Blah blah blah

Ran into this article and to an extent this seems like normal. But it feels somehow old and washed out. Hasn’t this been the mantra for ages? In brief  it says:

Share your knowledge and promote your expertise.

Be a mentor.

Learn the right way to use social media.

I am all for sharing but having sharing presented as a PR activity really hurts me deeply. Share if you love to share and help your fellow workers, don’t share if the primary reason is to better your career. Being a mentor is something wonderful (having a mentor also) you can have somebody to bounce off ideas and who will be there to keep you in check if you get some crazy ones. Its just important to have it more in a friendship style and not “Me king, you pawn!”. And as for social media, I am up for all the new hot technologies and using it to better get in touch with you followers and I totally think this channel of communication has more problems then benefits but if used correctly it can be done.

Now for something really extrodinary!  Check this out!

That is how you position yourself as an expert!

As a start I said Scott makes me drowsy, maybe its just the format

Take a look at his great article The cult of busy and don’t forget to read the comments some really nice things there.

Personally I am all for your results matter and not how much effort you put in. It is not always in direct relation and the rewards in the cruel capitalistic world are definitely out of all imaginable proportions

Have a nice day!

Now for something completely different.  From 1st June I will be changing to another position in my company (AT&T). Focus of my work will be on project management thus a new chapter occurs in the story that is to be my life

After careful research I decided that my first steps into serious project management will be the basic course at PMI.org (the guys who brought you PMP/CAPM) and Scott Berkuns “Making Things Happen”. The PMI course is going on pretty decently but its a lot of material to digest to start understanding truly what they are saying. I am happy with it although the price could be a tad lower (as always). I am already coming to grips with the terminology, and the names of all the documents that will be produced during one carefully thought out project.

Scott Berkuns book is pretty decent but a real torture for me somehow. There is interesting stuff, a lot that I could learn and a good story behind it with him being a long time Microsoft employee. But after 15ish pages I get really drowsy. Blame it on my lack of sleep but my ATM favourite book author Seth Godin just puls me in and doesn’t let go.

Considering the seriousness of the situation and that I definitely want to really do my job well and like the job itself I decided on an attack plan to combat study fatigue and increase retention of new topics and improve old ones. Books are mountains and for every mountain you need an excessive amount of effort. Articles are hills, across smaller ones you can even run, over bigger ones you can jog. So spotting one good business/project management/people management article per day and digesting it is what need to be done.

Now let’s get to it

As my job is going to be slowly switched to security I was browsing eBay today and while surfing for PIXs and ASAs looked at prices of routers and switches for CCIE R&S. You can now get a 3550 48 port SMI for $350 which is dirt cheap compared to last year or a bit more when I was looking. Then they were around $1000. For someone going into CCNP it would be great to buy two of these plus a couple 2950 ($75-100) and a couple 2610 ($100) which can all be used for CCIE later. Thats just above $1.000 and trust me will be very beneficial for you. Just for BCMSN I used around $150 for rental and used Dynamips for others but would have loved to have had real equipment.

I can say that now it has become affordable to acquire equipment for your CCNP which can carry on to CCIE (just add 2 more 3560) and you can also use these in all other CCIE concentrations and preparations for the likes of CCSP.

Think about it

I have recently been able to test online flash cards from www.certflashcardsonline.com. Trying to prepare anyways for this exam so this was a nice addition to the materials.  Tride out a couple of the “tests” in which you get 50ish questions and try to answer it before looking at the answer. Nice thing is that you get thorough explanations for each answer so you know why you were wrong. Pretty good materials and will surely come in handy when taking the test. One thing I did not like is that you can’t just go to the home page you need to go to app.certflashcardsonline.com to find the tests. A bit awckward for me but it was free and still beats anything else I have seen so two thumbs up.

Hey people, spent like two hours setting everything up so thought someone might like to try it out. It is from the first volume the OSPFv2 exercise, think its not breaking no legal stuff.

KLMN router are attached just to the 10.31.x.x network with O. The network 10.30.254.x is not operational but still there are connections built in the .NET file.

When moving my blog to another server the files got lost and can’t find them right now as I switched to another computer too and the last one is gone. Still trying to find everything but not sure if I will be able to. Sorry

How to switch between multiple terminals (command prompts for you windows people )

ALT + F1 – ALT + F6

How to view processes

just use “top”

Thats all folks

Just today had a situation where we had some strange behaviour. Some users and OUs were not replicating. OK I go in do some diagnostics just to find out those are some two old DCs which had been brought back to life after like 4 months.

 The thing is their Tombstone time expired and now they were no good (if you know what I mean). It took some time and a whole lot of searching

 Here is the TechNet article on it.

Reconnecting a Domain Controller After a Long-Term Disconnection

P.S. I passed 70-298 my finall exam for the MCSE: Security

It was a drag

Luckily these two posts made it clear (aftear a couple of hours lost) as to how to make everything right in Virtual PC

Link one

Link two

Check out the comments on them there is some wisdom there too

Well since I am now studying for my ISCW it was time to test SDM and how it works. None the less it only works on Windows operating systems. First couple of practices I did went with no problem, but as soon as I got to 3 routers and some tunneling and encryption I got the popular memory stack problems. Needing to alleviate this problem I sat down and thought hard. Having before tried the Windows inside Linux and vice versa, I knew there was no really good solution. Finally it came to me that while trying Fedora inside VMWare on Windows I was running the InternetworkExpert topology with something like 15ish routers. Sitting on 3 routers inside VMWare on Fedora and using SDM from my host Windows really works cool. And its not a problem to setup.

1. After you have everything setup for host/guest communication with VMWare start the Dynamips process on Linux

2. On Windows create your .net file and set it up so that each router has an interface pointing out through the VMWare interface to you host machine.

3. Add addressing on those interfaces and ping them from the host machine, should work.

4. Connect with your SDM to the routers

Happy securing and device hardening