November 21st, 2006
Scott
Just a quick note. When configuring the Remote Agent for the ACS appliance it’s of critical importance that the following instructions are followed:
AD Changes
Woops, maybe these work.
Without these changes it just doesn’t work. I kept getting “Internal Error” on the ACS log and “error 6L” in the debug mode on the remote agent. I think the problem I was running into there was because I was logged in as myself and not as the user that the service needs to “run as”.
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November 13th, 2006
Scott
We’re just about into that period where everything starts to get really crazy for the holidays. I don’t really enjoy it so much. It’s more a matter of trying to get through it without losing my mind. Many parties to look forward to, gifts to buy, house to prepare.
That’s at least a little of what I’ve been busy with the last few weeks. Trying to make it through a number of house projects. Finishing Belle’s room with some wainscotting, adding some molding to the dining room, various outside projects. It’ll be nice when these things are done and we can work on some other things. Like the Cobra, the garage (electric and insulation), possibly a back patio. The list just seems to grow. Somehow I really want to drive the Cobra next year. My tolerance for looking at it unfinished has just about expired.
I did get a new car. Ya hoo! Went and bought myself an Audi A3 with the DSG transmission. I haven’t sold the M3 yet, which is going to be a project all itself. I’ll try to post a review of the A3 after I’ve driven it for a few weeks. I’m very seriously considering autox’ing it in Decemeber if the CDC event doesn’t get cancelled.
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I was fortunate enough to be able to take the last week off from work. Didn’t go anywhere and the kids were still in school. But, I did have some time to work on the Cobra. In a nutshell I got all of the wiring in wire loom and routed where it’ll go in the car. The rear harness is clamped in place but I ran out of clamps so the front is only hanging there. Got more clamps but didn’t get back to that. I spent the rest of the time working on the dash. I went through cutting down most of the old dash wires to bus blocks I put on the firewall. Then I began cutting the holes in the dash. I got Stewart Warner gauges from Breeze so the holes aren’t the same size as the standard dash. I just about have all of the holes cut. The only ones remaining are for some of the switches. I still haven’t decided on how I want to handle the headlights. I might do a pull and turn type knob but I might just use a toggle switch. Can’t cut the last hole until I decide and I can’t mount the gauges and start wiring them until I drill all of the holes. It’s a vicious cycle.
I’ll post pictures sometime in the next week or so.
I’ve decided I have another problem that needs fixing. The garage gets too damn cold. When the wind blows it pushs the doors in to the point you can see quite a bit of sunlight coming in around the side. I’m not really sure how to fix that since there’s already weather stripping on the outside of the door that’s supposed to be stopping that. Add another item to the to-do list.
Still, it was nice to see some progress. I see some light at the end of the tunnel and when the wiring is done I’ll feel better about making progress. It’ll be back to mechanical stuff and things like e-brakes and loose ball joints. 
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Well looky here. Took them a while but there is a native Intel driver for the GUC232A USB to Serial dongle! Since I decided to rebuild my MacBook I needed to get the serial dongle working again. Figured I’d check the IOGear website and the driver is there. I installed the DMG, rebooted and it’s working perfectly! No fiddling with anything to get it to work.
Also, instead of messing with a shell script I just added an alias to my bashrc. “cc” (Cisco Console of course) now opens the unix app “screen” and points it at the IOGear tty. Works great! Much simpler than before.
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Took the MacBook in to the Apple store to get the heatsink and dirty palmrest problems fixed. That part seems to be fine now. However, for some unknown reason they decided to replace the optical drive also. Maybe there is an internal recall. Ok, I’m fine with free upgrades. Unfortunately the second CD I put into it wouldn’t come out. Yeah…thanks for the upgrade. I managed to get it to slide out by gently prying the opening a little wider. So, they either gave me a bad drive or they installed it incorrectly. Either way, I’m not too happy with them about it. Hopefully it was an isolated incedent.
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I’ve had my MacBook for about 6 months now (!) and I figure it’s time to talk about how that’s working out. First of all, the bad. My MacBook has been hit by the two known problems with MacBooks. Discoloration of the palm rest and the random shut down. Now, the discoloration I can live with although it is getting pretty ugly. The random shut downs though…that’s a big problem. I’ve determined that it happens more when the laptop’s cold. After it’s been running for a while it seems to be ok. Either way, I went into the Apple Store in Columbia MD to get it fixed. 7 days for parts. Ok, I can’t leave it. I’ll bring it back. So they call me and tell me the parts are in and I can bring it in anytime…and leave it for 5 days. Yeah…that’ll work. So, I’m hoping to drop it off next week when I’m on “vacation”. Hah!
Ok, on to the interesting bits, the usage. For about 3 or 4 months I was mostly using XP in Parallels. Ok, so not such a great test or migration of the work flow. A couple of months ago I decided to push myself to use Office in OS X more. I still have a couple of big problems like Visio and Project. I tried Crossover and it managed to load up Visio. Slowly. It’s pretty much unusable. And no, I can’t switch to Omnigraffle because asking clients to export to XML all the time isn’t really practical. So, Parallels stays for those two apps, although I rarely fire it up any more.
Now, for those other things related to the Cisco world:
*iTerm - Console app with tabs. Running through tabs with apple-arrow is pretty cool.
*Screen - good old unix app for piping the serial connection to the terminal. I use an IOGear USB-Serial cable and simply pipe it to screen.
*TFTPServer - I like this app except for one thing. I can’t just tftp a config file to it. I have to create the file (touch it) first. Sometimes I even have to restart the tftpserver once I’ve done that. I really wish it would just create the incoming file.
*TextWrangler - pretty decent text editor for being free. I really like SubEthaEdit but that costs money.
*KisMAC - Wireless sniffer. Works pretty well. Does cool things like read the SSID to you. Kinda fin to turn on while you’re driving around and listen to the mechanical voice tell you about all the open AP’s.
*Adium - iChat is very nice for chatting but it’s lacking encryption. I know there’s a way to jam OTR into iChat but it requires a proxy and that’s not my idea of cool.
*Remote Desktop Connection – Gotta connect to Windows boxes over RDP sometimes. One failing…only one session allowed at a time. I know, there’s a program that manages it for multiple connections and I also know about CoRD. CoRD is…rough around the edges.
*RANCID - for grabbing and diff’ing configs. I was shocked at how well it worked.
*CDPR - listens for CDP on an interface. Pretty useful for finding what port you’re attached to on a switch.
*Dynamips - Cisco 7200 and 3600 simulator. I haven’t spent a lot of time playing with it but what little I have…woah. I can imagine CCIE candidates would love it. And it runs great on the MacBook.
Of course, I run other things like MS Office and Firefox. But those you can get anywhere. Next up for me…maybe some more scripting or trying to get Cacti to work.
I’m trying out Blog Thing as Performancing has been giving me display problems for quite some time. Oddly the font size is off. Trying something smaller…
Can I just say how much I don’t like CiscoWorks. I mean, what a cumbersome piece of software. Anyway…
