Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

Infoblox API Perl Modules

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We recently migrated from Alcatel-Lucent’s VitalQIP to Infoblox for our IPAM (IP Address Management) solution. I hope to make a more detailed post reviewing Infoblox in the future, for now I’ll stick with the issue of integrating with the API interface. One of our goals for the past few years has been to enable MAC address registration essentially turning off the dynamic nature of DHCP. This would prevent someone from connecting any device to our internal network and getting a DHCP issued IP address. It certainly not a complete solution to the security dilemmas but it would be a good first step.

I do most of my work with CentOS and RedHat Linux because those are the distributions that my organization supports internally (even if I’m one of two people that support Linux across the entire organization). In this case I was working with a CentOS 5.7 server but I was having an issue compiling and installing the Infoblox Perl modules.

LWP::UserAgent version 5.813 required–this is only version 2.033

When I attempted to compile the Infoblox Perl modules I received the following errors;

LWP::UserAgent version 5.813 required--this is only version 2.033 at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Infoblox/Agent.pm line 3.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Infoblox/Agent.pm line 3.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Infoblox/Session.pm line 19.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Infoblox/Session.pm line 19.
Compilation failed in require at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Infoblox.pm line 8.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Infoblox.pm line 8.
Compilation failed in require at ./ibcli.pl line 78.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at ./ibcli.pl line 78.

This was with Perl 5.8.8 on CentOS 5.7 x64, unfortunately it seems this is a known issue with the version of LWP::UserAgent that is currently being distributed via the CentOS repository.

I was able to spin up a new CentOS 6.0 x86 server which was running Perl 5.10.1 and didn’t experience this problem.

The installation was pretty straight forward (except for the issue above) but the API reference manual does a very thorough job of detailing all the possible installation methods on both Windows and Unix/Linux. I just opened a browser to one of the Infoblox appliances and downloaded the Perl modules.

https://10.1.1.1/api/dist/CPAN/authors/id/INFOBLOX/

Just replace the IP address of 10.1.1. with the IP address of your Infoblox appliance. I’m not sure why Infoblox hides their manuals behind their support portal, I just don’t understand why companies do that.  You can find the manual right here, Infoblox_API_Documentation_6.1.0.pdf.

Cheers!

Linode VPS Hosting

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I’m home sick today with a nasty sinus infection, so I thought I would make a quick post about Linode. Last week (maybe two weeks ago now) I decided to give Linode a test drive by signing up for a Linode VPS 512. The increase in traffic to this site and the discussion forums has been significant enough over the past 6 months that I’ve been trying to stay ahead of the curve rather than falling behind (I personally hate a slow site). I’ve been coming up against my 40GB/monthly transfer limits with RIMU hosting even after setting up a CDN so I went looking for alternatives and found Linode.

I ran some quick and dirty benchmarks using Unixbench (1 parallel test) and here’s what I found;

NoGuest Operating SystemArchitectureCPUDescriptionResults
1CentOS 5.7 x86 1 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5540 @ 2.53GHz VMware ESX 4.1 HP BL490c G61010
2CentOS 5.7 x642 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5160 @ 3.00GHzHP DL360 G5935
3CentOS 5.7 x644 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5540 @ 2.53GHz HP BL460c G61005
4CentOS 5.7x862 x  Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU @ 2.80GHz IBM x345 Series387
5CentOS 5.7 x86 1 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5506 @ 2.13GHz RIMU Hosting – XEN 1vCPU290
6CentOS 6.0 x86 4 x  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHzLinode Hosting – XEN 4vCPU495

Note: I currently use the IBM x345 Series server as my test and development server so I don’t have to worry about destroying my live production server.

A number of the servers above are virtualized with either VMware or XEN and some are physical. I’ve provided some comparison data in servers 1-4, the two of interest are 5 and 6.

You can see from the numbers that the Linode server beat out the RIMU server by quite a margin. I also chose to have the Linode server placed in their Newark, NJ data center which is geographically closer to me in Pennsylvania than the Dallas, TX data center that my current VPS resides in. With that location change I noticed a big delta in the RTTs to/from the two locations. From my Verizon FiOS home broadband I get around 50ms to the Dallas, TX data center while I’m getting around 20ms to the Newark, NJ data center.

There are other pros and cons between RIMU and Linode which I won’t completely go into here but in my specific example it was the storage and transfer bandwidth that caused me to look elsewhere. I have nothing bad to say about RIMU, they’ve given me more than 18 months of great service.

Last week I moved the blog (that’s this site) to the Linode VPS and it seems to be running great. If everything continues to run smoothly I’ll migrate the discussion forums and remaining sites over to Linode and cancel my RIMU account over the next two weeks.

Have you noticed the speed increase or any other issues with this site?

Cheers!

It’s snowing here in Pennsylvania in October!

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I woke up Saturday morning to the snow falling fast and furious here in Pennsylvania, just about 35 miles outside Philadelphia. It snowed and it snowed and it snowed all day long and the snow actually stuck the streets, the grass and the trees. The power went out and came back on multiple times throughout the day but eventually our luck ran out and it finally went out around 3:30PM and has yet to be restored. I would guess that we have about 3-4″ of the white stuff on the ground right now. The picture to the right was taken around 11:00AM this morning just as the storm was getting started. it was a great time to reconnect with the family and spend some quality time together. Unfortunately it’s currently 54 degrees F in the house (no electricity means no heat) so it’s pretty cold and the battery in my laptop is about to die.

I’ve never seen snow (in my lifetime) in the PA-NJ-NYC area prior to Halloween, I’m curious what that means for the rest of winter.

Is it snowing where you are?

Cheers!

Update: Sunday October 30, 2011 7:00AM – it’s 51 degrees F in the house this morning and the power was just restored and the heat is on!

Ethernet Routing Switch 8600 High-speed Fan Tray (8010CMHS)

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I ran into an interesting oversight on my part today. We have a cluster of Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 8600s which are running dual 8692SFs w/Mezz and a combination E and R cards on 5.1.3.1 software. We’re growing the network (when are we not) and we’ve outgrown the two 8630GBRs we have in each switch. So we purchased a 8648GBRS for each switch along with an 8648GTRS to replace the legacy 8648TXE card.

Upon inserting the 8648GBRS module in slot 9 we received the following alarm from the console;

CPU5 [10/18/11 12:48:29] SNMP INFO Chassis running on low fan cooling.Please change the fan. Note that if the switch is booted with fan check enabled, then to power up,
1. R module requires a fan (regular or high speed) in running state.
2. RS module requires a high speed fan in running state.
CPU5 [10/18/11 12:48:29] HW ERROR Card in Slot=9, Type=8648GBRS, not powered on due to fan requirements.
CPU5 [10/18/11 12:48:48] HW INFO Card removed: Slot=9 Type=8648GBRS

I immediately knew what the problem was, I had overlooked the high-speed fan tray requirement for any RS modules. We have legacy chassis’s at this location so I knew that slots 1 and 10 couldn’t be populated by an R/RS module, I also knew the power supplies had already been upgraded to 8005PS’s so there was adequate power. However, I overlooked the cooling requirement so today I had to order a bunch of 8010CMHS fan trays.

Cheers!

State of the Blog 2011

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1039006_38582413It’s that time of year again… where I review the overall success and cost of running this blog (and forums) and I post some general thoughts about the past year and try to solicit new ideas for the future. I’m totally amazed when I think that it’s been 4 years now since I started blogging back in October 2007 on Blogger. Technology has come a long way in those 4 years as have I both professionally and personally.

Content

While I haven’t been winning any awards for my journalist talent it has been rewarding to hear the feedback from all the wonderful people that I’ve met either on my blog or in the discussion forums. I’m hoping to round up some guest bloggers in the future and try broadening the topics I generally cover. If you’ve got a knack for technical writing and you’d like to see your name in lights please drop me a line.

Forums

The forums have been a pretty big success in my opinion although there’s still a lot more I’d like to see us achieve. I’ve had a lot of help which I need to acknowledge here from Flintstone, Dominik, Paul and Artur. Without these guys the forums wouldn’t be half the place they are today. Thanks guys!

The forums have grown tremendously over the past year, we’ve seen a 359% increase in overall traffic with some 51,116 unique visitors to the forums generating some 81,766 visits and 239,651 pageviews in total. We have a total of 681 registered users with 421 users have made at least one post or more. Over the past year we’ve had visitors from 125 different countries.

1380007_75870024Finances

The financials are pretty straight forward. In calendar year 2010 I paid out around $378.42 to GoDaddy, and RIMU for domain names, hosting, etc. I collected around $367.41 in advertising revenue which came from Google Adsense and a few direct advertising sales. So while we were in the red again this year I was only down $11.01 which made my wife quite happy.

Let me say “Thank you” to the sponsors and all those that take the time and effort to follow my blog.

Blog Traffic

There’s been a slow but stead increase in blog traffic over the past 12 months. Looking at some of the Google Analytics data I can see that there has been approximately a 94% increase in visits (23,633), unique visitors (17,944) and pageviews (44,489) comparing the June-July 2011 timeframe to the same timeframe in 2010. Over the past year there were some 159,872 unique visitors to the blog generating some 232,498 visits and 440,725 pageviews in total.

The traffic increase has been steady enough that I’ve had to investigate CDN solutions and deploy caching plug-ins such as W3TC in an effort to keep up with all the traffic. In January we received a free upgrade from RIMU that we applied to the VPS and increased our memory from 480MB to 740MB. With the upgrade we were able to increase the number of web clients we can support concurrently. We were also able to install APC to help with PHP caching and increase the amount of caching within MySQL all in an effort to boost the servers overall performance and decrease the time which it takes to serve up the content to you the user.

Future

I’m not sure what the future holds. The global economy has been all over the place this past year and the uncertainty ways on everyone as people try to “do more with less”. You’ll probably find me here again next year blogging away. Perhaps I’ll make good on my last years claim to start making some screencasts.

What would you like to see?

Cheers!

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