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*