Hello all guys, today I have a great news to give you finally I’m online again!
I have just registered a new domain and configured Wordpress blog with an hosting company called justhost.com .
I’m still in the process of setting stuff up anyhow the new address is blog.ccielogs.com if the feedback will be good I’ll think about setting up a forum as well (that’s already included).
I hope to be up and running in a week or so, hope to see you there soon!
Cheer Lethe.
Hello all and happy new year to all my readers!
I’ve come back from The Netherlands but had a bitter surprise, I don’t know for sure what happened anyhow it seems that blogetery servers failed and they restored a backup, so far so good apart the fact my blog has been offline for some days and they’ve lost like 20 posts…
Too bad, shame on me, I don’t have a backup of these posts so I think I’ll just move the blog somewhere else so if anyone of you does know a cheap blog hosting service, based on wordpress would be great!, please let me know and I’ll start the migration.
I won’t update the blog until I find another hosting company as I don’t want to risk another server failure, so please be patient I promise I’ll keep up blogging as soon as possible.
Thanks, Lethe.
Once again quite a while I don’t post, sorry for this but my life is running faster than me and I try to catch up…
What I’m about to write and, hopefully, you’re about to read is not an IT related post… It’s more like a rant, a personal post. I thought a lot before writing this, after all this is an IT blog and you’re here to read about IT… but please forgive me if I’m using this little personal space to spit out what I can’t keep inside anymore…
Again this is not an IT post, so please don’t read nor feel offended by it in any way if you came here looking for an IT only post. I’ll blog about something technical soon, promise!
Alea iacta est once said a great Italian man called Caesar now I repeat it looking at new USA’s president Obama victory speech. He won, he’s the new president and I gotta admit I was hardly hit by his words “…The United States is the place where everything is possible…” you may or may not like him but his words are still there! Like my sadness looking to my country where, as someone already said, NOTHING is possible.
A country where information is under control of corrupted politician, a country where Gerontocracy and Oligarchy reign… A country where you’re no one if you’re son of someone… A country where the word meritocracy simply does not exist, it has no meaning to us Italians…
Quoting from Beppe Grillo’s blog, an Italian comedian and weirdly enough one of the few “uninfluenced” source of information, “…Just imagine Obama who as the first action of Government declares his own immunity by law so as to save himself from a corruption trial…” Oh well that’s normal that already happened here in Italy…
I feel sad and believe it or not I’m almost crying while writing this… Crying cause of the “Bel Paese” which simply is not more… A country near the collapse, a country where we have no future at all!
Sometimes I stop by and think, I think too much I know, and I feel like we’re living in George Orwell’s 1984… If you haven’t done so go grab a copy and read it!
This morning I looked at my tired face and to my eyes, in the last 4/5 days maybe I’ve slept like 10 hours because I’m putting all my energies all my efforts in the work I’ve been assigned and in the study of my Cisco certifications but this morning suddenly I asked myself, WHY?
This morning I’ve realized I can’t accept this anymore, I’m out of it… I always told I wanted to relocate abroad but I preferred to wait to get a job before moving, before jumping into the unknown… now I know I need to run before it is too late, so guys wish me good luck as I need all of it as February/march I’m gonna relocate in the Netherlands…
I don’t know if I’ll meet success and joy or failure and pain but I know I gotta try.
Wish me good luck and if you want to know more about “Il Bel paese”” which is sinking day by day please check this link http://www.beppegrillo.it/eng/
Lethe.
Hello all guys!
Wow I’m on a damn busy, and I mean BUSY, schedule lately and even don’t have the time to answer your emails or post on the blog 
So sorry for this but I’m feeling the pain of teaching Windows 2008 courses 
As I wrote in my previous post material suck big time and so do the classroom material! Man this is sucking away all my time!
Nothing really new on the horizon, I’m stuck with CCNP as I have to work late to fix stuff or for late afternoon meeting and don’t have much time to study
On a side not a good new Finally I’ve got a new laptop, can’t remember the model right now, my company bought not me, but it’s a new HP with 8GB Ram O.o wow lot of fun for me
Well time to run again, have some spare time and I wanna dedicate it to OSPF
Lethe.
Wow finally I have 5 spare minutes I can dedicate to write what’s going on, as I’ve written in my last post these are terribly busy days…
First of all let me excuse if I’ve been slow to answer your query via email, secondly sorry if you found any error in my last post about how to add an host to your GNS3 topology, you can find it here, but that has been written in around one week one line every now and then so to be honest I had not the time to double check it.
So, if you’re reading this you’re interested to know what’s going on… Well during these days I’m really busy preparing a few MOC courses for our customers on Windows 2008 technologies, I have to admit I’m not that excited about this for a few reasons. First of all new MOCs suck big time! There is no information in them so you’re supposed to study on web resources like technet and MSDN, all the instructor notes are in the PPT slides (how am I supposed to read them?), last but least all these new courses seems to me like a big BIG marketing operations… stuff like “…Mention to your students the advantages of implementing this or that product (for which you have to pay of course!) for better performances…” ok fine MS your the MOC your the rules but I’m a technician teaching to other technicians I’m not paid to promote or sell your stuff! There is yet another little annoyance, instructor notes for the demonstration steps are… gone, this is somehow a good thing as it forces you to have hands on experience on the product (trust me I’ve seen so many trainers teaching just reading slides and notes…) but yet this makes me waste time as I have to “guess” what would be better to show and how to show it… aka you have to prepare your own demonstration steps and this is a big waste of my time!
I started to wonder, MCT certification costs ms around 400€ per year, I’m lucky enough my company is paying for it, but for what? For some slides I have to edit myself and books with no information in them? For the nice cert and wallet card MS sends you? Oh no sorry, they don’t send you the MCT cert anymore for 400€ they just send you a greetings letter totally useless and 2 DVDs with base images for the virtual machines that you can anyhow download from the MCT site.
Ok sorry for the rant, back on track, my CCNP studying are going… I’m totally lost in the beautiful inner details of EIGRP routing gotta admit I love this protocol! No worries I’ll blog about this soon enough! I still don’t have any plan on when I’ll sit my BSCI exam as my schedule is full at the moment and I need to find a suitable date, but anyhow I don’t want to rush this… I need some rest as from the beginning of the year I’ve already sit more than 20 certifications exams… so I think I can slow down things a little
Ok I think more or less this is it, on a closing note I’ll share just this as it arrived right now in my inbox… A colleague just got a promotion, nothing strange if this person did not waste money and resources of a series of failure projects… Wow what a wonderful nation I live in, you should be “punished” instead you get a reward for being unable to complete your job successfully!
This, at least, gives me yet another reason to try harder to relocate out of Italy, so if you need a senior Systems Engineer with more than 8 years of experience on the various IT fields just let me know and I’ll forward you my CV
Lethe.
It’s been a while I’ve been able to post on the blog, sorry for this but I’ve been really busy with work anyhow more on this later on
What I want to show you on this post is how to add a PC to our "virtual" Dynamips topology, why you’re wondering? Well for testing our topology my friends, you could, of course, use a real computer or simply add another router to your topology but why wasting resources when all we need is a box being able to use ping or traceroute just for testing purposes?
All you need is to download a software called Virtual PC Simulator which is a free software that runs both under Windows and Linux systems and can be found here . Once you’ve downloaded the software extract it somewhere on your computer and launch it (vpcs.exe) a dos window will open up if you need help using VCP just type a ? for instructions :
VPCS expect a file named startup.vpc in which is defined the startup configuration of your virtual hosts, you can easily edit this file with your favorite editor to suit your needs (notice the editor I’m using here ;)) :
In case you don’t like to edit configuration files as I did you can simply use the command ip to assign an IP address and default gateway here’s an example :
ip 10.0.0.5 10.0.0.1 24
This will assign the ip address of 10.0.0.5 in the 255.255.255.0 subnet with a default gateway of 10.0.0.1. Ok now let’s integrate VPCS into our GNS3 installation.
First off open up GNS3 and select Symbol Manager under the Edit menu when the Symbol Manager window appear on the left pane select Computer and double click it to add to the right pane of Customized nodes. Under Customized node settings type a name of your choice, I opted for Computer what a fantasy, and be sure to select Cloud under Type :
Back to GNS3 main page a Computer icon should have appeared between the available Symbols, drag a computer in your internetwork and right click on it and select Configure and input what in the figure :
Now connect your PC to the switch, check my previous post if you’re in doubt on how to create a link between two devices. Basically what we’ve done is configured each computer as a cloud that connect to GNS3 via UDP ports designated. Now all you have to do is to configure the PC with the proper IP address, if you’ve not done that yet, and configure the proper interfaces on the routers so that you’ll be able to ping/traceroute connections in your internetwork.
Wow I’m just done cabling my lab for the CCNP preparation… Men it took more than I planned but finally I’m done, wish I had a rack but I don’t have the space for it in my bedroom so I had to use the poor man’s rack (read a chair…). Anyhow now I’m done with this nasty part I’ve configured the 2 backbone routers and the Frame Relay switch, I’ll post the full config and the topology when I have 5 spare minutes and possibly will publish it in GNS3 format as well so you can work with it as well.
Well time to have some sleep as tomorrow I have class and my student need 100% of me.
Lethe.
There is something I often see asked in support forums, even in the one I moderate, and it is the annoying error message you often can see when working with Cisco devices, this is something on by default and I’ll show you how to easily solve this.
It could happen that you see these messages during the startup of a Cisco device :
%Error opening tftp://255.255.255.255/network-confg (Socket error)
%Error opening tftp://255.255.255.255/cisconet.cfg (Socket error)
%Error opening tftp://255.255.255.255/3620-confg (Socket error)
%Error opening tftp://255.255.255.255/3620.cfg (Socket error)
All these messages are related to a default configuration built in the IOS configuration which basically will attempt to access service configuration files from a network TFTP server, I covered how to configure a TFTP under linux here .
To disable this default configuration you simply need to input these commands on your router/switch :
Router#config terminal Enter configuration commands, one per line. Router(config)#no service config Router(config)#exit Router#copy running-config startup-config
The next time you’re going to reboot your router the error message won’t be displayed again. That easy!
Hello all, just a quick post to let you know I’ve officially started my CCDA study, I’m not sure if I’m going to put apart the study of BSCI while I’m busy with CCDA as I can study both at the same time.
I’ve made the choice of studying CCDA first because I like a lot the planning phase of every project, after all I’m always an "ex" Architect in Microsoft technologies, and secondly because I think having a solid understanding of Cisco evangelism can be a good aid in my preparation of the BSCI and BCMSN exams.
I plan to sit the exam around November if my classroom schedule will allow it. I’ll will keep you posted about my progresses!
Cheer and thanks for reading this.
In my last article I briefly introduced you to Dynamips and GNS3 and explained you how to install and run for the first time this wonderful software.
In this article I’ll in much more detail about the configuration of GNS3 and will explain you how to build a fully working topology for your CCNA/CCNP lab. Before we start let me list the different model of Cisco routers supported in Dynamips, this is to help you to download the right version of IOS :
1710 1720 1721 1750 1751 1760 2610 2610XM 2611 2611XM 2620 2620XM 2621 2621XM 2650XM 2651XM 2691 3620 3640 3660 3725 3745 7200
Ok for the purpose of this post I’m going to use a 7200 image but keep in mind you can use any image that you like (at home I’m running lab with 2611XM images, the same I have on my "real" routers). For our example we’re going to build the following topology :
Looks great eh? Ok let’s get to work and start building the topology!
Ok before we begin to build our topology we need to calculate the "idlepc" value for the particular IOS image we’re going to use, this is very very important, we need to let GNS3 calculate IDLE PC values for our routers, as you have noticed when you started the routers your CPU usage jumped to 100% near that (the picture is from one of my notebooks an HP Pavillon with AMD64 Turion processor and 2 GB of memory) :
This is because Dynamips, the core emulator running under GNS3, does not know when the virtual router is idle, and when it is performing useful work. The “idlepc” command performs analysis on a running image to determine the most likely points in the code that represent an idle loop in the IOS process. Once applied, Dynamips “sleeps” the virtual router occasionally when this idle loop is executed. This significantly reduces CPU consumption on the host without reducing the virtual router’s capacity to perform real work. IdlePC values are particular to an IOS image. They will be different for different IOS versions, and even for different feature-sets of the same IOS version. However idlepc values are not particular to your host PC, operating system, or to the version of Dynamips that GNS3 is using. It is possible that Dynamips will not be able to find and IDLPC value for an image, or that the values it does find do not work. If this happens, try repeating the process again.
To determine an IDLEPC value for a given IOS, start GNS3. Drag only one router set up to use the IOS version you are trying to configure. Right-click the router and choose Start. Then right-click the router and choose Console. You may need to press Enter once initially in the Console window. When asked “Would you like to enter the initial configuration dialog?”, enter no and press Enter. Wait for the router to settle down at a Router> prompt. You may need to press Enter once or twice to get there.
After the router has settled down to a Router> prompt, return to the main GNS3 window and right click on one of your routers selecting IDLE PC and let GNS3 calculate the best IDLE PC for your particular configuration :
A few IDLE PC values will be displayed with the ones suiting your needs displaying an * in front of them, try to select the one with a lower value and click on OK. Great! we can continue to configure our topology.
Open up GNS3 and drag our three routers into the topology pane and change their hostname to something meaningful for you (I choose 3 cities I love ;)) by right clicking on the routers and selecting "Change hostname"
Now let’s add the needed interfaces to our routers, for the purpose of this topology we need :
- Serial interfaces for the WAN connection
- Fast Ethernet interfaces for future use (optional)
To add interfaces simply right click on one of the routers in the topology and select Configure and then select the TAB Slots :
As you can see you can configure one router at time, by selecting its "name" on the left pane, or you can globally configure all the routers by clicking on Routers, from this page select the cards to insert in the virtual slots.
As you can see I’ve added a FE interface and a PA-4T+, basically a serial interface, to our routers, of course the cards and the number of slots depends on the model/image you’re using so you could see something different.
Ok now that we have our interfaces all we have to do is to connect the routers, click on the Connect button and to have a greater degree of control on the configuration select Manual this is not mandatory I use just to be able to choose which interface will be connected to what.
Now click on one of your router and select the interface to which the cable will be connected :
Now, I know you’ve guessed, click on the other router to select the interface and complete the connection :
Now click on the big red cross, aka the create a link button, to go back to design mode :
If you look at the right pane you’ll see how the Topology Summary is now showing the connection we’ve created :
Ok let’s power on our internetwork, it has routers no? so it’s an internetwork You can simply right click on routers one by one and select Start or click on the Play in the too, time to open a console session to our router and start configuring them (I’ll just show you the output of the show interfaces command) :
As you can see all our interfaces are there and working perfectly!
Congratulations! You’ve just configured your first internetwork with Dynamips now it’s up to you to build your topologies and start having lot of fun in the wonderful world of networking!
As usual feel free to contact me for any question or problem about the post or more in general about your studies I’ll be glad to answer asap!
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