News From Nikki!

As some of you know, Nikki Prewitt, one of our NSA students, has had to be on bedrest this quarter. You might be interested in this e-mail I received from her today:

Hey Ben,

I had Isaac yesterday, 4/28/08 at 8:32 am. He was 7 weeks early, but he was 4 lbs 14 and 1/2 oz. So pretty healthy weight! He was on a ventilator all day yesterday but is now breathing on his own! And feeding through a tube at this point but he’s having a really good day today. They are saying he could be here 2-4 weeks, which is ok with us since he is getting all the care he needs. And as for me, I’m good, I had a natural birth with no epidural, so I’m pretty proud of myself haha! I’ll be going home tomorrow but coming up here everyday until we get to take him home! I hope all is going well with you and your family! Children are the best thing in life. Tell the guys I said hello!

Troubleshooting – 4/29/2008

Welcome back to troubleshooting! Today we looked at chapters 7 – 9.

Homework:

• Chapter Seven: Review Questions
• Chapter Eight: Review Questions
• Chapter Nine: Review Questions

Network+ – 4/29/2008

Today we actually put our money where our mouths are and used some of the TCP/IP tools that we discussed last week. Most entertainingly, we edited our HOSTS file and turned Google in Yahoo. Several of you discussed outside applications for this method, and it should be interesting to see the results of it.

In addition, we also used tools such as ARP, NETSTAT, NBTSTAT, TRACERT, PING, IPCONFIG, etc.

Homework:

• Chapter 3: Review Questions
• Chapter 4: Review Questions

MS Exchange – 4/28/2008

Hey, sorry you punks missed class tonight. Todd and I basically sat around and shot the breeze until we left at 6:00. We’ll make it up next week. Yee-haw.

Homework:

• Actually come to class next week.

Implementing Network Infrastructure – 4/28/2008

When the prospect of installing updates individually on 1,500 client machines makes your head boggle, think SUS. When the prospect of those same 1,500 clients connecting to the Internet to download XP SP3 tomorrow sucking up all that bandwidth, think SUS.

SUS stands for Software Update Systems and is a great solution for administrators looking to have a happy medium between total manual updating and total automatic updating. It’s ease with control — it’s having your cake and eating it too.

But SUS wasn’t all that was on the agenda today. We also explored Routing and Remote Access (RRAS) which basically turned our poor helpless server into a router. Since routers take packets and move them between different networks, that’s what we worked on with RRAS, in several different implementations. One way was the create VPNs and connect to our server via a “dial-up connection”. In addition, we also used RRAS to implement a packet filtering feature which, in our implementation, blocked all access to TCP port 80 (which if you remember from previous discussions, is the port used for HTTP, or web, access.)

Remember, next week we have our Checkpoint Exam over the 70-291 material.

Homework:

• Chapter 7: Review Questions
• Chapter 8: Review Questions

Critical Thinking – 4/23/2008

We discussed stereotyping — a function that people are hard-wired to do — in depth today. First, we got in groups of two and made first impressions of people and then made judgments about them. We then compared those judgments to the actual truth, and in many times it was pretty funny how far off some of them were (Brandon was perceived to be an avid exerciser, but turns out, he barely leaves the couch). After that, we whiteboarded various things we look at when judging people and then drew conclusions based on them. Some of the stereotypes were admittingly ridiculous, but were great examples of where our brains go when we let them.

Homework:

• Bring your DiSC assessments in, so we can discuss them. See Jeremy Atwell (or e-mail him) if you no longer have your DiSC report
• Be ready for our field trip to Greenwood Mall next week!

Troubleshooting – 4/22/2008

Today was simply a checkpoint exam.  Overall, decent grades, but I would have liked to have seen better.

Next week we get back into normal classroom operations.  We’ll do that for a couple of weeks, have a second checkpoint exam and then get into the fun stuff: fixing computers!  Be thinking of computers that you could bring in to fix and be asking around if any friends or family have any they’d like to have fixed by students for free.

Seriously, it’s going to a blast.

Homework:

• Read Chapters 7-9

Network+ – 4/22/2008

Now that we’ve talked about the OSI model (you do have all seven layers memorized, right??), we talked today about the real-life implementation of that in the most common networking protocol we see today, TCP/IP. To do that, we compared the OSI to the Department of Defense (DoD) model. Doing that we were able to line up various aspects of the TCP/IP protocol to the varying functionalities that the DoD set out to accomplish in their model.

The point of all this talk is to show you specifically what each of these differing technologies do. For example, the TCP/IP ARP tool exists on OSI Level 3 (the Network layer). We know that OSI3 is responsible for directing data packets to the various different destination points they are headed to. Knowing that ARP is responsible for showing us what MAC addresses are assigned to which IP address, it makes sense that ARP would exist on the layer responsible for making sure data gets to where it’s going.

On the OSI 5- 7 layers, we specifically talked about several tools that TCP/IP provide us with and discussed what many of them actually do. In addition, we went over the default port numbers that each of these tools use (FTP uses port 21, DNS uses port 53, etc.). It would do you a lot of good to know which tools use which port numbers (if they aren’t in your book, they are listed in the handout for chapter 3, downloadable on your right).

Homework:

• Chapter 3: Review Questions
• Make sure you know OSI and port numbers for next week!

MS Exchange – 4/21/2008

Tonight’s class finally dealt with real-live Exchange activities. Specifically, we dealt inside the System Manager, and played with the Delegation of Control wizard. Basically, we learne that you have to be an Exchange Full Admin in order to delegate control.

Due to equal parts pretty weather, my laziness and Clay’s incessant whining, I called class out early tonight. Enjoy the sun, see you guys next week!

Homework:

• Chapter 3: Review Questions

Implementing NI – 4/21/2008

Securing our server communication was the topic at hand today.  The first chapter we covered today, chapter 5, dealt with security in a general sense, discussing topics such as:

• the differences between permissions and rights
• using Security Configuration and Analysis
• EFS (Encrypting File System)

Next, after a good hearty meal of Taco Bell, we moved on to Chapter 6, which dealt with IPSec.  IPSec is simply a way to encrypt TCP/IP communication.  This technology is typically used to lock down Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and protect them from the prying eyes of the Internet.  One of the coolest exercises we did today (and actually one of my favorites we do in the whole program) was to use Network Monitor to intercept data transmission and analyze it.  Using Network Monitor, we were able to see first-hand why FTP communication is so dangerous — user names and passwords are both sent completely unencrypted.  To try and battle against this obvious danger, we implemented an IPSec policy which encrypted FTP communication and allowed anyone “sniffing” packets to get just a bunch of garbled mess.

Homework:

• Chapter Five: Review Questions
• Chapter Six: Review Questions