Wednesday, 29 May 2019

Configuring Auto QoS on Cisco Switches

Auto QoS is a great feature included with the majority of switches running at least the LAN Base feature set. It will likely require some further tweaking after it's setup however it's a great base for applying QoS. Cisco provides support for it's own telephony devices (surprise, surprise!) through CDP broadcasts. However in my case I am working with a different vendor and since not all switches will provide classification of packets I'm relying on the tagging being performed by the downstream devices. It's very simple to setup - simply apply...

Thursday, 23 May 2019

Cross compile packages for OpenWRT / LEDE

For this tutorial I'll be using Fedora 29 for the build host. We'll install the necessary dependencies firstly: sudo dnf install asciidoc binutils bzip2 flex git gawk intltool zlib gmake ncurses openssl-devel patchutils p5-extutils-makemaker unzip wget gettext libxslt zlib-devel boost-jam perl-XML-Parser libusb-devel dev86 sharutils java-1.7.0-openjdk-devel b43-fwcutter zip The next step is to obtain the OpenWRT SDK which will allows us to cross-compile packages that we require on OpenWRT. I'll be using a BT Home Hub 5A for this exercise -...

Wednesday, 8 May 2019

Linux: Backup Options

There are countless ways to backup disks easily with Linux - however I'm going to demonstrate some of the more commonly used methods. Forenote: Always ensure the discs are not in use / mounted while performing the below operations otherwise it is likely that new / changed files will be corrupted and will run into problems with the file system. Backing up a disk with dd  sudo dd if=/dev/xvda of=/mnt/usbdrive | sync or better yet we can use a sane block size (dd uses 512 bytes by default): sudo dd bs=16M if=/dev/xvda of=/mnt/usbdrive |...