Max Lyth

So the parts to our ESX4i server have been dribbling in with the last piece to arrive being the Intel SR1600UR chassis which we had to get special ordered.

Putting the bits together was easy and we just needed to follow the instructions that came with SR1600. We were worried that we would be short of cables, thermal paste, riser cards, screws and accessories but the Intel chassis came with everything we needed. It may be ugly but it’s well thought out.

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We’ve been running VMWare Server 2.0 on top of a CentOS box for a while now but it could not really cope, especially as we are limited to 32bit CentOS for other application reasons which always meant upgrading the hardware was mostly pointless.

This finally got to breaking point over the summer so we started planning an upgrade. The release of ESX4i as a free version was a deciding factor although we did evaluate both VirtualBox and XenServer. The biggest problem in leaving the Linux based VMWare Server to a bare metal hypervisor is that you don’t have the luxury of broad hardware support.

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I finally got around to writing up the instructions one of my most complex How-Tos which covers setting up IPAcco on Mac OS X.

IPAcco is a free software package that helps a network admin to collect, visualize and analyze IP accounting data from the Cisco routers. Cisco routers themselves are capable of collecting IP accounting information.

Because IPAcco is based on TCL, MySQL, PHP and GD; this how-to covers configuration of all these elements and in particular, building and installing a GD capable version of PHP.

I have been building up a backlog of information I wanted to post on my old HowTo website but I just could not be bothered to launch GoLive and wrestle with it for 20mins before I could even start making changes.

The inevitable death of GoLive after the Adobe-Macromedia meant that sooner or later the site was going to need reworking. However rather than pay Adobe for the GoLive-Dreamweaver crossgrade I figured I could get a much better site without shelling out any money if I switched to WordPress.

Problem is that I liked the layout of my old website and its variable width design and I could find no Themes I liked for WordPress although GlossyBlue from N.Design Studio came close. I decided to crack out my copy of the excellent CSSEdit and trusty php editor TextMate and set to work. I’m pretty pleased with the result (although I wasted hour trying to get it to work with IE and it’s still not that great) and even got the variable width to work as I wanted.

It’s going to take me a while to port my old HowTos to the new system so they are off-line for the time being (sorry) but let’s hope that this is the start of much more frequent updates.

While all our servers are firewalled we leave the SSH port open as it is a connection of last resort for administrators when the server cannot be contacted by any other means. While we have strict password policies this does no stop an incessant bombardment of dictionary attacks on those SSH ports.

I was also noticing my logs filling up with endless futile attempts from China to log in as root (the root account is disabled; duh!) to my unix box. While I was confident that my security wuld not be breached I wanted to be able to abruptly cut off these hackers so they would know they had been hacked in return.

I used the BSD built in host.deny feature as a simple way to cut-off hacking hosts and married it with a perl script from pettingers.org running as a daemon to manage and purge the hosts in the blacklist. I’ve written up instructions on how to implement the auto-blacklist in one of my HowTos.