Country blocking lists in various formats

Very useful to block the spammers even includes bogon ranges. Updated every 24 hours.

Country IP Blocks now offers Network Data in 7 Separate Formats: CIDR, Netask, .htaccess deny, .htaccess allow, IP Range, Decimal/CIDR* and Hexadecimal/CIDR. You decide who can access your websites and servers.

Block a country, allow a country. Now you can take complete control of your website and network traffic. IP Blocks are a simple and effective way to improve security by limiting spammers, hackers, bandwidth wasters or malicious traffic.

Handy app for blocking IP address ranges in IIS

One to investigate, especially to stop form spammers from China etc.

MS article for registry settings for WSUS 3

As servers in the datacentres are categorised for applying patches to help automate the process all servers have registry keys assigned to pick up updates centrally. This Technet article shows what each of the registry entries does.

How to patch ESX3i using command line

3 various approaches on how to patch your running ESX3i to the latest version.

How to get XPx64 to change a site's .Net level

Easy one this, just get the site ID from IIS, no need for MetaEdit.

Run from the appropriate .Net folder under c:\windows\microsoft .net\framework\....

aspnet_regiis -sn W3SVC/99999/ROOT/

VMWare appliance to run a Cacti station

Using this in production, a few slight problems but on the whole pretty damn good!

Need to watch out if an unclean shutdown that /usr/opt/apache/logs/httpd.pid is removed for the apache daemon to run on reboot, can always check to see if httpd process is running and restart if necessary.

Also need to watch disk space, logs etc. can eat them up, check with df -h that capacity isn't all used up.

Easy one to release space is the cacti.log file, just remove from /usr/opt/apache/htdocs/cacti/log

PRTG monitoring

The freeware only monitors 10 devices but it's enough for setting up for a single client.

Found this a bit fiddly and prefer Opmanager, there is an older version that allows you to monitor 20 devices, not available for download anymore but keeping on my FTP server.

ftp://ftp.mechanised.com/software/ManageEngine_OpManager_6_windows2.exe

Handy HP Part numbers for ordering

437502-B21
HP BLc3000 Single-Phase Enclosure w/2 Power Supplies and 4 Fans w/8 Insight Control Environment Trial Licenses - Rack-mountable - power supply £1,902.96

UH311E
Electronic HP Care Pack 4-Hour 24x7 Same Day Hardware Support - Extended service agreement - parts and labour - 3 years - on-site - 24 hours a day / 7 days a week - 4 h £483.84

410917-B21
HP GbE2c Ethernet Blade Switch - Switch - 16 ports - EN, Fast EN, Gigabit EN - 10Base-T, 100Base-TX, 1000Base-T 5x10/100/1000Base-T(uplink) - plug-in module £685.00

406740-B21
HP 1Gb Ethernet Pass-Thru Module - Expansion module - Gigabit EN - 1000Base-TX - 16 ports £399.00

437572-B21
HP - Power supply - redundant - 1.2 kW £128.00

412140-B21
HP Active Cool Fan - Fan unit £69.00


AK502A
HP ProLiant BL460c - Blade - 2-way - 1 x Quad-Core Xeon E5440 / 2.83 GHz - RAM 4 GB - hot-swap 2.5" - no HDD - Gigabit Ethernet - Monitor : none £1,006.49

431958-B21 & 432320-001
HP Single Port - Hard drive - 146 GB - hot-swap - 2.5" - SAS - 10000 rpm £130.00

397413-B21
HP - Memory - 4 GB ( 2 x 2 GB ) - FB-DIMM 240-pin - DDR2 - 667 MHz / PC2-5300 - Fully Buffered - ECC

UK066E
Electronic HP Care Pack 4-Hour 24x7 Same Day Hardware Support - Extended service agreement - parts and labour - 3 years - on-site - 24 hours a day / 7 days a week - 4 h £245.25

445978-B21
HP NC360m Dual Port 1GbE BL-c Adapter - Network adapter - PCI Express x4 - EN, Fast EN, Gigabit EN - 2 ports £165.00

406771-B21
HP NC326m PCI Express Dual Port 1Gb Server Adapter - Network adapter - PCI Express x4 - EN, Fast EN, Gigabit EN - 10Base-T, 100Base-TX, 1000Base-T - 2 ports £105.00

378343-002
HP/Compaq SFF Small Form Factor 2.5inch SATA / SAS drive Tray / Caddy

BL460c
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12518_div/12518_div.html

HP SAS Enterprise and SAS Midline Hard Drives
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12244_div/12244_div.html