StaticNAT

Thanks JohnWaynesteeth!! I’m sure I wont see the light of the front page but 5 diggs is 5 readers I didn’t have before. Thanks for the support guys!

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I’m going to make this quick and to the point. Look for details in my upcoming post “Cacti the killer monitoring app? I have now installed Ubuntu 7.04 Server and Cacti in some form more than 18 times in the past two weeks. Most of those have been a frustrating failure! I am by no means a *nix god so most of my problems probably had to do with not knowing the ins and outs of the Ubuntu OS. My failures can probably also be directly attributed to a lack of 7.04 install guides for cacti. So with so many failed attempts and 3 Fully successful attempts both on HP hardware, Dell Hardware and a VM Ware server Virtual Machine I am going to post my 8 basic steps to making cacti work.
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Back on March 19th of this year I posted, “Three weeks in two, bah who needs sleep.”, I must have lied because between those two weeks and the subsequent crazy weeks following I pretty much fell off the map. During the aforementioned two weeks though I visited Ottawa, Canada for Sales and Engineering training for CryptoCard. For me trips like this are exciting not for the trip but for the time I get to spend with other professionals learning, hanging out and passing on our tricks to each other. During a break on the training routine our instructor Patrick posed a question something to the affect of; if we don’t like spam and attacks and we know that 20 to 30% of all spam and attacks come from North Korea and China then why don’t we block them at the edge?
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I can tell from my traffic stats that there are people out there checking things out here at StaticNAT I can also clear see how my inability to post lately has helped my numbers to tank. I never planned on this to be a huge site and my primary income so the numbers don’t kill me. But I can say there there is something exciting to watch the graph in Google Analytics rise as well as equally disappointing when the numbers drop. To avoid this emotional roller coaster I have enlisted the help of a friend who is a great systems administrator. You could soon be seeing posts by AppleEvangelist. Both AppleEvangelist and I spend a large portion of our time in a mixed OS X (server and desktop) and Windows environment (XP and 2003 Server) but it leans heavily towards the OS X side. This systems environment I refer to is clearly a small Enterprise environment. With more than 20 edge sites currently connected via serial T1s but soon to be connected via metro-Ethernet around 50 servers, hundreds of switches and an expanding security structure this is a very unique environment to be a Mac user in.
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I haven’t posted in awhile due to a crazy work schedule. But I have set myself up with some tools to help me blog better. So this post is two fold.

1. A test of the ScribeFire plugin for Firefox.
2. Test new a new type of content for www.staticnat.com.

Up to this point I have not said a lot about my home network. I will be posting more because I think its relevant to the overall purpose of my site. Any of you who are into this fun little world of networking in the mid to large scale understand the value of test enviroments. Being a consultant most of that either happens on customer site if we are building a new site or in my basement if we are making changes in productions.
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Ok based on the title and the personal info I am about to divuldge I should be in bed right now. I tried that and I just cant go to slleep so I figured I would fuel the growing masses that are checking out Staticnat. As last week ended I knew things were going to be busy for the upcomming few weeks. What caught me by surprise was that by the end of today I had more than 120 hours or work scheduled by the end of the day today. Don’t get me wrong I have worked my share of 60, 70 and even 80 hour weeks, but when I hit those higher numbers I can usually slow down the following week. So just for the sake of posterity I’m goingto break down my next two weeks here along with a few thoughts about it.
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Well we have known about this for quite awhile. I have mentioned it to clients and my internal support folks at my company. But wouldn’t you know it we are a day past the new Daylight Savings Time implementation and I’m getting calls and frantic people running back to my desk wondering if the sky is falling. It is funny I have had my home network (Cisco 1760, Cisco 3640, 2 x Cisco Cat 3500XL, PIX 501, 2 x Ubuntu Server, 3x Win XP Workstations, Asterisk Box, and about 5 other little project boxes in various states of not working) up to date and ready for the change for more than an month. I should mention that I missed my VX6700 WM5 phone thanks to Verizon just notifying me on friday that there was a problem. But anyway I’m going to post the work around commands and the link to Cisco’s DLST site for my reference for what will probably be a 6 month battle to find all the devices at clients that do not conform. Maybe some of you will get some millage out of it also. Good luck and fight the good fight
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Spanning Tree Protocol or STP as we all get to know it quickly (Thanks CCNA) is one of the most used and more important protocols in networking, especially if your on a big flat switched network.  Anyway sometimes STP can be a bit tricky.  I just found this great flash demo of STP.  Its a quick and visual way to learn or remind yourself how STP works.  And if your like me the visual aspect of this really helps out!!  I do want to credit my source..again NetPro Forums and in this case this thread.

Yeah yeah…I know it took forever.  I am posting a bit more now on Cisco’s Netpro forums and I figured it was easiest to just post a config sample for the question that was asked.  So here it is.  It is a Catalyst 3550-48-EMI config that has been truncated.  It shows the basic config for a 3550/3560/3570/any Cisco L3 switch to route VLAN traffic.  Check it out!!

For good measure here is the link for the NetPro thread that this was posted for.

Thanks for all of you who have been checking out the site.  I see my numbers starting to move around which makes me think that at least a few people are getting something out of this.  I have lots more planned but it all takes time.  I would love to hear from any of you so feel free to drop me a line at joshobrien77+staticnat@gmail.com

All of us who work on routers and switches have had to do a show interface command.  Some of the information we gleam form that command is straight forward.  Other little tidbits aren’t quite so forthcoming with their purpose or meaning.  This is the case with teh reliability x/255 txload x/255 and rxload x/255.  If your like me you have learned over time the reliability of 255/255 is good and much of anything in txload and rxload is bad.  Well thanks to NetPro Forums and Cisco Docs here is the answer.  Enjoy.
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