Bring Your Own Device – A Technical Perspective – Part 2

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So after having implemented our BYOD network as described in this post… I began thinking about how it would be great if we could remove the Microsoft RADIUS server from the equation and have Smoothwall perform the RADIUS AAA. This would enable Smoothwall to know the user that was connected simply by the account they authenticated with against RADIUS; as opposed to having to log into the Smoothwall again through a web page using the same credentials you just passed to RADIUS to get on the WiFi in the first place!

Then back in May 2013 Smoothwall released Main Update 60 which in essence turned the Smoothwall device into a RADIUS server. Perfect! Just what I had wanted.

So I began to play around with the Smoothwall RADIUS offering and our Netgear Managed WiFi set up.

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Nagios HP MSA P2000 Status and Performance Monitor – Part 2

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In an earlier post I wrote about the tweaks I made to Thomas Weaver’s Nagios script for monitoring our HP P2000 SAN. I am pleased to say that Thomas has incorporated these tweaks into his version of the script which is available for download on his site here.

As I have documented our new VMware Cluster and HP SAN further I have begun to realise that we needed to monitor things on the SAN in a slightly more granular way than this script was allowing us. First off, here is my first attempt at a network diagram of the whole VMware cluster:

vmWare Cluster Network Diagram

 

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Learn Moodle – Week 1

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So this week saw the start of Learn Moodle, Moodle’s first MOOC. Now I have been using Moodle for many years, but as we are just about to introduce a VLE at my new school, I thought this course would be an excellent opportunity for myself and teachers at my school to get up to speed with Moodle before we start the process at school.

Now I started with Moodle way back when it was at version 1.5 and when I left my previous school we were at version 1.9. I had spent many hours getting to know Moodle and training many teachers to use it in the T&L. I am also a member of the Moodle Q&A Testing group so spent quite a bit of time testing the features introduced in version 2.0 and 2.1. However it has been some time since I have used Moodle on a regular basis, so I thought it best for me to re-submerse myself in Moodle and get to know what has changed!

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Nagios HP MSA P2000 Status and Performance Monitor

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We have just finished installing our new HP P2000 SAN ready for the implementation of our VMWare set up next week and thought we should set up some monitoring other than basic pings for them in Nagios! HP supplied the SNMP MIBs with the SAN, but rather than write new SNMP queries for everything we wanted to monitor, I thought I would search the Nagios Exchange first to see if anyone else had already created such a plugin.

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Instant Nagios Starter Review

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I was recently asked to review “Instant Nagios Starter” by the people over at Packt Publishing.

This book is the first book I have read in Packt’s “Instant” series, which is publicised as “Learn in an instant. Short; Fast; Focused”. The book is certainly short; it is only 46 pages long and by the time you get to the start of Chapter 1 you are already 17% of the way through the title! The book is available in e-book format only (epub, mobi and pdf versions are all available). The price too is very reasonable; coming in at under £5 including VAT!

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Bring Your Own Device – A Technical Perspective

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This is a description of how I have set up our Bring Your Device solution at my current school. It makes use of the following hardware and software:

  • Smoothwall UTM1000
  • Netgear WC7520 WiFi Controller
  • Netgear WNDAP360 and WNDAP350 Access Points
  • Netgear GSM7328S v2 L3 Switch
  • Netgear GS724TPS Smart Switch
  • Microsoft Server 2008 R2 NPS RADIUS Server
  • Microsoft Server 2008 R2 DNS and DHCP Servers

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Windows Clients not authenticating to NPS / RADIUS Server

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I have been in the process of setting up a BYOD solution at my school for the past few months (more on this to follow!) and have set-up a NPS / RADIUS Server as the core authentication server for this solution. All was going well and the launch was publicised to everyone for the start of the January term.

I returned after the Christmas break to perform some final tests and document the system ready to let our students start connecting their own devices; when I found that Apple and Android devices would connect fine but I could not get any Windows laptops to connect at all!
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Ubuntu Server 12.04 “Cannot display this video mode”

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I have been installing a new Ubuntu server on some old hardware at work this week (HP Proliant DL360 G4) to configure a Free-Radius server for our site-wide WiFi solution; however I fell at the first hurdle!

After installing Ubuntu as normal and rebooting the server, I was presented with a black screen displaying “Cannot display this video mode”. Very annoying!

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Nagios check_http plugin

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Today I have been playing around with my Nagios install and making a real effort to get all services on the Windows servers monitored effectively. One of these servers I have been looking at is running WSUS and a couple of other web based services on different ports.

I started to read up on the help file of the check_http plug-in, which up until now I had assumed (wrongly!) would just check for a web response on port 80 for the host you ran the check against.

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