NetBox is an IP address management (IPAM) and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tool. Initially conceived by the network engineering team at DigitalOcean, NetBox was developed specifically to address the needs of network and infrastructure engineers.
$ git clone -b master https://github.com/ninech/netbox-docker.git
$ cd netbox-docker
Once cloned, I used docker-compose to pull the images
$ docker-compose pull
And then I started the stack with
$ docker-compose up -d
The service will be up and running after a few minutes. Once ready, you need to find where to connect to with
$ docker-compose port nginx 8080
Or use this snippet
$ echo "http://$(docker-compose port nginx 8080)/"
Here I use Portainer as a gui to manage Docker, and Traefik as a reverse proxy to enable FQDN access to the services behind. I added an entry on my DNS to route netbox.arturo.local to the Docker IP address, on the exposed port for Nginx.
Andrew Foster at Topland Communications reached me via Upwork looking to customize and fine tune a existing Spiceworks installation.
After a quick inspection, I decided to tackle the project by compacting the DB in first place. Spiceworks keeps a lot of logs regarding the system activity, which are located on C:\Program Files\Spiceworks\Log. In order to clean them, the first step is to stop Spiceworks service.
Logs are stored in two main locations:
C:\Program Files\Spiceworks\Log, for the Spiceworks service
C:\Program Files\Spiceworks\httpd\log\, where the Apache server keeps them
Once the logs are cleaned, I compacted the DB to increase the performance, and I started the service again.
Ticket rules were configured to auto assign support tickets, thus saving time to the support operators.
And the user portal was customized to match the company colors and logo.
A security company contacted me thorough Upwork, searching for support on a brand new installation of an Axis Camera Station System on a educational institution. This company, Coyote Cabling from New Mexico, US, was on charge of a 52 camera installation, with an option to add 32 existing cameras on a later stage.
After a research, they decided to use Axis S1148 servers, which really are re-branded Dell servers. The S1148 comes with a ready to use Windows Server 2012 OS, and with the Axis Camera Station preinstalled. This vendor supported hardware allowed to reduce licensing costs, because they are included on the server price, and avoid any incompatibilities
Client wanted to set up a ISPConfig 3 Control Panel onto a Digital Ocean droplet.
Digital Ocean works best for this kind of services, because they provision the public addresses directly on the server. The configuration is easier to build and mantain, thanks to the Digital Ocean integrated firewall.
ISPConfig allows to manage servers and hosting plans from a friendly GUI.
After a couple of successful jobs with my client Visual Link Internet LLC, they reached me to set up a service similar to dyndns.net. I had already developed another value added services for their customers, like web filtering and firewalling, so I found this project very interesting and fun to do.
Cool, but what is DNS ?
DNS stands for Domain Name Systems. Yep, domains like google.com.
It is based on a distributed database that takes some time to update globally. When DNS was first introduced, the database was small and could be easily maintained by hand. As the system grew this task became difficult for any one site to handle, and a new management structure was introduced to spread out the updates among many domain name registrars.
Due to the distributed nature of the DNS systems and its registrars, updates to the global DNS system may take hours to distribute. Thus DNS is only suitable for services that do not change their IP address very often, but not for servers being run with dynamic addresses, which are likely to change their IP address over very short periods of time.
Ok, but my ISP gives dynamic addresses, and I want to access services on my network. What can i do?
Dynamic DNS is a system that addresses the problem of rapid updates. The term is used in two ways, which, while technically similar, have very different purposes and user populations. The first is “standards-based DNS updates”, which uses an extension of the DNS protocol to ask for an update. The second is usually a web-based protocol, normally a single HTTP fetch with username and password which then updates some DNS records (by some unspecified method).
Many providers offer commercial or free Dynamic DNS service for this scenario. The automatic reconfiguration is generally implemented in the user’s router or computer, which runs software to update the DDNS service. The communication between the user’s equipment and the provider is not standardized, although a few standard web-based methods of updating have emerged over time.
Yeah, but those free services are now paid, and some have even disappeared
I know, I know. But this service can be built in-house. Using open source software, there are no fees, and the company domain name can be used to keep things professional.
This is what my client wanted, so I deployed a solution on a that allowed to offer added value services to customers, and provide easy remote access. Using a open source solution based on PHP (https://github.com/nicokaiser/Dyndns) and some custom Bash scripts I was able to deliver a stable system in a short amount of time.
The main techonologies I used are Apache 2 and PHP 7 for the HTTP requests and update system, and BIND9 for the DNS service.
The solution used the standard URL schema of DynDNS, so it is compatible with any device with support for it. Also, because most CPEs of the client’s network were MikroTik based, I also wrote a RouterOS script to call the update.
