Wrap Up

This has been a wild semester. I don't think I've been busier in my life, but it has all been worth it. I've spent this semester learning all about Cisco networking and design as well as working towards finishing up at school.

This semester has been very rewarding and this opportunity to learn skills that I'm going to be be able to use in the real world has been very gratifying. I did let myself get distracted several times as this seems to be a great opportunity to explore and school became secondary in my priority list, behind learning about what I had in front of me.

I've learned a lot about building networks and I found out even more about network security. That seems to be something that I want to do for a portion of my life. That is probably the greatest thing that I've gotten out of this internship is a direction to go in when I get done with school in the summer. I didn't really have that at the beginning of the semester.

Direction is always a good thing to gain.

Last CoOp Day

Today is the last work post because this is all due tomorrow.

Spent today working on getting issues with VPN connectivity solved for Steve. He had to change his internal network IP scheme so it didn't match our networks. It causes confusion between the networking devices when the ip schemes match.

I'm really going to have to grind out the rest of the weekend working on the slides for next week. I have to get it all done so I guess I'm going to have to get it done. I hate it when things come down to the line, but it's where I shine.

Slides +Server

This week I worked on the slides and on the side, getting the office file server reloaded. I haven't had time to work on getting it fixed until today.

My goals for the day:

1. Get some slides done
2. Rebuild the file server and get it working with Active Directory.

What I need to Do

Still not really clear on what needs to be done for the presentation. I heard back from Professor Agarwal and it seems like just a simple PowerPoint with the block diagram is all that is needed.

Going to do something pretty simple. It seems that I only have 15 minutes at the most for my presentation and that should disappear quite quickly. Hope that this comes out okay.

Slide Project

This week at work is dedicated to working on the Slides. I still have a lot to do and not very much more time to do it in. I've read a large part of both the ICND1 and CompTIA book. I haven't even cracked the ICND2 book and that is due the next week. I don't know if I'm going to have enough time to finish this project. It is getting tight.

I have learned a lot though. The ICND1 and CompTia cert are like the first half of the CCNA. That was one of my possible tasks for this independent study course and I think that it would be beneficial for me to do this project as an ancillary to that goal since I wont be able to actually participate in a CCNA course before the end of the semester.

Why you shouldn't even think about working while out of town.

We were out of town all week this week. In fact I just got back from the Airport and am making this post. Went to Disneyland with the family and didn't get a single thing done all week.

When you spend all day walking around in a theme park with your family and riding rides and having a good time, you don't have time for anything else and you're tired when you get back to your room at the end of the day and want to do nothing but sleep.

Not a good week fro productivity.

Everything Broke....

Well, my network that I built and have had up and running without too many issues, up and decided to break this week. I had my Exchange host, for some reason corupt itself. When I reloaded it the DNS refused to accept it as the Exchange host and computers couldn't resolve the Exchange services through Active Directory.

So, with this may concurrent failures I decided that I just had to rebuild from the ground up. Spent the bulk of this week reloading and rebuilding the environment. It's very handy to have good backups of the useful information. It allows you to do just about whatever you need to do maintenance wise without too much worry.

The one thing that does seem to be working almost all the time is the VPN. *knock on wood*

Still at a loss for the PowerPoint

I'm still at a loss for what I should put into my PowerPoint presentation. I'm going to put in an email to Professor Agarwal next time I get a chance to see what I should do with it.

Going to be out of town next week with family for Thanksgiving. Wont be able to keep track of journaling or doing any work for the project.

VPN

Today is the day that I set aside to test and resolve the VPN to allow Steve or myself to work on anything while we are out of town. Since I'm going to be out of town next week for vacation, I considered this a priority.

The solution for our network was to setup an EasyVPN solution using the current firewall as the VPN gateway. Since our office is so small I have the firewall configured to also be the DHCP server for any hosts that don't have static mappings. The reason for the VPN being the DHCP is that the DNS server is going to be isolated via VLAN at some point and I didn't want to have to rework the whole network and ACL's to pass DHCP traffic across the firewall between VLANs. Too much work for 3 people who are out of town most of the time. Also having the firewall be DHCP allows the IP pool to be part of the VPN rather then having to go to a DHCP server to issue IP's after a client has authenticated.

With my trusty SNPA book at my side I speant all of today configuring the IP pools and nat-transversal rules that I needed to support the VPN connection. Thatnkfully I had already gotten an email from the network admin that manages our executive suites that mapped out our external IP. We had him setup and static NAT mapping to our internal network address. This is consequently why I had to setup nat-transversal and nat-encapsulation so that the traffic for the VPN could navigate two NAT's while getting out to the internet.

I've setup the firewall to handle the initial authentication for the clients as they connect and future plans do include a certificate authority once we have more people in the office. This should allow us to have two factor authentication, which is better than what we have now, but with so few people I don't see a need to setup that sort of system, yet.

Anyways, the firewall is up and running and configured to allow me, Stephen, and Steve to connect to the network via VPN. The traffic from the internal network is passing as it should and I have access to all the servers that I need to have access to while any of us are on the road.

Success... I guess I can do something now.

Slide Editing

Speant this week working on creating a stencil for Visio so that I can create all the slides with neutral content. As well, spent a lot of time reading the ICND1 and CompTIA instructors guides so that I can understand what content I need to be adding to the predestination and what can be pulled out without ruining the content.

Despite the large work load that has come with this project, it is helping me learn a lot about the basics behind networks. The history and reasons why somethings were done in order to make network design and topology work are very handy to know. As well as the basics of sub-netting A, B, C and D networks and what that means. All very useful things to know as I progress.

Working on PowerPoint

Created the base and layouts for the PowerPoint presentation. Probably spent more time then I should have working on the pretty parts.

Moving on to what content I should put into the slide. Don't really know what I should be doing.

Proposal Returned

Got my proposal back this week from Professor Agarwal. He liked it, so I guess it was done right. Working on updating the block diagram and looking to building my PowerPoint presentation for the senior presentation.

Slide Project - OMG!

So, Steve told me that I was going to be working on this huge slide redraw project that he has setup for the 2nd week of December. Now I know why he was going to give me a bonus. There are well over 500 slides in just the ICND1 course and they all have to be edited for Cisco content, reworded to be compatible with both the Cisco and CompTIA certifications and then freshly lain out.

I know that this going to take a while and with my school schedule I'm going to have a hard time getting this done by the 2nd week of Dec. Also, the ICND2 slides aren't even posted to the public directory where we are storing the slides, so I don't have a way to even start working on those.

Firewall Setup.... Windows Woes

I got the firewall back to its status quo. It is allowing network access to the internet and filtering all unsolicited inbound traffic without any issues. I still have to segment the network using VLAN's at some point but that has become a tertiary priority.

Also, I made a big mistake with our file server which I added to the plan last week after my post. I used our install disks for Windows Small Business Server. It turns out that this version has to be the ROOT of the domain. So when it isn't it powers itself down without asking for permission. This makes building a remote environment a pain in the ass when your server unexpectedly will shut down without any notice. I've setup a plan to move the data to backup and reload the server with Win2k3 standard. But, as always, something has come up.

Steve got back into town this week and offered be a bonus opportunity. He has a video shoot in Florida the 2nd week of December and he needs the ICND1 and ICND2 slides redrawn for it. I also have to make them compatible with the CompTia Net+ certification. This is going to require removing all the Cisco proprietary information from the slides as well as redrawing them so that aren't using any Cisco marketing or proprietary information.

This is a pretty big project and it puts most of my other projects on hold until I'm done with it.

Proposal

Finished and turned in the project proposal to Professor Agarwal.

Project Proposal – A Beginning

I began the planning for my project proposal tonight. I think that I'm doing this right. The guidelines do say that it is a "proposal," so that is what I'm going to write.

I hope that I'm right.

VPN Trouble

The original model for the network in our office was going to be using contextual mode. It turns out that the ASA series firewalls doesn't support VPN through contexts, or at all with the firewall when you have it switched to multiple mode.

Having to rebuild the firewall completely from the ground up. Also added DNS server and Exchange server to the list of items to be built. The exchange server will be for our internal domain only, it wont have an internet facing side. The DNS server is built to handle VPN clients connect remotely to the internal domain, resolve the internal names.

Active Directory will also be setup to support Windows NetBios names. This is a lot more than was initially planned but it should work. The next step after setting all of this up is to segment the network using VLAN's and writing ACL's to restrict access to particular network segments.

Also, I want to have the servers isolated from the internet completely excluding update.windows.com so that they can patch themselves.

Firewall - Cursed by CCNA Books

Ended up spending a lot of time working on the CCNA lab books for Steve's class next week. Only managed to get the firewall up and running so that internal network access was setup and allowing traffic from our host computer to the internet.

Also setup the firewall for logging to a logging server and created access lists to log and block bogon list traffic.

Bread Board Power

Worked a little on what it was going to cost to have a power supply for testing at home. The ones online are a little expensive, I want something that I can built myself.

Founds something good here that might be worth a try:
http://www.eleinmec.com/article.asp?16

Firewall Implementation

Got my list of tasks for the week before Steve went out of town. My goals included building more lab books for the CCNA course and working on setting up the firewall with one of the new ASA's that we picked up for last weeks class.

The firewall has to be setup to allow traffic inside the office and it also needs to be setup so that we can VPN into the network.

Should be a good week, since I have to implement what I learned while I was out of town already.

SNPA Class Wrap-Up

Well that was a quick week. I don't know if I quite absorbed as much as I thought. It all seems sort of a haze as I look back on things. There is quite a bit that I learned that I can't quite put my finger on, but I bet that is because I'm not sitting in front of a piece of equipment to work on.

I think that I prefer this sort of education to traditional sorts of education. There is a lot of subject matter covered very quickly and lots of hands on to accompany the instruction that you are recieving. I'm a big fan of burning new knowledge with hands on experience so that it sticks in your mind in more than one way.

I learned a lot this week and I'm going to have to put it to use in the office. In terms of what my goals for this semester worth of internship I found this very useful and will help me attain the rest of the goals if I have the opportunity to do them.

SNPA Course - Day 5

This was the last day of the course for us. We are headed back to Denver as I type this up in the passenger seat.

Today was sort of a quick day. We very quickly went over the contextual mode for the firewalls. Which is a sort of virtual firewall within the first firewall. It allows you to create segmentation with completely different policies, in fact completely different configurations between each of the 'guest' firewalls.

Part of this configuration process was building a new firewall from the ground up. This was achieved very quickly and we spent most of our time typing the configurations in, rather then doing anything else of significance.

Most of the people in the class weren't interested in this portion of the class and many of them left by 2pm for the day, since they didn't need the rest of the information that was being presented. So that being the way of things we decided to pack up and get a roll on earlier rather than later.

I'll have a class wrap up when I get back to Denver.

SNPA Course - Day 4

Today we started with a serious lecture on EasyVPNs. EasyVPNs being a misnomer since it really isn't that easy and is in-fact quite complicated to setup and get working. I assume that this is probably what is used to have the interactive VPNs that Steve wants me to setup in the office.

I really didn't know what was going on in the first part of the day. Stephen blew through a lot of stuff on ACLs, Tunnel Groups, subneting and all this stuff very quickly. Again a little bit of my lack of previous experience is setting in but I'm getting a better feel for it. I don't feel nearly as lost as I did on the first day of class.

The lecturing went all the way to lunch and after lunch we are supposed to spend the rest of the day configuring our firewalls to do the EasyVPN solution so that another group can connect to our internal network and we can connect to another groups internal network.

The first part after lunch went really quick. We had all the ACLs and nat transversal's setup that we needed and then we led into getting them to work with the ISAKMP policies and we ran into some minor road bumps. It's well planned that we use the rest of the day to get this part configured and setup, the time is definitely needed in order to get things setup and working properly.

We got to the end of the day and our firewall was able to receive connections from the outside to get in and we were able to connect to another groups firewall. This was a very informative day. I learned a lot getting this setup and my familiarity with the command structure got fleshed out. We had to rebuild twice to get all of the configurations in the right order and the right place. Helps to do some things over again to get them down.

Tomorrow we are going to spend time on the contextual mode for the firewalls. Apparently we have to rebuild the firewall from the ground up when we put it into a virtual mode. I guess we are going to be doing a lot of things over then.

SNPA Course - Day 3

Today started with more on ACLs as well as more on object groups and how to configure them.

The second part of the day was spent on lecture on basic IPSEC peer-to-peer VPNs. The second half was spent configuring the options for those VPNs. The lab work associated was with the other people in the room to configure our firewall to allow them VPN access and conversly we would have VPN access to their network.

The day wraped up a few minutes early to lead into the next day which will be mostl EasyVPNs.

Today was a lot of work. There was a fair bit of lecture, but we did things that I basically knew nothing about and working with the people in the room who already had a few certs under their belts was getting a little frustrating. They had all the language I seemed to be missing today since you apparently do this sort of tunnel between routers and switches frequently.

Anyhow, another day and I feel like I'm getting familiar with the command structure of the Cisco IOS and could rebuild what I've done already if I needed too, without too much help and a good command reference.

Out of Town

I'm out of town this week for a business trip. Can't really work on anything related to school.

SNPA Course - Day 2

Today was a great day. We started off with a really short blast about access control lists(ACLs), policy generation, and object groups; then we jumped right into the configuration of the firewalls.

Last night I worked on reading a little bit about the basic command structure by flipping through the book that Steve gave me for the course. I felt much more comfortable today about the basic command structure of the firewalls and spent much less time stumbling as we configured the basic parameters.

The structure of the lab was basically permitting traffic from the inside our network to the DMZ web hosts, so that our imaginary web developers can update their web servers. As well we configured ACLs to allow traffic from outside to the web servers for HTTP and FTP, restricted FTP so that only get traffic would be allowed through the firewall, built bogon object groups and configured our NAT so that there were static mappings for our DMZ web farm.

All in all this was a very good day. We spent most of the day working on this one lab to get all the ACLs setup between the different parts of the network and the outside of our network. All in all it was a very instructional day and we got a lot of hands on.

For the day I felt that I got a lot of good experience working with the IOS. I spent a lot of time just banging around in the configuration trying to get things to work, trying different ways to get what I wanted to happen, happen. I feel much more comfortable with interacting with the IOS and talking to other people about what is going on.

SNPA Course - Day 1

First thing this morning we went over the hardware configuration options and difference between the various models of the ASA framework. There was also a comparison to the previous PIX versions of the firewall.

After all of that summary we jumped in head first into basic configurations for the firewall. We worked on setting up host name, network addressing, and naming the interfaces to isolate the different portions of the network.

Learned a lot today about the basic functionality of a Cisco firewall. As well as the configuration options for it. There are a lot of little line items that require a configuration in order for the device to work.

This being my first configuration exposure to a piece of Cisco equipment I spent a lot of my time having to fight the command line in order to get anything done. I was getting more comfortable as the day went on, but I still seem to be having trouble with the basics. I'm going to have to see how things go tomorrow.

ASA Firewall Class

This week we are going to be going to Omaha, NB for an Cisco SNPA ASA course.

We purchased 3 new ASA 5510 firewalls for the purposes of the class. Before we left I reconfigured the 3 firewalls to have the latest two versions of the Cisco IOS on them and the web management environment for the two different versions.

For this purpose I had to use TFTP to upload the software to the firewalls and configure the firewalls to run the appropriate version of the IOS before we started the class.

Looking Ahead

Browsed e-bay today to find out how much it would cost me to grab a TDR or an occilliscope online.

Things were a little bit outside of my current price range.

More Research

Found some great stuff online tonight. There were two great examples of cheap TDR's that I found.

Here:

http://www.elecdesign.com/Articles/ArticleID/6260/6260.html
http://electronicdesign.com/Articles/Index.cfm?AD=1&ArticleID=4292

These are booth good ideas and they are really cheap to build. Need to do some more looking to see if there is a better way.

Research

Continued on the path of research. Here is a basic listing of the things that I found on Wikipedia so I can reference back to them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-domain_reflectometer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_wave_ratio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-domain_reflectometry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_line

Progress

This week I did several things in the area of the applicable research:

• I moved all of my work to a consolidated notebook on my server at home.
  
• I installed and tested Multisim and Visio so that I can create and experiment with some basic designs
  
• Built my To-do list for the next few weeks
  

Next week I plan on beginning the active research and trying to build examples of some of the circuits that I've found online to see if this will work at all.

Purpose

The purpose of this blog is to be a journal for my independent study course. To be turned in at the end of the fall semester of 2007.

The journal is meant to be a log of what I've done as part of my internship and how it related to the furthering of my education.

Some More Detail

It looks like there are a few things that are going to be required for this project. I'm starting to see a combination of components that should take care of what needs to be done.

The list of what is needed:

Impedance selector for various cable terminations
Pulse generator
Frequency Counter
Microprocessor
USB interface to the computer
Software

Pulse Generator

I think that a Simple 555 timer can be used for this. It will have to be triggered in order to get the right kind of pulses that are needed.

The Purpose

The purpose of this blog is to document my progress as I design and then build my senior project during this school year.

I am a senior at Metro State College of Denver and it is a course requirement to keep some sort of journal to detail what we do. This was the ideal system.

Enjoy, if anyone else actually reads this.

~eetCollegeStudent