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Messages - deanwebb

#1
Yes, that information is in the CCNA official guide, volume 2.

https://www.amazon.com/CCNA-200-301-Official-Guide-Library/dp/0138221391 <-- not affiliated with me or the site in any way, but it's a solid resource I recommend. This will have examples that you're looking for.

For a real-life example, I can think of many large enterprises where there are major datacenters that connect to large national/regional offices that then support a range of sub-offices. There has to be a routing system in place that allows for geolocation within the enterprise, especially where different nations have different rules on data storage and access.

With that geographic consideration, there's also the overlay of redundancy, where enterprises want to utilize both primary and secondary links in normal times, but have the ability to put all traffic on one link or another in an emergency situation, with QoS policy shaping the traffic to fit the bandwidth available.

So consider an enterprise with datacenters A and B in North America, and datacenters C and D in Europe. It has a smaller datacenter E in Latin America and a smaller datacenter F in Asia.

Due to regulations, it also has a small datacenter G in Germany for handling German data and datacenter H in China for Chinese business operations.

For each datacenter, there is one main regional office and 20 regional sub-offices, so there are 2 main offices in North America and 40 sub-offices. Same in Europe, with 1/20 in Latin America and Asia. Germany has the one main office and 5 more sub-offices and China has one main office and 25 sub-offices.

Each sub-office has one internet link and each main office has two. Each datacenter has four separate internet connections.

Now, if a person takes an order in Germany for delivery in China and sends a message to the Chinese office for their awareness, the message goes from the German sub-office to the German main office to a main office in Europe to a Euro data center to the Asian data center to the Chinese data center to the Chinese main office to the Chinese sub-office.

Given the redundant connections, how would you rate each such that there is one main path to choose based on distance and cost, but still have alternate paths in the event of an outage? But to be sure that each alternate path has its own distance and cost so that slower links or more expensive links are not used in favor of the bulk traffic routes?

And what happens if a datacenter goes down? How does that affect routing decisions? When the datacenter comes back up, what cost/distance factors restore paths that were previously in place? How do we make sure that each main office (and its sub-offices) prefers only one data center over the other, for purposes of load balancing?

I'm here to work through these with you, so if you do some initial work, I'll be happy to coach along. :)
#2
Indeed! And also in finding IOS images out there on the Interwebs, good luck!
#3
Security / Re: TACLANE SNMP Question
November 13, 2024, 11:26:09 AM
Quote from: Otanx on November 12, 2024, 07:26:23 PMYes you can. On the KG configure your SNMP server as a GEM server. It only does SNMPv3. I don't remember for sure but I think it was using AES128/SHA for protocols. Also the MIBS can be found on one of the CDs either the KG firmware one or the GEM install one.

-Otanx


I feel a swell of pride as I understand every. single. term. used in this response. :smug:
#4
I'd also add that knowing about the cloud and how off-prem networking works is more important today, for certain. At least being familiar with SASE, SD-WAN, and things like that is helpful.
#5
Forum Lobby / Re: Microsoft Power BI
October 17, 2024, 09:08:50 AM
I have never heard of that, what is it?
#6
I see 3 teams mentioned, and sticks are famous for only having 2 ends. They may get zero stick and find themselves spun off to some vulture capital group.
#7
And I just read today that Cisco laid off a huge part of its workforce so it can focus more on AI and Cybersecurity.

WebEx, being neither of those things, is likely to continue to see things not get fixed.
#8
Labbing is definitely a way to go, things have changed, and the labs help you to catch up quick.
#9
And, as a coda, I just had to put in a ban on the MSFT OpenAI IP range because of odd inputs we were getting from it. Zero trust in action!  :smug:
#10
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD0758206.pdf

Save it locally and refer to it every now and then. I first read this about 10-11 years ago. It is incredible how the author describes the world of IT that we have today. While technologies for connecting, storing, and processing information have improved over time, security has not. It has *always* been "somebody else's problem." Software guys aren't the only ones - there's some pretty bad security on every piece of hardware we use. Not "almost every". EVERY piece of hardware.

While I don't want to disconnect the PCs, power them off, melt them down, and then bury them under a mountain and then push the mountain to the base of the Marianas Trench, I *do* think that having everything interconnected is, on the whole, a bad idea. When I think about the technology I'd miss if I was living back in 1979, smart anything and Bluetooth are not on my list. All I need my fridge to do is to refrigerate things and have a frost-free freezer. My dishwasher should wash dishes. My lightbulbs should make light. I'm good with all that plain Jane stuff. By interconnecting all that stuff needlessly, we've increased our vulnerability to being trapped by our own technology when it fails us at scale.

The CrowdStrike-Windows mess is just the largest mess *thus far*. Bigger ones await us because no matter what happens here, security will always be someone else's problem.
#11
Forum Lobby / Re: CrowdStrike Outage 19 July 2024
July 20, 2024, 08:00:37 AM
All investment advice presented here is for entertainment purposes only. Do not consider seriously any investment advice from a source that has a smilie like this --> :smug:

I'm all for rapid updates and everything, but maybe just maybe somebody slows the roll by 30 mins and checks to see if the PC we have running in the dev lab survives a reboot after the new code is pushed. And this really is a lesson for *every* firm doing super-agile CI/CD pipeline.

Back in the 90s, we called super-agile CI/CD pipeline "updating production directly". It was a great way to get fired if one did stuff like that.
#12
Forum Lobby / Re: Quiet Vacationing
July 20, 2024, 07:51:36 AM
When billable, I feel better when I bill in 30-min chunks, just sayin'.
#13
Forum Lobby / CrowdStrike Outage 19 July 2024
July 19, 2024, 07:58:48 AM
A gut-punch of a story. CrowdStrike pushes an update to its agent globally, wrecks tons of systems because it's broken.

Yes, I want security updates fast and furious to keep ahead of the baddies.

BUT

I also want my mission-critical servers in banks, airlines, and health care to not crash because of a security update.

 :-\
#14
Forum Lobby / Quiet Vacationing
July 17, 2024, 02:27:37 PM
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/quiet-vacation-work-remote-jobs-b2580849.html

Like "quiet quitting", but you still like your job. You just don't disclose where you are when remote...  ::)
#15
Indeed. We need documentation about what works, but if updating docs isn't a sprint activity for the devs, then it's good-bye docs, casualties of the sprint cycle.