Houston Linux Consulting

Forgot your Cisco router password?  Did you know you can change them without losing your configuration?  In this brief how-to, I will walk you through it. In order to perform a password recovery, you will need to reboot the router a couple of times.  This means downtime, but it is a good sacrifice to make in order to get your passwords reset.
 
First, hook up the DB9 end of the standard light blue serial cable to your serial port.  The other end of the cable should plug into the port labeled “Console” on the back of the Cisco router.  If you do  not have a serial port, then you'll need to go purchase a USB-to-serial adapter cable and install it on your computer.
 

I recently implemented the Zenoss Enterprise appliance for the City of Houston Airport System to monitor over 250 Cisco network devices located at George Bush Intercontinental (IAH), William P. Hobby (HOU), and Ellington Airport (EFD).
 
Why Zenoss? According to the CTO of the Houston Airport System, Matt Hyde, the implementation of Zenoss “will give us greater visibility and control over our network devices and reduce our current monitoring costs”. He goes on to say that “within sixty days, we were able to make the switch to [Zenoss] and will pay for the cost of the new system with just two months of network monitoring savings. Total annual cost reductions are over 500%. Rarely do we ever get an ROI of that magnitude and we would not have achieved these savings without the help of Pate Consulting [implementing Zenoss]."
 

Need to track and combine multiple RSS feeds? This script will allow you to add RSS feeds from multiple sites and integrate them into yours dynamically. Feel free to use and modify the code below for your own website. Need help with the script? We offer php and web devlopement.
 
 <?php
// simple timeout in seconds
$timeout = 2;

// variable to be used later
$xml_string = "";

Siemens, a Global Fortune 500 company, will be saving $20,000 with Pate Consulting and a little open source project named LooperNG. LooperNG is specifically designed to replace NetCool NNM probes. Basically, LooperNG has input modules and output modules. Both types of modules can read/write in multiple formats – SNMP trap, syslog, log file, and NetCool database to name the most common.

NetCool licenses by the number of aggregators sending inbound SNMP traps to it as well as the number of NetCool database connections that it makes.
Siemens has a multitude of aggregators sending traps and, therefore, pay thousands of dollars on license fees. In addition, the NetCool NNM probe makes a connection to the NetCool database after processing the incoming traps through a set of rules. This is where LooperNG's magic comes in to the picture.
 

I decided to help out other developers either getting into PHP or experienced ones that are just looking for a different way to make fairly easy and clean database connection and queries.

I try to write a majority of my SQL in stored procedures, but that is just me.  This way I can cut down as much as possible with SQL Injection.  It is sometimes a bit more work, especially if you are using the current MySQL Clustered environment, where you have to edit the stored procedure on each SQL node you have in the cluster, hopefully in a future release they will make is single edit and it updates everywhere.  For this example though, I will not be using stored procedures.  This way you can see the sql code being used.

As part of a MySQL Cluster setup, I recently setup a 2-node web cluster using CentOS's native cluster software suite with a twist. The web root was mounted on a DRBD partition in place of periodic file sync'ing. This article focuses on the cluster setup and does not cover the DRBD setup/configuration. Let's go:

Install "Cluster Storage" group using yum:

[root@host]# yum installgroup "Cluster Storage"

Recently, I had a customer in the banking industry that needed legacy pseudo tty support on their servers. This article describes the process of adding pseudo tty support in the CentOS kernel. In addition, I describe how to create a customer kernel RPM for easy distribution to other servers.

Let's get started:
Download source kernel RPM from http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/updates/SRPMS
Install the source RPM: