Friday, December 2, 2011

New Blog Gadet for E-mails

You can now follow my blog easier through the new gadget that blogger made. You can now follow my posts by simply putting your e-mail into the bar and hitting submit. Gadget is located on the right of my blog posts, directly on top of the polls. HAPPY BLOGGING!

Lab #5

For lab #5 you have to configure the routers interface, if you do not then you network cannot reach the eagle server (My Situation). To configure the routers you have to first setup the R2-Central router, which is the first router connected with the switch. You have to install an operating system for the Host PC and you need to install the terminal command prompt. After you install the operating system you go to the command prompt, and you type in the command INTERFACE, FastEthernet0/0 which then you add in the ip address given and turn the port on. My failure was the access the command prompt (A simple mistake which i hope i won't make in the future). My biggest failure of the lab which i now understand was to correctly read the instructions that are given to me CAREFULLY.

Lab #4

Lab #4 is basically lab #3 except you fully mastered the understandings of how to actually repair your network. You basically have to replace your "broken" devices (The Eagle_Server) with one that is configured correctly. When it says to replace it means to reconfigure and reboot the problem. That process is called troubleshooting, its something that 90% of the time you have to do when you first make a network. By troubleshooting the network, you will run simulation mode, which directly takes you step-by-step how the packet is traveling through the network. This helps you identify the problem accurately instead of actually taking the time to find the problem more physically. You repeat the simulation and also the trail & error process it takes to successfully send and receive a packet.

Lab #3 Reflection

Lab number three is basically to try and understand what went wrong with the network and to repair the problem in the network. You add in more numbers to the devices such as the gateway IP address and the DNS address which was the main problem of my network. I completely ignored the DNS server IP address, which is probably why the 2 routers didn't want to communicate with each other, it's imperative that you reach all of the requirements to components of the network if you want your server system to function correctly. Therefore, the problem was located in the transport layer which deals with TCP.

Lab #2 Reflection

In lab number 2 the main concepts were to determine if you configured the devices correctly so you can send a packet. The lab simply told you to diagnose the computer and to look at the scenarios when you send a packet to see if you successfully configured your network right. I configured all of the data that was given to me in the charts, after that i connected all of the devices together in the correct diagram. I turned on all of the ports, used the correct type of wire, and finally got all of the lights to go green.

Now was my part in lab #2 to send a packet from the Host computer to the Eagle_Server, without any type of technical difficulties. That's the main challenge and concept of the lab, to see if you know what you're doing instead of just randomly plugging in cables and typing random numbers. In this case, i did not complete the lab; therefore and i knew what the problem had to be. When i sent the packet over from the host to the eagle server, the packet successfully went through the from the host computer to the switch to the router. The packet did not however, travel to the second router. So right then i knew that the network was not working and i was just configuring with random numbers i did not comprehend with. Understanding what went wrong is the next lab.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Lab #1 Reflection

Hi!

For the first lab I learned how to use Packet Tracer, and the ability to configure and operate a server using 2 routers, 2 PC's, 1 switch, and 1 Eagle Server. At first, the task was a bit confusing because when i gathered all of the materials displayed in the lab, they were all red besides the 2 PC's and the switch. The problem was that i didn't correctly configure the routers with the servers. I also, had to setup the network and the network gateway using the 2 PC's (One of which, were the host). The settings to configure the devices were on the sheet of paper in the lab instructions and on the device itself (Of course).

After i had input all of the numbers in the correct device (including the gateway ip, host ip, and the subnet ip) there was still a physical problem with the devices. I had the switch the ports from off to on (Otherwise the device is just a simple piece of "brick"), after all that work the server was good and running smoothly. Now was the part where I diagnose the computer. I requested a message from the computer (Non-host) to the eagle server. I checked on bottom-right part of my screen to see the status of the message and the status of my network, and it was a successful connection.

As a result, i learned the main mechanics of how to operate the eagle server to be online, and to make the PC host communicate with the server using routers, switches, and cables.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

My CISCO Student Career So Far........

Introduction
So far, if i were to rank my progress as a CISCO student i would say that i would have greatly improved by a TON compared to my grade last marking period. In the last marking period, i passed the class with a 77% which is a C; I currently have an 89% on my grade which clearly presents an improvement in the class.

Why am i Improving you ask?
The reason being of why i am improving is because I'm greatly improving my scores on tests. I find the tests to be more easy as i go through the course of the CISCO training and i has become very easy for me to understand networking. I would also like to say, I believe that the pre-test is impacting my motivation and effort that i put into the Actual examinations because the pre-test gives me a more general idea on what i should be studying on, why i already know, and what i need to know to pass the official examinations. If my instructor continues to give me pre-test, my grades would definitely, for a fact, increase my knowledge in the networking course and continue to gradually increase my grades and test scores.

How to continue to do better
All i have to do to keep my grades going higher is to do my work, study, and keeping a perfect attendance in class. All it takes to accomplish this flexible goal is motivation and self-confidence to know what my capabilities are and my limits. In reality, my capabilities are endless if i know how to accomplish it and to not abandon my objectives.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

CISCO Academy Benefits

Benefits are Listed Below
  • Cisco Course Completion Certificate
  • Congratulatory Letter
  • Alumni Connection
  • Prometric & VUE Discount Vouchers

CISCO Website Usage Agreement Summary (16 Policies)

1st Policy- CISCO's policies may not co-operate with any other outside source reference policy thats close to CISCO, and follow CISCO's terms.

2nd Policy- Basically, by making the account you are agreeing with CISCO's rules and if you disobey you're breaking your contract with CISCO.

3rd Policy- Feel free to socialize with other CISCO peers but do not violate their policy by exposing inappropriate content to other members or "Cyber Bully" them.

4th Policy- Do not promote any business in their website other than in the chat or forums, CISCO's website is not used for promoting any type of outside company.

5th Policy- By becoming a member of CISCO you are responsible for keeping your own personal information in their website; You are also accepting all of their policies and to remember to keep your information safe and independent.

6th Policy- CISCO doesn't monitor or pre-screen any type of content you post onto the website and they recommend that you may remove the materials that violate your agreements with CISCO, otherwise you will make CISCO a liability for your relations with them and you break your contract.

7th Policy- Anything that was made by CISCO is copyrighted; you can't plagiarize anything that CISCO does otherwise CISCO has the rights to sue you.

8th Policy- CISCO has the right to block you or deny access to you from their website if you violate their policies.

9th Policy- CISCO and their suppliers do not offer any warranties to its members. So if you claim you received a warranty from them, they will disclaim what you said.

10th Policy- You can't rely on CISCO or its suppliers if you cause any type of damage to their products.

11th Policy- CISCO's terms and agreements co-operate with the laws of the state in California. If you are brought to court by CISCO you will have the court sessions in the California District.

12th Policy- CISCO will notify you anything on the CISCO website 5 days after the situation has occurred.

13th Policy- CISCO Systems made those policies, and they give us their website information and how to contact them.

14th Policy- You have the rights to practice the policies that we read to ensure that we don't violate them.

15th Policy- They will respond to any type of criticism that you give to them, and their begging that we do not give them any type of personal information.

16th Policy- CISCO's copyright Agent can be contacted (They present contact information). If you believe you broke a policy then you may contact them at the information provided.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Lab 4.5.2 TCP/IP Transport Layer Protocols Reflection

To conclude this lab i would summarize it with an easy yet challenging interpretation. At first, the wire shark task (Task#1 Capturing an FTP session) presented a new method of networking that gave me exploration to knew data information. Basically Wire Shark helps you capture TCP/UDP communications and present it through the header information and also interprets it to an even simplified form. It gives you the protocol information, header information, & ip traffic which gives you a source of what CISCO people call Reliability. This made me understand the 3-way-handshake from an all new perspective which allows me to apprehend the networking world more clearly. The 3-Way-=Handshake is basically one end sending an SYN, then the other end receives the message and sends an ACK, finally the message gets sent back to let the other person know that there is a confirmation of communication.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Thursday's Assignment; What happened & What we learned

Team #5
Brandon, Kamil, Jason, & Anthony

Thursday's assignment was about testing our team communication, our knowledge, and innovation skills to present our performance as a real CISCO employee. Our main goal as a team was to get 2 computers fully operational and ready for work; but in order for our team to accomplish the objective we had to test our ability to construct a half-built computer. The problem with the computer was that is was missing many significant accessories (Components) for the computer to be functional without encountering any hardware errors. As a team, Jason and Kamil (Technicians) were installing the hardware components while Anthony and I gathered other requested gears that the Technicians required. It took us relatively around 1 hour to finally get 1 computer running without having any technical difficulties for the windows operating system to start-up. After our first milestone was achieved it was my duty to download and install linux, replacing the current operating system which contained windows xp.
When i got up to downloading the operating system we had to abort the task because our timing had come to an end; leaving the team in an attempted fail to complete our primary objectives. The main problem i would blame for our teams failure would be the lack of resources available to us, short amount of time, lack of brainstorming ideas, and not enough efficient teamwork that was put into the tasks. A resolution that would help benefit us next time would be to, co-operate fully as a team, listen to other ideas and become more open minded to the situation, and to work more fast without any flaws or errors when booting up the computer.

Monday, October 17, 2011

UDP and how it works with Transport

What is UDP and how it helps the Transport layer in TCP/IP & OSI Model

What is UDP you ask? UDP stands for User Datagram Protocol and it mainly supports the internet/network layer of the TCP/IP model. UDP is a way for data to be organized and sent through the network. It is made up of single unit data grams that is first eight 8 bytes contained with its own id and the remaining bytes contain message data. The UDP data gram ID's was consist of 4 different classes.
  • source port number
  • checksum
  • datagram size
  • destination port number
Source Port- Basically allows access from a variety of different application to maintain a path for data to transfer; this works along with the Destination Port number.
Checksum- Secures data from being corrupted
Datagram Size- The total amount of memory (bytes) contained in the ID datagram.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Transport Layer Problems of Sony (Playstation Network) & Blackberry

Sony's Problem
  1. What Happened?
  2. What was the Problem?
  3. What caused it?
  4. How was it fixed?
  5. Did the Company repay their efforts?
The Playstation Network had a security breach from an anonymous user(s), the hackers breached the information of millions of customer's account data including credit card information, purchases, and other personal information. The Sony's website had a weak security system installed into their network so the hackers breached into their systems and blockaded it from everyone other than themselves. Sony solved the network problems by hacking the website back and improving their security network problems. Sony will compensate their customers because of the outrage that was caused by the users of Sony, most Sony users do not pay for their services in the play station network. However, there is a premium service that allows user's more access for the service which Sony compensated for.
Source for Sony
- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/13/sony-playstation-network-breach_n_861816.html
-http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entertainment-brief/55659-sony-will-compensate-users-for-psn-outage
-http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216191/Sony_warns_users_of_data_loss_from_PlayStation_network_hackA)

BlackBerry's Problem
  1. What Happened?
  2. What was the Problem?
  3. What caused it?
  4. How was it fixed?
  5. Did the Company repay their efforts?
The problem that Blackberry's Network had faced was a service problem. The Blackberry Network was offline and user's couldn't access any type of network ability whether it was text messaging, internet service, phone calls.etc. The problem was caused by a Switch crash within the data center of BlackBerry. In the articles listed below, it explains that RIM did not have enough capacity to support re-routed traffic to the countries served by Slough. One of the strategies they used to fix the problem was, to connect to other near by services by changing the network path (Data Traffic) to address closest to the switch that failed. So far from compensation, RIM has apologize for the switch failing and promises to offer something in return for its user's around the world that uses the Blackberry service. They promise to innovate the Blackberry even further to something close to the new windows 7 operating system. They do however, decide to fix the networking problem as soon as they can so that user's are using their money's worth to it's value.

Source for Blackberry
-http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/12/tech/mobile/blackberry-outage/?hpt=hp_c1&imw=Y
-http://www.pcworld.com/article/241917/rim_clueless_about_cause_of_blackberry_outage.html
-http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/241895/four_ways_rim_can_rebound_from_blackberry_outage.html

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

How does DHCP work?

DHCP stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, and it is a simple settings for a host's network. It makes it easier for the host because they have the ability to configure all of the network devices settings. It does the complicated network administrators job by simplifying it into a network protocol. The Protocol requires only an IP address to connect other devices into the internet. That is why it is call Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, to configure the host's network.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Peer to Peer Client Server Model

Centralization
In my opinion, Server-Client is more centralized because all the messages are sent to one server and the messages are then sent back to the clients.

-
Client-Server

  • Advantages of Client-Server: Client server is good for getting messages from 1 source rather than relying on the message to go from multiple people.
  • Disadvantage of Client Server: If the server is down then the messages can't be send back to the clients which can be devastating to many users.
-Peer to Peer
  • Advantages of Peer to Peer: The advantages to P2P networks are that the messages are traveled through multiple clients through dedicated servers.
  • Disadvantages of Peer to Peer: The network can be slower through P2P depending on the clients server connection which makes receiving the message longer.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Task 3 & 4 of Lab 2.2.5

Task#3::Reflection
To summarize traceroute, it is basically a way for you to find how many "hops" it takes to go to the domain site. The Computer contacts ip-adress to send a message to the domain site, when the site receives a message; it responds back by using the direct ip-adresses it took to receive the message. When the site responds, there should be a message saying trace complete. The usefulness of the traceroute is that, you can see if a website is "up and running". Therefore, the domain owner will understand if the server of the website is working properly. Also, to know whether or not their is a problem with the server's connection with the internet, or if it's the computer.ect.
Neotrace allows you to gather detailed information about the server address. For example, you can know where the server is being held, how to contact the server's company, who is the server's company.ect. It does it by using the internet to connect to the server's ip. Just like the traceroute in the command prompt, only less limited.

Task #4:: Challenge
The problems with using traceroute is that it gives you too much personal information about the server. Depending on what the person decides what information he/she puts, can vary and risk their privacy. For Example, if i want to know where the creator of youtube lives, i could just use Neotrace and retrieve any information i want from the server. It also gives you information on how to connect to the server by seeing the # of hops. The computer will tell you how many hops and who to hop to, in order the send messages to the server ip.