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14 Aug 2013A good customer of mine needs to replace their Service Desk system. Having a fair idea of their requirements, I asked them if they had looked at $(insert very well-known player here).
(Read more...)A good customer of mine needs to replace their Service Desk system. Having a fair idea of their requirements, I asked them if they had looked at $(insert very well-known player here).
(Read more...)Cisco made some announcements about SDN certifications at Cisco Live US, in June this year. These didn’t seem to get a lot of attention at the time, perhaps due to little detail being available. A few more things have started to come out, but it’s still not full released. What might these SDN certifications be like, and will they be in demand?
(Read more...)Microsoft patches are released on a (mostly) monthly cycle, and other vendors have started following suit. When this first happened, people treated it like a major event. But I think that it is now treated as “Business As Usual”, and maybe it’s time for the headline-writers to realise this.
(Read more...)Juniper recently released 12.1X45-D10 for the SRX-110. The key new feature for me was DHCPv6 Client support - finally! It’s still new, and buggy, and I wouldn’t rush it into production, but if you need DHCPv6 client support, it’s here. These are my notes on how I’ve configured it to get it working.
(Read more...)IMC has a predefined list of over 6,000 devices. This list maps sysOIDs to devices, so when you add a new device to IMC, it will say “this is a Cisco Catalyst 3560 Switch”, or a “HP MSM 760 Wireless Controller”, etc. Here’s a sample of what that list looks like:
(Read more...)The most interesting talk I attended at HP Discover in Las Vegas this year was Ken Gott’s talk on “Management of Software Defined Networks and Hybrid Environments with HP IMC.” This talk outlined the architecture for how HP plans to manage hybrid network environments using IMC, and gave us a quick demo of the code.
(Read more...)Timezones can be complicated things - every country has its own set of rules around how to decide what time it currently is - and those rules change, frequently. Modern Operating Systems have systems in place for handling those changes. Give it a location, it will deal with the rest. Unfortunately, network devices don’t have those systems, and we need to explicitly tell them how to work out what the current local time is, and when to change it to Daylight Savings Time. Here’s how to do that for Cisco IOS, HP ProVision, and HP Comware systems.
(Read more...)I’d just like to clear up a little confusion that people have about HP IMC templates, and how they are used. Templates can be used to define credentials for different access methods - SNMP, Telnet, SSH, WMI, PowerShell, SOAP. You can define multiple templates for each access method, and they can have a range of options - e.g. Username/Password, Username/Password + enable password, Private Key + enable password, SNMPv3-Priv-Aes128-Auth-Sha, etc.
(Read more...)Auto-discovery can help you populate your NMS, and keep it up to date. HP IMC supports several methods of adding devices - either by manually adding them, or getting IMC to automatically discover them. Here’s an overview of the options available to us:
(Read more...)HP IMC has an optional add-on module for NetFlow/sFlow Analysis called “Network Traffic Analyzer (NTA).” This comes in 10-, 20- or 50-node license packs. Based on the license names, you might think that it’s as simple as counting up the number of NetFlow-generating devices in your network, and purchasing sufficient licenses. Not quite so fast.
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