Cisco DNA Center Installation notes

These are my notes for installing Cisco DNA Center: Things to look out for, things to check in the release notes. Accounts to keep track of - in a password safe please, password recovery is painful.maglev - this is your Linux root account. If this is gone you can recover it, but it's painful. Access …

Fortigate performance – gotchas in hardware acceleration

Fortinet's Fortigate firewalls have amazing performance for the dollar, all thanks to their strength in ASIC design: They use custom hardware chips to accelerate everything from straight packet-slinging to encryption to content inspection. When that hardware acceleration switches off, you may find yourself with terrible performance and CPU spikes. This article aims to document some …

Does it make sense to keep your emergency fund in a HELOC?

For a change, a personal finance post, not a technical one. There's this idea that you can use a Home Equity Line Of Credit (HELOC) as your emergency fund, and pocket (or invest) the difference between the interest rate on your mortgage and the interest rate of wherever your emergency fund was sitting. It takes …

How to move from OneNote 2016 to OneNote Windows 10

Microsoft have stated that Windows 10 OneNote, the UWP version that installs from the store, is going to be the only one receiving new features. And OneNote 2016, the desktop client, is going to stay as-is. If, like me, you have a number of OneNote 2016 Notebooks, you may be stumped as to how to …

IPv6 with Prefix Delegation on Fortigate

[Edit 2018-10-18] Make sure to use FortiOS 6.0.3 or later for this, as earlier versions of 6.0.x will force your interface to IPv6 "static" when you make any change to the interface from the GUI, including changes to its IPv4 configuration, such as a DHCP reservation. I have not tested 5.6.x but am assuming it …

JunOS SPACE installation notes

Installing JunOS SPACE can be a slog through documentation. These are my notes to help with the needed steps. Edit: vSphere 6.5 can have issues installing the OVA file provided by Juniper. Until Juniper provides OVF files, you can install ovftools and convert the OVA using those. ovftool -st=OVA -tt=OVF space-17.1R1.7.ova space-17.1R1.7.ovf Source (.ova) and …

JunOS SPACE upgrade to 16.1r2

These are my notes for upgrading JunOS SPACE from 15.2r2 to 16.1r1 or 16.1r2. They are meant to be consumed together with Juniper's upgrade instructions. Since you are installing a fresh copy of JunOS SPACE as part of this upgrade, maybe now is also a good time to revisit some default settings. 16.1 is the …

JunOS SPACE fails when upgrading applications

When upgrading JunOS SPACE, the applications installed on it need to be upgraded as well. I've seen jboss crash and restart when several applications are upgraded in a row. This happened after moving to SPACE 16.1r2 and then again when upgrading to 17.1r1. JTAC advised that the issue is that Java runs out of "PermGen" …

Installing VMWare Tools (Open VM Tools) on JunOS SPACE 16.1 or newer

These instructions are for JunOS SPACE 16.1 or newer. I also have instructions for JunOS SPACE 15.2 or older. JunOS SPACE, Juniper's management tool for JunOS devices (switches, routers, firewalls), officially supports Open VM Tools for management from ESXi. Unfortunately, Juniper's instructions are to build Open VM Tools, and that won't work without a dev environment, …

WSL “Bash on Windows” as a dev environment

Edit 2019-05-10: This post references WSL 1. I'm getting hyped for WSL 2, and won't be pushing to make things like Swift work in WSL 1. I don't aim to introduce WSL, or do more than link to installation steps. I do want to take a quick note of tweaks that have been helpful to me …