the simple IF...Then methodology. Download Facebook photos that you're tagged in, upload them to a Google Drive. Download gMail attachments, upload them to Dropbox. Search Craigslist for keywords, notify you via email when a new listing is posted. You can check out sample recipes or create your own at http://ifttt.com.
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17Mar 2016 by Curtis No Comments

OpenDNS Alternative, SafeDNS

Uncategorized
I had once been a longtime user of OpenDNS for my home and some small businesses that I worked with. It served as a forward lookup DNS server and as a web filter for those networks. OpenDNS performed quite well. I don't know why but I eventually drifted away from OpenDNS as a web filter and implemented Barracuda Web Filters or spun up Squid/Squidguard on pfSense if the need were to arise. Recently though, with my personal company, CloudFirst Technologies, I needed a reliable and AFFORDABLE web filter for my customers. I stumbled across SafeDNS. It seemed to have the same features as OpenDNS but until I tried it, I didn't know how effective it was. I'm happy to report that it is a great alternative to OpenDNS. It blocks…
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