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Showing posts from 2019

Azure Networking Options - Core Cloud Services

I have done a lot of AWS things on here. Time to give Azure some attention. After all, since employers don't think Cisco or COMPTIA certifications are important, maybe Microsoft ones are? First, let's really think about why these are the two biggest cloud services providers in the world: They've been doing internet things for a long time. Amazon launched in 1995 , a virtual bookstore. Microsoft, well, you know.  They've lived, breathed, and frankly, created, infrastructure that we use today, that they're selling to us today. Of course the Store of Everything and the Company of Everything would encourage us to put everything in their hands. Also: Azure has a lot less silly names for modules. Important. I appreciate straightforwardness. I said 'a lot less', not '100% sensible names' Microsoft has a clear set of Azure Fundamentals that anyone can interact with. Let's talk about networking basics, basically to say, again, &quo

Route This Way: OSPF

  Something I very recently learned is that routing protocols are learned on Control Planes. Also, welcome to possibly the last post of 2019. I need a break too!  There's plenty more coming in 2020. Meanwhile, visit and follow the new LinkedIn Company Page , if you please.

We have a LinkedIn page now!

https://www.linkedin.com/company/lucas-network-solutions Give me a follow on the official RUN TCP/IP / Lucas Network Solutions page. Gonna post about one a week, not here to overload you.

Route This Way: (E)IGRP

IGRP information is...scant. It's made by Cisco, and they have since moved on to EIGRP. EIGRP talks to its neighbors it knows via the neighbor table. Neighbors are directly connected. The topology table stores routes it learns from its directly connected neighbors  Hellos are sent every few seconds (Depending on Network capability) to make sure the neighbor is still there. A hold time is around 15 seconds. The router will drop the connection if the neighbor doesn't respond. Routers get updates via multicast address 224.0.0.10

Apple Troubleshooting: The Second Part

A few ways to solve common problems: src "Can't reach the internet, and I'm the only one!" First, I like asking the user to ping google.com - but it's a bit different on Mac, more on that in a bit. In Windows, we could ipconfig /renew to give up our IP address and get a new one, which might work, or reset the TCP/IP stack to reestablish connectivity. In the vein of "You don't have to touch that icky terminal! (Unless you're using Python)" spirit of Apple, we can do it via the GUI.

Route This Way: Introduction To Routing Protocols + RIP

Less 'introduction' and more "Well, I paid and studied to take the CCNA, so I'm going to put this information to use somehow." Also, apparently network administrators feel very strongly about their routing protocol of choice, and will fight people over it. Lol. Someone just created a new Twitter account to criticize my view on BGP. Classy! That’s a quick block. pic.twitter.com/WmoIbqunoI — Daniel Dib (@danieldibswe) November 18, 2019 To be clear, I'm 🤔 at the person who went through all that effort to make an account to do this. I have that kind of time as well, but I'm not doing that, I'm doing this. So, what is a Routing Protocol? Graphic Design in My Passion

ipaddress Module in Python

Article Helpful for quickly seeing the broadcast address, number of hosts, if an IP address is link-local or not. I wonder how this can work with SDN. You do have to import it to your version of Python. #of hosts in a range. I wanted to see if it knew to move onto the next octet when over the 255 limit; It's all outlaid in the linked article, not much for me to explain. Just a neat tool I wanted to share (and bookmark). Because, in the real world, your employer doesn't care how you subnet, just that you do.

7 Suggestions To Improve the Job Seeker Experience on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an American business and employment-oriented service that operates via websites and mobile apps. [...] it is mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs. - Wikipedia LinkedIn seems to have gotten a little left behind in the always-connected, faux-intimate world of social media - as well as missing potentially helpful options for the job seeker.  Here's 7 potential ways it can improve.

Solarwinds' ipMonitor Evaluation

I was not sponsored by SolarWinds to look at this. I received the e-mail and went 'Hey, a free tool!'. You can skip the email and go right over here ! Remember - Your domain (if you're a single person using this) is more than likely COMPUTERNAME\LoginName . It's how you log in on the (local) web portal. Scan your network within an IP range. If you leave the settings as they are, chances are you're scanning for about 75k IP addresses - and SolarWinds will let you know! Welcome to the dashboard: (I can show you the IP addresses because they're local to my network and not public for internet consumption!) There's a very early 2000s feel which I kind of adore. Scanning the network did not put my phone 'on the map'. I put in my phone's IP address to see if it could be found. They're on the same network. This nifty screen popped up with how I can monitor myself! I removed the Active Directory option. (Remember, thi

No School Like The #NewTMobile; Communications New-Giant Pushing 5G Out December 6th

What a difference 6 months makes. T-Mobile announced today, under the hashtag # NewTMobile several things - Low Prices 5G Nationwide And all on December 6th They did all this with a livestream featuring John Legere. T-Mobile is pushing a narrative about this being for the greater good, in order to sooth the 5 of us who were concerned about the ( approved by the FCC) merger between T-Mobile and Sprint.  There are services they mention that lean toward that - Free Unlimited Data Plans for First Responders  Lower pricing. Free Internet for low-income families affected by the Homework Gap - When students can't do online homework because they simply have no internet service. (And that's why municipal broadband needs to be a thing nationwide) A hashtag - #5GForGood So, how does 5G work? Let me explain how 5G works. In order to have lightning fast speeds AND dependable broad coverage, you need all 3 spectrum bands. Combining @TMobile 's 600 MHz an

Search and Infiltrate: How to Deeply Investigate a Company's People , Updated for 2023

Latest Update - 6/4/2020 This is a bit of an impromptu post after reading this article. I had a small thread about this on Twitter, a blog post is a lot better to get the information out in a clear way. Have you ever used Recruitin.net , came across a group of people who match Your Dream Company, Dream Location, and do your Dream Job on LinkedIn...and they're not active? What was the POINT, am I right?  A place for professionals to network, but they're not active ...because they have a job to do! You want to be like that! Unfortunately, in this day and age, unless you have a 'relationship' with someone, they're not going to help you.   Hm.  (Note: 'relationship' is different than relationship ). I'm not here to talk bad about recruiters - They have a difficult job, I know I couldn't do it! - And even they want a relationship before they place you somewhere, competency be damned. What do you do instead? This: (Note; I&

The Best Fiber Network in America is Owned by The People

I'm a huge fan of municipal broadband and the ordinary people owning public utilities (within reason...Do you trust your neighbor to own your power grid?). Ammon, Idaho beats out large, cumbersome, clunky cities that I will live in one day to have America's most sophisticated fiber network . You may have great fiber, yeah, but do you have diversity of thought, people, jobs, and industries? Seriously, I don't know. It's a choice to opt into the network, and new residential houses are being built with the fiber infrastructure in mind. But lets check those stats: 1 Gbps connection to 10$/mo with no contract - and you need not even do that - you could get 15 Mbps free. This is even better than water or power being utilities. Members can also easily establish their own private networks with friends and family (or coworkers for businesses) without incurring any additional infrastructure costs. You, the people, can make VPNs! I wonder how that looks. Wha

AWS servers hit by sustained DDoS attack, Making us All Say "It's Always DNS"

Article  If you aren't familiar with Route 53 on AWS, it's a Domain Management module.  So, the DDoS attack battered the records that tie IP addresses to FQDNs. From 6:30pm BST on Tuesday, a handful of customers suffered an outage to services while the attack persisted, lasting until approximately 2:30am on Wednesday morning, when services to the Route 53 DNS were restored. This was the equivalent of a full working day in some parts of the US. Amazon also encouraged users to specify the region their bucket was in when trying to update the configuration of clients. What have we learned? Anything can be attacked. Hopefully, you didn't have to learn that, as that is the mantra of anyone working in IT (Right after "It's always DNS").  After all, there is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer: You still need backups , though I admit I'm not sure how you'd store DNS records (Though I can configure them in Cisco Command Line

Ammo for the Streaming Wars: Verizon Customers Get a Year of Disney+ For Free

  Article That's an even better deal than one offered to us D23 Members  Well, $140 for 3 years, A year's subscription for D+ is 69$, which is 138$, more or less the cost of one person's service per month when I sold Verizon plans back in 2013. Is this an effort to bolster numbers in the face of T-Mobile and Sprint's approved merger? Perhaps not, as the deal is also given to existing customers of Verizon with 4G LTE and 5G Unlimited Service. Maybe 5G will be capable enough before the deal is over for us to stream from anywhere. Apple also has a deal ; Buy one of their expensive pieces of hardware that costs far more than a year's worth of their service, and get a year for free. No word on if HBO+, or DC Universe, or Quibi, or whatever else I'm missing will break out such deals.

Severless Application with Node.js, & AWS CodeStar and Cloud9

Instructions: Here Technologies; Node.js AWS CodeStar AWS Cloud9 Node.js is running Javascript on Chrome's V8 engine that is event-driven. I used it quite a bit in the past year without actually understanding what it truly does - Run Javascript without a browser. Including applications that use JS. According to the instructions above, Cloud9 is an IDE (Integraded Development Enviroment) where you write, run, and debug code of popular programming languages. CodeStar builds and deploys the applications: "Create service role?" "Why yes, I believe I will." The above image is from the instructions linked above. On the project template page, I pick Node.js: Then I name it 'nodejs-serverless-project' 'serverless-brooklyn' It's not as if the name prevents the tutorial from working, right? And I select AWS CodeCommit. CodeStar will set up a complete integration pipeline (While monitoring with CloudWatch), Co

Yes, There Are Competent IT and Cyberprofessionals Out There, If You're Not Cheap.

The updated (and frankly, better written and edited) version will be on my Medium blog December 7th, 2020 with the title " The Myth of the Tech Talent Shortage and The Cost To Your Business ." My Medium profile is here . This post is getting attention again: Hi. I like to think I've gotten less angry than when this was posted (Though I still think it's true, the times have changed with COVID-19, and I could have worded this more constructively). I'm pivoting to different areas of IT; Check the services and projects tag.   It's still BS that there aren't more part time positions in IT and tech. It's not like the talent isn't plentiful.  From Pexels.com Atlanta, Georgia Baltimore, Maryland Newark, New Jersey Savannah, Georgia What do they have in common? They have been the victim of serious cyberattacks on their infrastructure. Said attacks cost the affected city governments and companies more than 30$million dollars .

Return of the Toy 2: Walmart and Mattel Ensure That The Empire Strikes Back

Article Not content to let Target and Toys R Us have all the fun this holiday season , a new toy titanship has emerged: Walmart and Mattel have teamed up for KidHQ, a giant, digital catalog. I appreciate that the website is unlike other things in the marketing sphere, openly pointing out that this is advertising. We are here to sell to you. All for brand engagement , of course. When you make people think a brand is their friend, they're likely to buy. After all: Marketers receive aggregated, anonymized data on purchases through KidHQ and how visitors interact with different toys, [Ivy] Sheibar said And data is worth more than gold. Time to talk about Mattel's past few years.  In 2015, they lost a very lucrative contract - The right to make Disney Princess dolls. Why? “We took Disney for granted. We weren’t focusing on them,” [Chris] Sinclair says. “Shame on us.” [ source ] Also, Mattel had made its own fairy tale heroine line with "Ever After High&q

AWS: Connecting to an EC2 Linux Instance

Haven't practiced this in a few months. Back to establish the basics. Before, I just jumped into the available white papers on Amazon's site. While informative, a lot of it went over my head. Learning the simpler things such as using EC2, Linux, and puTTY works to make the information stick. I'm using the yearly free tier of AWS for practice. Many things are run on Amazon's infrastructure - like Netflix. Have to keep up with that! But how do you use puTTY to connect to your Instance? You change the key Amazon gives you (.pem) to one with a .ppk extension using puTTYGen. Key blocked. Then you use said adjusted key, your given login name, and your public DNS IPv4 chain-code thing on your EC2 Management page (the blanked out square under 'Host Name (or IP Address)'). DNS IPv4 Chain-Code blocked. We have connectivity! What happened? I spun up a Virtual Machine on EC2 / AWS, installed an Amazon-variant of Linux, and SSH'd into it with pu