Tunes!

I really like music, I have no musical talent just love to listen. Anyway, the following clip comes courtesy of Fabric and is hosted at SoundCloud

Enjoy!

iPhone Blogging

So you can blog from the iPhone! Not sure I have the patience to write much this way though. I have found landscape mode a little easier though.

Pictures?

Richmond Lock

Oh yeah I can post pictures too, that will help me to avoid lots of iPhone typing.

I Hate Mondays

Of course this should have been posted on Monday, but it took me until now to get over it.

I hate Mondays

I’m sure I’m not alone in hating Mondays of course. The image, silly as it is, was courtesy of Acme License Maker and the underlying image was sourced from RT’s Blank Plates.

The theme of hating Mondays was recurring with the Garfield cartoon character, fascinating.

Cisco NFC 5.0.3 – CentOS or RHEL?

If you don’t know what Netflow, Linux or Java are then you might do well to stop reading now. I make no apology for the gratuitous technical nature of this post

I am always keen to look at technology and solutions, some of which forms the job I do on a day to day basis. So recently I have been looking at the Cisco Netflow Collector server software, that collects Netflow data from Cisco devices and crunches the data into human readable reports. Essentially its network traffic analysis, and its quite simple. More on Netflow from Wikipedia …

Anyway, Cisco’s NFC 5.0.3 which I happened to have access to requests that you install it on either Sun’s Solaris or Redhat’s Enterprise Linux – both of which are commercial operating systems and require licenses. I happen to have a licensed copy of RHEL4 and went right ahead and installed it and NFC 5.0.3. It took about 15 minutes and worked, out of the box, simple as that.

So why the post?

Well. I wanted to see if NFC 5.0.3 would work on CentOS, which is a project version of Linux based on the RHEL release. More information about that here.

CentOS installs as quickly and easily and RHEL4, no surprises there. NFC installs from a simple setup.sh script on the CD and only takes a couple of minutes to complete. CentOS installs iptables by default which interferes with access to the web interface of NFC, so I have quickly disabled that using the ‘service iptables stop’ command:

[root@netflow ~]# service iptables stop
Flushing firewall rules: [ OK ]
Setting chains to policy ACCEPT: filter [ OK ]
Unloading iptables modules: [ OK ]

Access to the web GUI is simple and works straight away:

NFC GUI

Once logged in I setup a quick Aggregator configuration for the routers to export flows to:

Aggregator Configuration

With routers already configured to send flows to the CentOS server it only takes a few minutes for data to show up in the Status tab of the NFC GUI:

Collection Status & Statistics

So, all good as far as I can tell – and so far 100% reflection of the setup I have on the RHEL4 NFC 5.0.3 server. The issue I am encountering occurs at the Report stage:

Reporting

As soon as I select one of the reporting options from the tree on the left I get an error instead of the usual choices:

Error

This is what the working RHEL4 NFC 5.0.3 server displays:

Reports working on RHEL4

So far I have been unable to determine why the CentOS server implementation is failing at this specific point …. I have posted this query in the Q&A’s at LinkedIn too.

…. to be continued

Friday. Music. Babies

Friday. I love Fridays.

Listening to Chris Moyles on Radio 1 this morning, between 9 and 10am is their weekly Golden Hour slot. I tend to listen to the show most days, and its a mixed bag – sometimes good, sometimes not so much. Anyway, Golden Hour is great, and today’s mix took me right back to School Days, Technotronic, Dee Lite, Soup Dragons and so on … given the trend for Radio 1 to over play the latest pop music this ‘hour’ of oldies makes a refreshing change, and beings all kinds of memories back to the front!

Babies. Our weekly ante-natal class would usually consist of 4 couples, and we’re all first time parents heading towards due dates around the end of October – start of November time. So we arrived last night to find only 3 couples. The informed that the couple with the furthest due date were not going to be there due to the arrival of their little bundle of joy! Great news for them, healthy baby girl and smiles all round. We were all very happy for them, but there was no mistaking the obvious impact this news had on the prospective mothers and fathers – different reactions, but unmistakable panic/fear spread like wildfire …

New Arrival

So, this weekend is all about preparation, just in case.

Last minute spurts of productivity?

Why is that at 17:30 I suddenly find all kinds of inspiration to complete tasks that have confounded me for most of the day!? I should be thinking about heading home and kicking back but no … I’ll just try this one thing before I go …

STOP RIGHT THERE

Well I stopped it in its tracks tonight, post a blog entry about it, kill the productivity dead there and then. See ya. I’m off home now to see the wife, have some tea and head to NCT classes later.

Daily Grind …

What do you regularly drink, or want to drink when you need a liquid refreshment at the office or by way of distraction from the monotony or work?

Gold Blend Instant, Starbucks or PG Tips?