How to remove stale vcenter licenses

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2054008

Setup net-snmp on Ubuntu 12.04

This is the bare minimum to set up snmp on Ubuntu to allow monitoring from Cacti or similar

apt-get update

apt-get install snmpd snmp-mibs-downloader

snmpconf

 - Choose /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf
 - Choose snmpd.conf
 - Choose 3 for 'Access Control'
 - Choose 3 for RO community
 - Type community name
 - Press enter or type allowed network/host
 - Press enter to allow all OID

mv snmpd.conf /etc/snmp/

service snmpd restart

IPTables example

Allow tcp port 80 from source address 192.168.10/24
iptables -A INPUT -i 10 -P TCP -S 192.168.1.0/24 --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

Drop tcp port 80 from range of addresses
iptables -A INPUT -i 10 -p tcp --dport 80 -m iprange --src-range 192.168.1.1-192.168.1.254 -j DROP

List chain with rule numbers
iptables -nL INPUT -v --line-numbers

Delete particular rule
iptables -D INPUT 10

DHCP option 121

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3442

This is used to add a classless static route to the DHCP clients.

To add option 121 to a Mikrotik DHCP server, it's value is specified in HEX. The format is as follows.

0xnnddddddddgggggggg

where n=mask, d=destination, g=gateway.

To convert ip address to HEX, you convert each octet, so 192=C0, 168=A8, 55=37, 1=01

You can use a tool such as http://www.miniwebtool.com/ip-address-to-hex-converter/?ip=192.168.55.1

Example:

To add a route to the destination network of 192.168.55.0/24 via gateway 172.16.10.1.

/ip dhcp-server option add name=classlessroutes code=121 value=0x18C0A837AC100A01

where 18 is 24 in hex.

*note: depending on the subnet mask, you may only need to specify 0-4 octets. In fact only the non-zero, or network portion of the subnet. Here is a table from the RFC.

             subnet mask           Number of octets
                     0                        0
                  1- 8                       1
                  9-16                      2
                 17-24                     3
                 25-32                     4

so for the /24 subnet in the above example, we only needed to specify 3 octets - C0A837

Mikrotik Bridge Horizon

To achieve similar functionality to Cisco's private VLANS, where all ports are on the same L2 segment, but cannot exchange packets, you can use Mikrotik's Bridge Horizon feature.

Basically, every port in a bridge is assigned a horizon value, and RouterOS will only forward frames to other interfaces in the bridge that have different horizon values.

This means that you assign the same horizon value to the interfaces that you don't want to be able to communicate.

For example, you want to bridge all your customers and use a single /24 subnet and the same gateway. Typically this is bad and poses a huge security risk, not to mention performance issues. If you assign the same horizon value to the customer interfaces, then the router will not forward traffic between customers. Customer A will not be able to ping Customer B.

If you had a server, such as an IP-PBX that all customers needed to access, and you were lazy and added it to the bridge, then you would assign a different horizon value to that port.

mysql timezones

Add the timezone names to the mysql table:

root@db1:~# mysql_tzinfo_to_sql /usr/share/zoneinfo | mysql -u root

mysql> CONVERT_TZ( 'datetime', 'from_timezone', 'to_timezone')

Mikrotik NAT, access services via external IP from inside the network

The laptop at 192.168.1.10 wants to communicate with the web server on 192.168.1.10 via the external IP address of the Mikrotik router at 1.1.1.1.

Say you have a service such as webmail, which has a nat rule to allow access from an external network...

/ip firewall nat add chain=dstnat action=dst-nat dst-address=1.1.1.1 protocol=tcp dst-port=888 to-port=80 to-address=192.168.1.10

This works fine of course, so users set up the shortcut to http://1.1.1.1:888

Problem is when they are on the internal network it doesn't work, because the Mikrotik router won't send the reply data back out the same interface. A work-around is to create a src-nat rule directly below the dst-nat rule like this.

/ip firewall nat add chain=srcnat action=masquerade src-address=192.168.1.0/24 dst-address=192.168.1.10

Goes something like this..

1. Client initiates http request to 1.1.1.1:888
2. MT receives and translates destination to 192.168.1.10 as per 1st rule
3. MT then translates the src address from 192.168.1.160 to 192.168.1.1 as per 2nd rule
4. Now communication appears to be between 192.168.1.160 and 192.168.1.1

Happy days.