StaticNAT

I know as a Network professional I should never forget a WPA key. Docs Docs Docs. But tonight I was setting up someone else ‘s computer and forgot our general WPA PSK and did not want to dig for it in the password vault. So I cheated.

In OSX go to Spotlight and type Keychain Access
Then on the right hand side choose the System Option under Keychains
Then select the wireless network you lost your key to, right click and choose “copy password to clipboard”

At this point you will need to jump through the local password hoops but then you can past it into textedit and get back to doing whatever you were doing.

Here is to not loosing your keys and if you do hopefully a way out of the mess.

So tonight as I was getting into bed I did my normal scan twitter to see who I have pissed off or what might be going on that should rob me of sleep.  Well tonight @david_Strebel asked the following questions;

“Who thinks FCoE will win over iSCSI?”  and I responded “Not I” and then David asked the next logical question which was why not and here is what I had to say in the incredible detail that Twitter allows;  ”l2 boundaries, specialized hardware other than nics, hate relationship from most network people.”

The problem with this answer is pretty clear though.  It does not really answer the question just gives a few power point bullets to appease the crowd.  I don’t feel like this is enough though.  So I am going to attempt to lay out my overall view on this issue of who will win iSCSI or FCoE and why.  For those of you who don’t want to read the whole article which might get a a tad windy I don’t think either will win.  But I don’t think FCoE will emerge as the leader until something better come along.  For those masochists who like this kind of crap read on.

Read the rest of this entry »

Find yourself trying to decipher your Cisco CDR exports? Your not alone. I’ve got to give credit to some folks who helped me out – especially since I’m using Excel for MAC 2011.

Found this on Blindhog.net – smart guys!

Are you using Excel for MAC 2011 and find your year is off by 3?
You actually need to change the hack digits at the end of your formula from 25569 to 24107.
Check out this link.

Also, I was struggling with getting my human date and time to match that on www.epochconverter.com using the formulas above. It was off by 3 or 4 minutes. I found that if I removed the outermost set of parenthesis, then my formula actually matched the exact minute, as verified in the picture below.

Hope this helps some of you out rather quickly. Enjoy.
BTW, using the eastern time formula above, I was still off a little, so I simply added another hour (4*3600).

I will be the first to admit that I make mistakes.  I make lots of mistakes.  But I learned a long time ago that it is not the mistakes that define us but
what we do when we make them.  To that point it is both fascinating and infuriating when I enter someone’s network land and find that they have gone out of their way to do nothing to solve their own problem or in many cases to even
build a proper functioning network.  So I am going to set out to show the Methods I use to deal with these people and their problems and the Madness that they have brought to the table to cause the issue.

This is going to be a series.  Really my first series of posts, and they will all fall under the heading of Method and Madness with some sort of witty little
tagline.  I will be pulling on a careers worth of situations that were totally preventable and how we resolved the problem or moved past it.

The format for each of this will be as follows:

Situation:  This will be the “lab” Scenario piece of the post in which I outline
the base problem as well as the end goals of the situation.  This section will
include a base diagram for use as reference.

The Method:  This will be the troubleshooting and resolution phase of the post and
will breakdown the ultimate solution or bypass to the problem.

The Madness: This section will be my analysis of how things got to this point in the first
place.  Keep in mind I have no in interest in posting garbage about oh look the senior
network engineer put a wrong static route in at 4am and a junior guy had to find it.
No I am more interested in exposing the issues where a Network Engineer or worse a team could not solve a problem that should be second nature for them to solve.  In doing so I hope others will learn from and not find themselves in these situation.

So with all that said look for them.  I hope to have the first one out by the end of
the week with about 50 Million other projects so bear with me.  I think these will be a great recap for me and both education and humorous for you.  I really encourage your feedback on these posts because I am not always right and there are lots of different paths so resolution of a problem.

Quick and dirty is how I like it when I have 4000 menial tasks to get done.  So another oldy but goody that I had to dig up today was how to delete a full directory structure and its contents from a Cisco files system.  So here it is enjoy.

From normal enable mode:

delete /recursive /force flash:(enter the root file name)

So delete is the easy one.

/recursive sets the flag to recursively cycle through the whole directory structure you specified.  So you should probably never type

delete /recursive /force flash:  BAD DON’T DO IT!

And finally /force eliminates all the are you sure you don’t want to shoot yourself in the forehead messages.

Again quick and dirty saves time but if your dumb about using it can get you in trouble.