iman jalali, director of sales and support at trainsignal, was nice enough to send me a free copy of their ccnp video course.

the ccnp certification training package, according to the website, contains over 50 hours of training for the bsci, bcmsn, ont, and iscw exams for the ccnp certification.

the videos are led by chris bryant, ccie, who never misses an opportunity to try to get you to visit his own website (link intentionally missing), where he sells his own training products as well. i don’t particular care for him, but i’ll try not to let that bias my opinion of trainsignal’s course as a whole. i hope to “review” it here soon.

the iphone 2.0 comes out tomorrow morning.

here i lay, on the couch, watching the videos and downloading applications from the app store (aim, facebook, google mobile app, remote, twitterific), even though i don’t have an iphone. yet.

you see, in about seven hours the stores will be opening up and i shall have one. i’m not really sure why, though. i mean, yeah, they’re cool and all, but i have a completely functional blackberry pearl sitting right here.

why must i have an iphone?

the truth is i really don’t know. but i must. and i shall. and i will.

while there’s a plethora of labs to work through if you’re preparing for cisco’s ccie examination, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot for the lower levels, specifically the ccnp (what i’m currently working on). it could very well be because i haven’t bought any of the “official” cisco press books, who knows.

regardless, i, like many others, have been making extensive use of dynamips for running labs on a pc (even though i have a stack of cisco gear sitting right next to me). it’s just easier to not have to mess with the physical cabling, plus i can take it with me (i have dynamips and dynagen set up on my macbook).

i’ve considering making up some of my own lab topologies and then creating some exercises to go along with me. there are plenty of lab topologies already available (some even with the dynagen .net file), but i haven’t found many that have actual lab exercises to go along with them.

if i were to make up some of my own (complete with visio diagrams, dynagen .net files, and exercises to work through), would there be any interest?

p.s. i don’t use gns3 so you’d have to come up with your own config files for that.

if you happen to be going to cfunited (like me) next week, be sure to read through the cfunited attendee packet — some good info in there to know ahead of time.

this will be my first time attending cfunited and my first time in washington, dc, in about 15 years. anything i should know beforehand? =)

from the mozilla developer center:

after more than 34 months of active development, and with the contribution of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready. it is our expectation to ship firefox 3 this upcoming tuesday, june 17th. put on your party hats and get ready to download firefox 3 — the best web browser, period.

go figure they’ll release it the day i’m heading out to washington, dc, for cfunited. oh well, maybe i’ll find a celebration party in dc.

taking a page from the doctors at the moses taylor hospital, i.t. staff at the scranton, pa., facility last year diagnosed their messaging system and came up with an effective treatment that’s turned out to be a life saver.

the patient in this case was an aging microsoft exchange 5.5 environment that couldn’t support increased message loads and was going to cost a bundle to upgrade.

i love hearing stories like this.

[ read more... ]

i’m curious if anyone is using voip at home, with service from a commercial voip provider — and integrated with asterisk. i’m one of the younger generation who hasn’t had a home phone in almost two years. the last year that i had one was only so i could have dsl and a fax at home (for my business). i use my work-issued cell phone (blackberry) for all my phone calls (except when i’m in the office).

i’ve been toying with the idea of setting up an asterisk box at home lately. i don’t really need to, but when has need ever had anything to do with the reason a geek does something? because i wouldn’t really use it much, i’m looking for something cheap.

what i’d like to do is just use voip at home without being tied in to any vendor-specific hardware (i.e. if i switch providers, i still want to be able to use it), and to be able to purchase an “x minutes/month” plan. i want something that’ll integrate with asterisk and give me a fixed number of minutes per month for a fixed cost. i’d probably pick up a couple of cisco ip phones to use.

if i can get that working, i have another house in another town that i’d connect as well. it has dry dsl, so there’s no actual phone there (i’m only there once every few weeks). i’d put a cisco router in there, set up an ipsec vpn between that house and my primary residence, and put a cisco ip phone there as well (assuming the latency and jitter are okay).

i’ve briefly looked into broadvoice and packet8 and would be interested in any opinions or recommendations.

a month or so ago, i downloaded jungle disk. i installed it on an older laptop i have running windows xp that has quite a few files on it i’d like to have backups of. i uploaded a few hundred megabytes of files to disk storage on the amazon s3 system and pretty much forgot about it.

a few days ago i was looking at my bank statement and seen a charge from amazon for $0.04 for the s3 storage. that got me thinking about backups again. i don’t really have any good backups here at home, other than keeping copies of “important stuff” on multiple machines — not exactly an ideal backup strategy.

i have an external usb drive that i’ve been wanting to use with time machine on my macbook to keep it backed up (it has pretty much became my “primary computer” in the last few months). i was keeping copies of important files on it, though, so i couldn’t just wipe it clean. instead, i first hooked it up to an ubuntu linux box that i have here, copied off all the important stuff, and then wiped it clean.

the external usb drive is now hooked up to the macbook and the first full backup (using time machine) is taking place as i write this (in textmate, of course!). it’s currently at 7.7gb of 105.9gb to back up. fun!

on the ubuntu linux box, jungle disk is hard at work backing up all my important files to the amazon s3 storage. i started out with 2.4gb of data to upload, mostly pictures and video that wouldn’t be easily replaced. with my cable modem connection (10 mbps down/1 mbps up), it’s going to take a while. once i get all the “important stuff” dumped onto amazon’s servers, however, and only occasionally add stuff to it, the backups will run much quicker.

i still have a few more pc’s to sift through in order to find everything i want backed up, but i don’t anticipate having more than 10gb or so of data stored on amazon’s servers. at their rates, that makes for very cheap off-site backups.

if you’re looking for a good solution to this same problem, i highly recommend amazon s3 and jungle disk. i’ve had no problems with either as of yet (granted i haven’t used either extensively). jungle disk is commercial software (only $20), but you can run it on as many pc’s as you have. they also have windows, linux, and os x versions that operate nearly identical. i haven’t installed the os x version yet, but i imagine i will before the day is over.

christian hammond, a vmware developer, let us now that vmware workstation 6.5 will have “100% more unity”. this isn’t a big deal for me as i’ve been using vmware fusion on the macbook for a few months now, but for my colleagues who haven’t yet “made the switch”, this will be cool for them too.