On the MX, you must enable aggregate ethernet interfaces. 100 is overkill, but this is actually from a MX960 in my lab. It’s upper limit is thousands.

set chassis aggregated-devices ethernet device-count 100

Without this, your new interface will never even appear in the interface list.

Now configure your first agg ethernet interface.

set interfaces ae0 description “test aggro port to lexus1″
set interfaces ae0 flexible-vlan-tagging
set interfaces ae0 mtu 9192
set interfaces ae0 encapsulation flexible-ethernet-services
set interfaces ae0 aggregated-ether-options lacp active
set interfaces ae0 unit 1234 encapsulation vlan-bridge
set interfaces ae0 unit 1234 vlan-id 1234

Note the vlan interface. I’m using bridge domains here. You don’t have to do it that way. Here’s the rest of the config for vlan 1234:

set interfaces irb unit 1234 description “test vlan for agg”
set interfaces irb unit 1234 family inet address 192.168.200.1/24

set bridge-domains vlan-1234 domain-type bridge
set bridge-domains vlan-1234 vlan-id 1234
set bridge-domains vlan-1234 interface ae0.1234
set bridge-domains vlan-1234 routing-interface irb.1234

That’s it for the MX configuration. This will work from MX to MX as well if you want a consistent LAG configuration. Now for the Nexus configuration.

Create a port channel:

interface port-channel1234
description “test agg link”
switchport mode trunk
switchport trunk allowed vlan 1234
spanning-tree port type normal
mtu 9216

Now configure and add the interfaces:

interface Ethernet1/3
description “link1 to mx”
switchport mode trunk
switchport trunk allowed vlan 1234
spanning-tree port type normal
mtu 9216
channel-group 1234 mode active
no shutdown

Note the mode active on the channel group. That forces active LACP. Also note the lack of VPC number in the port channel. That’s because it’s a single Nexus that’s not part of a VPC pair. I got burned on my original configuration because I’d left it in there. (Facepalm)

I updated my thermostat to one of these. It’s made by Homewerks (Home depot sells a filtrete branded version.) It’s not as cool as the NEST, but it’ll do the job of controlling a furnace/AC. The interesting part of this device is that the wifi interface can be cloud managed, making it possible to control the thermostat via my iPhone, iPad (or android) from anywhere with data connectivity.

It’s actually a fairly decent device for the money. It has a JSON api that allows you to get and set variables via web interface. There’s a fantastic PDF on the API that shows examples using curl (available on linux, mac, etc). What’s really interesting is that with a JSON interface, you could easily write your own application for mobile phones or just script up some commands from your choice of computing platform.

Wiring was interesting. On my ancient furnace (built by chrystler) I discovered some new details. The fan wire wasn’t connected at all! At some point, some A/C tech had installed a honeywell fan controller and the fan is activated by either the cooling or heating wires being engaged. (there is a manual switch inside the furnace. Argh!) However, I was able to re-use the fan wire as a C wire to deliver both sides of the 24v a/c transformer power to the thermostat. Wifi eats more power, and you need an external supply to feed that radio.

Setup is pretty neat. I loaded the radio thermostat App on my iPad, and once it discovered the thermostat, I had to join the ‘stats wifi network. Then I could configure my WPA2 network (excellent! Thanks for supporting proper protocols!) as well as a dynamic or static ip address. I opted for static the last time I configured it. –I reconfigured it a few times while I played around with wiring options.

The hardware in the device is rather interesting. It’s the first one I’ve seen with a wifi USNAP module. I’d expect to see more of these devices on the market. The price point is fairly low and the curl api is ideal. Hmm, arduino USNAP shield, anyone?

Resources:

Wiki (unknown owner) for developing: http://central.isaroach.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

PDF Documenting the Thermostat API. (local copy here) This is the interesting one.

iPhone jailbreak notes:

I used an iPhone 3g, downloaded 4.2.1 iphone firmware and used pwnageTool_4.2 to build jailbroken firmware.
(then did it all over again to build unlockable firmware – update baseband to 6.10: (add link)
First stop was to configure wireless to talk to my home network.
Then I hit Cydia (the app that’s loaded when jailbroken.) and updated everything it wanted.
Get cell service (you can do this later):
Install ultrasn0w and get a pay as you go t-mobile account activated on it.

Now it’s time for software:

Install openssh via cydia.
ssh onto the phone and change the passwords for the root and mobile users.

I also install veency – it’ll allow you to vnc onto your iphone, making it much easier to do all your work from your computer. Set a password in settings if you like.

We want perl, so add the coredev.nl repo:
download http://coredev.nl/cydia/coredev.pub on your machine. Then scp it to root@yourphonesip:/var/root
ssh to the phone and run: apt-key add coredev.pub
then run: echo ‘deb http://coredev.nl/cydia iphone main’ > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/coredev.nl.list
Now when you load cydia next, you can get perl installed.

Use Cydia to install the following packages. Instead of confirm after each, just hit continue queuing and add things to be installed. Then you can go to manage or just hit confirm on the final package you want to install.

minicom
perl
perl-dbd-sqlite(search for dbd::sqlite)
perl device serial (search for device::serial)
vimproved (This is vim, find something else if you don’t do vi.)

Later we’ll want a command line sms sender, but for now I haven’t decided which to use yet.

Set things up:

Set up Minicom:
As root mkdir /usr/etc
Run minicom -s, set serial to /tty.iap, set 9600 N81, turn off flow control
Save config as default.
install vi (or vim for the search to work) (I like vim. deal.)

If you have a serial port dock built, now’s the time to test your port. My first phone had a bad dock connector, so no serial on it. Luckily I had a spare laying around with a bad home button. I swapped the screens and was good to go.

If you’re getting a data plan, it might be nice to ssh into the phone over the nat’d edge/3g/whatever you paid for:

install autossh.
Follow this how-to: http://llemarie.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/tip-connect-to-your-iphone/
install p5-Device-modem (which gets you device::serial)

Congratulations. Now you have the equivalent of a funky linux (yeah, it’s bsd. I know.) box with geolocation, 3g, wifi and a serial port. Muhahah.

For now I’m using what I have on hand: a dual core ATOM Foxconn 45CSX (the network interface is crappy slow on it) I will be upgrading it to something with gig and a core 2 duo at least in the future. That’s stuffed into a case with a 12v power supply. An older 200gb laptop drive will soon become a new 500gb, but it’s not a big deal.
For the server, I decided to use ubuntu linux with the alpha air video server installed. It turns out to be really simple to do, thanks to a custom repository out there. I chose linux because it’s the most stable when you’re dealing with random power outages and it won’t waste the sparse cpu driving an unnecessary GUI.

Thanks to http://blog.frameos.org/2011/02/08/installing-airvideo-linux-server-in-ubuntu/ for the time saving writeup!
More later when I get the install together.

I updated this server to a more recent version of my favorite Linux flavor: Ubuntu. The old system was running on a Slice that was built many years ago and ran just fine on Ubuntu 6.06.2 LTS. It had a good run, but since I was destroying one of my other virtual machines, I figured it was time to migrate. Here’s how I did it.

1)Built a new slice at slicehost – my favorite virtual machine vendor. I installed the usual things like Apache2, php5, mysql, etc. Then I copied my Apache2 site configs over and added the missing modules to make them load properly. After that a large scp transfer copied my data and I performed a dump of my databases to flat text and imported them into my new improved MySQL server. My new slice ended up in a different data center on new hardware:

10  abovenet-peer.chcgil01.transitrail.net (137.164.130.174)  22.218 ms  22.107 ms  22.106 ms
11  xe-0-0-0.er1.ord7.us.above.net (64.125.26.245)  34.977 ms  27.394 ms  24.189 ms
12  64.124.65.218.allocated.above.net (64.124.65.218)  23.406 ms  23.524 ms  23.524 ms
13  core1-ed1-edge3.ord1.rackspace.net (173.203.0.101)  24.545 ms  24.808 ms  24.535 ms
14  173.203.0.189 (173.203.0.189)  24.642 ms  25.373 ms  24.576 ms
15  biobug.org (184.106.65.132)  24.138 ms  24.182 ms  23.993 ms

Looks like a Chicago data center (and behind a Juniper MX router at above.net) for the new system. My new VM is likely on a faster CPU and I upgraded the ram while I was at it. The price of the new data center was a new IP address, so I was forced to update DNS for my sites that I maintain here.

Since my home network is a bit more complex than most, I found some interesting issues with Mediacom’s DNS. Yesterday, our wireless network stopped working (My wife reports that to me: the internet is down, did you pay the bill?) I could ssh in from work, so the connection was definitely working.

A bit of poking around and I find that the old primary DNS server isn’t even responding to queries. Luckily, I run my own dns server on my inner network and it works just fine. My fix for now is to allow a special NAT exception so that my internal dns server and supply dns for every network zone in my house.

I would hope that a full dhcp renewal would provide new, working DNS servers. But ultimately I don’t care since my fix was just a reversion to my old network config anyway.