HiddenOne

The lack of updates here recently has been compounded by a number of issues. The first of these issues is my “9-5″, which can be anything from an “8-4″, a “7-7″ or anything in between. Many times going home simply means I go home only to VPN in and complete some tasks I didn’t get to during the day.

Over the past few weeks we have been having some issues with our tape backups. Back in December of 2008 I inherited the duties of Backup Administrator since I had some experience at a previous employer. The first issue was that our tape library was appearing as offline in BackupExec. This was related to SCSI cable which was an easy fix. After we resolved that issue, we noticed that the “Job Rate” on our backups drastically dropped. Drastically means the job rates went from about 1,200 MB/Min to 190 MB/Min! This meant that the 100 GB Exchange database backup went from a little over two hours start to finish to over 26 hours! After some troubleshooting it was discovered that the tape library had been changed to use the HP drivers while I was troubleshooting the previous issue with our vendor. After changing the drivers back to the ones provided by BackupExec the job rates have returned to normal.

On the network front, I have been doing some work to bring the management of our network up to par. First I have deployed RADIUS authentication on our switches in order to better control and monitor access. Additionally I have deployed a banner or message of the day (MOTD) on each switch. This is the message you see before you are prompted to provide your login credentials. On HP Procurve switches HP provides a boring canned message asking you to register the switch. Deploying a banner is accomplished with one command:

banner motd #
This is my custom banner!

Don't mess with my network gear!
#

Once I get some additional copper modules installed in some of our switches, I will be enabling BPDU protection on the edge ports (Port that end-users connect into). Evil Routers has an article that covers configuring BPDU protection on HP Procurve switches.

BPDU protection prevents a rouge switch from changing your spanning tree topology. If the switch sees a BPDU on a port that has BPDU protection enabled, it can react in a number of different ways. My personal choice is to have the port disabled permanently. This requires the invention of a network administrator for the Port to be enabled me again. This gives me a chance to talk to the user, explain what happened, and why it happened.

My CCNA studies are still progressing slowly. I am hoping to begin the final preparation for the exam in the coming weeks.