Category: Errata

For a Good Time Forward Your Ports.

Over the past few months I have been ramping up for the next phase of my career.  I strongly believe that Data Center technologies are going to power the future of not only servers and applications but indeed all sectors of IT services including networking.  Recent announcements from both Cisco and VMware about competing virtual firewalls, new L2 virtualization models within VMware and players such as Vyatta seem to indicate that I am correct.  So along those lines I have been working to re-design my home lab and ramp up to learn these technologies as well as knock down my CCNP in prep for starting my CCIE early next year. Read more

Sometimes we just dont need routing

More than once lately I have come across L3 capable switches that have ip routing enabled by default even though it is not visible in the config.  This has happened on every single 4500, 4900, 3560 and 3750 I have touched in the past 6 months.  So I am pretty well aware that the first thing I need to do if the device is to function as a basic L2 switch is do no ip routing.  However it appears that this is lost on quite a few people.  I have been working at a client for a few weeks who is doing a basic core routed vlan network with dot1q trunks to each of their sites off of their Metro Ethernet WAN.  The issue has nothing to to do with normal traffic but instead management traffic.  If you have ip routing enabled and have also set ip default gateway your going to end up with some problems getting to the actual device to manage it.  If you are not going to use a VRF for management simply do no ip routing on the device and it will work just like any other L2 only switch.

Do Not Social Engineer Yourself out of Clients or your Job!

About 9 months or so ago a weird thing happened to me.   I had been using Twitter heavily and liked the idea behind 4Square.   So I added the app to my BlackBerry and started checking in.   Then as I prepared to meet a friend after work at his office I got a call from my then General Manger demanding to know where I was.   Being after work I told him meeting a friend, but he persisted.   So I told him.   At that point he demanded to know why I was there and if I was on company business.   This whole situation pissed me off but more to the point exposed that people are tracking us via our social media footprints with the right to do so being granted by our use of the systems.   In this particular case it was me posting to 4Square, which injected a tweet into Twitter which was then re-posted into LinkedIn where my GM and I were linked and he was watching my activity.

Right then and there I pulled the 4square app off my phone and turned my Twitter geo-tagging to optional.   My reason had nothing to do with being tracked by my management.   All they have to do is ask and I tell.  I don’t really care that some people have no real work to do, so they stalk employees via social media.   As a matter of fact we should assume managers do this crap.   The real reason was that I realized how easily I could expose information about clients Read more

“the books you read and the people you meet”

Ever since I saw Dave Ramsey at Catalyst a few years ago I have been a huge fan.  Then last February we went through Financial Peace University.  From that point on I have pretty much become a zealot.  Yeah I’ll admit it.  Since February we have led two more FPU classes and until our local talk radio show moved to a new format I listened to Dave everyday.  As it is I continue to listen on the net and the podcast.

One of the lines that I have taken to heart is then Dave talks about one of his friends saying “your only difference between now and ten years from now will be the books you read and the people you meet”.   I think there is something to this.  For me I meet new people everyday and in the past two years I have been lucky enough to not only meet new people  but actually interact with them and grow my sphere of friends and colleagues.  One thing I have not been doing though was reading non-fiction outside of the technical material need to do my job.  In January though I committed to changing that and if you will notice the sidebar of the the blog or choose to click on this link you see what I have, am and will be reading.

If you take the time you will notice that much of my reading focus is on marketing, business and sales.  Part of that is me wanting to be better at what I do as a Network Engineer in an expanding market.  But I won’t lie by saying that there isn’t a bigger plan to my reading madness and I look forward to sharing that with you all in the next few months.  Until then what have you read and who have you met?  Because 10 years from now what you start doing today could change your life.

Winbook 37T1 and Sony RM-AV3000 THANK YOU GOD!

Nice and simple post. After 3 years of Having our Winbook 37T1 LCD Which as been a great Cheap TV. I Paid $399 New for it. And 2 Years of having my Sony RM-AV3000 that I traded a set of JBL PC speakers for I can say that they work together.

Tonight I just sat down and kept trying likely codes until I found that it responded to the Samsung TV Code 8026 for the Sony RV-AV3000. I hope this gets indexed and helps some other folks. I know from reading on AVS forum that some of these TVs respond to Tatung codes but in my case it did not.

If you Strike us down we will only become stronger. #GartnerSucks

I have felt this way for awhile, Gartner sucks!  While I worked for the State of Ohio I saw several instances of what appeared to be more than independent reviews of a product/technology.  And pretty much ever since then I have viewed Gartner and other analysts with a HUGE grain of salt and I mean the like that would kill T-REX if it fell on him.

But last night my general annoyance with Gartner jumped to a level of flat at hatred and disdain for them as an organization.  They have moved from a model of bottom feeding and instigation to a model of attacking criticism and silencing key players in the next gen Networking field over minor criticism.

Steve Chambers at http://viewyonder.com posted the following on his site: Read more

The Great Hope Re-Visited

So back in October of 2007 I posted The Great Hope.  Since then a lot has changed for me especially in my world and view of finances.  Back then I was struggling to pay things off and hanging onto promises made by employers that were never kept.  Today I am a Dave Ramsey zealot!  So what I am getting ready to talk about is a bit out of my new character.

In June of 2007 I had told my Father in Law (very good with money) that if I invested 10k right then and there I would get a 70% average return.  Well go back and read the old post, because I did a bit better than that.  Dave Ramsey teaches that we you should not invest in the open stock market unless your a pro or you have dealt with all your other investments as he calls out in his Financial Peace plan.  Mainly he encourages heavy investment in Growth Stock Mutual Funds which over time average around 11.8 to 12.4 percent.  With that said though I have done ok with my Virtual Portfolio and I would gladly have placed my own cash in the same setup. Read more

Zombie Outbreak Prevention or how to kill your network.

Had and interesting call with a client today.  Initially they though that their AIP20 IPS module had died.  In the process they lost almost all communication to the internet.  At first I was afraid that I had not used ips inline fail-open sensor vs0 and that the unit had failed and blocked all traffic.  However once I was on site after I pulled the config it was clear that I had configured it correctly. Read more

Who knew….

Who knew that my last post on an encrypted backup drive would be so timely.  Last night while testing a piece of software something went horribly awry.  One moment I was in my Windows partition working away and the next my laptop rebooted and informed me there was not bootable OS on my hard drive.  PANIC!!!  I had an Ubuntu Server Alternate CD on me so I popped that in and assessed the damage.  It was not good.  What used to be my NTFS partition for my Windows XP install was shown as an unknown and my boot partition was shown as free space.  I honestly have no idea what happened.  The good news is that I was able to use the Ubuntu CD recovery mode to validate that my encrypted LVM partitions were ok.  Now I just have to figure out how to get everything pointing and booting it again.  Most importantly though all my critical business information was on my 1 Gig CF card in my PC Card slot encrypted using TrueCrypt.  So no real data loss just time and application install loss.  So as of right now I am typing from my newly installed XP install setup the the way I like it and not how Dell likes it.  Which means that it boots in less than 45 seconds and my wireless works at boot instead of 15 minutes later like it did in the default install.  I will keep a running update as I dig through the rubble of my HD trying to figure out what happened.

Exit stage right….enter Netech.

Not that everyone knows where I work but I am moving from a mixed VAR and BISCI shop tommarow to my new profesional home at Netech I expect to be posting more in the near future considering I will be living out of a hotel for a few months. That and exposure to my new life as a dedicated Cisco Engineer should give me lots of fodder for my humble little site. So add me to RSS and look for new content soon.

Now children we are going to disect a packet…eww!!!!

I would like to welcome a cool new resource to out party. openpacket is a cool site that takes traffic capture files of a set type of traffic ranging from Normal, Suspicious to Malicious. Being able to reference these captures could be very beneficial when it comes to diagnosing network issues. So surf on over and register with these guys. Just make sure you don’t get any packet headers on you when you dive in.

The Great Hope

This is outside of my normal topics but still kinda relevent. Last june we went on vacation with my inlaws. My father is law is a cool guy who worked in the accounting department of Ohio University after his stint in the Army and a brief trip to the FBI as a runner for Agents and a run in with J Edgar Hoover. He retired shortly after my wife and her sisters graduated from OU. Since then he has worked for Valic and is getting ready to start with another retirment/insurance group. All that said he is a pretty smart guy when it comes to money and finances. But back to vacation…on our way home we were talking about investing and I mentioned that I was trying to save up $10,000 to invest. Let me say this is not an easy thing and I am not there yet. If I had been able to pull that money together then this story would be alot more interesting. Anway when he asked me what I wanted to invest in I said I thought playing the stock market would be the best and most interesting return at least in the begining until I figured out what all the investment options are. He followed that question by asking how much I thought I could get in a return on my 10k, to which I informed him I thought I could pull 70% in a year. Lets just say this gave him a good laugh.

So that very day I logged into the hotels wireless and chose 10k in stock picks. They were; Read more

I will RULE them all!!!!! hey who turned out the lights…. (Why Cisco Went off the Air.)

Ok I lied.  I am going to put out another update about the Cisco .com outage that I reported here a few days ago.  I talked to one of my contacts within Cisco Engineering and was told “I can’t disclose alot but it was a power outage.”  My reply to him was that I was shocked that Cisco doesn’t use Akamai or another service or even multiple national and international data centers to serve their content out of.  His only response was that there were systems in place and that the failure was not an infrastructure (data that is) failure but a power failure. Read more

Google said who visited my site? Oh the DOD that makes sence.

Just wanted to get a new post up for those of you who check up on my little slice of the web. I am still alive but just buried in work and personal endeavors. One of those happens to be that my wife Patti is Pregnant with our second child. Currently she is about 8 weeks and our two year old Aidan keeps telling us he wants a baby sister. Today though I am finishing up a pseudo vacation and before I go back to my normal 60+ hour weeks I wanted to check up on my site metrics to see if my absence had cause staticnat.com to become another lost soul on the information super highway. I am thrilled to report that it has not. Between my few loyal readers and some new visitors not only have I seen pretty stable numbers but also some pretty unique visitors. The most unique has to be The DOD Network Information Center. As seen here DOD_Visit1 in a capture of my analytics account you can see that two days in a row some folks at the DOD Network Information Center check out my site. They even hung around for a bit and read 3 of my pages. If it happened to be you that visited me from the DOD I would love to hear from you. Feel free to email me at; Email Image. That goes for all of my readers. While I don’t have tons of time to write at the moment I am very interested in what my readers are looking for when they visit me and what you would like me to add. I have hundreds of unique Cisco configs that I can sanitize and post as well as lots of other networking information, so if there is something you need drop me a line.

Again thanks for the continuing traffic and I hope to be supplying some new content and configs soon.

Level 3 Hijinx…I think there is a Microsoft mole in the network.

I was on client site today troubleshooting some bandwidth problems. The first issue ended up being a power outage the night before had kept the edge router from coming up clean. A reload and a quick check of the config and life was good again. Currently this particular edge site for the client only has 1Mbit of their T1 and the rest is dedicated to their phone system. After being down a good portion of the morning the data link really took a hit when we got things working as email came flying in and everyone rushed our to see how their Ebay bids were going. So getting back from lunch we noticed that the link was still fully committed. The traffic pattern in PRTG indicated that it was some sort of update stream (we have fought this battle before) but with Apple Update servers blocked we were pretty sure it was not the Mac (95% of all systems on this network). However based on the network it was on and the location within that network we were left without other options. Read more

Cacti on Ubuntu 7.04, 8 steps to the a flexible and functional setup.

I’m going to make this quick and to the point. Look for details in my upcoming post “Cacti the killer monitoring app? I have now installed Ubuntu 7.04 Server and Cacti in some form more than 18 times in the past two weeks. Most of those have been a frustrating failure! I am by no means a *nix god so most of my problems probably had to do with not knowing the ins and outs of the Ubuntu OS. My failures can probably also be directly attributed to a lack of 7.04 install guides for cacti. So with so many failed attempts and 3 Fully successful attempts both on HP hardware, Dell Hardware and a VM Ware server Virtual Machine I am going to post my 8 basic steps to making cacti work. Read more

Digital Demons, lets cast them out of our digital homes.

Back on March 19th of this year I posted, “Three weeks in two, bah who needs sleep.”, I must have lied because between those two weeks and the subsequent crazy weeks following I pretty much fell off the map. During the aforementioned two weeks though I visited Ottawa, Canada for Sales and Engineering training for CryptoCard. For me trips like this are exciting not for the trip but for the time I get to spend with other professionals learning, hanging out and passing on our tricks to each other. During a break on the training routine our instructor Patrick posed a question something to the affect of; if we don’t like spam and attacks and we know that 20 to 30% of all spam and attacks come from North Korea and China then why don’t we block them at the edge? Read more

Three weeks in two, bah who needs sleep.

Ok based on the title and the personal info I am about to divuldge I should be in bed right now. I tried that and I just cant go to slleep so I figured I would fuel the growing masses that are checking out Staticnat. As last week ended I knew things were going to be busy for the upcomming few weeks. What caught me by surprise was that by the end of today I had more than 120 hours or work scheduled by the end of the day today. Don’t get me wrong I have worked my share of 60, 70 and even 80 hour weeks, but when I hit those higher numbers I can usually slow down the following week. So just for the sake of posterity I’m goingto break down my next two weeks here along with a few thoughts about it. Read more