Ryan Is Rambling On Again

This commercial cracks me up!

My name is Ryan and I am a do-it-yourself addict. From little things like fixing a leaky faucet to the big scary stuff like replacing the water pump on a front wheel drive car, I try to do these things myself.

For instance, this weekend I’m planning to replace a blown exhaust gasket and do an oil change on my car. The cost savings is maybe $50, but I’m going to do it myself anyway. It will take me three to four times as long as taking it to a shop so the money savings is pretty much a trade off for the time I invest in the job. This is how insidious my disease is.

I have a more advanced form of the disease than most however. I actually VOLUNTEER to help other peoples with their do-it-yourself projects. I’ve built swing sets, done brake jobs, painted houses and many more things along those lines. I guess that makes me an enabler. It gets worse. I’m also a pusher. I convince people that many of the things they were going to pay someone to do they can do themselves. I even volunteer to help them. What kind of sicko am I?!

Once, when I was younger and mildly dumber, I convinced a friend’s mother that I could take down a tree in her back yard that was threatening to ruin her pool. So there I was on an extension ladder, dangling off the side with a chainsaw in my hand trying to cut some of the larger branches off. As I looked down at my friends (they were pulling on a rope tied to the branch in an effort to keep it from falling on the roof) it dawned on me that I might actually not survive this. Did I stop…not a chance! That is the depth of my sickness.

There are many other examples I could give but I’m already breaking out in a cold sweat thinking about that one. So I’ll just end here with a tip for all you do-it-yourselfers. DON’T DO IT, WHATEVER YOU’RE PLANNING!! Go to the movies instead. Its safer and will probably cost less.

Back in February I started at a new job at Keystone Industries in Cherry Hill, NJ.  This is my first job in the IT field.  The first few weeks were crazy for me because they were in the process of switching from one ERP system to another.  I was left to figure out most things on my own which is difficult when you don’t even have access to all of the buildings.  I didn’t have a clue how the network was structured or even how many servers we have (I now know that we have 18 in total) and what the functions of each server is.  I was left to handle all non-ERP related functions which consisted mostly of desktop and printer support.  I learned very quickly that all of the printers were not installed on the same server.  In fact, the printers are spread out over 5 different servers which isquite the nightmare when trying to diagnose problems with or install new network printers when you don’t know the names or even quantity of servers in the organization! 

Things have finally settled down a little for me.  I’ve gotten a handle on the structure of the company and my job scope has been more defined.  I’m getting to know the people here and I surprised to discover that there are only two people that I am not very fond of.  I expected that number to be higher.  Maybe it will increase as I put in more time here, but I hope not.  The new ERP system is Microsoft’s Dynamics AX and it is apparently quite different from the old system.  I get questions about it all the time and I am completely unable to help because I had never even heard of it prior to coming here.  I need to learn how it works so that I can be a better resource to the company and so I don’t feel like a complete tool when a user asks the “IT guy” a question and all I can do is shrug my shoulders and say something brilliant like “hmmmm…” or “I don’t know”.  Does anyone have any suggestions on where I can go to learn this system?

As time goes on this job will become much easier but I do not believe it will ever be boring.  There is just too much to do in a three person IT department for it to ever get dull or repetitive.

I finally finished my Associate’s Degree at ITT-Tech!  Now I can take a few weeks to catch my breath before heading back to school at DeVry University to complete my Bachelor’s degree.  Does anyone have ant thoughts about either of those schools they would like to share with the group?

UGH!  BIND DNS is killing me!!!  It WILL NOT work with a 64 bit version of Windows Server 2008.

GOOD NEWS!  As long as we can properly simulate an MPLS network we don’t have to scrap our original plan.  That is such a relief.  Al and I will be spending the next 2-3 weeks focusing on learning the IOS commands for BGR and IS-IS protocols.

I have to figure out what happened with BIND today.  It was running perfectly and then I shut Server 2008 down and *poof* no more BIND.  Not only is it no longer the default DNS, I can’t even start the service anymore.  I think I’ll just start from scratch and completely reinstall BIND.

Al, Tom, Trisha and I stayed late at class last night and got 90% of our hardware and pricing figured out.  Say what you want to about Dell computers, but their website is freaking brilliant for our purposes.  Select your computers/servers, configure them with what you need and then click print!  It gives you a breakdown of what you selected and a price.  Simple!  There will be a few additional items that we will need to add as we progress with our design, but for now that is under control.

I’ll make my plea once more.  If you read this and know of any sources/blogs/websites with good tutorials on how to set up an MPLS network, please share them with me in the comments.

That’s it for now.

In my last post I was pretty discouraged and I believe I described our project as “hosed”. I may have been a little premature with that assessment.

Al, who was just as discouraged as I was, had a brainstorm and started searching for simulators that can handle MPLS. He came across one called GNS3. It’s an open source simulator that allows you to load an IOS .bin file to the router in the simulator. This allows you to give the router a modern enough OS to be able to configue it for MPLS. It comes in both Linux and Windows flavors and not knowing which would work better we decided to try to load both. I fired up VMware on my laptop and loaded my Fedora 11 machine and he grabbed his laptop with 64 bit Windows Vista on it. We both went to SourceForge and downloaded the program and set out to get it working. After a brief 3.5 hours of extreme frustration I decided to shut down my Fedora virtual machine and try to install it on my laptop’s 64 bit Windows 7 OS. A brief hour and a half later I finally had success!  The simulator FINALLY worked!  Al had one little box checked that was preventing him from getting it to work on his computer (isn’t that always the way). So we both loaded up a .bin file of IOS version 12 or newer and tried to configure a router. IT WORKED! I think that Al and I may have burned out a few of Google’s servers figuring that out tonight. Now we just need to figure out how to configure an MPLS network. Hahahahaha (imagine the Joker laughing here).

I’m happy that we should now be able to stick with our original plan. I’m also a little intimidated by the prospect of having to learn all of the new command line stuff in the next few weeks. But I’m no longer discouraged about this project.

To infinity and beyond…

Our project just got flushed today!  We’ve been planning, with the encouragement of our instructor I might add, to build our Capstone project around an MPLS network.  However, the routers available to us at ITT-Tech are older than the MPLS technology so we can’t configure them for our needs.  I also learned that Packet Tracer 5.2 STILL doesn’t support MPLS so we can’t even build the MPLS network in a virtual environment.  What this all boils down to is WE CAN’T SHOW A DEMONSTRATION OF A MODERN NETWORK ARCHITECTURE AT A NATIONALLY ACCREDITED TECHNICAL SCHOOL WITH A COMPUTER NETWORKING DEGREE PROGRAM.  HOW PATHETIC!!!

Now, 4 weeks into this project, we have to start over with our network design.  It seems that the best we can do is demonstrate a VPN as long as we bring in our own computers.  Yes folks, the wonderful “suits” at ITT-Tech don’t see the need to give us a few computers in each lab that are configured with 2 NIC CARDS.  AND, they don’t allow us to open the existing computers up and install a second NIC card because we will VOID THE WARRANTY!!!  So, for the privilege of paying them $40k+ I get to work on outdated equipment, demonstrate decade old technology,  and I am still forced to bring my own personal equipment from home in order to properly demonstrate this decade old “secure” network technology.  Oh, yeah, and the computers in the labs the CNS students use are only 32 bit.

I know next to nothing about setting up a VPN so I’m seriously stressing out.  We have to research the technology and implementation of a VPN, come up with an IP scheme, and figure out what equipment and pricing will be for this.  My group now has to scramble to get anything put together in time.

Wish me luck…lots and lots of it.

The problem with my site was actually caused by upgrading to a newer version of WordPress and not loading all of the files into the correct directory.  I thought the cosmic forces thing sounded cooler though.

Back in business.

It’s official…Microsoft Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 sp1 DO NOT play well together.  After almost 2 hours of trying to install Exchange 2007, I finally gave up.  I downloaded Exchange Server 2010 and PRESTO…no problems!  It installed with no errors on the first try!  As you can imagine I was thrilled and disgusted all at the same time.  So, we will be using Exchange 2010 for certain.

BIND DNS may be the most widely used DNS server on the planet, but like all things open source it has NO GUI, numerous little “quirks”, and no decent documentation.  I installed BIND, configured it, started it and was able to verify it was working.  Then I shut down VMWare and my computer and went to bed.  When I came back this afternoon to work on it some more, BIND was not working.  I tried to start it manually…no luck.  I tried to reload it…no joy.  AAAARRRGGGH!  Time to fire up the primary resource for the open source community, Google, and figure out what is going wrong.  I found numerous blogs about this problem, but none of the solutions seem to work.  I think that when I shut down the server last night it installed an update.  According to a few of the posts I’ve read, those automatic updates from Microsoft have a habit of blowing out BIND DNS and reloading Microsoft’s DNS (shocking that Microsoft would do something like that *said dripping with sarcasm*).  But, after shutting down Microsoft’s DNS, rebooting and shutting down Microsoft’s DNS again, and finally shouting and swearing at my monitor I still can’t start BIND.  If you heard a hollow thudding sound earlier today it was just the sound of my head repeatedly banging against my desk.  I’m thinking that I’m just going to reinstall BIND from scratch RIGHT AFTER I DISABLE THE AUTOMATIC UPDATES FROM MICRO$OFT!!

I learned a lot of good stuff about an MPLS network over the weekend.  Now I’m not sure that we can do it at the school.  It seems that we don’t have routers at the school that can be configured for MPLS.  They want a live demo, not a simulated one, but when the equipment is older than the current technology out there (ex., not a single 64 bit PC in the building except the student’s laptops), they may need to loosen up the rules just a touch.  When I see my instructor this week I’m going to ask if we can do our demo through Packet Tracer.  Does anyone know if MPLS can be configured in Packet Tracer?  If the answer is yes, does anyone know how?

My next task is to turn Fedora 11 into our web server and integrate it into our network.  I feel many hours spent with SAMBA, SWAT and/or Webmin coming on.

Other than all of the problems caused by Microsoft’s brilliant (again, *sarcasm*) software, I’m feeling good about the progress we are making.  Al was here today working on the IP address scheme and finishing up the documentation that needs to be turned in.  Tomorrow Al, Trish and I will be meeting up at the school for a few hours to finish up the stuff that’s due later this week.  Also, we will be getting Tom back now that his medical woes seem to be coming to an end.  That will be fantastic!  Things are moving along.

More to come…