What have you done today? - (Network Version)

[Pako]

Ok, so...not as exciting as things you have done to your computer, but I feel the need to shout out a small victory cry!

I've spend the last two days deep in Cisco IOS, or CLI configuring and testing, and failing, and reading, and, and, and...

Started with two pieces of gear that were used, password protected, and no longer being used, A Cisco 891 Router and a Cisco Airnet 1131 Access Point. Obsolete equipment for the network they were pulled from I found myself knee deep in the Cisco theology.

It had been years since I had touched a Cisco OS so intimately but found myself determined to figure it out. Tools today are much easier to program the routers, but they are still not plug-n-play.

Summary of events:
Find an old box with a serial port.
Hook up console cable to serial port and router.
Cntrl+Break to stop the Flash loading sequence and reset the routers Register mode.
Clear NVAM and do some basic ethernet port assignments.
Install Cisco's GUI interface on computer for more in depth configurations on the router.
Create RIP entries, DHCP, ACL's, Firewall, content filtering and Static IP Route rules.

The AP was a lot easier and had that up and running in no time.

All in all, very happy with the network performance boost that the household received from the new configuration. Out with Netgear, in with Cisco. To test the load, I streamed from Netflix and Hulu to three difference devices, had a streaming HTPC moving going, had a 500gb Backup/transfer to the NAS, and ran some speed tests. Ping was rock solid to the test server. On a best day, I would get 65 ping. I was 64-67 ping every time even with all that bandwidth getting sucked while I rant it. Prior to the upgrade my ping would have been in the 140-160 range easy, and my DL speeds would have been cut in half. DL speeds still were affected, but not as much. More importantly though was the ping not being adversely affected by power use of the network. YAAAAAY~

So....what have you done to your network today?

 

[Casio]

As my current company doesn't have a Cisco set-up I've a bit removed from the Cisco side of things for probably 5 years. (Though I have an old 1812 on my desk that I use every now and again). Anyway I was out at a customers site the other week and he booted up the ASDM GUI and my mind was blown. Just doing whatever he wanted from a GUI that wasn't terribly laid out. Is their anything else happening in the Cisco universe I should know about.

Currently I administer Juniper switches\firewalls. They're solid bits of kit, but I still have to configure them over console\ and\or a config file that freaks out if you have a single astray tab space in it's 8k line long config. They have a GUI option but it's really unintuitive.

 

[DQuaN]

A job i did a few months ago.

(1 = before and 2 = after)


*edit*
Oh and SonicWall FTW.

 

[MHPALA]

The level of jelly is strong. Almost done with my CCNA. Getting my MCSE 410 next month. It is going to be a while before I catch up with you guys who work IT.

With my noobish setup, I finally got around to securing my network. Gathered the physical addresses of all the devices me and my family uses, and created a DHCP filter allowing those devices. Since I want the SSID to be broadcasted, I went ahead and added the addeses to the Mac address table on my AP.

Been fiddling with my CA too. I find it nice that I can get domain computers to receive a trusted root certificate with group policy. Bomb diggidy. Trying to get some services to run with certificates. Damn X.509 V3 certs, I tell you.

 

[MHPALA]

Errr. The moment you have a subnetting brain fart. Any of you guys working in the IT field use a subnetting calculator? Is it moral to use one? I think that as long as you get the concept of hierarchical addressing is all that matters.

Purchased a new wifi nic for my laptop. It supports AC bands. It also sports the latest bluetooth protocol revision too, which means that I can chuck my old bluetooth card that is in the other mpcie slot, and replace with my old wifi mic. Having two nics will help get around networks that have imposed data caps (torrents, I tell you).

 

[DQuaN]

I occasionally use one but I never have a need to use anything other than 255.255.255.0 unless I'm dealing with WAN IPs.

 

[MHPALA]

I've spent 2 hours refreshing on subnetting. Hope I land a job where all I have to deal with is Class C addresses.

Currently renaming the main domain address of my LDAP database. At first I was going to reinstall windows server and start over since I thought the process was going to be complex because of the way active directory is heavy reliant on DNS. Turns out that all I had to do was run some simple commands, redo my DNS configuation, and redo the ftp links for my CA's revocation list.

 

[MHPALA]

Time to revive this awesome thread .

Running a 4 port layer 3 ether-channel between my two switches (I feel like god). Trying to figure out how to use my server's LDAP database for authenticating access to my switches and router.

I also SNMPv3 setup on the switches. Unfortunately netflow is not supported.