I recently got a terminal server for my lab because as the number of devices grows it was difficult to manage them all by USB console adapters. So i found a cheap and quite old terminal server - Lantronix ETS8P - a terminal server with 8 serial RJ45 ports and 1 x 10Mbps ethernet interface. It’s actually that old that it doesn’t even support SSH, you can remote access it just by telnet.
Today I’ve been working to set up a High Availability cluster made up of 2 virtual instances of CentOS Servers using Heartbeat. The cluster will be using one of the servers as primary and the second one as backup. The basic idea behing Heartbeat is that the backup server will be continuously pinging the primary server (using broadcast, multicast or unicast packets). In the eventuality that the active server goes down the backup server sets up a floating IP address, sends a gratious ARP message informing the others hosts on the local network segment that the mac-address corresponding to the floating IP has changed. The floating IP address is an IP address shared by the active and standby servers but it’s assigned just to one of them at a time.
My latest lab toy is a Cisco 881G which integrates a cellular 3G interface used a secondary data link. In the following article I will present the existing scenario and what needs to be acomplished.
I am personally using VirtualBox as a virtualization solution as it fits my needs and it integrates well with Ubuntu. I recently found that you can set up a web interface and manage Virtualbox through it. In the following article I’ll describe how you can set up the web interface for VirtualBox using phpVirtualBox and I’d also like to thank the developers for doing this great job.
In today’s post I will show how to get a free US DID - a local number and point it to your VoIP network. For this setup I will use an analog phone plugged into a FXS port of a Cisco 1751-V router. The use of a voice router isn’t necessary, you may also use an ATA - Analog Telephone Adapter.
