StaticNAT

So for the past two years I have been a Mac guy.  I have fallen in love with the clean easy to use interface of OSX coupled with the power of the base os for when I need to get down and dirty on a network.  Along with this love affair I had come the the conclusion that the days of portable computers bristling with ports and expansion slots like guns from battleships of old were gone.  Then I switched jobs and was issued my Dell Lattitude D630.  So far it is a nice laptop.  Aside from the OS options I have ( I chose Ubuntu) I was surprised to see all my hardware options including a serial port (woohooo no need to care my keyspan USB adapter!!!!), a docking port slot ont he bottom, the ability to remove my DVD drive for a few extra hours of battery, 4 USB slots, VGA out on board, an a PCMCIA slot.

Lets just say out of all of those mentioned my PCMCIA (PC CARD) slot was my least favorite.  Many computers are moving to the PC Express Cards that have much more bandwidth for options just out audio and video interfaces.  So I just left my PC Card slot alone with the blank that had come in it.  Some of the guys I work with are carrying super thin laser mice in that slot and my wife’s HP has a cool little remove that hides in that bay but all in all it seems pretty useless.  That was till I found an old CF to PCMCIA apter that I had picked up to try to use CF cards in my older Cisco routers (That did not work!).
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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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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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