(no subject)

As you all probably know by now, I did, indeed, pass my CCNA test on Friday. I am the proud holder of my first Cisco certification. And I actually am proud. The other certs I have weren't that big a deal to qualify for, but the CCNA was a lot to learn. I may even put it up on the wall next to my great-grandfather's award from the American Society for Testing and Materials, and moiracoon's Golden Key National Honor Society plaque. Not that it's on the same level as those, but it's something I'm proud of. I have a great deal of information in my head that wasn't there before, and a bunch more that is much more solid than it was. Now I just want to use it!

And I may have a chance to. My manager sent out a congratulatory email for me to the help desk and the server guys, and I've already talked to a few people on the server team about lending a hand at some of the backend stuff. I know they've got a lot to do right now, and the team lead is going to talk to my manager about what kind of time I have to spend with them and what I can do. I'm not quite sure how they're going to find time for me right now to tell the truth; help desk is like that, and we're always understaffed. But I'll make it work. I want to move up and on and I think this is the way to start.

Speaking of wanting to try some of this out, I have been justified in my instinct to never throw anything away ever. Now that I'm back from my course, I want to play with the Cisco 2500 router I have in the basement that I snagged from work back a year or so ago. It has two serial ports, and an ethernet port. Trouble is, the ethernet port is an AUI jack. And, of course, I gave away my AUI to RJ45 adapter with the lot that I gave to that freecycler a while ago. I figured that thing was so old that I would never have a use for it.

I gave away the 10baseT hub (specifically a hub, not a switch; I have several of those) that it was attached to, too. Of course, now that I don't have it, I want it so I can put it inline between my router and cable modem and sniff packets. Ah well. I'm sure I can find another hub around somewhere. The AUI adapter might be a bit more difficult. I've been looking at 2600 routers on Ebay though and may just pick up one of those when I have a little cash.

I'm going to end up spending some time tonight catching up on finances. I had a statement from the bank my student loan is with saying that made it look like the last check I sent them went toward creating a savings account rather than to paying off my loan. I talked to them on the phone today and they explained that when I send a payment, they put it in a savings account unti the day of the payment, then apply it to my loan. Weird on the front end, but if it makes them a little more money, I understand. However, they didn't take the full payment out of the savings account, instead taking the minimum payment out and applying it, then leaving the rest in the savings account. I'm going to call them after sending my next check to make sure that both the extra from last month and from this month gets applied. 'Cause that's not cool. And he couldn't apply what was in there right now because it has to be at least one full month's payment.

I've finally decommissioned my server. The email functionality has gone to Gmail. The web server functionality, well, I'm not sure where that's going yet. And the file sharing functionality has been replaced by a Linksys NSLU2 that I got from tybis last year. This thing is so neat! It's a network attached storage controller that you can jack with to get a full installation of Linux running on. In fact, if I can find time to mess with it, I may even replace my web server functionality with it. This little slug running at 15w is a huge improvement over the Pentium 3 Xeon with 6 drives in a RAID5 that was probably using 250 or 300.

And speaking of RAID, I've used these steps over at Tom's Hardware to hex-edit a few of the Windows XP system files on my picture editing computer to make it support software RAID-5! Yay for undocumented features! I've plugged in an old DEC SCSI tower that used to have a bunch of 4GB drives in it which I yanked and replaced with 72GB drives that I yoinked from scrapped servers at work. I'm going to power it up every week or so and back up the NSLU2 external drive to the RAID array, which is formatting right now. I have a fifth 72GB 10k drive that I could put in there, but I'm going to hold on to it as a cold spare. Just in case.

I guess that class really was inspiring. I haven't played with my tech like this in a long time.

Anyway, gonna do the ledger-keeping, and maybe even find time to write a personal update too rather than just a techy one.