Keith Smith - My Blog
Unitrends to NakivoWednesday, December 12, 2018 - Posted by Keith A. Smith, in Network, VMware, MicrosoftSix years ago I was still using LTO tapes as a primary backup method with backup exec to backup several terabytes of data from various servers. Some of the backups would take days to complete; some would complete successfully while others would complete with errors and on the flip side the recovery of data would take even longer than the backups would conclude with the high chance that the one wouldn't be able to recover anything at all. It was well past time to move from tapes to a D2D for backups; I started performing bake off's between may products at the time.
The unitrends solution beat all the other D2D solutions by a wide margin, one of the many things that I liked about unitrends was that they didn't charge per client and they had an appliance that they had built and would support. As time had progressed the unitrends solution started to show it's age and has become very costly at renewal time, this is something that I've experienced multiple times as I've implemented the solution at many organizations.
The renewal costs have pushed many customers to go back to the drawing board (as a lot of customers had built their entire DR/BC plans around the unitrends solution) and evaluate other solutions. The unitrends solution had been a go-to for me for a long time when it came to designing DR/BC architecture; I now find myself saying goodbye to the unitrends solution in favor of the Nakivo for a D2D solution. The Nakivo backup and recovery solution is entirely web-based and comes as a virtual appliance, a package on a NAS or can be installed on a server you provision running *nix or windows. I've found the transition to quite pleasant, the support has been very knowledgeable, and the administration has been straightforward to navigate.
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Installing Python 2 on Mac OS XThursday, October 11, 2018 - Posted by Keith A. Smith, in Automation, Linux
OS X comes with a
large number of UNIX utilities, those familiar with Linux systems will
notice one key component missing: a decent package manager. Homebrew fills this void.
Homebrew is a package manager for OS X. A package is a collection of code files that work together. Installing them usually means running a script (a bit of code) that puts certain files in the various directories. A lot of the packages you will want are going to have dependencies. That means they require you to have other packages already installed on your computer. Homebrew will find and install dependencies for you AND it will keep them organized in one location AND it can tell you when updates are available for them. On top of all of that it gives super helpful instructions when everything doesn't go smoothly. You can read more about it at Homebrew's website. For now, install Homebrew using the following line of code: $ /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" The
script will explain what changes it will make and prompt you before the
installation begins. Once you’ve installed Homebrew, insert the
Homebrew directory at the top of your export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH" Now, we can install Python 2.7: $ brew install python@2 Because export PATH="/usr/local/opt/python@2/libexec/bin:$PATH" Homebrew names the executable $ python -V # Homebrew installed Python 3 interpreter (if installed)
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Powershell add A resource records to DNSTuesday, September 18, 2018 - Posted by Keith A. Smith, in Microsoft
I wanted to take sometime to write up a
quick how to for adding A resource records into a windows DNS server via powershell. In my
case this is something that must take place before you use a product
like observium because it requires all the network devices to have A
resource record in DNS. To create these records it's best to do it in
via scripting, in this case powershell using the below 3 cmdlets:
Add-DnsServerResourceRecordA Add-DnsServerResourceRecord Get-DnsServerResourceRecord
For a single entry you can use the following in powershell
Add-DnsServerResourceRecordA -Name Device1 -IPv4Address 192.168.9.10 -ZoneName yourdnszonename.net-ComputerName ADServername The command is broken down below: Add-DnsserverResourceRecordA = This is the CMDLET used to add A resource record only -Name = -Name of the A resource record -IPv4Address = Is the ip address of the resource -ZoneName = is the zonename you are adding your record to -ComputerName = -ComputerName is the name for Dns Server -CreatePtr = This is optional, if you want to create ptr (Reverse lookup record entry).
Note: To view the changes in DNS manager you will need to right click and refresh the zone, if you have already opened DNS manager. For a multiple entry situation you would need to do the following in powershell
To add multiple resource record from csv file, Here is below step by step tutorial. I have saved excel file as csv. (and it is saved in c:\temp location) Open up a spreadsheet program and name the first column Name (this is the name of the device) the next column should be named IPv4Address (here you would put the static ip of the device. You would need add all your devices in the aforementioned columns. Once your csv file is completed fire up powershell and run the following (modified the below path as needed)
Import-Csv driveletter:\folder\DNSEntries.csv | ForEach-Object { Add-DnsServerResourceRecordA -Name $_.Name -IPv4Address $_.IPv4Address -ZoneName yourdnszonename.net -ComputerName ADServername}
Note: To view the changes in DNS manager you will need to right click and refresh the zone, if you have already opened DNS manager.
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Outlook google calendar syncWednesday, July 18, 2018 - Posted by Keith A.Smith, in Microsoft
The Gmail web UI hasn’t changed much over the years regarding the way it looks and it still is lacking features. I found that most prefer to use a mail client instead to send/receive mail which is a pro but the con to this method is synchronizing calendar items, insert outlook google calendar sync for the win.
This solution is open source and works great, it can sync calendar items from your outlook calendar to your Gmail calendar or from your Gmail calendar to your outlook calendar, or it can do bi-direction sync which is most useful for those who bounce between the Gmail web UI and the outlook client. If you have Gmail and you use the outlook client I recommend installing this, don’t forget to enable the auto sync on it.
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Observium - Rename existing devicesTuesday, July 17, 2018 - Posted by Keith A. Smith, in LinuxObservium is one of my go-to open source solutions for network monitoring, I figured I'd share a recent challenge I encountered. I found myself needing to change a few device hostnames in observium, and it can be a bit tricky since it can't be done via the UI. This task can be done successfully from the command-line by running the following: Shell cd /opt/observium/ and execute php rename_device.php old_device_name new_device_name Once you're done renaming your device you should force snmp discovery and the poller to run: Shell execute the following: php discovery.php -h all php poller.php -h all Once the above process is completed you should see your devices renamed in the UI.
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