Anyways sometimes Packet Tracer as like as dynamips/gns3 are not a panacea when it’s necessary to emulate mid-sized network or test some specific ios features on real Cisco devices. There are several options: the first and the easiest one means to buy Cisco device. But we all know that Cisco’s pricing policy is far away from democratic in application to individual users so even used or refurbished Cisco router/switch will cost enough to think about another option. Second option is to schedule access to Community Lab at packetlife.net. Nice to know the access to it is absolutely free so anyone can get logon to Cisco routers, switches or ASAs once user reached his/her timeslot. Here is the list of hardware you can have access to (there are multiple devices of the same model):

Cisco ASA 5505
Cisco 2811 (2xWIC-2T)
Cisco 1841 (1xWIC-2T)
Cisco Catalyst 3550-24

Not bad for free lab as for me. The lab is broken into two blocks so user can reserve only one block or both blocks simultaneously. This is to make it possible to access the lab by multiple users simultaneously. Devices are connected to each other according to predefined topology — see separate diagrams for Ethernet and Serial connections below (they are split to prevent overhead on the graph I guess). All documentation as well as FAQs can be found here: here and here. Thanks to Jeremy Stretch.

P.S. By the way if you can share any other similar labs allowing people on the web to access Cisco (or some other networking devices) — you are welcome to share this information here. Thanks!

P.S. Previous hot post is here.

1. Cisco IOS Versions what’s this?)
2. Physical Terminations/Connectors (what’s this?)
3. VLANs (what’s this?)
4. Quality of Service (what’s this?)
5. MPLS (what’s this?)
6. IP Access Lists what’s this?)
7. Spanning Tree (what’s this?)
8. OSPF (what’s this?)
9. EIGRP (what’s this?)
10. BGP (what’s this?)

11. General Cisco IOS cheat sheet (router/switch commands etc.)
12. Cisco Commands for Beginners
13. Descriptive list of Cisco Commands (fresh)
14. Cisco IOS Firewall Cheat Sheet (Official Design Guide)
15. Cisco – Ethernet Encapsulation (in pdf)
16. Mini CCNA Cheat Sheet
17. CCNA Cheat Sheet (commands debugging)
18. Connector Pinouts Cheat Sheets

Great thanks to Jeremy Stretch (author of packetlife.net) for the first 10 cheat sheets from above list (to get them all just download this package).

1. Canonical Store is to sell multimedia codecs for Ubuntu. Codecs are developed by Fluendo and Cyberlink. It is still possible to do sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras and get that staff installed…
2. In A comparative look at compact sysadmin distributions article Cory Buford shares the observations he got during review of several portable (not more 210 Mb) Linux distros which may be helpful to handle “minor catastrophes”. BTW I prefer RIPLinuX
3. T-Mobile, Google and HTC announce that first phone based on Android platform will be out next week (23th of September 2008).
4. Google is going to launch its own “computer navy” (sea floating data centres). Now jokes – rumors.
5. Codeweavers company has adapted Google Chrome browser for Linux and Mac platform.
6. Mozilla asks to display firefox EULA in Ubuntu 8.10. Some people are really disturbed about that.
7. XFCE 4.6 first alpha is out for public testing.

And we just launched Linux and Open Source News aggregator at Linux Screw, so you are welcome to set it your homepage

Sounds strangely? Just read below!

Computing centres are located on a ship or ships, anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away.

This text was somehow seen by The Times in this patent application written by Google… Rather interesting article is published at their site. As for me, I didn’t know that Microsoft is planning to build data centres in cold climes of Siberia or that Sun is going to place its supercomputers in abandoned coal (see cold) mine…

By the way all data centers around the world consumed about 1% of all electricity in 2005. How do you think, what would be in 2009?

Useful Links:
Data Center Knowledge
Discussion at Slashdot

And these days I came across a good article “Shell Games” (by Marcus Nasarek) telling about above mentioned matters…

Both Bash and the Windows Vista PowerShell include commands for navigating directories, managing files, and launching other programs. System administration is an important duty for the shell, and Bash and PowerShell are equipped to help manage systems from the command prompt. Whereas Bash typically relies on a combination of newer tools and classic Unix utilities, the PowerShell has its own set of command-line programs. Windows refers to PowerShell commands as cmdlets. The PowerShell cmdlet called Get-Process is a counterpart to ps, and the cmdlet Get-Content corresponds to less. PowerShell differs significantly from previous Windows command shells. In this article, I look at how Windows Vista PowerShell compares with Bash. Read more >>

More useful links:

1. Microsoft PowerShell official page
2. Bash Reference Manual
3. GNU Bash for Windows

1. Open Source Alternative
Quick and useful guide to the best open source software. You can fing here the open source alternatives to your favorite commercial products (not only Windows ones). The main advantage of this site is that you can browse through their software categories and compare pros and cons of both commercial products as well as open source software.

2. The Linux Alternative Project

The goal is to provide an informational and available website for all linux users. I will be periodically updating the database with Windows software and the Linux equivalents and alternatives.

Nice and simple site to find Windows software alternative project name and see comments on it for your Linux box.

3. Linux Screw’s Windows Software => Linux Software page
That page is based on Linux Alternative Project’s staff but it is updated more often and contains some new applications suggested by our visitors. You are welcome to leave a comment and offer and Linux or Windows application you wish to be added to Linux Screw’s software equivalents list.

4. LinuxQuestions.org’s Linux Software equivalents page
This is categorized list of programs that was prepared to prevent duplicating threads like “Where can I get a program for Linux that is similar to XYZ program on Windows?”. Useful and informative list.

5. Windows-Linux Software
Russian table of equivalents / replacements / analogs of Windows software in Linux. Very informative and descriptive. The page is available in many languages including English, Russian, Italian, Spanish, French, German and others.

Of course you are welcome to use Google to find needed software

Here is the nice article to read in which UbuntuCat (one of the most active writers at ubuntuforums.org) tries to find out how did Ubuntu end up so popular…

I think this goes along with the forums being less intimidating, but associating the Ubuntu “Humanity Towards Others” philosophy with the distro seemed to give it a purpose and a flavor beyond mere technology. Read more >>

We have all run into cases where Windows refuses to load for one reason or another. The problem may be a hardware or a software failure, and the problem may seem to be irrecoverable. Yet often Linux can be used to help recover data that otherwise might be lost.

In writing this paper, we generally assume that either a Linux workstation is available to accept recovery information or that a USB drive of sufficient size is available to hold the data. Generally in either case, enough free space should be available to store the entire hard drive as a bit-for-bit file and still have at least 2GB of space free. However, if more space is available, the process of organizing the recovered data is a bit easier. If neither of these is available, the utility of Linux in data recovery will be limited.

Download this document in as pdf format here. You can read interesting comments on their site by clicking at this link.

By the way, Port 25 site is copyrighted by Microsoft under the Microsoft Permissive License that is available here.

Install mkpasswd in Debian or any other distro containing APT by command:

sudo apt-get install -y mkpasswd

For some reason Ubuntu’s repository contains makepasswd that was written by Marco d’Itri and has similar functionality. To install it run sudo apt-get install makepasswd.

Generate strong password by executing mkpasswd or makepasswd in command line.

Examples:

makepasswd --char=10
mkpasswd -s "salt"

Another way is to get strong password online with www.goodpassword.com that provides you with service free of charge.