CCNP at last!

May 11, 2012 – 11:44 pm

6 months of studying while actually designing a solution for a client, and while studying for a university course in management. I pulled it off, and I’m real proud of my achievement. No idea if that’ll take me anywhere but I’m glad I did it.

Excitement on the job

April 26, 2012 – 6:28 pm

I’ve been working in IT for 23 years now. And after all that time, it kind of becomes routine. Yesterday, I went to my client’s remote datacenter (disaster recovery site) to setup their new equipment and implement the telecom solution I have designed, change the ip adressing scheme, upgrade the Cisco ASA, etc.

While this is probably very mundane for some, to me, I actually felt excited doing this. A year ago, I knew nothing about routing and switching (other than a general understanding of the components of course), and yesterday I was creating routes, configuring routing protocols, adjusting access-lists, configuring the ASA firewall, etc. I just had a “wow, I can’t believe I’m actually doing this (and succesfully! :) )”.

This made the effort of learning all of this worthwhile to me. Do bring me excitement back in my career, this feeling of accomplishment.

We’ll be overhauling the head office in the next few weeks. Let’s hope things go just as good!

IOS Keyboard shortcuts

April 24, 2012 – 10:02 pm

Ctrl+T: Swap the current character with the one before it
Ctrl+K: Erase all characters from the current cursor position to the end of the line
Ctrl+X: Erase all characters from the current cursor position to the beginning of the line
Ctrl+L: Reprint the line
Ctrl+C: Exit configuration mode
Ctrl+A: Moves the cursor to the beginning of the current line
Ctrl+E: Moves the cursor to the end of the current line
Ctrl+F: Moves forward one character
Ctrl+B: Moves backwards one character
Ctrl+R: Redisplays a line (starts a new line, with the same command shown)
Ctrl+U: Erases a line
Ctrl+W: Erases a word
Ctrl+Z: Exits configuration mode, returning you to privileged EXEC mode
Ctrl+P (or up arrow): Displays the last command entered
Ctrl+N (or down arrow): Displays previous commands entered
Tab: Completes a partial command
Esc, F: Moves forward one word
Esc, B: Moves backwards one word

And another one down!!

April 23, 2012 – 7:42 pm

CCNP ROUTE exam is finally done. Consensus seems to be that SWITCH is harder than ROUTE. Well not for me! Took me a while to get my mind around the OSPF LSAs and areas, as well as BGP (urgh). Taking a break tonight and tomorrow, I’m getting started on TSHOOT. I have all the gear to build the topology, now if I could only find config files to load up on my rack and fiddle with. Pre-broken configs would be awesome! (With solutions of course lol)

A feel good moment :)

April 5, 2012 – 10:02 am

I got this email yesterday…

Marc,

I just wanted to shout out and say thank you SO much for the CCNA lab work you put together.  I passed my ICND1 last week.  Your labs for the ICND1 were helpful beyond words.  I had downloaded it from the site earlier last year when it was free but I just bought the combo today in appreciation for all your hard work!  I plan on taking the ICND2 later next month and I already know that the labs will be what I need to pass!
Thanks again for the labs they are awesome.
Levi
PS – PLEASE consider writing labs for the CCNP…
Really feels good to know that people find your work useful and that it somehow helped them to reach their goals. And Levi, I am considering doing the CCNP workbooks… I just want to pass the CCNP first and I’ll see what I can do!