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For years I have recommended this IPSec book. I read it in one sitting on a flight from LAX to Orlando. Its well written and I really enjoyed it. I’m sure you will as well. As an added bonus, If you purchase from the link on this page I’ll get a few cents for all my hard work recommending it to you and you will get a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

So Lately I have been using my Macbook for everything. In fact, its been the best purchase I’ve made in a long time. There is so much functionality that I cant even begin to tell you about. Thats not the point of this post though. I guess I’m just here today to sing the blues.

Now I know that a few posts back I talked about working on DMVPN and that I was working it up in Dynamips. In fact, I’m actually using GNS3 as mu GUI interface. Its great and all….but where is the support for the MAC OSx. I know beggers can be choosers but with the majority of college students running a MAC today I thought there would be someone studying for the CCIE that would have a MAC and have PEMU running on it.

I guess it really doesn’t matter because I use the InternertworkExpert Vracks, but I would really like to work up quick labs to test theories and concepts. I know I can do it on Windows but I dont want to use windows. So, If you have PEMU running on a MAC OSx, specifically Leopard, please comment on this post and let me get something formal in the way of a how-to.

Well back to reading. I have deadlines you know!

I am an avid watcher of GeekBrief.tv, with Cali Lewis. In Brief # 358 she talked about something called evernote. I had to know more so I signed up for the beta. I LOVE IT. Basically its a note taking application that goes the extra mile. Exactly what I have been looking for since losing Microsoft OneNote when I switched over to a MacBook. The coolest feature….It can search images for text. No Joke. I was thinking about possible uses and here is what I came up with:

-Take Pictures of stuff I’ve white-boarded in classes I teach.
-Take Pictures if receipts that I need to expense or track
-Ever see a funny license plate? Take a PIC and search for it later.
-Have a network diagram with IP addresses and such—-there ya go!

What I really like about it is its cross platform capabilities. You can integrate a “Clip to Evernote” in your browsers (IE, Safari, Firefox). You can install the Software on MAC and windows and sync them.

Here is a screen shot of the desktop application. I’ve been working on a DMVPN lab and searched for the word “Hub”

Anyhow, sign up for the beta or shoot me an email if you cant wait and I can send you an invite directly.

So I got the Microsoft Wireless Presenter mouse and wanted to give my opinion of it.

As far as I’m concerned, if you use Powerpoint for you presentations this is a great mouse to run the presentation with. The one downer is that I switched to a MAC and it doesn’t work with a MAC even though Microsoft sells the Office:Mac edition.

At any rate, it’s bluetooth and has a button on the top that changes it to presenter mode. You then flip it over and it has buttons to advance through the slides and black out the screen. Its has a button that turns on the mark up tool but you have to go back to mouse mode to write on the slides. The batteries last for a good amount of time. It comes with a bluetooth adapter but I used the internal bluetooth on my Thinkpad T60.

Well thats it….my optinion- Thumbs up for trainers that are heavy with powerpoint.

I just watched the DMVPN section of Brian McGahans CoD. He makes it so Easy. I think I’m going to work up a lab in dynamips and play around with it. Later today Ill post my dynamips topology and the steps I went through.

Feel free to grab it. Also, if you like some of what I have here then please subscribe to this blog. If you have any ideas of stuff I can do that would benefit you please leave a comment.

Thanks!

So right now I am having a major mental block. I have to submit another chapter for a book that I am working on and I cant even mesh out the drawings for the examples I’m giving. Uggh! This is so frustrating.

I decided to take a breather from the book and reschedule my rack time. I’m using 98% Internetwork Expert for my CCIE Security Prep and about 2% ipexpert. I have both lab guides. I like Internetwork Experts better but I already paid for IPexperts lab and proctor guides and some Rack time so I am going to use it. I’m curious about the IPexperts DVDs though. Are they worth it? I have the Internetwork Expert COD that I can watch online. Have any of you readers out there used both?

On Monday I’m gonna hit the racks for the first time since my son was born 2 weeks ago. I’m not sure what I am going to focus on but whatever it is, Ill blog it.

Until then…

For a few months now I have been using a MAC for everything. I must say that aside from the fact that you have to learn a few new things this has been the best experience with a laptop that I have ever had. In fact, I dont use Windows unless I absolutely have to. That situation came up on Monday when I was teaching a MARS class online. When I started setup in the morning both my Windows Vista Desktop PC and my Windows XP Thinkpad T60 Laptop would not load the Centra Symposium Application. Since Centra doesn’t work on anything but Windows I quickly booted up my Vista install in Parallels and logged into the Centra Session with ease.

At First I was a little concerned that the audio would be poor going from a VM to a physical and so forth but I have to say it was seamless. I didn’t have any issues and I even jumped back and forth between the MAC and Vista. Drag and Drop works with ease and the USB pops up a question box when you connect it, just to make sure that you want Vista to see it. I also have sync’d my HTC 5800 Smartphone running Windows Mobile 6 with it and again- ease!

The Virtualization solution from Parallels (called Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac) allows nice integration between Windows and your Mac. Parallels calls this feature “Coherence” for its ability to hide the Windows desktop and make it appear as if your Windows applications are running directly on your Mac. VMware Fusion also has the same feature called “Unity”. It also works very well, although not with Windows Vista, yet.

With this feature Parallels Desktop now goes even further to deepen OS integration and create a seamless user environment.

I also found that Parallels Desktop is better integrated into the Mac OS desktop by means of registering file types with the Parallels guest applications, MS Office applications could be opened by simple clicking on them. You can also get Windows notifications on the Mac desktop – that is very cool.

Parallels also set up shared folders between OS X and Windows quite nicely. VMWARE Fusion asks you to do this manually.

Fusion lets you access Windows programs from its Applications menu. Parallels let you run programs from its Applications menu or the dock icon. Its like the Application is actually running on the MAC. For example, when you do a spotlight search for PAINT it returns the Windows Paint Application. Click it and it loads the Vista VM and opens the PAINT App in coherence mode.

You can open Mac files with Windows apps and Windows files with Mac apps (which means you have the ability to choose). For some time working with Parallels you can almost forget that you’re running two OSes!

Parallels has a Snapshot Manager feature which lets you save a copy of your virtual machine at a point in time. You can create a snapshot for a stopped or running virtual machine. When I created a snapshot of my Windows XP, it took about 23MB. Parallels also has a nice User Interface for managing the snapshots. You may have any number of snapshots and they can all be managed nicely. VMware also has snapshots, but they seem less robust.

With Parallels you don’t notice that you are working with virtual machine, it seems to be just a real machine with real applications. Parallels Desktop has excellent usability.

I am completely satisfied with Parallels, especially since they have a fairly active support team with forums, knowledgebase and all the other necessary stuff. I stand with Parallels!
I cant say enough about the product and I look forward to seeing what they do next. From a User that has been nothing but VMWARE for 5 years I give Parallels a total thumbs up and I’m sure you will too.

A Congratulations is in order for Fellow Instructor Arden Packeer who just passed the lab! Read about it and leave him a comment here.

I wanted to cover in this post the process of diffie-hellman, related to you in part from wikipedia.org.

The Coolest thing to me is that you can actually use a scientific calculator to work through it using your own numbers. One thing to remember is that this is a simple example. Cisco routers can use DH group 1 (768 bit) DH-2 (1024 bit) and DH-5 (1536 bit).

The simplest, and original, implementation of the protocol uses the Multiplicative group of integers modulo p, where p is prime and g is primitive root mod p. To illustrate we can use the example of Bob and Alice. The process is as follows:

5⁶ mod 23 = 8.

5¹⁵ mod 23 = 19.

19⁶ mod 23 = 2.

8¹⁵ mod 23 = 2.

Both Alice and Bob have arrived at the same value, because g^ab and g^ba are equal. Note that only a, b and g^ab = g^ba are kept secret. All the other values are sent in the clear. Once Alice and Bob compute the shared secret they can use it as an encryption key, known only to them, for sending messages across the same open communications channel. Of course, much larger values of a, b, and p would be needed to make this example secure, since it is easy to try all the possible values of g^ab mod 23 (there will be, at most, 22 such values, even if a and b are large). If p were a prime of at least 300 digits, and a and b were at least 100 digits long, then even the best algorithms known today could not find a given only g, p, and g^a mod p, even using all of mankind’s computing power. The problem is known as the discrete logarithm problem. Note that g need not be large at all, and in practice is usually either 2 or 5.

So today I was asked if you could SSH into a MARS with an account other than the PNADMIN account. I had never done it with any account other than PNADMIN before so I wasn’t 100% sure. I created the following video to document the test. The End Result: NOPE. SSH only worked with the PNADMIN account.