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.