Tag: datacenter

Another showcase with Palo Alto PA-3020 firewall hardware device by Palo Alto Networks running PAN OS 6.0 (PA-3000 series). This time we would like to discuss a use of multiple IP addresses on the external interface. Say, you are running into a situation where more than one HTTPS web services should be offered to the public, but they are based on separate hardware resources internally. The simple solution would be to use another IP address for incoming connection on TCP port 443 and create another NAT policy rule for that additional address.

We were not able to alter MAC address of main network adapter inside a Windows 2012 R2 instance. No matter how we tried with registry hacks and even 3rd party software tools, the outcome was unsuccessful. Though for certain applications dependent on a particular MAC value it does not have to be on a primary network card. We realized we just needed another network card! That could be achieved by installing a dummy loopback network driver that would serve as an additional network interface. It can be assigned with a bogus IP while its physical (or MAC) address we may alter freely. Luckily, Microsoft offers such driver among most of its Windows distributions that is called KM-TEST Loopback Adapter.

In our initial post on the AWS topic we explained how to automate regular EBS volume snapshot creation using a small Linux instance as a controlling and automation server. Now it is time to fill in the gap of what happens next: automated copy from region 1 to region 2.

Amazon AWS instance may become very expensive when running 24/7. Our solution? An automatic shutdown when there is no need to have that server online. This recipe is simple when implemented with AWS’s functionality added not so long ago which was called CloudWatch monitoring.