Adam's blog

Ever wonder how Cisco recommends you build an enterprise network? If you've studied for nearly any of their exams over the past few years, you've likely read about SONA, IIN, and the Enterprise Composite Network Model. All good things, but you might still be asking how do you actually build that stuff?

Well, someone at Cisco can read your thoughts and decided to give you a crash course on building an enterprise network in the form of the Small Enterprise Design Profile Reference Guide (a mouth full). This reference guide, available in a 20Mb PDF, has diagrams, pictures, configuration script examples, nearly everything except for the equipment and power cables to get a network built. 

Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac launched in September and I finally got around to upgrading to the new version on my Macbook Pro. They claim there are some pretty lofty improvements in Windows 7 performance and startup times.. Oh, and you can play 3D games in your VM too. After playing with it a little bit, surfing the net in the W7 VM does seem a little snappier, but it still takes a couple minutes to boot up the VM from scratch. Not sure if I need to enable something to make that move faster. I normally just put the VM to sleep anyway, which is pretty fast to wake up.

What caught my eye this morning is a new feature which lets you access applications running in your Windows VM from an iPhone or iPad.

Infoblox recently hosted a free webinar where their VP of Architecture Cricket Liu discusses vulnerabilities in the current implementation of DNS and provides a very high level view of DNSSEC. It's a little over an hour long, but it is easily squeezed into a lunch hour since it is indexed and you can fast forward over the introduction. Here's a link to the Free webinar:

Cache Poisoning and DNSSEC: A Look into the Threats to DNS and How DNSSEC Addresses Them

I've been on a search for the ultimate solution to data storage for quite some time and have yet to plunk down the cash for a solution. There are a few requirements that the solution needs to meet, which I've listed below. If you have a solution you've worked with and know works well, please chime in and share your experiences.

Basic Requirements

There are hundreds of options out there for storing data, but everyone has different requirements. If you are working in a video production shop, you likely need your storage to be fast, plentiful, and secure. If you are storing some documents for archival purposes, you might just need something that's cheap and big. Most people with home networks that want to store their music, home videos, pictures, etc are probably looking for something in the middle of the spectrum. So, to give us some boundaries, here are a few basic requirements that any system should include:

Several years ago, there was a really cool project called ZipTie. The focus of the project was to develop a free network utility that could backup network device configurations and store multiple revisions using as much storage as was available, kind of like CiscoWorks, but better in that it will actually work. I downloaded multiple beta versions and got it working in my environment through many trials and tribulations.. 

Most of us out there have a copy of Wireshark on our PCs and laptops for troubleshooting problems as well as for learning and figuring out how protocols work. Well, what if you are troubleshooting a problem and you don't happen to have Wireshark installed? 

No problems if you are working on the Nexus 7000, wireshark is built in. Now, don't get too excited, it isn't like there is a built-in GUI (yet?). Cisco simply based their Cisco NX-OS Ethanalyzer on the command-line version of wireshark, also known as T-shark. The syntax is very similar to tcpdump in linux, here is an example:

If you have ever used a Unix based system to do software development or some line of work that required you to edit a lot of text files, you are undoubtedly familiar with the diff command. Diff is a brilliant little program that compares two text files line by line and tells you what's different. 

As Windows and other gui based operating systems gained popularity among the development community, the need for a gui based diff program was answered with a variety of free and paid-for options. By far my favorite of the gui-based diff applications, and the topic of this post, is WinMerge.