October News

OCTOBER NEWS

Well, it's been a while since my last post, I can only apologise for my absence. I haven't been totally idle in that time, I recently acquired a Cisco Catalyst 3750 which I've been tinkering with.

I saw it in a pawn shop and made a silly offer for it, which they accepted.  I reckon I got a bit of a bargain, although my ears are paying for it.  Have you ever tried to live with 19" rack-mount kit?  It's like having a small jet engine in the corner going 24/7...

This Cisco has taken me way back to when I first started working in IT for a tier-1 ISP - I'm having to re-learn all the goodness of layer 2 and layer 3 and get a grasp of all the Cisco TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and the oddities of IOS which sometimes seems counter-intuitive in it's commands and syntax.

Hand-in-hand with switches comes monitoring.  I've installed the venerable MRTG on a Raspberry Pi which monitors the switch interfaces via SNMP.  Once I get to re-learn SNMP I'll add monitoring for the various RPis I have - things like CPU, mem, temp, filesystem space etc.

Still, at least I have a lot of nice LFLs (Little Flashing Lights) now...