James Mason's Blog -or- The Journal of Contemporary Lunacy

I wanted a neater way of auto-mounting network shares on startup than simply sticking the path in Login items so I thought I'd search around and see what methods were available. I finally settled on using a bit of AppleScript to first check if the mount point exists and, if not, to attempt to mount the network share. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 tell application "Finder" if not (exists POSIX file "/Volumes/Data" ) then try mount volume "afp://some-server.local/Data" end try else display dialog "Already Mounted" end if end tell Given that I wanted to mount multiple shares, putting the above in a function seemed like the way to go. Unfortunately, no matter what I tried, passing the path to Finder as a variable caused the test to always fail - even though though the path could be displayed via dialog as well as appearing in the AppleScript Editor's Events box. After finally giving up on that, I switched ...

After putting in a new shelf and tidying up my network gear a week ago - as seen below - it was time to organize the Cisco routers I'd picked up off eBay during the week. First thing to do was add the extra WICs I'd bought (WIC-1Ts as they could be had for around $15, whereas 2Ts started at $30). The 2821 - maxed out spec-wise and already running IOS 15.1 - came with no WICs at all, while I chose one of the 2600-series to be 'piggy-in-the-middle', so to speak, and it now has two serial cards. And that was that. The 3 routers are now sitting on the trolley I picked up a couple weeks back (much cheaper than a wheeled-rack; easily movable/adjustable). Above them the switch setup is starting to take shape with the two 3550s that just came in the post. I'll add the 2950 I already have and hopefully a couple more - either more 3550s or perhaps a 2960 or two. With 4 or more I should be able to setup some decent LACP, PAgP and STP scenarios, along with L3 ro...

I picked up a TP-Link managed switch last week as something of a compromise between affordability and features - as it turns out though, it does just about everything I could ask for, just without the extra expense from buying something that has HP or Cisco written on the side. I grabbed the TL-SG3216, a fanless L2 managed switch with 16x1Gigabit ports as it ticked all the boxes: Silent (fanless) Managed Link Aggregation/802.3ad (LACP) 802.1Q (VLAN) STP As a bonus, the CLI interface (via console cable or ssh) is very similar to Cisco's IOS, so I don't have to learn an entirely new syntax to configure it. Before I replace my existing switch, I spent a bit of time testing out its features. First up, I setup a spare Raspberry Pi with a second ethernet interface (via a USB dongle) to test out link aggregation. First up, the configuration on the Pi (Raspbian): Install ifenslave to allow for the creation of bonded network interfaces # apt-get install ifenslav...