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Welcome to my personal web site. Here you’ll find useful information and resources that I’ve written over the years.
I am an IT Consultant working in the Auckland, New Zealand, area with a passionate interest in all things relating to Networks and Security. I also do a lot with Linux, Virtualisation, and Cloud systems during my day job. You’ll also find a few odds and ends here relating to other things that I’m doing such as flying small airplanes when time and the weather permit.
Note that I’m still working on some of the content for this site – it’s actually a complete rebuild of the old site which was manually coded HTML. I’m still importing stuff from the old site such as the Logsurfer info and the aviation check lists. Please bear with me for the next couple of weeks – or let me know if there’s something missing that you’re looking for.
Please note that all comments are currently being moderated due to the number of spam comments coming in. If you post a comment please wait a day or so for me to approve it.
Permanent link to this article: https://crypt.gen.nz/
Over the last couple of years I have gathered the number of new job postings for particular jobs advertised on Seek. Here’s the results.
I’ve been fighting a bug with Junos Olive VMs running under KVM on a CentOS server for the last few days. I use Olive images now and then for network labs and to test configurations, and lately they’re not running very well at all on my Linux KVM server. Here’s a quick post on the …
The problem with making changes to any decent-sized network, which is running a routing protocol such as OSPF, is that in order to fully verify the change you will need to log into every device in the network and verify that your change has worked. This post shows how Ansible can be used to perform …
I’ve been using fail2ban to protect a number of services from external attacks. The software works well, but what I wanted to do is to have fail2ban update an ACL on a Cisco IOS router rather then the IPtables on the host itself. Here’s the code and some tips on setting it up.
The Cisco Zone-based firewall was derived from the old “firewall feature set” and allows the administrator to define firewall rules based on zones, where each zone may contain one or more logical interfaces. Using Cisco’s zone-based firewall isn’t as easy as many other solutions (e.g. Juniper SRX, Cisco ASA), and recently I needed to configure …
Sometimes it’s just unavoidable that you need to do in-band management of firewalls. This is particularly the case if the firewall is hosted externally – such as within AWS. Here’s a quick recipe on restricting management access to the Fortigate firewall.
I had an interesting situation in a lab environment the other day. It seems Juniper has been tweaking how OSPF works with their routers with some interesting consequences.
The client’s requirements were simple: they had an existing Cisco ASA 5505 with a base and unlimited users licence connected to the Internet with a PPPoE interface over ADSL. They wanted to add more bandwidth and redundancy so decided to add an additional 100mbps fibre link. Is it possible? Read on …
