Monthly Archives: May 2011

Cisco Port Security with Dynamic MAC Address Learning

In this lab I used a Cisco Catalyst WS-C3560G-24TS switch [IOS Version 12.2(40)SE]. Using Cisco Port Security it is possible to associate a static MAC address to a physical port on a switch. This only allows one host with that … Continue reading

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How to Fix – Force10 S4810 Switch Stuck in Boot Loop

In this blog I discuss how to fix a common boot loop problem. A boot loop can occur if you change the boot variables for a switch and accidentally put in incorrect information. You may also make a typo when … Continue reading

Posted in Force10 Networks, Networking, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

pNIC, vNIC, and vmNIC Confusion

I have been using both remote desktop and vSphere Client quite often lately. Yesterday, I had a remote desktop session with a Windows Server 2003 physical server and also had vSphere Client (connected to an ESXi server) open with a … Continue reading

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Functionality of Layer 2 Switches/Bridges

Layer 2 switches and bridges switch frames on a network while layer 3 routers route packets between networks. I once heard a network engineer being asked if a network can be made faster if the network is optimized to use … Continue reading

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Facebook Hack – How “shared” is your website on Facebook?

In this blog I describe a cool little data mining hack you can use to determine how “shared” a specific website is on Facebook. Let’s say you want to determine how often the “http://www.cnet.com” site has been “shared” on Facebook. … Continue reading

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Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop

This blog explains how to use Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop. The Remote Desktop technology allows a user to connect remotely to a Windows server using a thin client to display the Windows graphical user interface (GUI). In Windows … Continue reading

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Setup SSH Access on Cisco Switches

The Cisco Catalyst WS-C3750G-24TS [IOS 12.2(25)SEE3] switch provides both layer 2 and layer 3 functionality. In this lab I’m going to demonstrate how to setup SSH access to the switch. The first thing I do is set a hostname and … Continue reading

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VMware vSphere 4 Step-through

VMware vSphere is an industry leading virtualization platform. Basically it is a software suite composed of applications directed towards managing datacenters through the use of virtualization technology. I’m going to briefly discuss some of the major/core components of vSphere 4. … Continue reading

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Setup Telnet Access on Force10 Switches

I am going to use a Force10 S60 switch [FTOS 8.3.3.4] to demonstrate how to setup telnet access. To setup telnet access you first need to set an IP address on either a data port or a managment port so … Continue reading

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Creating a Link Aggregation Group (LAG) in FTOS

This lab demonstrates how to create a Link Aggregation Group (LAG) in FTOS on Force10 switches. A LAG in Force10’s FTOS is called a port channel and in Cisco’s IOS is called an EtherChannel. As described by IEEE 802.3ad, LAG … Continue reading

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