A New Home

I’ve staked a claim to a new domain name for my blog and a new hosting service to host it.  You can now find my latest posts at www.redwarriornet.com, where I will be adding more content.

Thank you for visiting!

Where Have I been?

I’ve been in a data center…climbing racks, crawling under the floor and generally getting good and messy.  The company I work for is rolling out a brand new, 80-rack data center.  It’s  a pretty exciting…and exhausting project to be a part of.  So far I’ve learned a ton of tricks to dressing cables, labeled more cables than I care to remember, and gotten to install and configure ten gigabit interfaces.

I will be uploading my CCNA-Wireless study guide this week and I will be starting my BCMSN studies this weekend.  I’m excited to dig into some rapid-spanning tree after installing all these switches!  

Knowing Thyself = Knowing How to Succeed

I am a creative person, which often surprises people that assume that a person working in networking would be analytical by nature.  I believe, however, that creativity is essential for being able to think beyond current constraints and for being able to visualize that which really isn’t visual.  Troubleshooting a juicy network issue is much like unraveling a knot, which requires an ability to see beyond just a tangle of threads.  The best network engineers I know are ones that never take anything for granted and instead are able to see beyond what is to what could be.  That is creativity, baby.

To that end, I find a lot of advice geared toward endeavors more traditionally considered creative is relevant and helpful in my world as well.  I have several websites I wander through each day as part of my habits, generally when I’m procrastinating starting something new or stuck on something I’ve begun.  A lot of the advice I read has to do with knowing yourself.  You would think that after living with myself for 31 years, I’d be an expert at who I am and how I function, but the truth is, I don’t think any of us, no matter how old, are completely in tune with ourselves.  It has taken me almost this many years to figure out exactly how my brain learns new information and come up with the best ways to get new information into it.  I’ve also discovered, grudgingly, that I’m really much smarter in the morning than as the day wears on…by the time I hit the sheets, I’ve gotten almost to reality TV levels of intelligence.  This has forced me, against my will, to become a “morning person.”  I’d rather stay up late, but staying up late leads me to be a moron, so I wake up early while my neurons still fire decently and get to work.

To that end, I found the following blog fascinating, describing the routines of great writers.  Each of them had to develop their own way of approaching and structuring their day so that they could be productive.  It’s led me to look at my own routines and think about how I might tweak them to fit more with how I work best…within the confines of my working hours and my humble cube, of course.

Back in the Ether

I’ve been away from my blog for a while, busy starting a new job and also busy jumping into the exciting new field of wireless.  I have my ISCW exam scheduled for Dec. 22nd and immediately following that, I’ll be starting on my CCNA-Wireless.  I’ve accepted a permanent position in the company I’ve been contracting with for the past few months and despite the economic downturns everywhere, it seems like Healthcare is booming.

I plan on continuing this blog and also expanding it to include more of my favorite study resources, both for my certification exams as well as my work projects.  I hope to build it into a resource that I can use to share the tools that I use with others.

Great New Link…To Links!

I found this today on Network World – http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/27681 . I don’t know if it’s just me, but it’s tough to navigate the huge amount of information on Cisco’s website, let alone find what you need elsewhere. This blog entry on Network World shows exactly what one experienced Cisco Engineer keeps in his bookmarks and I’m planning on adding many of these to my own.

Among the highlights, a link to a page detailing how to copy IOS files from a tftp server using SNMP, a list of end-of-life, end-of-sale products, error pages, BGP, MPLS, and even submarine cabling systems! There is probably more information in these links than I could ever digest, but I definitely plan on hitting his QoS section hard in the next few weeks!

Where Have All the SNPA Labs Gone?

When you’re studying for your CCNA, there are a plethora of labs out there you can use, from the kind you buy made up of either equipment or Simulators, to the kind you can download for free which are practice labs you need to provide your own Sim or equipment to use.  For SNPA, I’m finding very little of either available, but definitely plenty of very expensive 5-day courses.  I think I’d rather save up my cash for a CCNP bootcamp sometime down the road.  I’m hoping once I’ve finished reading my Cisco Press book that the labs it contains will be of some help along with the experience I’m getting working with the 5505’s at work.

In the meantime, I found the following link to another person’s experience taking the exam at PCMag – http://tcpmag.com/exams/article.asp?editorialsid=109  It sounds like he found it challenging, but doable…we’ll see if it’s the same for me.