Kablam!

The earliest time that I can remember that influenced my love of technology. It is pretty hazy. Even when I look back to that time it’s very hard to remember. It was a time when I was merely 6 years old. My parents had brought me to this country a few days after they celebrated my 4^th birthday in the Dominican Republic only 2 years prior to this event. My control of the english language was still primitive and I had trouble adjusting to the new environment I was placed in.

While sitting in my 1^st grade class staring at the multicolored tile floor angry at myself. All the other students had gone to the Gym for PE. I was left behind because I became very frustrated with the fact I was unable to grasp what the other students had already, the ability to read.

Teacher had kept me in class to try to give me some personal instruction. Shortly after she read to me the ABC’s and how to pronounce them properly. She handed me a book and moved towards some other teachers for a short meeting. I don’t really remember the name of the book that was handed to me. But, it was something involving technology.

My basic ability to read only went so far. I couldn’t make out all the words on each page. But what influenced me were the pictures of Technicians soldiering wires, Programmers sitting at their desks typing away, Engineers drawing wiring schematics, and those people wearing white suits that make processors. They are burned into my memory. Those pictures made me wish I was one of them. They were all engineers, inventors, programmers, mathematicians, scientists, physicists, architects, and technicians. These are the people I look up to and aspired to be for the rest of my known life.

My eyes were wide open with excitement to see all the toys they get to play with. I didn’t really understand that they were at work. When teacher returned from her meeting I told her “I wish I could play with their toys”. The other teachers in the room who were looking on laughed and then walked away. I didn’t really understand why they laughed. But it didn’t change my focus on those people I saw in that book.

In the future I wish to make that dream come true. To be a professional network engineer helping develop solutions to issues people have on a daily basis. To this day I feel absolutely great when I get a new problem that needs to be solved. These problems that people give me are usually technology related and the joy I get when doing these tasks always brings me back to those old memories from my childhood. Sometimes I wonder if I had achieved that boyhood dream but then I realize that I haven’t. To be professional requires much more. The more I’ve worked and learned. The more I realize the complexity of making that dream materialize. To play with all those “toys” and work with other professionals would be my life’s dream. These last 4 years were my hardest years working towards that dream but I will achieve it before I turn 30.

I’ve decided to hold back on taking the ICDN1 exam until I at least finish CISCO CCNA Exploration 3. I feel I am ready but want to much make sure before I slap down $125 for the exam. Those exams are some of the toughest in the industry and failing an exam would be a waste of money. In the mean time I have my trustee home Networking lab.

Currently the lab is a mix of simulaters and actual equipment.

Real stuff

3 Cisco cat 2950 12 port Managed switches (IOS 12.3a)

1 Cisco 2501 Router

Netgear GS108T 8 port Gigabit managed switch

http://hphotos-snc6.fbcdn.net/280255_215157851853500_100000778611381_549623_7875558_o.jpg

My main computer

CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 940

Motherboard: MSI K9A2

Ram: 4GB DDR2 1066Mhz

HD: 2x 74GB 15k RPM SAS/SCSI (Raid 0 promise) Fujitsu

2x 320GB 7.2k RPM SATAII Seagate (Raid 0 AMD chipset)

1x 1.5TB Western digital Green

GPU: 4x AMD Radeon 4870 1GB (4GB Frame buffer total) Quad Crossfire

Fake stuff

Virtualbox (VM)

• Ubuntu Server 10.10
• Windows XP Pro 4 guest sessions

Dynamips (GNS3) Simulator

Cisco 2690 IOS 12.4

If you are viewing this site and ever wondered what that header pic is from. It is from the video game Eve online. I play it occasionally. Very fun game.

The pic is actually me finding myself at the core system of the game. The name of the system is “New Eden”. I got pooped out from a wormhole right there. Always wanted to visit but never had the time. So falling into the system made my toes tingle and I just had to screenshot it. It was taken nearly 2 years ago.

Since then I’d seen every region in the game. Recently I decided to return to my roots. Being in wormhole space brings back old memories. It is truly the pinocle of the game. Living in a place so hostile yet beautiful.

Wormhole space is similar to how it would be like for us early humans during the space exploration age. Exploring the vastness of space, never knowing who or what will threaten you, and what treasures you’ll find. It makes you feel happy when things go well. But when it doesn’t you feel absolute despair. This is the ultimate playground for eve veterans.

After looking very carefully at my network. I’ve identified that there are many areas that need work. From a normal consumer point of view my network is pretty good for a home. But not from a network engineers point of view.

The router (or should I say multifunction device because it technically doesn’t route) supplied by my ISP Verizon is very weak. It is incapiable of supporting the level of traffic coming from all my devices. I have 3 laptops, 3 desktops, 3 smart phones, 2 printers, and a console. I’ll note that I’ll be possibly adding more devices once my money situation lightens.

Here is the sucker right here.

It is only able to sustain a max of 7500 sessions in its NAT table at any given time. 7500 may seem like a big number. Unfortunately when you have as many computers as me it starts becoming a serious problem.

When at the networks peak the router drops packets constantly and has the slight chance of crashing completely. There is a well known trick on crashing the router by searching for servers in STEAM. At peak time I normally hit 130 servers before it crashes. When the network is not at its highest utilization I can hit about 3200 servers before it poops out. That shows that even when its 3:00am in the morning the computers on the network are still pushing out a lot of requests. Running wireshark showed me that on the desktop end the majority of the traffic is just ARP requests and the machines looking up updates. This is normal but for some weird reason on the wireless end there’s a lot of odd ball requests that I can’t figure out. I mainly don’t use wifi because I have very specific requirements that aren’t able to be handled by wireless tech. This ranges from bandwidth, latency, and availability. CSMA/CA just can’t give me that.  Anyway digressing to the router. The thing has hit its last wall. There is no way of improving on it.

To the rescue comes the Cisco 2691 and Netgear FVS338.

I’ll be using the netgear to function as the edge router and do 1 to 1 NAT overload to the router. The router will act as the core router for all internal machines and have a transparent NAT proxy for caching. That’ll help removing the load off the primary router and transfer it to the core router and proxy server.

For the proxy I’ll be running FreeNas. It’ll be acting as the primary network storage device. Should also make it less complicated to access network services then what I got running right now (which btw is a mess lol). As of this writing I haven’t yet purchased the equipment but will post an update once I got some of it running.

Welp, it’s that time of the year again. Time to clean up the joint and get things rolling.

I’ve decided that it was about time that I did something constructive with this site. Besides taking care of the issues in my real life. I think it’s about time I clean up things on this server and try to get some traffic in here. Watch this site because I’ll be adding some sweet content soon!