More Parts

Decided to order some more things from Parallax as I get closer to building some actual circuitry. I ended up buying a Basic Stamp PIC microcontroller testing board. It has some very awesome functionality for such a simple board and interface. I think that it will be good.

As well I bought an ADC chip from them that I hope to use to measure the incomming analog signals as they come back on the cable. This will let me do the calculations for the distance to the break.

Things are going well.

Parts Order

Got down to ordering parts today, for the project.

Ordered stuff from DigiKey, and SparkFun electronics up in boulder. As well I'm working with a distributor called Parallax that makes a bunch of micro controller stuff.

I ordered an RS232 to USB-Bmini PCB breakout that uses the FTDI chip.

Going to be exciting to get some fun stuff.

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.