TECHPRO.MS

I was recently asked what the makeup of my CCNP lab is. I've got a fairly standard lab that has its' roots in my CCNA lab. I started out with 2 2501's in my CCNA lab then expanded with 2 3640's, 3 2600s and 3 2950 switches. The reason for the additions was my enrollment in the CCNA v4.0 curriculum at Santa Rosa JC's Cisco Networking Academy Program. The labs in the curriculum are very extensive and require the configuration of frame relay clouds and other complex routing configurations as well as a minimum of 3 switches for the full STP experience. Right now I'm studying for the CCNP Routing exam and have the lab configured as follows:

1x 2509 Remote Access Server (2 Serial, 1 10BaseT)
2x 2501 Routers (2 Serial, 1 10BaseT)
2x 2611XM Routers (2 100BaseT, 1 WIC-1T Serial)
1x 2610XM Router (1 100BaseT, 1 WIC-1T Serial)
1x 3640 Routers (1 NM-2FE, 2 NM 4/AS Serial)
3x 2950 Switches (24 port)

The only reason I still have the 3640 is I need something to act as frame relay cloud and this fits the bill. NM 4A/S cards are dirt cheap. You can fit them in a 2600 series router but they only have 1 network module slot. I'm using a Dantrak 24U rack to hold everything. Even though the 2501's use an older version of IOS, I'm holding on to them because they can make decent IPv6 backbone routers. When I move on to the switching exam I expect I'll need to pick up a 3550 siwtch or two so I can do QoS, SSH and all that other fun stuff.

Life interfering with updates.

Going to have a few new writeups soon. I'm working on a VMWare appliance based on Ubuntu Desktop 8.04LTS that includes the following:

Nagios
NTOP
SmokePing
Cacti

Where applicable they're running off MySQL and of course the HTTP server is Apache2 with PHP and Perl. I've actually got everything up and running. The VM is 1GB download. If you're intested send an email to mcse@techpro.ms. Everything is free license so that means no Splunk or Nessus for now but I have put in some apps like Wireshark. I still want to get MRTG up and running for SNMP monitoring, specifically graphable OIDs like througput on an interface. Nagios is great for uptime and stuff like that but MRTG is better for things you can graph.

At this point you may be asking yourself, why waste the time doing this? Well, my answer is that I wanted a virtual machine that I could drop into a network that would allow me to start monitoring with a minimum of hassle. Why Linux? Because it's free and robust.

I'm also going to post up some tricks for VMWare Player. There are some obscure things regarding VMWare Player that are useful to know like that VMWare Tools comes with VMWare Player. All you have to do is mount the ISO and install it. There will also be a few things regarding file locations to make modification of network settings easier.

So in conclusion, I'll be doing writeups on the following:

How to use snmpwalk to find OIDs on a Windows 2K3 Server.
How to use snmpwalk to find OIDs on a Cisco switch.
How to use GetIf to find OIDs on a Windows 2K3 Server.
How to use GetIf to find OIDs on a Cisco switch.
DHCP and NAT setting for VM Player, where they're located and how to modify them.

File this under learning experience. I was setting up a syslog server and clients this weekend on my network. Two rather innocent seeming configuration options cascaded into a deluge of email to my main account. How did this happen you might ask? I was having configuration issues with syslog-ng and wanted to verify that log information was being created by the router to determine if the problem was on the client or server. I decided to speed up the log generation by implementing a rather restrictive firewall rule. I also turned on the routers' smtp server so it would email the log files. What I forgot to do was turn off the firewall filter when I was done. This generated 100s of large log files. If you sent me an email between Friday night and noon Monday, it's going to be awhile before I find it. The one upside is I now have a lot of information logged on the syslog-ng server to play around with.

I thought I'd post up a write up for a little Windows XP trick. I wanted remote access to my lab so I used a notebook with 2 network cards. In order to do some labs I needed to use public address on a private network. The writeup is a quick guide to the route command to overcome that little problem.

There seem to be quite a few technology sector specialist recruiters floating around that have no understanding of Microsoft or Cisco certifications. The following is a brief tutorial.

If someone has the MCSE: Security, that means that they have the following additional certifications; MCSE, MCSA: Security, MCSA, and MCP. So if you call me about a job and state while my MCSE: Security is great but I really need to be a MCSE and MCP, you know what the snickering was about before I hung up.

Another note about Microsoft certifications, I had 0 questions about Exchange on the 14 or so exams I took and Exchange isn't mentioned anywhere on my resume. Why are you calling me for a position that requires significant Exchange administration experience? Here's a tip, instead of the calling the MCSE: Security, try someone with the MSCE: Messaging certification.

Now for the really tricky part...if someone has a CCNP they also have a CCNA. In addition not all CCIE's have a CCNA. Let me rephrase, being a CCNA is a requirement of the CCNP certification but not the CCIE certification.

I didn't make the cutoff for the old CCNA exams. That's why I'm now a Cisco Certified Entry Networking Technician. I figured I'd give the CompTIA Network+ a shot while all the theory was fresh in my mind. It didn't really matter. I think I could have randomly selected answers, the passing threshold was so low. The content of the test wasn't much better. I had one question where the answer choices didn't actually include the right answer. I can't elaborate because of the NDA though.

5 Routers, 3 switches, 1 access server and just enough knowledge to be dangerous! This is what I spend my spare time on. Yesterday it was trunking with 2 switches and a router.

3640_1>show cdp neighbor
Capability Codes: R - Router, T - Trans Bridge, B - Source Route Bridge
                  S - Switch, H - Host, I - IGMP, r - Repeater

Device ID        Local Intrfce     Holdtme    Capability  Platform  Port ID
2509_AS          Ser 1/1            139          R        2509      Ser 0
2501_1           Ser 1/3            169          R        2500      Ser 0
2501_2           Ser 1/2            152          R        2500      Ser 0
3640_2           Ser 1/0            178        R S I      3640      Ser 0/3
3640_1>show ip route
Codes: C - connected, S - static, R - RIP, M - mobile, B - BGP
       D - EIGRP, EX - EIGRP external, O - OSPF, IA - OSPF inter area 
       N1 - OSPF NSSA external type 1, N2 - OSPF NSSA external type 2
       E1 - OSPF external type 1, E2 - OSPF external type 2
       i - IS-IS, su - IS-IS summary, L1 - IS-IS level-1, L2 - IS-IS level-2
       ia - IS-IS inter area, * - candidate default, U - per-user static route
       o - ODR, P - periodic downloaded static route

Gateway of last resort is not set

     192.168.4.0/24 is variably subnetted, 2 subnets, 2 masks
C       192.168.4.0/24 is directly connected, Serial1/2
C       192.168.4.2/32 is directly connected, Serial1/2
     192.168.5.0/24 is variably subnetted, 2 subnets, 2 masks
C       192.168.5.0/24 is directly connected, Serial1/3
C       192.168.5.2/32 is directly connected, Serial1/3
R    192.168.6.0/24 [120/1] via 192.168.5.2, 00:00:13, Serial1/3
C    192.168.1.0/24 is directly connected, Ethernet0/0
     192.168.2.0/24 is variably subnetted, 2 subnets, 2 masks
C       192.168.2.2/32 is directly connected, Serial1/0
C       192.168.2.0/24 is directly connected, Serial1/0
     192.168.3.0/24 is variably subnetted, 2 subnets, 2 masks
C       192.168.3.2/32 is directly connected, Serial1/1
C       192.168.3.0/24 is directly connected, Serial1/1
3640_1>
2509_AS>2
[Resuming connection 2 to R2 ... ]
3640_2>show ip route
Codes: C - connected, S - static, R - RIP, M - mobile, B - BGP
       D - EIGRP, EX - EIGRP external, O - OSPF, IA - OSPF inter area 
       N1 - OSPF NSSA external type 1, N2 - OSPF NSSA external type 2
       E1 - OSPF external type 1, E2 - OSPF external type 2
       i - IS-IS, su - IS-IS summary, L1 - IS-IS level-1, L2 - IS-IS level-2
       ia - IS-IS inter area, * - candidate default, U - per-user static route
       o - ODR, P - periodic downloaded static route

Gateway of last resort is not set

R    192.168.4.0/24 [120/1] via 192.168.2.1, 00:00:23, Serial0/3
R    192.168.5.0/24 [120/1] via 192.168.2.1, 00:00:23, Serial0/3
R    192.168.6.0/24 [120/2] via 192.168.2.1, 00:00:23, Serial0/3
     192.168.2.0/24 is variably subnetted, 2 subnets, 2 masks
C       192.168.2.0/24 is directly connected, Serial0/3
C       192.168.2.1/32 is directly connected, Serial0/3
R    192.168.3.0/24 [120/1] via 192.168.2.1, 00:00:23, Serial0/3
3640_2>

I subdivided the DHCP page into multiple sections. I added a section covering installing dhcp3-server on Ubuntu. I was thinking that showing both Linux and Windows 2003 Server DHCP operation gives a better understanding of the fundamentals than just one by itself. The DHCP best practices section is going to get killed mainly because Microsoft has a fairly good Technet article on the subject.

I found out that Microsoft has no centralized listing of blogs from it's various teams. What a great way to organize the dissemination of information, force people to use Google. Try searching for the blogs on MSN vs. Google. Anyways, the Microsoft Blog listing is getting a lot of traffic. If you know of any blogs regarding servers or networking please feel free to email them to me for inclusion.

I got bored and implemented RDP through my cable modem->voip adaptor->wifi-router. It's published under the Articles section to the left.