The modest hardware requirements, rock-solid stability, and extensive feature set of the FreePBX Open Source project make it the most cost-effective PBX platform for both Small and Midsize Enterprises. (more…)
Triggering Nagios Alerts With SNMP Traps
Although SNMP polling is a great way to monitor the health of your network infrastructure it is impractical to poll every object on every device. Trap notifications can cover this visibility gap and provide immediate notification on network events.
Nagios: Monitoring Interface Bandwidth Utilization Using Cacti Data
One area where Nagios is severely lacking is bandwidth utilization monitoring of network devices. Since I already have a fully-functioning Cacti server and a scaled up Nagios server, I wrote my own python plugin to do the job. (more…)
Configuring FreeRADIUS for LDAP over SSL Authentication
As a Network Engineer there will undoubtedly be a time when you need to set up your own RADIUS front-end so that 802.1x, VPN, AAA, a Wireless Controller, or all the above, can securely authenticate against the Corporate LDAP Directory Server. (more…)
Monitoring Network Devices with Nagios
Nagios is a scalable, flexible. and powerful Network Monitoring solution that pairs well with graphing tools such as Cacti or MRTG. In this post I’ll share templates and configuration files to get you started with monitoring Cisco routers, switches, and security devices. (more…)
Cisco Nexus 5000 Series vPC Design and Configuration
Whether you’re looking at the Cisco Nexus 5000 line for the Unified Fabric feature, the 1.92Tbps of throughput, or simply as an upgrade from the traditional Catalyst 6509 chassis, you will definitely want to take advantage of its Virtual Port-Channel (vPC) capability.
Cisco ASA: Configuring LDAP over SSL
The Cisco ASA documentation for configuring LDAP over SSL authentication for VPN clients is limited in scope and extremely Microsoft-specific. If you’re running an OpenLDAP server or experiencing non-network related connectivity issues, there aren’t a lot of resources available to help. (more…)
Dress Up Your Cacti Graphs
Cacti has been around for over a decade and is a terrific tool for graphing everything on your network from interface traffic to temperature and voltage. Unfortunately the default templates give you bland-looking graphs. Since you’re going to be eying your graphs on a daily basis why not give them a little more pizzazz? (more…)
Expect Scripting For Network Engineers (Cisco)
Have you ever spent a good portion of your day repeatedly logging into all of the network devices in your data center to add the IP address of a new syslog server? Or perhaps removing the local user account of a former peer who jumped ship to greener pastures? (more…)
