Map Apple Keyboard on Windows 7 and Restore Apple Function Keys

This is a short post just to redirect all Apple Keyboard users on Windows 7 machines to a great blog that explains how to get the full functions of the keyboard.

Check the Map Apple Keyboard on Windows 7 and Restore Apple Function Keys for more info.

CentOS yum(8) Error « No module named cElementTree » Fixed

I've been having problems with yum(8) on one of the CentOS 6 x86_64 machines. After looking at many different forums and bug reports, I now found the solution.

Oracle Solaris 10 Kerberized SSH Configuration

If you manage Oracle Solaris 10 machines, you might want to configure your servers to accept Kerberos principals via SSH. The SSH that comes with Solaris 10 does not understand the same configurations as the OpenSSH one does. And Solaris has a little quirk that Linux and BSD don't.

If you don't already have a Kerberos infrastrucutre in place, then the first thing to do is to set one up. Read my other article HOWTO : Kerberos KDC with OpenLDAP 2.4 Back-End and SASL GSSAPI Authentication on CentOS 6.2 to learn how to create a Kerberos realm.

MySQL Backup and Recovery

If your site manages it's data with MySQL, then you obviously need to make sure the data is safe. In this blog post, I will show how to create a daily backup automatically. I will also show a continuous data protection plan for MySQL databases. This blog post uses the previous backup server configured in my Secure Backup & Recovery with rsnapshot, rssh and OpenSSH article.

Oracle Data Pump

Today I'm going to show how I use Oracle Data Pump utilities. Starting with Oracle 10gR1, Oracle replaced both the export and import utilities by their new Data Pump counterpart : expdp and impdp respectively. The official documentation on these utilities is found in the Oracle Database Utilities10g Release 2 (10.2)

The steps outlined in this blog post are part of a database consolidation effort in which several databases from two different machines will be merged into a new Linux x86_64 server running RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.9 and Oracle RDBMS 10gR2.

VoIP QoS on Cisco 3560 Switches with Polycom and Cisco IP Phones

Today we are going to setup network Quality of Service (QoS) for Voice over IP (VoIP) traffic generated by Polycom and Cisco IP phones. Our goal here is to tag the VoIP packets so that they are placed in a priority outgoing queue so that if the available bandwith is saturated, then the VoIP packets will be the last ones to be dropped by the switch. VoIP is a delay-sensitive application while bulk data transfers are not. When a switch port gets more data that it can handle, the switch will start dropping packets. If a VoIP packet is dropped, people having a conversation will hear a glitch. We don't want that and this is why we must treat the VoIP packets differently than other data packets.

IOS Upgrade on Cisco WS-C4507R Chassis with Dual Supervisor V Engines

Today we will upgrade the IOS version on both WS-X4516 supervisor engines V in a WS-C4507R chassis. This blog post assumes that your 4507R chassis's supervisor engine already has network support for you to SSH into it.

First, go to the Cisco support site and download the latest IOS version (you need a Cisco support contract to have access to new IOS images). Place this image on your TFTP server. In this example, the TFTP server is a CentOS Linux machine called alice.company.com.