An often overlooked aspect of managing network appliances like switches and routers is the necessity of configuration backups. Changes to these devices are usually infrequent, making backups easy to forget after finalizing a configuration. What’s more, network appliances often lack …
Author Archives: Owner
Leveraging SMB and VHDs for Windows Server Backups
Backing up a Windows Server (WS) installation for disaster recovery has always been a thorn in my side. As critical as backups are in any infrastructure, I’m surprised there doesn’t exist a more robust and flexible built-in backup solution for …
DRBD and Nested LVM
DRBD is a opensource block-level storage system designed to provide distributed storage in cluster environments. Nodes of a cluster write changes locally and DRBD replicates those changes to other nodes. It supports both Primary/Secondary (master/slave) and Primary/Primary (master/master) configurations. I’m …
Tripplite Smart UPS: A Review
My experience with Tripplite Smart UPSes has not been very positive, yet I’m required to manage and monitor six of them to prop up our entire IT and broadcast infrastructure. I know these units are rather old, but I want …
AoIP and Liquidsoap
Many modern broadcast facilities, like the one I work at, are fully AoIP enabled. AoIP gives stations great flexibility and availability with their audio sources, and enables engineers to rely less on end-point hardware, like sound cards and processors, that …
Centralized backups using rsync and OpenSSH on Windows 10
I consider backups to be the “desert island” service of IT; if you’re going to provide one service to your users or business, it has to be backups. Data changes all the time, users make mistakes, and disasters happen. What …
Monitoring Log Messages with Nagios Passive Checks
Nagios is powerful, industry-standard monitoring software that can track uptime, generate performance reports, and alert relevant personnel when something goes wrong. It’s probably the most important software I use on a daily basis.
Nagios’s primary mode of “service checking” is …
Tuning Cisco and Linux IGMP for AoIP
Modern AoIP implementations from vendors like Wheatstone or Telos utilize multicast networking to efficiently deliver audio streams among devices on a network. Without multicast, bandwidth usage and latency on the network can spike. Uplinks connecting access switches with the core …