Fiber carries light

Lighting the way for progress

Not when fiber breaks

– Paul Schuh

I wrote this haiku a few years ago as I was testing fiber trunk lines between two campus buildings to locate a suspected break.

Async Cables

Serial cables

Front of Rack

Rear view of rack

Setting up my CCNA Lab routers this evening. Have everything mounted in the rack and cabled together. At the core of the set up, I have a 3620 with an async card in it that gives me terminal/console access to everything in the rack without having to swap the console cables around. I just telnet to a specific port off the 3620 to access a particular device.

For example, when I want to connect to the router connected to Async line 6, I just connect with: “telnet c3620 6006″

Here are some shots of my current set up.

First shot is a close up of the octo-cables coming out of the Cisco 3620. Each line goes to a serial interface on other equipment in the rack. Right now, I’m using 10 serial lines. The interface here supports up to 32 serial lines — so I’ve got a bit of room for growth.

The next shot is the inter connecting serial DTE/DCE cables between each Cisco 2600 router. The router with four serial interfaces is connected to four separate 2600’s — one, two, three, and four. One and Two are further connected to each other, as are three and four in this particular set up.

Finally, here are two shots, one of the front of the rack and another of the rear of the rack.  Below the routers is a shelf where I have a couple of Linux boxes that I use as nodes on the networks for testing connectivity between different router setups/configurations.

I’m building a lab at the house to use to study for CCNA and CCNP certification. On the left are some old Cisco routers and switches scrounged from work. On the right are some routers and switches I bought on eBay. I have a Cisco 3620 with an Async cable connected to all of the console ports so I can access all of the systems console ports thought the 3620.

It’s just about ready to go — I’m just waiting for an order of DCE/DTE crossover cables to arrive and then I’m in business. I hope to be able to get things set up so that I can administratively reconfigure the systems without having to make a lot of patch cable changes to create different scenarios… we’ll see.

Finally, in the bottom left corner, is an Ubuntu Linux system I’m using for general management of the switches. It’s got tftpd set up, and can receive syslog messages from the systems if I need to do some heavyweight log troubleshooting. Eventually, I hope to get it set up as a TACACS server as well.

Update #1 — mounted the equipment into a rack that was donated to this cause.

I’m testing auto-blogging via Flickr from my iPhone.

Cornell University Dragon Day 2008

Dragon Day is an annual event that occurs on the last day of classes before Spring Break on the Cornell University Ithaca campus.

Cornell Architecture students create a huge dragon float and carry it down towards the Engineering Quad to taunt the Engineering students.

When the dragon procession reaches the engineering quad area, the engineering students block the path of the dragon with their own creation, a phoenix. A “battle” ensues and then the entire procession heads up along Ho Plaza towards the Arts Quad — where the floats are ceremoniously cremated in a bonfire.

Note the Phoenix did not make it to the bonfire this year.

Full Dragon Day 2008 photo stream is here: http://tinyurl.com/2bxa5j

You can listen to the show along with photos from the studio on the Snake Oil Salesmen website here.

Here I am in my new Utilikilt at the Snake Oil Salesmen 16 Feb 2008 gig. We played at The Nines in Ithaca, NY and it was an amazing concert — I’m processing all of the audio and video and hope to get some things posted to the Snake Oil Salesmen website within a few days.

The kilt was the birthday present mentioned in an earlier blog post. It is so comfortable to wear, I’ve already ordered a second one, and I’m planning to purchase a third. So far, I’ve done all my ordering from The Kilted Nation in Manassas, VA and they’ve been very responsive both in shipping as well as a few pre-sales support questions. I’ve got a conference (Internet Security Training Workshop) I will be attending in Virginia early next month and I plan to stop by their brick-and-mortar store when I get a chance.

I’ll expose the details about the gift later this month as long as its not too cold.

Daily Zen