Winter Weather Reminder

As I’m sure you all know, we have been hit with winter weather again.  Just as a reminder, please check with local radio/TV stations about whether or not we have class — they will have the details.

And in celebration, here’s a weatherman I’d love to have on WBKO:

Troubleshooting Applications – 2/9/2010

Today we looked at our Office installations and discussed various things that might hang us up in a corporate environment.  Things like hardware requirements (although even Office 2010 has relatively low hardware requirements) as well as licensing issues.   We discussed the concept of volume licensing, which, if you’re getting Office put on a large number of computers (I’d say, more than 3!) you can buy product keys instead of multiple retail copies and install Office across your network that way.  We then covered personalization functionality within Office and played with it, making Office our own (and how to help users when they may inadvertently do something that makes the usage experience less than ideal.

Homework:

• Study for your midterm!!!

Troubleshooting OS – 2/9/2010

Chapters 8 and 9 were on the agenda for the day, which meant we were talking about troubleshooting storage devices and printers.

Tackling storage devices first, we dove straight in to mostly hard drives.  Windows supports either basic disks (which usually is fine) and dynamic disks (which provide us with a few more options).   We went over several hard drive tasks such as creating new partitions, formatting, converting file systems, changing drive letters, and more.  Being a troubleshooting class, we went over a couple of ways to manage and maintain (and repair) hard disks, including disk defragmenter, chkdsk, and Disk Cleanup.  We also discussed some good 3rd party solutions (some of which will appear on the Ben’s Toolbox CD coming later this quarter).

Moving on to printers, we talked about how Windows handles print jobs.  Very old versions of Windows allowed direct hardware access to printer ports, and allowed software direct control over what got printed and how.  For compatibility reasons and computer experience reasons, Windows changed this to require that printing be done via Windows’ print management feature.  As such, it’s helpful that we recognize and be able to discuss the new Windows print model, and so we covered that in class.

We then went over how to install a local printer, a network printer, and a TCP/IP printer (which a lot of people mistakenly call a network printer).  We dove deep into the Properties box of our printers and discussed many of the features, controls of that and introduced a term that Microsoft loves to test you on: Printer pools.  We also explored the NTFS permissions that you can assign to printers to allow or disallow users access to them.

Homework:

• Take Home Test #5 – download it here.

Designing NI-AD – 2/8/2010

Piggy backing what we discussed last week in the NSA 285 class, we discussed today setting up the IP addressing scheme for a network . This is important as you need to balance future growth verses IP address waste.  We discussed and practiced with setting up IP addressing schemes and discussed implications of those addresses and what we might do to accomodate future growth without disrupting access for our users while we do.

Since DHCP will likely be the vehicle by which we configure our clients, we revisited it, with a focus on distributing addresses across different subnets (therefore, across routers).  As we’ve covered, many routers do not pass the broadcast packets that DHCP clients use to initiate configuration, so if a DHCP server is in another subnet (and thus, on the other side of a router), the DHCP client will not be able to get their packet across to the server.  As we’ve covered before, the way to get DHCP packets across a router is by configuring a DHCP Relay Agent, which effectively smuggles the packet across the router.  Conversely, we can also set teh router up to forward packets, provided that the router is RFC-1542 compliant, however, this allows broadcasting to traverse the router and therefore hit the subnets that connect to it.  Depending on the size of the subnets and the amount of broadcasting that happens, this can have adverse ramifications on the network.

Homework:

• Take Home Test #04 – download it here.

Planning NI/AD – 2/8/2010

In today’s class, we discussed Chapter 5, covering the ever-elusive question of how do we get Internet connection to our network computers without buying an AOL account for each one.  (Ha!)

Just as a reminder, and to make sure we’re all on the same page, the Internet is simply a connection of thousands (millions?) of networks, all “touching” one another.  The way we get a packet of information from one network (such as the one in our home) to another network (such as the network of our Aunt Sue) is by sending that packet out to the inter-connected structure of devices that make up the Internet.  That structure is largely made up of routers.  As we discussed, routers basically have their feet in a couple of different LANs and can transform a packet from one LAN to another.  These routers operate very swiftly, passing packets from one LAN to another to another until eventually the packet arrives to Aunt Sally’s LAN.  It looks like this:

There are a number of ways of launching your packet out from your LAN to the vast sprawling chaos we call the Internet, and we briefly discussed each one: Dial-up modem, ISDN, CATV and DSL,Leased lines, andFrame relay.  Each method has its strengths and weaknesses, and when you’re planning your network around the established requirements, you’ll need to choose the appropriate method based on your needs and budget.

What discussion would be without a mention of security?  Of course, there are security concerns we should keep in mind as we are setting up access.  We need to identify any applications or users that we don’t want using the internet, as well as setting up policies on how allowed applications and users do use the Internet.

In older days, each computer that had Internet access actually sat on the Internet.  This was scary because not only was this computer extremely vulnerable, it would use up an IP address, which is a finite resource.  To overcome these obstacles, NAT was developed.  NAT stands for Network Address Translation, and it allows us to set up LANs with “private” IP addresses, and then funnel them through a “public” IP address.  The NAT server keeps up with which computer is what, and to the Internet, all computers behind the NAT server appear to be coming from the same public IP address.  This keeps computers somewhat safer, as it (assuming we’re smart) puts firewalls and other security devices in between the Internet connection and our computer, and also hides individual machines away from the prying eyes of the ‘net.

Microsoft has a solution for a NAT server (proxy server too) called the Internet Acceleration Server 2006.   Using IAS, we can set up policies for users to get Internet access and to actually require only authenticated users to access the Internet.  Think of it as NTFS permissions for Internet Access.

As a reminder, you will be taking a midterm exam next week over Chapters 1-5.  Make sure you’re ready!!!

Homework:

• Take Home Test #04 – download it here.

EXTRA CREDIT!!!

Hooooo-boy.

It’s extra credit time!  Some of you are itching for this, and some of you aren’t (ironically, it’s usually those who need it the most are itching the least…  hmm…).  But either way, here’s your opportunity to rack up an additional 10 extra credit points for whatever class you’d like!  All you have to do is turn in a paper to me before the START of the class you’d like it applied in.  For example,if you want it applied to your Tuesday afternoon class, you must have it turned in to me by 12:30p on Tuesday.  If you turn it in at 12:31p on Tuesday, it’s late and you get no points!  So enough with the overhead, here’s the gig:

Recently, Google announced that its online applications will cease to support Internet Explorer 6 (IE7 and IE8 are still supported) on March 1.  Here’s the Google Blog announcing this.

In order to earn the full 10 points, your paper should be reasonably well-written and answer these questions:

• What are the implications for home users?  Corporate users?
• What are the implications for browser vendors other than Microsoft?
• What are the implications, if any, for corporate IT departments?
• Why is this a big deal?

You will likely need to use outside resources.  I’d recommend typing “Google ends IE6 support” into your search engine to get rolling.

The paper is due by the start of your class during the week of February 7.  Good luck!

Implementing Network Infrastructure – 2/4/2010

Tonight’s class covered Chapter 4, the chapter where we actually manipulate and work with DNS, not simply setting it up (although that’s important!).  We looked at DNScmd, DNSlint, NSLookup, and monitoring DNS from day to day.

Homework:

• Take Home Test #04 – download it here.

CompTIA Network+ – 2/3/2010

Today we really hit it hard and played some catch up.  From a topical point of view, it was actually a good thing, since what we talked about in Chapters 6-8 all centered around the same thing: the IP protocol and how it is responsible for packets flying around and getting to their destinations correctly.

Chapter 6 worked as an introduction into the TCP/IP protocol.  We first started by examining the Department of Defense (DoD) model for networking.  It lines up with the OSI model, but is slightly different in terminology and layout.  The TCP/IP protocol, the main protocol for the Internet, uses the DoD model directly, so its important that we study and get to know about it.

Chapter 7 was about the IP addressing protocol directly.  Specifically, we talked about IPv4 (the one we’re most used to) and then IPv6 (one that looks a little scary on the surface, but is really not all that bad).

Chapter 8 I used as a very brief introduction into subnetting.  We will tackle this head on next quarter, but I thought it might be nice to get to know some of the concepts now.  Make sure you know about this, it’s very important as you go forward into your networking administration careers!

Homework:

• Chapter 6 Review Questions
• Chapter 7 Review Questions
• Chapter 8 Review Questions

Troubleshooting Apps – 2/2/2010

Today we looked at Chapter 5, which about configuring Internet Explorer.  We looked at things such as cookies, zones within which IE can operate and how to configure them to behave, individual policy settings, and some tips on running secure with IE.

Homework:

• Take Home Test #4 – download it here.

Troubleshooting OS – 2/2/2010

Happy Groundhog’s Day!!!

We started the day by taking our midterm exam, over the first half of the book.  After you guys made clean work of it, we went back to our learnin’ and dove into Chapter 7, the chapter about hardware and how Windows XP handles it.  We first looked at displays, and how to configure them.  Mostly, this was a review from the A+ class most of you had last quarter, and we talked about things like refresh rates and screen resolution.  We then moved to generic I/O devices, including keyboards and mice, and how to configure them inside of Windows.  We spent an amount of time talking about USB.

Lastly, we moved to talking about ACPI power schemes.  As the theme of environmentally sound computing makes its way through IT (it makes a whole lot of sense, really), knowing about the power-saving features of a computer and/or OS is very important, and it’s important to know how to troubleshoot them.

Next week, we’ll talk move into Chapters 8 and 9, and continue to do 2 chapters each week.  Adjust your calendars accordingly.

Homework:

• Take Home Test #4 – download it here.