StaticNAT

Not that everyone knows where I work but I am moving from a mixed VAR and BISCI shop tommarow to my new profesional home at Netech I expect to be posting more in the near future considering I will be living out of a hotel for a few months. That and exposure to my new life as a dedicated Cisco Engineer should give me lots of fodder for my humble little site. So add me to RSS and look for new content soon.

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I would like to welcome a cool new resource to out party. openpacket is a cool site that takes traffic capture files of a set type of traffic ranging from Normal, Suspicious to Malicious. Being able to reference these captures could be very beneficial when it comes to diagnosing network issues. So surf on over and register with these guys. Just make sure you don’t get any packet headers on you when you dive in.

Here is how you find it on Cisco Chassis running IOS

Show idprom backplane

Enjoy

This is outside of my normal topics but still kinda relevent. Last june we went on vacation with my inlaws. My father is law is a cool guy who worked in the accounting department of Ohio University after his stint in the Army and a brief trip to the FBI as a runner for Agents and a run in with J Edgar Hoover. He retired shortly after my wife and her sisters graduated from OU. Since then he has worked for Valic and is getting ready to start with another retirment/insurance group. All that said he is a pretty smart guy when it comes to money and finances. But back to vacation…on our way home we were talking about investing and I mentioned that I was trying to save up $10,000 to invest. Let me say this is not an easy thing and I am not there yet. If I had been able to pull that money together then this story would be alot more interesting. Anway when he asked me what I wanted to invest in I said I thought playing the stock market would be the best and most interesting return at least in the begining until I figured out what all the investment options are. He followed that question by asking how much I thought I could get in a return on my 10k, to which I informed him I thought I could pull 70% in a year. Lets just say this gave him a good laugh.

So that very day I logged into the hotels wireless and chose 10k in stock picks. They were;
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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.

Just wanted to get a new post up for those of you who check up on my little slice of the web. I am still alive but just buried in work and personal endeavors. One of those happens to be that my wife Patti is Pregnant with our second child. Currently she is about 8 weeks and our two year old Aidan keeps telling us he wants a baby sister. Today though I am finishing up a pseudo vacation and before I go back to my normal 60+ hour weeks I wanted to check up on my site metrics to see if my absence had cause staticnat.com to become another lost soul on the information super highway. I am thrilled to report that it has not. Between my few loyal readers and some new visitors not only have I seen pretty stable numbers but also some pretty unique visitors. The most unique has to be The DOD Network Information Center. As seen here in a capture of my analytics account you can see that two days in a row some folks at the DOD Network Information Center check out my site. They even hung around for a bit and read 3 of my pages. If it happened to be you that visited me from the DOD I would love to hear from you. Feel free to email me at; . That goes for all of my readers. While I don’t have tons of time to write at the moment I am very interested in what my readers are looking for when they visit me and what you would like me to add. I have hundreds of unique Cisco configs that I can sanitize and post as well as lots of other networking information, so if there is something you need drop me a line.

Again thanks for the continuing traffic and I hope to be supplying some new content and configs soon.

The tech sector is an interesting place to work and play.  This is even more true in the high dollar high stakes world of Enterprise networking.  So often customers get locked into a vendor and just keep drinking that vendors coolaid after the first sip.  In cases where that vendor is Cisco it usually isn’t a bad thing (”No one gets fired for buying Cisco!”) but it could be a very costly thing for your organization to focus on a vendor instead of a vendors core competencies and it standings in a particular market.  In doing research on competitive products to the Cisco MARS platform I stumbled across this site of cool links for competitive reviews of Cisco products versus other vendors products.  As with all “third party” testing you need to take these results with a grain of salt (most of these were commissioned by the competitor) but I’m sure there is some good info to be found.  Enjoy this link.

I was on client site today troubleshooting some bandwidth problems. The first issue ended up being a power outage the night before had kept the edge router from coming up clean. A reload and a quick check of the config and life was good again. Currently this particular edge site for the client only has 1Mbit of their T1 and the rest is dedicated to their phone system. After being down a good portion of the morning the data link really took a hit when we got things working as email came flying in and everyone rushed our to see how their Ebay bids were going. So getting back from lunch we noticed that the link was still fully committed. The traffic pattern in PRTG indicated that it was some sort of update stream (we have fought this battle before) but with Apple Update servers blocked we were pretty sure it was not the Mac (95% of all systems on this network). However based on the network it was on and the location within that network we were left without other options.
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I was mowing my yard yesterday and trying to catch up on my podcasts. One of my favorites is Diggnation, which is hosted by Kevin Rose the founder of Digg and his Friend Alex Albrecht. This is a great podcast if you want to keep up with current culture as welll as current technology from about a 10,000 ft view. Anyway at the end of the show they mentioned Tubes. Tube is a product that acts like an IM client but also allows you to create custom P2P networks for your IM Friends. What is even cooler is that fact that you have lots of granular access control over the files once they end up in your online-share. Products like Hamachi were able to do this by creating a PC to PC VPN then allowing file sharing between the PC’s but that was cludgy. This is the whole package in one client. So far its a Win32 only app but they are working on a OS X version and I would guess a linux version also. With 2 Gig of free storage this could be a killer app for small companies and distributed work forces.  Anyway not going to go on an on about it but check out Tubes this could be the next big thing.