Passed 300-115

Posted on by Ryan

Just a short post about my recent Cisco exam, I was able to pass the 300-115 to renew all my lower CCNA certifications. The last time I took a Cisco exam was almost 3 years ago when I passed the CCNA Data Center certification. Overall the exam was fair although you will need multiple study resources to make sure you cover all the exam objectives.

The primary reason for doing this exam first instead of ROUTE or TSHOOT was I felt it was maybe the hardest one? Won’t really know until I take the other two.

The resources I used:

I “officially” started about three months ago, but was really off and on throughout 2018.  During the last three months I did about an hour a day (Monday-Friday), the weekends I would shoot for 4 to 5 hours off and on during the day.

What’s Next

Not really in rush, so I’m probably going to wait until next winter, maybe ;)… I know it seems weird to drag this out and not just pass all of the exams but there are some personal/life goals this year I would like to at least start, in the meantime I hope this information is helpful and good luck!

Color Code Your Routers

Posted on by Ryan

It’s kind of hard to believe this was eight years ago! Time has changed some things over the years and I had a user Aaron or Frank? 😉 contact me about this post. In the post I posted a question, “trying to figure out a way to change the color of just the banner only” well eight years later I got an answer, so first of all thanks for reaching out and I’m glad you found this resource helpful and I’ll just reference the response here:

“The sequence you need is [0m – this resets any colour and formatting codes back to the terminal defaults. I also found that you need to set the international flag on your lines before this would appear correctly.”

So something like this:

R1(config)# line vty 0 15
R1(config-line)# international
R1(config-line)# end

Cisco Skills

I came across an interesting idea, what if you could color code your devices in command line? So such as if you were operating routers at a core level you could color code the CLI to the color red, and the branch routers green and etc. I wasn’t sure if this would possible but doing some searching through the internet I found a guy Ivan Pepelnjak who wrote how to do this  a couple years ago and wrote a couple books as well, check out his blog/website at http://www.ipspace.net there is tons of helpful information along with his original guide here. 

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Dual ISP – Cisco ASA HA Active/Standby

Posted on by Ryan

So a single ISP isn’t cutting it anymore you need a backup just in case the primary fails and might as well add a second ASA into this design, more redundancy equals more up-time, right? On paper it sounds good but in the “real” world there probably is tipping point, more redundancy increases complexity. In this post we’ll aim to keep it simple, with setting up a Cisco ASA HA active/standby pair and then add in the second ISP. Let’s get started!

Continue reading “Dual ISP – Cisco ASA HA Active/Standby” →

FMC Syslog with Graylog Extractor

Posted on by Ryan

Let’s continue to talk about the Cisco Firepower Management Center, in this post we are going to look at sending connection events over to syslog. In this example I’m using Graylog which is an open source logging platform and  although any syslog server would work, one of the problems with syslogs is there is little uniformity when you have different systems sending these logs. One of the things that Graylog can to do is extract the raw message and put each part of message into a separate searchable field. We’ll configure the FMC to send syslogs and then configure an extractor on Graylog. Continue reading “FMC Syslog with Graylog Extractor” →

Oh…Spanning Tree

Posted on by Ryan

black and white cold fog forestIt’s the “S” word we don’t like to hear, and often times it has degraded networks or even took them down entirely.  (All Systems Down – an older but classic story) It’s also one of those things that nobody really likes, we even had network companies, as well as IEEE try to replace it with something else. Remember the names like TRILL, and IEEE 802.1aq (SPB) or Cisco’s FabicPath technologies? You had all of these different flavors that showed a lot progress, but they never really took off for one reason or another. The funny part is this protocol we are all trying kill off is still alive and doing well, so let’s look at spanning tree in the meantime because you will likely run into it.

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