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Cisco Skills

  • 2 min read

New Problems, New Job, and a New Look

I still consider myself a rookie in this field even though I started my "official" career in the Network/IT space 5 years ago. Why is that? Is part of the reason because of the rapid push that applications are demanding from the infrastructure? For example if we want XYZ app to be ready for testing today and production in a week how would you be able to stand that up manually? You can't, it really could take weeks to be ready for just testing and that doesn't fly anymore.

  • 11 min read

RBAC Radius with Microsoft NPS 2012 R2

In this configuration I'm at looking at using Microsoft NPS 2012 R2 as radius server and I’m going to skip the installation of NPS because it really is just a next, next, finish installation. In this demo I already have this NPS system connected to a Windows domain, my goal is to create role based access on Cisco IOS routers while using radius to login. I’ll have a couple for active directory accounts each them will represent different types of allowed access to these IOS routers. One account will get full administrative access while the other will only get read access, how cool cat is that ;)

  • 2 min read

Rancid can’t SSH to older ISRs?

Well its 2016 and you still have that one-of-kind Cisco ISR 2811 or 3845 running in the environment? You followed and installed Rancid, all the new stuff works like it should but when you try to connect to that “one-of-kind” 2811 with Rancid it closes the connection... :/

  • 4 min read

iPerf Throughput Testing

Testing a network’s throughput is a good move, if you are testing a new service you stood up or making sure you getting what you paid for. iPerf is good free open source tool when there isn’t really a need to use commercial more expensive tools. In this short tutorial I’ll go over how to configure iPerf which is a CLI tool so let’s get started.

  • 12 min read

Installing Graylog on Centos 7

Let's start out 2016 with setting up a logging system called Graylog. If you have not used Graylog before then I encourage you to check it out. This is an open source log management system and is pretty flexible as it can capture, index and analyze almost anything. Once up and running this system can be scaled out for an enterprise wide log management system. High availability, clustered, and replicated is what Graylog thrives on. In this demo I am going to have two systems. One is the Graylog server, web server and will also have a Mongo database. The other system will be an Elasticsearch node which is what will have the actual data stored in and indexed. For bigger “production” ready setups you just scale this out to separate systems.

  • 2 min read

Cisco VIRL – Update

Cisco released VIRL almost a year ago and it’s not at the 1.0 version yet but it’s getting close as they have done some good work towards the product since it first lunched. Cisco VIRL is like GNS3 which is simulation platform that runs Cisco’s current operating systems so instead of buying used Cisco hardware you can run this program on your computer. This software is geared towards proof-of-concept designs, for personal and training on Cisco Certifications. Let’s talk about it!

  • 12 min read

Configuring OSPF - The Basics

We have to start somewhere so let’s look at the basics of configuring OSPF. Remember OSPF is an IGP (Interior Gateway Protocol) and allows packet authentication as well as IP multicast when sending and receiving updates. In this post we are configuring OSPF in a single area. In this topology we have four routers and two PCs. The PCs subnet are 172.30.2.0/24 and 172.30.3.0/24. We have point to point connections between each router.

  • 7 min read

PRTG Daily Email Powershell Script

So I don't write much powershell but recently I needed a way to send daily emails out of PRTG. Thanks Paessler which has kept it simple with their PRTG monitoring system as the hardest part of this script was getting the data in HTML, remember I don't write much powershell. ;)

  • 2 min read

Passed the 640-911 DCICN

Cisco started this exam back in 2012 and I have thought/semi-studied about this test for about over a year now, just did not feel comfy about it until recently. I took the test last week and passed, however there were some questions on the exam I noticed that weren't on the exam blueprint so that kind of surprised me. I was happy to still be able to pass the exam but I was caught off guard. So with that I’ll let you know what I used to study and what areas I think might help so you won't be as "surprised" as I was.

  • 3 min read

Converting Hexadecimal to Decimal and Binary

The purpose of this post is to reference the CCNA Data Center (640-911) exam. This exam starts the conversation of IPv6 and since IPv6 is hexadecimal this post starts the talk about how we look at a hexadecimal values and learn how to convert them to binary and decimal. If you know subnetting skills then this won’t be that difficult. If you are new then check out The Wonders of Binary post as well as Part 1 and Part 2 of subnetting. Let’s get started!