What this essentially means is that you can manage up to 16 Cisco devices from a single access server. The only difference is that the ‘serial cable’ in this case has ethernet RJ45 plugs at both ends and one end goes into the console port of the router/switch/firewall you’d like to manage as always, and the other end instead of terminating into a serial port on your pc, goes into an asynchronous port on the access server.

The ‘serial cables’ that are used with Cisco access servers are called rollover cables and they are just standard ethernet cables but with a reversed pin out arrangement. I made my own from some standard Cisco console patch cables as I had plenty of these lying around with just a crimping tool and some RJ45 connectors as you can see in the picture below.

Once you have everything plugged in and connected, from here it is just a simple case of setting up the correct config using the reverse telnet principle.

Current configuration:
!
version 11.2
no service password-encryption
no service udp-small-servers
no service tcp-small-servers
!
hostname Cisco2511-RJ
!
enable secret iddkd
!
username cisco privilege 0 password 0 cisco
ip host Cisco2950T1 2001 10.10.10.10
ip host Cisco2950T2 2002 10.10.10.10
ip host Cisco1760 2003 10.10.10.10
ip host Cisco2621 2004 10.10.10.10
ip host Cisco3550 2005 10.10.10.10
ip host CiscoPIX-515E 2006 10.10.10.10
ip host Cisco877W 2007 10.10.10.10
!
interface Loopback0
ip address 10.10.10.10 255.255.255.255
!
interface Ethernet0
description *** LINK TO HOMECOMPUTERLAB SWITCH #2 - 3COM 2924 (PORT 24) ***
ip address 192.168.1.200 255.255.255.0
!
interface Serial0
no ip address
shutdown
!
ip default-gateway 192.168.1.254
no ip classless
ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.1.254
!
!
line con 0
line 1 16
no exec
transport input all
line aux 0
line vty 0 4
logging synchronous
login local
transport input telnet
line vty 5 15
logging synchronous
login local
transport input telnet
!
end

Once that is done you can connect and manage your ‘remote’ switches/routers/firewalls by using the following commands:

telnet 10.10.10.10 2001

Once connected to the device, you can switch between active sessions by using  the following command to bring you back to terminal server:

ctrl-shift-6-x

To manage active sessions you can use the following commands:

show line

If one of your lines is stuck in an Active state (*) or you want to log someone else off:

clear line [line_number]

I decided to play around with some codecs to see if I could get the video to playback smoothly on my aging machine and by encoding the video into divx format. The result was that I was able to get my video to playback flawlessly whilst maintaining the 1080p hi definition and at the same time also reducing my filesize from 1.7GB for a 15min clip down to 432MB, a ~75% file size reduction!

Below is the command I used to do the encoding and also a for loop command in case you’d like to bulk encode an entire directory in one go.

ffmpeg -i /home/user/filename.MP4 -s hd1080 -b 4000k -ab 160k -vtag DIVX /home/user/output_in_divx_format.avi"

for i in *.MP4; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -s 640x360 -b 4000k -ab 160k -vtag DIVX "/home/user/Videos/${i%.MP4}.avi"; done

PANASONIC HX-DC01 MANUAL

# cfdisk /dev/sdx
# mkfs.ntfs -f /dev/sdx1
# mount -o loop win2008.iso /mnt/iso
# mount /dev/sdx1 /mnt/usb
# cp -r /mnt/iso/* /mnt/usb/
# lilo -M  /dev/sdx mbr

WINDOWS
The windows instructions I copied from the following website http://bramp.net/blog/create-bootable-windows-server-2008-usb-stick I had a look at these instructions first before I was able to replicate the process under linux and produce the instructions above. I have included the windows instructions here for completeness.

Select the USB device from the list and substitute the disk number below when necessary. In this example Y:\ is my mounted image or physical DVD and X:\ is my USB device

C:\> diskpart
DISKPART> list disk
DISKPART> select disk x
DISKPART> clean
DISKPART> create partition primary
DISKPART> select partition x
DISKPART> active
DISKPART> format fs=fat32
DISKPART> assign
DISKPART> exit
C:\> xcopy Y:\*.* /s/e/f X:\

I rely on a lot of different remote management tools to administer the servers in my loft remotely. One of these tools is remote Wake-on-LAN. In order to forward WoL packets between networks you can use the ip-helper address command on Cisco routers.

On the Router where the Wol packets will originate from, we tell the router to allow forwarding of udp packets on port 9. (This is the discard port that WoL packets use.) Then under the interface where the WoL packets will originate from, we tell the router where to forward the packets to.

R1(config)# ip forward-protocol udp 9
R1(config-if)# ip helper-address 192.168.1.255

Now all we need to do is create an access list on the other router to allow the forwarded broadcast messages, otherwise you could open yourself up to a possible Smurf DOS attack. Then we tell the router on which interfaces we will allow the forwaded broadcast messages to be received on.

R2(config)# access-list 101 permit udp 192.168.0.0 0.0.0.255 192.168.1.0 0.0.0.255 eq 9
R2(config-if)# ip directed-broadcast 101

It’s another ITX form factor server based on the VIA-EPIA chipset which I am now well familiar with. This particular model however, is the VIA-EPIA PD Series which comes with 2x FastEthernet NIC’s and 4x Serial COM ports which when combined with its low noise and low power consumtion, makes it the perfect platform to deploy as an opensource firewall/proxy/content filter server as well as a console server for my Cisco Lab.

I have played with both pfSense and Untangle as virtual machines in a sandbox environment in the past, but I am looking forward to seeing how they perform on the VIA-EPIA baremetal hardware and also in a real world environment. Something else that I’ve had a look into and would be interested in playing with is a Dual Firewall DMZ, but that will have to come later, much later, baby steps first :)

VIA EPIA PD Manual

Linux:
sudo shutdown -r HH:MM