.. to have a sadistic sense of pleasure when a network outage that you were sure was nothing to do with your infrastructure, after having carried out methodical troubleshooting, proves not to have been your infrastructure?
Answers on a postcard 😉
Love it.
Mine started with an absolute network sh*tstorm at 7:00. After a bit of investigation, found that it was an outage at the ISP, so failed over to the redundant connection by 9:00.. “only” issue was email – the Exchange CAS server is on the other end of the Layer 2 link from the office, and due to a legacy flat subnet at both locations, haven’t implemented redundant links to the datacentre yet.. it’s next on the list!
Took the 70-646 exam re-take yesterday, and passed. Whoohoo!
The day seemed to come very quickly – somewhere in my skewed logic, I’d decided to listen to my CCNA (and a few CCNP TSHOOT) videos during my days laying by the pool at the villa in Cyprus, rather than the 70-646 material. I figured that waiting til I got back to smash the studying would result in the material being fresher in my head.
I hadn’t figured though, on the first day back being a write-off due to getting home at 8:00am, and that the day of the test didn’t really count as a study day due to the travel etc! This left only Tuesday to hit the study, for which I used a slight change of tack and used the 70-646 Official Study Guide, which I have in PDF format on my iPad.
Although this is pre-R2, much of the material is relevant. On the train on the day of the exam, and then while I was waiting at the test centre, I used another PDF, “Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2”, to swot up on the new features. I knew from last time that these would be heavily tested on.
Took the test at QA Ltd in Holborn, which was a much more pleasant experience than ADA, and pretty easy to get to – I’d built resilience in to my route planning, which came in handy as the Circle line had heavy delays 😉
A very similar experience to the first test, the Testlets are still a great way of testing in my opinion; they put you much more in the shoes of a consultant. This really works in terms of making the tests different to the TS level ones.
I did find that it was not always necessary to read though the whole of each testlet scenario; each question specifies the section that you need to comply with, i.e. “Propose a solution which complied with the company’s “Technical Requirements” or “Proposed Changes”; in many cases, reading just these sections gave the answer.
Some of the questions (generally non-Testlet ones) were quite vague, and it was one of those cases where I genuinely didn’t know if I’d passed until it popped up on my screen. I also ran out of time before hitting Next on the last question in the standalone questions – luckily it was only one question!
So now I’m back on the the ICND2, to complete my CCNA. I’ll be using Trainsignal CBT, CBTNuggets, my Cisco Press ICND2 book, and the Chris Bryant Ultimate CCNA Study Package, all of which are already purchased.
Had the strangest experience with mounting virtual Media using Dell Remote Access Cards. I was carrying out an install of CentOS 5.5 with 6 CDs, and had to mount 4 images in total, one after the other.
Steps are:
1. Log in to the DRAC
2. Go to “Remote File Share”
3. Stick in creds with sufficient access rights to the share in question
4. Stick in the image path, using forward slashes instead of backward slashes, and in my case, referencing the server by IP instead of hostname seemed to get the best results
Once you’ve finished with the virtual media, for instance when having to swap disks, I’d expect to have to click “Disconnect”, then edit the path to that of the next ISO, then click “Connect”.
However, this consistently failed to mount the media.
The solution I found after playing around for a while is as follows:
1. Go to “Console / Media”
2. Choose “Configuration”
3. Drop the Virtual Media “Status” drop-down box to “Auto-Attach”, click Apply, confirming the prompt relating to dropping any active vFlash session
4. Drop the Virtual Media “Status” drop-down box to “Attach”, click Apply, confirming the prompt relating to dropping any active vFlash session
5. Go back to “Remote File Share” and edit the path to the media accordingly, then click “Connect”.
Weird sequence of actions here, but this has definitely proved consistent, and allowed me to finally carry out the Linux install remotely.
Server was a new PowerEdge R310, with the Enterprise DRAC card, v6.
Recorded here for my future reference as much as anything, but will hopefully prove useful to someone.
Jims' Network Diary - musings of a network admin 