StaticNAT

Led Zeppelin said it best I guess.  This past week Ohio along with lots of other states got hit with the remains of hurricane Dean.  So far it has been the most damaging storm for my clients in my short consulting career.  The first call came on Tuesday morning August 21st.  That call was from one of our account managers who indicated a client had sustained catastrophic damage to their 6509 when water rushed into their core network closet.  My first two thoughts were how quickly can we get replacement hardware and how long should it take for me to get them back up and going?
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I am sure that at this point most of you have had some sort of experience with VOIP. My personal experiences are very mixed. On the Enterprise side I have worked on a multi-million dollar install of Cisco VOIP on a new all Cisco Network and it was less than spectacular. As a consultant I have worked with Cisco’s Call Manager Express in it’s home waters of the small/mid sized business and again I felt that it was lacking. However on the personal side I have been an off and on user of Skype for quite awhile as well as other come and go lightweight VOIP apps over the past seven or eight years.
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Ok so I have been beating my head on ASA to LDAP auth (temporary fix till my client spins up RADIUS) but thanks to the great LDAP group at Cisco TAC I”m up and working. The piont of this post is to take what we tend to know about LDAP client configs and adjust it for what Cisco has setup in PIX IOS 8.
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Ok I lied.  I am going to put out another update about the Cisco .com outage that I reported here a few days ago.  I talked to one of my contacts within Cisco Engineering and was told “I can’t disclose alot but it was a power outage.”  My reply to him was that I was shocked that Cisco doesn’t use Akamai or another service or even multiple national and international data centers to serve their content out of.  His only response was that there were systems in place and that the failure was not an infrastructure (data that is) failure but a power failure.
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Well well well…  Thanks to JohnWaynesTeeth I have once more found my little slice of the web on digg this time for The King has left the building…err….the web.  So jump on over to the story and digg it up folks.  Thanks for your time and interest in staticnat.  I hope to be adding some cool new content shortly so stay tuned.

Thats right kiddies. Cisco.com is off line. I have a pending case with TAC in which I was supposed to download files with special access. Stay tuned for that story later. However as I tried to get the files all my attempts to contact anything off of the Cisco main page game up dead. I confirmed this from an iPhone on AT&T m XV6700 on Verizon as well as a network off of the State of Ohio Backbone. With my homework done I contacted an engineer at Cisco who confirmed…” Yep we are down…not one of our best days. We should be back online sometime later tonight. My engineer is in the eastern time zone with me and it was 3pm when he told me this so sounds like the are on the mat for a few more hours. Not sure what the problem is or how wide spread, but I’ll wager that this costs someone their job and Cisco allot of money.
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One of the Cisco Sales reps I work for called me a few months back and said hey why don’t we use a Cisco Wireless setup and client X to save them a bunch of money? My reply was…crap why didn’t I think of that followed by sure let me get to working on it. In the end we provided a solution that used Cisco 1240 A/G radios, two 5Ghz Point to Point panel antennas. We also got to use the 2.4 Radios for WiFi access on the insides of the buildings that the 5Ghz bridge was serving. Currently I am completing the config but once I have it all done I am going to post the juicy bits (sanitized to protect the client of course) as well as a few pics if the client will permit me to do so.

My company has done quite a few of these in the past. However this was my first go at a Wireless bridge setup. As usual with new projects I was a bit nervous but in the end I have been amazed at how smooth the whole thing went. Wireless connectivity has really jumped a level in my mind now. It was interesting though when I called one of our designers and then one of our engineers and asked “so now that my link is up how do I test the link quality and speed?” The answer was I’m really not sure they just work. For the moment I accepted the answer but in the end I have been troubleshooting a few things and I added my question to the list of things I wanted to solve by the time I handed it off to the client.
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