Moved !

My blog (http://blog.howardtang.com) and my photo blog (http://photo.howardtang.com) have been moved away from iiNet to my NBN home connection. Up time could be a problem as I still haven’t purchased a UPS for my system.

There are a few benefits moving the blog and photos blog back to my home server.

– save $60 a month VPS hosting fee
– able to provide IPv6 addresses to my blog
– able to back up my server anytime I want (And I can switch it off anytime I want)
– able to provide more bandwidth than hosting with iiNet! (40Mbps upload rate with NBN)

Stay tuned, I will let you know when IPv6 is setup!

NBN via Exetel

I have signed up a 100M/40M service using Exetel as the ISP. The download speed is very good, in my speed test, I get 91Mbps download and 38kbps upload.

Well, since I get a static IP address from Exetel, I am going to move my VPS from iinet to a physical server at home and run at home 24×7 with UPS backup.

Instead of paying $50 a month for iiNet, I think with the NBN connection, my server can run at a much lower cost and I back it up whenever I like.

A Cisco ASA firewall will be put in place to add additional security in my home network.

Screen Shot 2013-07-28 at 11.03.27 AM

My Cisco router freaks me out!

Recently, I have bought a cisco 887 ADSL router for home use. I can than setup SSLVPN, ipv6 tunnel, IOS IPS, zone base firewall, etc. It is really for my lab use to get myself familiar with the Cisco IOS again after passing my CCIE Routing and Switching 2 years ago.

One of the main reason of using a Cisco Router at home is the VPN connectivity which allow me to connect back to my Lab from work. May be you will ask, why don’t setup a Lab at work? well, GNS3 is resource greedy, and the laptop provided by work is not good enough to even just simulate one single router on GNS3.

To cut the long story short, I have setup AAA authentication with the Cisco ISE NFR kit. All the authentication for VPN and access to the router are done by the Cisco ISE. All of a sudden, I couldn’t login to my router this morning with my username and password! I have been trying over 1 hour.

I jumped on the Cisco ISE remotely and cannot see any authentication request during the period of failed login attempts and then I checked the log..

Here I found the problem of why I cannot login to my router.

May 9 10:18:49 AST: %AAA-3-ACCT_LOW_MEM_UID_FAIL: AAA unable to create UID for incoming calls due to insufficient processor memory
May 9 10:28:44 AST: %AAA-3-ACCT_LOW_PROC_MEM_TRASH: AAA unable to handle accounting requests due to insufficient processor memory and could be trashing the queued accounting records

This is a Cisco 887 router which I have paid to upgrade to Advanced IP Services. Cisco advertises this router is feature rich, you can use this with IPS, Firewall, VPN termination, etc. However, I don’t have much feature enabled on the router, it has already created problem. What if this router is going to be put in a branch with 10 – 20 users ?

Casual Photography Group Sydney Event in April

I have setup a Photography group in Sydney on Facebook. The aim of this group is to provide a place for photographers, models and make up artists to communicates and setup event.

Our Facebook group is here.

Our first event was held on 6/4/2013 and it was a “Red riding hood” theme. If you are in Sydney and like to join small photo shooting with us, please feel free to join our group.

Model : Ashleigh
Make up : Pansy
IMG_9461-2

Blog update frequency affects hit rate

If you have visited my blog before, you may notice that my blog is not updated frequently sometimes. I went to look at my statistic today and I realized that my hits rate dropped a big time compare to the month that I have several new posts. It looks like the more I post, it will attack more people to come to read my blog.

I didn’t have time to update the blog because I didn’t have time to find something interesting to write about. I was hoping to do some more lab works and write something about those labs, but end up I am too tired to do so after a long day work.

It is good to see my blog still getting visitors, I should really get some time to update my blog more frequent to give more information out about Networking, IT or Photography.

Valentine’s Day Dinner

I found a special restaurant online which is not accessible by car. You have to go there by a boat.

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It has a good water view. The name of the restaurant called Berowra Water Inn. The food was great and the service was excellent.

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A boat will pick you up from the docks at the east side or west side if you don’t have one.

You can visit their website for more information. Berowra Water Inn

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A Good online store for Camera related stuff!

Recently, I was doing some online searching about camera stuff. I came across an online store which I would like to recommend!

The online store address is http://www.itsmything.com.au/. If you look at the price and the free shipping offer and compare to eBay. You will find that the price that It’s My Thing offer is more reasonable.

If you are looking for camera stuff, gopro, etc. I highly recommend you buy it from there!

I have just bought my GOPRO Hero 3 Black edition from there!

ISE + ASA Home Lab Part 1

Yesterday I have written my plan of setting up a Lab at home to get familiar with the Cisco ISE and ASA (I heard that is going to be in CCIE security test…). Today I have some screen shot and have proved that the basic stuff works.

First of all, follow the links I posted yesterday for the ASA 8.4(2) run on GNS3 first. The next step is to setup a topology in GNS3. I haven’t completed the full lab, but this is what I have done today.

GNS Setup

C1 is the host computer running ADSM GUI to configure the ASA.

C2 is the Virtual Machine running Cisco ISE NFR 1.1.1.

C2 setting map to VMnet1

I setup an Inside interface with ip address in the same subnet as the ISE.

ASA Inside : 10.100.64.100
ISE : 10.100.64.70

I have done some ping test to make sure the connectivity are good. Then I add the ASA in the network device list on the ISE.

adding GNS3-ASA to ISE

The next step is add the AAA server in the ASA. Once this step is completed, I used a “test” username and password to test the radius authentication with ISE from the ASA.

test radius connection with ISE

As I haven’t setup anything on the ISE, I have expected the authentication will be failed. Now we can check the log on the ISE to see if it has captured the fail login.

The fail login was logged

I am happy to the result today. I am going to build a remote VPN lab by using ISE when I have time again. Enjoy!

Creating an ISE, ASA Lab at home without buying any hardware

I created a Lab to simulate a client’s situation yesterday on a ASA using GNS3 simulator. Suddenly, I want to create a Lab using the ability to connect GNS3 to a virtual machine. I am not sure if this will work, but I would like to write down the step here and share to everyone who have time to experiment this..

What you need (at least I believe what you need to have….)
– A powerful PC which you can run a few VMs
– A ISE VM
– A GNS3 installed on the host PC (prefer Windows OS, as all the guides are based on windows 7)

Using the ability to connects real device from GNS3, (in this case will be GNS3 connecting VM machines and host machines), enabling ip routing on the windows and allowing multiple VM networks to communicates…. I am hoping to do the following……

I have the Cisco ISE 1.0 NFR (Which I have upgraded to 1.1.2 by following the steps from Cisco Web Site). You can find my previous post about the Cisco ISE and the upgrade. The Cisco ISE is running in a VM. Now, what I need is the GNS3 and ASA. You can follow the steps from this link to setup an ASA in GNS3.

http://www.xerunetworks.com/2012/02/cisco-asa-84-on-gns3/

Once you have done that, follow the link below to create connection between the ASA in the GNS3 and other real machines. You can get the idea from this link and have it connected to your VM machine interface.

http://www.xerunetworks.com/2012/03/connect-gns3-network-to-real-networks-other-gns3-network/

The next step, I will be following the cisco support forum able setting up the “VPN inline Posture using iPEP ISE and Cisco ASA”.

https://supportforums.cisco.com/docs/DOC-24412