This one has been coming for a while… Last time I went for my CCIE was Q3 2007 and it’s been pretty quiet here since. In the mean time I’ve moved country, changed jobs and moved again, though not as far. So how is my CCIE doing? Well to be honest, it’s not.

You see, I came from a sponsored certification track -which incidentally I forged with my employer at the time- and thus had to sort out a transfer sum from my new employer. No problem for the Dutch employment market, at least at the time. But here in the UK I had no such luck, suffice to say that financially it was not a good idea to move country. My new employer expressed that they would be happy to support attaining CCIE status. Little did I know that we had completely different concepts of ‘support’.

Loving a new challenge I quickly settled into my new position, only to find two years had gone before the question of attaining CCIE popped up again. No wonder really when you have a 100% billable target and there’s plenty of over time involved in the projects at hand. Then when things settled down and I moved to another customer I only found myself further and further away from technology. Yes I still design and have a consulting role but I’m in no way challenged and kept on my toes protocol wise. It took a few technical interviews to fully realise the impact of this.

Which brought me to this point: Either, I work and retrain myself towards CCIE in my own time, hope my employer will pay for the lab and favour me with a week off for full-time study. Or do I let go of the desire to attain CCIE and trust that there will be employers out there who are smart enough not to be blind sided by a the highly praised numbers of my peers.

In conclusion I refuse to ask my family for a long and hefty sacrifice once again, been there done that. I’m now one kid and two cancers (promisestoday.com/@maizymoo tweet) further and value my own time more than my career, if this means UK employers don’t like me any more than so be it. I know what I’m capable of, just wish I was better at convincing prospective employers…

Tags: CCIE,cisco
Categories: CCIE R&S, Main blog, Work
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Two days ago my wife was notified by one of her customers of a defacement of their site. Obviously this kinda stuff always happens when I’m ill and the last thing I want to be doing is dealing with some random hacker. This post is about what I found and how this should motivate people to at all times update their websites with the latest security fixes and practices.

As far as I’m aware no sensitive data was access nor was any serious damage done other than a few index.html files over written. The only real loss is the joomla site that was broken into as the owner is on holiday and hadn’t updated it for a while, suffice to say it’s down for the time being.

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Tags: apache2,hackers,htaccess,joomla,linkedin
Categories: Main blog
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Seeing this initiative made me think of my wife who has spent the last year carving out her own piece of the IT industry. Some may call me biased, true. Call it what you like, I’m taking this opportunity to put my wife in the limelight and honour her for her efforts and achievements after we relocated to the UK.

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Tags: linkedin
Categories: Main blog
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Been hacking away as I found out I couldn’t edit a page nor did the page show up. My about page linked to the gallery instead. Spilt some blood and danced around on the keyboard loads. the result:

Note to self: DO NOT alter permalinks for pages! my about page was linked as who-am-i and this caused major issues. I also turned off the automatic XHTML corrections in the write-options page, not sure what it does so I’d rather get an error when writing a page than have my site go down. Priorities they say…

next to that my gallery now runs mod_rewrite in safe mode which works fine and I’ve re-linked an image on my about page. I recon the link was old style from WP 2.3 and older versions of WPG2 and Gallery2.

Please let me know if you find any issues, particularly with missing images. I hope all is well now and my server won’t die another terrible dead due to rewite/permalink hell.

Finally I have found the real culprit: /.htaccess was messing with things. What made it hard to find was that this file has been in place for a few years now. Upgrading WordPress to v2.7 as well as WPG2/Gallery2 tipped the balance.

What worked?
RewriteRule ^$ /wordpress/ [R=301,L]

Instead of:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/.+
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /wordpress/ [R=301,L]

Tags: linkedin,mod_rewrite,XHTML
Categories: Main blog
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It appears my host was under attack this morning. Have mitigated as much as I could but there’s only so much one can do against dns ddos attacks… Sorry for todays downtime.

Categories: Main blog
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Please excuse me while I hunt some issues with this site after upgrading wordpress, gallery2 and wpg2…

Categories: Main blog
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Note to self: disable and/or clear rewrite rules before upgrading… (Still in stormy water, just testing if I can update posts now)

Tags: doh,maintenance,rewrite,site
Categories: Main blog
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Not posted much about moving countries yet. As I’m on a roll I might as well just give a little update for all those who know me and wonder what I’m up to.

We’re not out of the boxes yet but working hard to get there. Hayley’s work and my CCIE are both ensuring that many hours are spent cleaning, drilling, moving and sorting. Trying to fit the same ammount of stuff in a different house is proving to be quite the challenge. It’s much like one of those kiddy puzzles where you have to move the squares around to find the picture. I often ended up picking the squares out and then putting them back in order. Sadly I can’t apply the same process here.

Due to family and work related deadlines we’ll have to get the study in order before the end of the month. Now if only I can get my phone system to behave and get myself access to nscglobals CCIE lab then I should be all set to go come March.

Tags: moving,UK
Categories: Main blog
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Not posted much recently, it’s time to add some more meat…

Last week I passed the F5 BIG-IP LTM v9.0 essentials exam. Was easier than I thought, however tomorrow I may be humbled further as I go for the advanced version of the F5 BIG-IP LTM v9.0 test. Studying with the training books from 4 days worth of training but without further hands on is not what I call fun. Admittedly it’s a lot easier than CCIE so what really am I moaning about. I suppose it the fact that I’m not studying for my next lab…

Tags: exam,F5
Categories: Main blog, Work
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Completed a server migration the weekend before last. Had to spend some time on my DNS configuration/migration and email. Both of which are now working as they should but www.djerk.nl doesn’t look right. Mailed the author of the vSlider3.[0|1] theme I use as it seems it’s unable to read the settings.

Odd things is the files, permissions and database are the same as what I have on the old server. Still there it looks perfect and here it doesn’t… Suggestions welcome! Reverting back to the default theme comes up fine. Where does vSlider store its settings?

[edit, 6 Feb 2008] Right, sorted the theme problem. A row in my WordPress database had gone weird, not sure what exactly went wrong but it may have been the database sync I used to keep the new server in sync with the now removed server. Anyway, I removed row vSlider from table wp_options and the theme then created a new one with default settings. Still trying to figure out what all my personalised settings were so please bear with me while I tinker away.

Categories: Main blog
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Finally some news to write. Not that I haven’t been busy but just not with CCIE. Have had too much on my mind and finally I can write about it.

Today I’ve resigned from my position at Easynet and signed with nscglobal as a Consultant. First thing while writing here is to thank Easynet for the time there, the opportunities and trust given to me. Despite moving my desk from Rotterdam to Amsterdam within six months of employment, I have thoroughly enjoyed working for Easynet. Seeing it mature from a internationally fragmented company into an upcoming global enterprise player has been both challenging and inspiring.

For those who don’t know nscglobal, they’re a UK integrator and I’ll be working in one of their London offices. This means moving from The Netherlands to the United Kingdom and we’ll be doing so physically in January. We’re looking for a rental house for multiple reasons but for this site the relevant one is my CCIE. Once in the UK I need to start focussing on my CCIE again and I hope to be able to do so with the support of some of the CCIE’s nscglobal has. So be ready for some new CCIE updates starting January.

Till then I’ll probably blog about whatever technology comes my way during the move. For example the UK mobile operator 3 has an offer with free Skype calls so I might be looking into UMTS coverage in London, Hitchin and the rest of the extended North of London. Plus I’ll be looking for a hosting location for my two servers, offers are welcome. Offers for dedicated hosting too, might help the uptime of things… My VoIP setup will have to change as well, only slightly as I’ll only be adding an FXO port at home.

Anyway just keep reading and you’ll find out, the great thing is that I don’t have to keep silent any more about what is going on and that we’re looking forward to new things.

Categories: Main blog, Work
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Yet another non CCIE post

It appears that Debian Lenny by default only binds to 127.0.0.1 (localhost). I had to add the following two lines to snmpd.conf to get snmpd to listen to external requests.

interface eth0
agentaddress 217.195.248.251:161

I eventually found the solution at debianhelp.org.

Categories: Main blog, Networking
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*Sigh* Took me an hour or two to figure this one out. Cacti now does a ping before actually polling a device for stats. I’m running a small cacti site which had been neglected for a long time. After updating cacti and cleaning up some mess I was confused why one router did get polled and the other’s graphs remained a dumb “nan”.

I debugged and pinged, even installed hping3 to do UDP pings. I don’t want to run cacti as root, especially not on a vhost. So the UDP ping had to work. The pings arrived but still no replies.

Getting sidetracked I noticed that the one router that did work was being hit by SSH login attempts and it’s cpu was spiking. An ACL took care of the break-in attempts but then I noticed that directed broadcasts were made to my server’s segment. So I nailed that down plus proxy-arps when I noticed that the router which had worked before now was causing errors in Cacti as well.

Tracking back I noticed that the UDP ping ‘replies’ were unreachables rather than ICMP replies (doh, how obvious!) . I enabled IP unreachables on both routers again and I was done. It’s amazing how blind one can be at times to the blatantly obvious…

Categories: Main blog, Networking, Work
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Only just noticed but in effect since September 7th. The CCIE lab exam has gone up from $1250 to $1400, which results in $1694,- / €1199,30 including the 21% VAT for the Brussels lab location.

Even though it’s a 12% price increase it’s been 8 years since the previous increase. It’s been argued on Groupstudy that a 2% annual increase is not bad as it’s relatively on par with the inflation we’ve seen over the last 8 years. Never the less for those of us forced to pay for our own labs it’s a bitter pill to take.

Also note that all exams from CCNA to the CCIE written and lab have increased in price.

Categories: CCIE R&S, Main blog
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I’m normally quite weary of sites tracking my behaviour and have NoScript installed on FireFox myself to control this. It’s amazing to see how much crap NoScript blocks.

Well, I kinda joined the evil camp by installing HitTail. In my defence, HitTail only looks at how people come to my site. It does not track users (to my knowledge that is). More specifically it tells me what search strings resulted in hits on my site.

I’ve come up with the idea that I’ll use these hits to delve deeper into stuff. I’m quite impressed by some other sites which go into intricate detail of current hot topics, be it training subjects or market hyped topics. My main priority will remain my certification. But looking beyond my 1st CCIE, I’m not sure what the future will bring. Could be another CCIE track or VoIP related, maybe even PRINCE2 or even something Juniper. Only time will tell.

However I really like the idea of addressing hot items. I realise that most google (etc) hits on my site will be related to the current content of my site. Guess I’ll have to involve the things I’m working on at work. But I’m open to suggestions, so if you have requests or suggestions for (finding) good topics then by all means leave a comment!

Categories: Main blog
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