Aun’s Blog

Upside-Down-Ternet

A friend of mine forwarded me this link. If you want to have fun with people piggybacking off your wireless network, check it out. The author doesn’t mention it but a Linux box would serve as your router out to the Internet, using IPtables for NATing / Routing and Squid as the Proxy. His trivial redirector (which can be called through squid) basically uses wget to grab the images and mogrify to modify and present them. It sure looks like fun - I will definitely try it out when I get time. IPTables, Squid and wget are easily available as rpm’s, as I’m sure mogrify is.

Studying for the CCIE

And so the journey begins… after almost 5 years in the Networking field, I’ve finally decided to take on the CCIE. As a first step, I’ve bought most of the books required to prepare for it (around 8! Btw, thats not all of them). While these books were on their way, I finished reading another book most consider the bible of Networking, a must-read, called TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 1 “The Protocols”. This is the book that will make you realize how little you know about the foundation of the field you’re in. So read this book (even if you aren’t going for your CCIE) if you want to understand the internals of the TCP/IP Suite aka Internet Protocol Suite - it is packed to the brim with information, and can be an overwhelming first read, so unless you have almonds every morning, and your brain soaks up information like a sponge, I would recommend reading / skimming through it a second time. It’ll help quite a bit, and even help you understand some topics better.

The next book on the list is the Official Exam Certification Guide by Cisco Press. I plan on finishing it in a week… unrealistic some may say, but I have quite a few books to go through, and don’t have time to waste! I want to take the written exam asap, so I can start working on the lab, which is the real deal. Now I know absolutely no one reads this blog… but if anyone does… and has any advice on how to go about tackling this monster of an exam, feel free to post your comments. I will do my part by posting updates on the progress as I finish each book, with my thoughts and opinions… so if you do stumble upon this blog… add it to your favorite RSS aggregator / reader, and stay tuned!