Charlie Schluting

During difficult economic times, firms are often looking to cut costs, and a SAN infrastructure can compose an overwhelming portion of the IT budget. The question is, is it worth it? We weigh the benefits of the SAN with the alternatives in a SAN-less world. Why a SAN Makes Sense Centralized management is the number […]

The Cisco VPN client, vpnc, enables your Linux workstation to connect to a Cisco 3000 series VPN concentrator PIX firewall. Until vpnc existed, corporate employees were often relegated to connecting to their company’s network via a Windows machine or with Cisco’s problematic VPN client for Linux. Thankfully, those days are over, but not without slight […]

Running a basic MySQL setup is quite simple, but as soon as you begin thinking about the best way to provide redundancy, things quickly get complex. There are many layers to consider when it comes to databases, and the variety of solutions is difficult to choose from. Depending on your availability goals, the storage system […]

We all agree that iSCSI is extremely flexible and useful, but a big pain point in enterprises these days is the management of iSCSI devices. You manually configure each storage device, and then manually configure all your iSCSI initiators to connect. There has to be a better way. Thankfully, the Internet Storage Name Service (iSNS) […]

The Sun x4500 series storage servers have been a big hit. You get 48 disks, and ZFS takes advantage of the large number of disk spindles to achieve amazing throughput. Here’s another great use for the x4500: host all your virtual machines on it and share them to your Linux clients via iSCSI. We’ll show […]

Whether you are running a small business, a Fortune 500 enterprise, or something in between, Web hosting providers may have something to offer. Once you decide you need Web hosting services, you need to do some research to determine whether a specific hosting company is a good fit. Small businesses will depend more heavily on […]

WANs often need Quality of Service (QoS) configured to ensure that certain traffic is classified as “more important” than other traffic. Until now, it took a serious Cisco guru to configure a network properly for VoIP if the network was at all bandwidth constrained. AutoQoS, a new IOS feature for Cisco routers, makes deploying VoIP […]

As our fetish for monitoring tools begins to subside, we realize that one of the neatest monitoring tools available has nearly been forgotten. Cacti is “a complete frontend to RRDTool,” as they say, which makes SNMP and script-based monitoring very worthwhile. In this article we’d like to talk a bit about Cacti and how it […]

Cisco Flex Links gives network operators a simple, reliable, and more scalable method of layer 2 redundancy. The Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is not destined for the scrap bin, but it will certainly fall out of favor with many enterprise networks. Flex Links are a pair of layer 2 interfaces configured to act as a […]

The Cisco Switch Port Analyzer, or SPAN, enables advanced network troubleshooting and the implementation of robust monitoring solutions. Port mirroring, as it’s also called, is required to deploy in-depth network monitoring. A SPAN port can be configured many ways, and it’s tricky to get right. Let us show you how. SPAN ports are configured to […]

TCP is used everywhere, and understanding how TCP operates enables network and systems administrators to properly troubleshoot network communication issues. TCP is wonderfully complex, but don’t worry: We aren’t going to tell you to go read RFC 793. This is a gentle introduction, or demystification, if you will. In this edition of Networking 101, we’ll […]

What’s more important than IP and routing? Well, Layer 2 is much more important when it’s broken. Many people don’t have the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) (define) knowledge necessary to implement a layer 2 network that’s resilient. A switch going down shouldn’t prevent anyone from having connectivity, excluding the hosts that are directly attached to […]