I keep needing to do this - so once again to help my future self:
When you have a number of public IPs being translated through a router to an internal address space, a router’s dynamic translation can get full. I’ve got an 877W, and it seems that a combination of running BitTorrent and a CounterStrike: Source server can quickly cripple the router (even with a memory upgrade!). When it gets too full you end up getting timeouts on other connections, usually this is most obvious by my browser failing to return pages.
To clear the dynamic translation table before timeout occurs log in to the router via ssh (or telnet) and in enable mode, type:
clear ip nat translation *
That seems to do the trick on my network anyway.
Noooo! One of my ReadyNAS devices died today. Based on the “hot component” smell and the fact that nothing lights up I’m hoping that it’s just the PSU/mainboard that fried, and that all my disks with their lovely XRAIDed data are intact.
I’ve sent a trouble ticket to support, but since they’re now owned by Netgear it’s anyone’s guess as to what’ll happen. Ideally I’ll get an empty chassis to put my (hopefully intact) drives in, and I can send my dead chassis back. Fingers crossed.
Update (6th July): I meant to blog this last week but: Kudos to Infrant/Netgear tech support. I was contacted within a day by a tech support guy who took my diagnosis of dead PSU as correct and on receiving a PDF of my original invoice immediately authorised the shipment of a new PSU from the states. This arrived a few days later. Interestingly it’s a very different design to the original PSU, and includes a plastic riser to keep the cables out of the way of the air-flow. It took a few minutes to install and my drives are all up and running again. Great service!
We recently had the need to simulate a routed environment with low bandwidth/high latency links between remote sites. To achieve this I used m0n0wall - a free software router - running inside Microsoft Virtual Server on multiple virtual NICs. Here’s how to get it up and running… Continue reading ‘m0n0wall and Microsoft Virtual Server’
Thing the first:
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 does not support teamed NICs on the host.
This bit us on the arse earlier this week when we teamed the NICs on the hosts of our virtual environment. As a result, although we could RDP to the host desktop, all our guest machines dropped off the network. A colleague is sure that with a bit of tweaking we could get Virtual Server to play nice with the (HP provided) teaming drivers, but we didn’t really have time to mess about with NIC configuration when there was an environment to build and documentation to write!
Thing the second:
m0n0wall is even better than when I last used it (several years ago). Its packet-shaping feature set is very useful if you want to simulate, for arguments sake, a low bandwidth lossy link between two networks. More on this and how to set it up in a virtual environment later.
Thing the third:
Turning off DHCP Client and Computer Browser on a Windows 2003 Server in an AD domain will break more than you might think. Specifically: the ability to register itself in DNS.
net start dhcp
net start browser
Thing the, aw hell, enough counting… Vodafone’s MobileConnect card will hang onto a 3G connection far longer and with far greater success if you configure it so that it’s *not allowed* to fall back to GPRS.
And finally, the commute from Winchester to Bristol is actually pretty reasonable - as long as you have a comfortable car!
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