Network+ – 10/27/2008

Covering the TCP/IP suite of command-line protocols was on the agenda today, for both the morning and evening sessions of this class.  We learned such fun things as the arp command, netstat, nbtstat, etc.

Obviously, you’ll need to know the basics of these commands (or I wouldn’t have wasted your time with them – honest!).  Here’s a run down of some of the more important ones you’ll need to know.

ipconfig /all – This command shows us the nitty-gritty detail of our current IP configuration, including (importantly) our MAC address.

arp –a – This command shows us the contents of the Address Resolution Protocol’s cache – the listing of current IP addresses our computers know and the associated MAC addresses with each one.

tracert site – This command will show us the “hops” that a packet takes as it travels from our host to a remote host somewhere out there.  This is useful for troubleshooting lost connections, in determining where a problem might lie.

netstat –a – This command shows all of the connections that are currently being used by our host – both established and “potentially established” ports.

netstat –e – Interested in seeing the Ethernet statistics of your NIC?  Issue this command.

nbtstat – In general, nbtstat gives us NetBIOS information…

nbtstat –a –A – These switches list a machine’s name table.  The small “a” indicates that the list is sorted by machine name.  The capital “A” indicated the list sorted by IP address.

nbtstat –c – This command shows the NetBIOS cache – the machine’s hostnames as well as their corresponding IP addresses.

Homework:

• Chapter Four – Review Questions

I Need Student Links!

Ok, my Student Links section is in a sorry state — two of the links represent students who have long since graduated, and one represents a student who has long since switched programs!  

Do you have a web site?  A blog, a Facebook page, a Myspace page, etc.??  Please send me your links and I’ll be happy to link to you on the Student Links section on the right.

Please?

Marketing – 10/22/2008

Your instructor is a big fat lazy slob.

Maybe that’s a little extreme.  At any rate, I’ve failed to blog today’s (Wednesday’s) class until now, on Sunday night.  Sorry about that.

Anyway, if any of you are reading, we how marketers use information to make decisions.  I could get into a rehash here, but I won’t.  

Homework:

• Chapter Four: Company Case

Implementing NI/AD – 10/21/2008

Hey guys, sorry for the late post (things just got away from me this week!

Anyway, we covered chapters 6 and 7 today (last Tuesday) on IPSec and WSUS.  IPSec, if you’ll remember, is a way of encrypting our packets of information in a way that is hardware independent, allowing us to block certain kinds of traffic and even encrypt previously unencryptable traffic, like our plain-text FTP traffic.

WSUS, as we’ve discussed before, is a way to have an in-house Automatic Update server.  The advantage of this, of course, is that you save on bandwidth from “the cloud” and you as an admin can test out updates before you deploy them to all of your users.

Homework:

• Chapter Six: Review Questions
• Chapter Seven: Review Questions

Extra Credit!!!

Here’s a good bit of no-brainer extra credit:

Tomorrow (10/21), at DJC, the American Red Cross will be here taking blood from willing victims volunteers.  For each person who willingly donates a pint of blood, I will reward with 10pts of extra credit for each class I have you in!

Remember, this is extra credit, so if you can’t or don’t want to give blood that day, it’s no big deal — it won’t hurt you.  It’s extra credit, after all.

Network+ (Night) – 10/20/2008

Tonight was basically a carbon copy of the day class (check out their post to see exactly what we covered).  This includes TCP/UDP, IP addressing, binary conversion, DNS basics, and we finished up the night with a cool HOSTS file prank!

Homework:

• Chapter Three: Review Questions

Troubleshooting – 10/20/2008

We finished up discussion on chapters 3 and 4 today, dealing with local users and groups and the users’ desktop experience — in that order.

Homework:

• Chapter Three: Review Questions
• Chapter Four: Review Questions

Network + (Day) – 10/20/2008

This morning’s Network+ class centered around TCP/IP as a protocol.  Specifically, we talked about the differences between TCP and UDP.  TCP is connection-oriented, meaning that it checks to make sure all of the packets that were sent actually have arrived on the target machine and are in the proper order.  UDP, well, doesn’t give a flip and sends the packets on without checking.  The benefit to this, of course, is speed and works well with streaming audio and video.  TCP is used when the integrity of the data matters — such as sending files.  If one packet gets dropped from a file, the file becomes corrupt, so having an “anal-retentive” protocol in place to check and make sure that everything arrives as it should would be a smart thing to do.

We also discussed IP addresses and subnet masks, and how they work.  Make sure you can correctly identify a class A, Class B and a Class C subnet mask.  In addition, we also worked on converting decimal numbers to binary.

Homework:

• Chapter Three: Review Questions 

Marketing – 10/15/2008

Today’s class covered a company’s environment — specifically, the microenvironment and the macroenvironment.  The microenvironment is everything that the company can directly control and is made up of:

1. The Company
2. Suppliers
3. Marketing Intermediaries
4. Customers
5. Competitors
6. Publics

The macroenvironment, on the other hand, is the environment outside of the company and thus, the company has no control over it:

1. Demographic forces
2. Economic forces (bailout, anyone?)
3. Natural forces (Katrina, anyone?)
4. Technological forces
5. Political forces
6. Cultural forces

Homework:

• Chapter 3 Company Case

Implementing NI/AD – 10/14/2008

Let’s see.  How would I describe today?

Crazy.  Erratic.  Unexpected.  Not-normal.

But definitely fun.

We started out the day by having Rob Brumley’s ARDSA class come over and listen with us as my friend Scott Duvall from Holland CPAs gave a presentation on a day in his life as an IT administrator.  Scott, being the sole IT person at his business, definitely wears a lot of hats, both in the hardware (my area) and software (Rob’s) realm.

Afterwards, we started to work on Chapter 5, which dealt with network security.  What we soon discovered, however, was that the ultimate in security breaches had already occured to us.  Our “vacuum cleaner” server, the old Dell 600 MHz Pentium III I was using to run our root domain?  Yeah?  Its SCSI adaptor now can’t find the HDD array.  Without the root domain working, and without any kind of backup (you’d think I’d REALIZE this by now) we decided that the best course of action was to tear down the entire domain structure and start from scratch.  This was definitely a cool learning experience, and we ended up getting finished with one of the chapters (which, admittingly, was more than I thought we might get finished with today — with having to rebuild entire domains, and all).

Homework:

• Chapter Five: Review Questions