Author Archives: Humair
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
How Perl/Python Scripts on Force10 S60 Switches Can Access the Internet
Let’s say you have a Force10 S60 switch [FTOS 8.3.3.4] hooked-up at a datacenter that currently has a console connection connected to a management switch that provides external Internet access. The natted IP address is 10.0.8.10/24 and the external IP … Continue reading