Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

It’s been a while since I’ve done more than just update the Unified Trees post for new versions, and I stumbled across an issue that Linux administrators that make use of iptables should be aware of. The case is actually true for any “client initiated connection” when it comes to iptables – not just MySQL slaves. That’s just where I stumbled across the issue.

Got multiple Cacti installs? Want the Tree view of your graphs to show all of your trees mashed together? Then this is the plugin for you.

I wrote a Cacti plugin I called DPDiscover – Discovery Protocol Discover, which uses LLDP, CDP, and FDP information pulled from SNMP to ‘spider’ a network and attempt to automatically add equipment to Cacti. It is heavily based off of the original “Auto Discovery” plugin that would sweep IP ranges.

Pebble released a significant update to their iOS app and Firmware. However, getting it running properly turned out to be a bit of a challenge. I’d be surprised if you ended up here before somewhere else in your searches for solutions; but in case you haven’t, here’s what you can expect and how I got it working.

Fitbit is a company that makes “activity trackers”: devices that will track your activities and give you an idea of how much you’ve done “something” throughout the day. My wife, owner of a competing product (Jawbone Up), convinced me to get a Fitbit One. Here are my thoughts on the ideas behind an activity tracker, the Fitbit One specifically, Fitbit’s iPhone app, and comparing that app to Jawbone Up’s app.

The first modern “smartwatch” to make it onto my radar, the Pebble has much promise and delivers on much of it. It’s a smart phone companion, but certainly not a smart phone replacement; and even as a companion, it might not do everything someone would want. I got one, and here are my thoughts so far.

An attempt to communicate an issue (and the solution) I ran into with Perl’s Net::SNMP function “get_table”, that would result in a “The message size exceeded the buffer maxMsgSize of 1452” error. It took a couple of packet captures and Googling to figure out why this problem was occurring and implement a fix.

I was wondering if I could come up with a quick way to describe my impressions; the best I can come up with: It’s like Apple is trying to borrow from the Android operating systems, but it’s also like they took one of the worst Android interfaces and left out the ability to customize it properly.

A fellow engineer attempting to debug a jumbo frames issue was seeing what should have been a bunch of fragmented frames as a single 13,000 byte frame. Once he figured out why, I was told to fix it. Here’s my solution.

Ran into a little issue at work and decided to write up some things to keep in mind when you have multiple masters with slaves behind each individual master.