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When I arrived home from work last Thursday, I was excited to see that my IPexpert Blended Learning Solution package had arrived! Eager to take a look,

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First, I would like to say thank you Josh for the introduction and for giving me the opportunity to write and share my experiences with all of the Blindhog readers as I prepare for the CCIE Voice Lab Exam.  I have always been a fan of Blindhog and am very excited about being able to contribute! (more…)

A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to win a Blended learning solution for the CCIE Voice track from IPExpert on twitter. I am not currently studying for my CCIE, so I traded it to a good friend in return for blog posts about his experience.

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If you have used GNS3 for any amount of time at all, you have encountered this situation. It’s late and you have been working on your lastest lab for hours. You decide to save your work. Logically, you go to File > Save. Unfortunately, the topology is saved but the router configs are gone.

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After releasing the video tutorial for installing Call Manager 5/6 in VMWare, I received a comment asking how to change the MAC address on the Virtual server. The same person, (DrM) later posted another comment confirming that he had actually changed the address in the Linux OS. I had tried changing the MAC in VMWare with version 5.x but eventually gave up. This tutorial will show you how to change the MAC address in order to duplicate a production environment within VMWare. Without changing the MAC address, it is not possible to completely replicate your CUCM environment in a test lab because the license files are attached to the MAC address.

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Do you get annoyed by Operating systems asking you if you are sure you want to perform an action 10 times before it will actually do what you want?

If so, you probably also get annoyed when your router gives you the old “Destination filename [startup-config]?” after you issue the “copy run start” command. Using the ‘file prompt quiet’ command will keep your router quiet.

Not only does this command stop annoyances, it is also the command you need to use if need to use file operations (copy, write, etc) with a kron job. I ran into a situation where a router configuration needed to be automatically backed up in two locations. I used the ‘archive‘ configuration to backup to an scp server and a kron job to backup to an ftp server. Without the ‘file prompt quiet’ command, the kron job fails.

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At different times, I have thought about creating training videos for Cisco certifications. After giving the idea a considerable amount of thought, I decided I don’t have enough time. So … I searched the net to find a company offering video training similar to my video tutorials.

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When Cisco first announced the Unified Communication Server (CallManager) would be based on Linux, my first question was “How much of the system would be available to users?”

I think it is great that Cisco does not require Engineers to understand the underlying system CallManager is built on, but some of us are curious. This tutorial will show you how to create a user on a CUCM 5/6 server with shell access and root privileges.

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As engineers, we don’t always document things as well as we should OR someone you work with is always “too busy” to document their work. This little trick will show you how to recover pre-shared keys on a Cisco Pix or ASA firewall.

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Since I discovered Dynamips and Pemu, I have been trying to figure out a way to test Pix configurations with a single PC running Windows XP. The real trick has always been communicating with the virtual Pix. With Linux, it was not a problem but Windows has always been another story until I recently figured out how to communicate with pemu using GNS3.

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