Wordpress Shoutbox

I was searching a good shoutbox for my hosted wordpress blog. Then I found a wordpress plugin for shoutbox. The name of the plugin is Wordspew. It was difficult to find out the pluggin because it is not maintained anymore by Andrew, while most of the posts I found on google were pointed to Andrew.

Finally I found the link of where the latest update can be downloaded.
Here is it, on Pierre's website.

Installing SSLeay on Ubuntu

I had a very hard time to install SSLeay on Ubuntu either by using cpan or compiling it directly from the source. It looks like that some headers were missing on the compilation process so I got so many errors and unable to compile the module.

I finally realized that there are always an easy way to do it on Ubuntu, as usual, by using apt-get.
Here is the command to install SSLeay on Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install libnet-ssleay-perl
sudo apt-get install libcrypt-ssleay-perl

Installing Debian without any CD installer

I really wanted to install Debian on my machine but I didn't have any CD installer of Debian. I was thinking of downloading the image from the web, but unfortunately I didn't have any empty CD to burn the image.
Finally I found a very good page on Debian website, telling that it is possible to install Debian without any Debian CD. It said that Debian can be installed over the network as long as I have a working *NIX OS on my machine. It is a very good solution to me since I have Ubuntu already on my machine. Then I only need to create another partition for Debian, follow the steps, and then now I'm running Debian.

The complete instructions can be found here

There are some additional steps need to be done on my machine since the instructions above will only install Debian without the GUI.
Here are the steps:
1) Login as root
2) apt-get install x-windows-system-core
3) apt-get install gdm
4) apt-get install gnome

That's it. Have a nice try.

RootGuard

RootGuard prevents a port to be a ND (non designated) port. So the port should always be designated. If the port receive a better BPDU, the port will become root-inconsistent state and the port will be blocking

LoopGuard

LoopGuard need to be enabled on Root Ports and Alternate Ports. When the port is not receiving BPDU, then the port will become a Loop-Inconsistent blocking state.

Looks simple, but unfortunately the sample answer of a question I got didn't match with my answer. Need to dig more about this.

Administrative Distance

When there are multiple routing protocols running on a router, and each protocols has a route then a route to the destination, then the router will select a path with the lowest administrative distance. So, the table below need to be remembered.

Route Source	Default Distance Values
Connected interface	0
Static route	1
Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol (EIGRP) summary route	5
External Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)	20
Internal EIGRP	90
IGRP	100
OSPF	110
Intermediate System-to-Intermediate System (IS-IS)	115
Routing Information Protocol (RIP)	120
Exterior Gateway Protocol (EGP)	140
On Demand Routing (ODR)	160
External EIGRP	170
Internal BGP	200
Unknown*	255

ODR (On-Demand-Routing)

Q: What is ODR ?
A: On-Demand Routing is not a routing protocol. It uses Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) to propagate the IP prefix. ODR is a perfect solution for hub and spoke topology when the spoke routers act as stub routers by connecting to no other router other than the hub. If you only use Cisco routers in your network, running Cisco IOS® 11.2 or later, you can use ODR. If you are running dynamic protocols (for instance, if you are an ISP), ODR is not suitable for your network environment

Q: How can I configure ODR ?
A: Configure the router odr command in the hub router and turn off any dynamic routing protocols in the spoke routers. Spoke routers automatically start to advertise their subnets using CDP. You do not need the router odr command on spoke routers

More info about ODR ? Check on this link

Roadmap - Written

I think guest the best way to create a Road map is based on the blueprint.
So I copied the blueprint here and will put the date on each topic

1. General Networking Theory
   1. General Routing Concepts
      1. Link State and Distance Vector Protocols
      2. Split Horizon
      3. Summarization
      4. Classful and a Classless routing protocol
      5. Routing decision criteria
   2. Routing Information Base (RIB) and Routing Protocols Interaction
      1. Administrative Distance
      2. Routing Table
      3. RIB and Forwarding Information Base interaction
   3. Redistribution
      1. Redistribution between routing
      2. Troubleshooting routing loop
   
   
2. Bridging and LAN Switching
   1. Spanning Tree Protocol (STP)
      1. 802.1d
      2. 802.1w
      3. 802.1s
      4. Loopguard
         
      5. Rootguard 5-nov-2007
         
      6. Bridge Protocol Data Unit (BPDU) Guard 5-nov-07
         
      7. Storm Control
      8. Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP)
      9. Unicast flooding
      10. STP port roles, failure propagation and loopguard operation
   2. LAN Switching
      1. Trunks
      2. VLAN Trunking Protocol (VTP) administrative functions
   3. Ethernet
      1. Speed
      2. Duplex
      3. Ethernet
      4. Fast Ethernet
      5. Gigabit Ethernet
   
   
3. IP
   1. Addressing
      1. Subnetting
      2. Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP)
      3. Gateway Load Balancing Protocol (GLBP)
      4. Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP)
      5. Network Address Translation (NAT)
   2. Services
      1. Network Time Protocol (NTP)
      2. Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP)
      3. Web Cache Communication Protocol (WCCP)
   3. Network Management
      1. Logging and Syslog
   
   
4. IP Routing
   1. OSPF
      1. Standard OSPF area
      2. Stub area
      3. Totally stub area
      4. Not-so-stubby-area (NSSA)
      5. Totally NSSA
      6. Link State Advertisement (LSA) types
      7. Adjacency on a point-to-point and on a multi-access (broadcast)
      8. OSPF graceful restart
      9. Troubleshooting failing adjacency formation to fail
      10. Troubleshooting of external route installation in the RIB
   2. BGP
      1. Protocol on which BGP peers communicate
      2. Next Hop
      3. Peering
      4. Troubleshooting of BGP route that will not install in the routing table
   3. EIGRP
      1. Best path
      2. Loop free paths
      3. EIGRP operations when alternate loop free paths are available and when it is not available
      4. EIGRP queries
      5. Manual summarization
      6. Auto-summarization
      7. EIGRP Stubs
      8. Troubleshooting of EIGRP neighbor adjacencies
   4. Policy Routing
      1. Concept of policy routing
   
   
5. QoS
   1. Modular QoS command-line (MQC) applied to:
      1. Network-Based Application Recognition (NBAR)
      2. Class-based weighted fair queueing (CBWFQ) / Modified Deficit Round Robin (MDRR)
      3. Policing
      4. Shaping
      5. Marking
      6. Random Early Detection (RED)
   
   
6. WAN
   1. Frame Relay
      1. Local Management Interface (LMI)
      2. Traffic Shaping
      3. HUB and Spoke routers
      4. Dynamic Multipoint VPN (DMVPN)
      5. DE
   
   
7. IP Multicast
   1. Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) v2
   2. Group addresses
   3. Shared Trees
   4. Source Trees
   5. Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) Mechanic
   6. PIM Sparse Mode
   7. Auto-RP
   8. Anycast RP
   
   
8. Security
   1. Extended IP access lists
   2. Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding (uRPF)
   3. IP Source Guard
   4. Context Based Access Control (CBAC)
   
   
9. MPLS (New)
   1. Label Switching Router (LSR)
   2. Label Switched Path (LSP)
   3. Route Descriptor
   4. Label Format
   5. Label imposition/disposition
   6. Label Distribution
   
   
10. IPv6 (New)
    1. IPv6 Addressing and types
    2. IPv6 Neighbor Discovery
    3. Basic IPv6 functionality protocols
    4. IPv6 Multicast and related Multicast protocols
    5. Tunneling Techniques
    6. OSPFv3
    7. EIGRPv6

How to reset MySQL password

I was looking for a way to reset a MySQL password if forgotten the current password. Then I found this website.

Here are the steps:

1. Stop the mysqld daemon process.
2. Start the mysqld daemon process with the --skip-grant-tables option.
3. Start the mysql client with the -u root option.
4. Execute the UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('password') WHERE User='root';
5. Execute the FLUSH PRIVILEGES; command.

These steps reset the password for the "root" account to "password". To change the password for a different account, or to set a different password, just edit the variables in single-quotes in step 4.

If you know your existing MySQL root password, steps 1-3 are not necessary.

Advanced Packaging Tool

Advanced Packaging Tool, or APT, is a front-end for the package management system used by Debian GNU/Linux and its derivatives (quoted from wikipedia). This tool should be very familiar for ubuntu/debian users as we need it to install application by using the command below:

$ sudo apt-get install package

When we run the command, debian will look for the package from the repositories. And the sources of the repositories can be found on /etc/apt/sources.list. We can edit this file to the closest server from our workstation or any server that we prefer to improve the speed of downloading the package.

Ubuntu, unable to compile

I’m quite new with Ubuntu and used to work with RedHat before. Using this new distro, made experiencing a lot of new thins such as what I got today. I was unable to compile several application from source code. The C compiler is installed, but not the essential headers. Therefore, I got the error message below whenever I compiled an application:

C compiler cannot create executables

To allow me compiling the source, here what I need to do:

#sudo apt-get install build-essential

Voila, I’m now able to compile the sources

Network Troubleshooting on Ubuntu

# ifconfig <– to see the network interface

# ethtool ethX <– to see if the NIC is disconnected or not

# ethtool -S ethX <– any error on NIC ?

More ? Click here

First post while testing

This is my first post. I'm trying to see if it is possible to create posting categories on this blog.