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When the time comes, I plan to get certified on Windows Sever. I'm sure Powershell will be part of that. I've read enough about powershell to know it's a powerful tool. I think slim sent me an article on how to migrate a local profile to a domain profile using powershell.
Man, the other day was a rough day. I had grown frustrated learning all the CCNA material and when I saw that I had only completed about 15% of the course, it was disheartening. But after a good night's sleep I woke up feeling refreshed and ready to move forward.
When I signed up for the CCNA course, I had no way of knowing all the minutia I'd had to slog thru before I'd get to something that I considered actual networking. Most folks don't think about things like recovering a lost password for a router or saving the running and startup configuration. Hell, I'd never even heard of a running or start up configuration. Nonetheless, it's very important.
I've made a couple of major breakthroughs (at least in my mind) over the last couple of days. One of those breakthroughs involves Static Routing.
Static Routing isn't used a lot in the real world unless it involves a very small network with only a couple of routers. But if you're learning Routing & Switching, it's kinds important to understand the principle's behind static routing. I can honestly say that understanding static routing is a real bitch and I can also say that I've finally mastered it. Well, I mastered it more than enough to answer any questions on a test.
Anyway, I've made it thru learning all the basic stuff and fundamentals. That was some very complex material to learn. it's no joke. However, you can't move foward to the more complicated stuff unless you know the fundamentals.
Back to the grindstone.
I continue to learn some cool things along the way. When you're building a routing table statically, you must configure a destination route AND a return route or ping will fail. Remember that pings send out a echo request and should receive a echo reply.
Anyway, if I construct a destination route and forget to construct a return route, ping will fail. The ping will make it there, but you'll never know that unless..... (here's the cool thing I learned)
Unless I run a "debug ip icmp". This will allow me to see the incoming ping without worry of the the ehco reply. I hope that made sense. It's kinda hard to explain.
Every once in a while I feel good about myself when I'm working on my CCNA. But just about the time I'm feeling good, they throw some bullshit in the game. lol
This time it's Route Summarization.
This shit will blow your mind.
Check it out:
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The scary thing is, I actually understood all of that.
When I first saw Route Summarization, it looked an awfully lot like Subnetting. It's not subnetting but it's very similar. In fact, the name for it is SUPERNETTING. Because I had taken the time to master subnetting, I found supernetting to be a piece of cake.
I see where this is headed. It gonna be about how to pick the best route in the routing table and that can get complicated.
This is really getting interesting now. Lets see how I can explain it....
If you're reading this, the data you see has gone thru several routers to reach your PC. There were multiple router paths the data could have taken but it chose a certain combination of routers to reach your PC. How were these routers chosen?
The answer to that question is one that I can't answer fully because I haven't learned Dynamic Routing yet. But I can tell you this: there are several Dynamic Routing Protocols. Each one of those protocols will look at things like "Shortest Path First" or "Administrative Distance", ect.
At the moment I'm still building static routing tables but this time I'm using "Route Summarization" and I'm learning to teach the router to take the path that I want it to take. Still work to do to fully understand it. I'm getting close.
I started studying Route Summarization yesterday. If feels like I've been on it for 5 years. Oh, I got the "formula" down right away thanks to my knowledge of subnetting but that's only a very small piece of the puzzle when it comes to actually implementing and understanding Route Summarization.
I've probably logged 12-hours of study time strictly on Route Summarization. Trust me, that's a long time.
Everything about CCNA is broken down into topics. I equate each topic as a battle in a war. You go in ready to fight. You take some incoming fire. You get tired and weary but somehow press forward until you win that individual battle but over the next hill a new battle awaits. I think I've won the battle on Route Summarization. I think I'll take the next 24 hours off and get ready for the next battle.
Oh, by they way, Route Summarization is really cool. It cuts down greatly on the number of routes that I have to manually enter into a router and it uses less memory in the router and the network runs faster as a result of not having so many routes in the routing table.
I wonder how many folks have actually studied routers?
I'm not talking about in a home setting or small office environment. I'm talking about on an enterprise level. This takes some special knowledge.
Here's the best way that I can describe routers on an enterprise level: The internet was invented by the military as a means of communication in the event of a nuclear war. If communication lines were bombed in one area, data would automatically be rerouted and would reach the intended destination. In other words, if a single line went down, there were alternative paths for the data to travel down.
Think of an enterprise setting along the same lines. These multi-billion dollar companies can't lose connectivity. It's important that their network stay up AT ALL TIMES. One way of making sure that happens is to design a network with multiple routers, with multiple paths in case 1 router goes down. The problem is that you can't just hook up a bunch of routers and expect them to automictically know how to route traffic. This requires a certain level of expertise to design and configure. And it's more complicated than I ever dreamed.
PS - Redundancy is also true for switches but I'm only talking about routers right now.
Sell them a Konica Minolta! In a pinch (scan to email can be a bitch to get to work) you can set them up for scan to user box in about 3 minutes! Love the Bizhub! Scan to Desktop is basicaly obsolete. Its a real pain to set up and has serious security risks these days. Worse risks than email. Im in the same boat as you. I learn a little here an a little there. Took me ten years to finally get scan to email to work!Originally Posted by slimslob
The CCNA course that I'm taking can be found at: Online Courses - Learn Anything, On Your Schedule | Udemy
I highly recommend Udemy. I also highly recommend everyone to take this course. Doesn't matter how old or young you are. I strongly believe that a good copier tech would make a good networker. That's especially true if you pay close attention to every detail. In today's world, knowledge is money, so why not further your education?
With that being said, there are a couple of course on Udemy for CCNA. One is taught by David Bombal. He teaches hands-on learning where you actually program the switches and routers. That's the one I started with first. I was able to jump out pretty quick to some more advanced stuff, however, it didn't take long for me to realize that there were some major gaps in my learning.
That's when I decided to sign up for a 2nd CCNA course that dealt more in theory. One of the smartest decisions I made in a while. This has definitely filled in the gaps...and more!!!
This 2nd CCNA course is taught by Neil Anderson. He's been fantastic.
It should be noted that even though Udemy does a great job that I've still had to seek out more information in books and on the web. You could probably pass the test without doing this, but there's some great stuff on YouTube that has really helped me along the way.
Next week, I'll finally start on Dynamic Routing. I've been chomping a the bit to get to that.
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