Old Dog, New Tricks

Being the educational adventures of an inexorably ageing nerd

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Nostalgia - Herbert Kornfeld keeping it real at Midstate Office Supply

Nostalgia – Herbert Kornfeld keeping it real at Midstate Office Supply

Every so often I’ll take a break from my educational adventures and reminisce about something or other which amused, interested, entertained or otherwise kept me occupied in the dim and distant past otherwise known as the Stone Age, Middle Ages, Dark Ages, or whatever epithet today’s youth deems fit to employ.

Today’s trip down memory lane is a visit to the occasional diary of one Herbert…

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Adding VLANs to OpenWRT 18.06.1 on a TP-Link TL-WR810N

Adding VLANs to OpenWRT 18.06.1 on a TP-Link TL-WR810N

Welcome back to Project Overkill. This instalment covers, as suggested by the title, configuring OpenWRT 18.06.1 to support 802.1q VLANs on a TP-Link TL-WR810N.

There are two pre-requisites: the network chipset in the router must support VLANs (some don’t), and OpenWRT’s configuration files must contain some instructions defining the switch and associated VLANs.

The TL-WR810N meets the first…

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Dual-WAN failover with the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite, using PPPoE and 4G

Dual-WAN failover with the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite, using PPPoE and 4G

One WAN connection isn’t enough for Project Overkill. Everyone’s home Internet connection needs full redundancy, right? Well, mine certainly does.

For years now I’ve made do with a paltry single router connected to a DSL line provided by British Telecom (even if it’s billed through someone else to disguise its origins). But I recently got to thinking: it sure is irritating when my Internet…

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Automatic provisioning of a Yealink T29G

Automatic provisioning of a Yealink T29G

The Cisco 7960G is an adequate enough VoIPdevice, but it is rather long in the tooth. Just like IBM, no-one ever got fired for buying Cisco (probably because if you can afford to buy Cisco, you’re most likely in a large organisation with so much capital expenditure that Cisco’s prices are a drop in the ocean), but is Cisco necessarily the best choice? If you’ve got the cash, then go for it.…

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2048 bits off more than iLO 4 can chew

2048 bits off more than iLO 4 can chew

Any good administrator knows that public key authentication for SSH is better than using passwords, and longer keys are better than shorter keys.

Well, someone might want to let Hewlett Packard know.

The latest version of HP’s Integrated Lights-Out 4 (version 2.55) will happily accept a 4096-bit public key for SSH authentication. There won’t be any indication that there might be a problem.

The…

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Using OpenWRT / LEDE for Out-of-Band Management

Using OpenWRT / LEDE for Out-of-Band Management

My day job is IT security for large, blue-chip organisations. I usually work on diverse, heterogeneous networks and have to remember which commands, menus, and options are applicable to whichever piece of equipment I might be using at the time. There ain’t no such thing as a single standard, so it’s important that I retain some sort of mental dexterity if I’m to have any hope of carrying out my…

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Cisco 7960G BTXML Error - HTTP 200 or 404?

Cisco 7960G BTXML Error – HTTP 200 or 404?

Today I learned that the directory XML file used by the Cisco 7960G IP phone doesn’t work from all web servers. It seems that the 7960G is fussy about which HTTP response codes it accepts, and that an HTTP 200 response might not be the correct HTTP 200 response.

Hosting the directory XML file on one web server caused endless “BTXML Error” messages at the top of the phone’s display and “404” at…

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