Set management IP on a VLAN on Dell Force10 S55 Switch Stack

While these switches do have dedicated management ethernet ports, it's often simpler and neater to set a management IP on the normal out of band / management VLAN that's already trunked on the uplink. For whatever reason the official Dell knowledge base article on the subject leaves out a crucial detail! It's necessary to set a default route before communication can commence. If you haven't set an IP on the management port you can't issue the management route command. Instead you need to issue the following:

ip route 0.0.0.0/0 192.168.0.1

to set a normal default gateway for the switch. Once that's done you're all set!

Netgear GS108v2: The Immortal Switch

We have a couple of Netgear ProSafe 8 Port Gigabit Switch model GS108v2 around the office. These things fail so often it's not even funny. Luckily I've discovered something I would guess Netgear would rather I forget. The device comes with a lifetime warranty on the hardware. The really interesting piece here, though, is that if the device was purchased prior to 11/09 an RMA doesn't require a proof of purchase. What's that you say? They're still available on Amazon? That's right - $60 USD will buy a gigabit switch with a warranty that will last until 2037! Though, by 2037 we'll likely be on 1000GbaseT or some such, but still - thanks Netgear!

SVG in Android Browser

I learned to my disappointment today that my favorite android browser Dolphin HD doesn't support Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).  Luckily Firefox does!  I'm currently giving the beta version a try for checking the bandwidth usage monitor in DD-WRT, but it seems quite quick for general browsing as well.

Setting up SPAN for packet sniffing on a Cisco Catalyst

The documentation on this subject is extensive and like all things Cisco somewhat archaic. I'm posting this here in an attempt to simplify and as a reminder to myself the next time I need to do this. Telnet in to your switch and issue the following commands:

1) enable
2) configure terminal
3) no monitor session all
4) monitor session 1 source interface fastEthernet0/1 both
5) monitor session 1 destination interface fast/Ethernet0/10
6) end

Command 3 clears any existing SPAN sessions. You can change the port number at the end of command 4 to the port of the uplink on the switch to monitor all traffic.  Alternately you can specify a range of ports. Change the port number at the end of command 5 to the port on which you intend to set up your sniffer. In order to turn the SPAN off then rerun the first three commands. That's basically all there is to it. Now plug in a laptop to the monitor port and run dumpcap on the ethernet interface.