Pi-hole? Huh? DNS? What I am going on about now you may ask. Pi-hole is billed as a “Network-wide Ad Blocking,” a black hole for Internet Advertisements. While it is that, it can be much much more – I can also help you secure your network to some extent.

For me, I am using it to help filter out some advertisements, but also using it to block tracking websites, known malware sites, as well as tracking what my internal clients are talking to.

Want to know how effective a tool like Pi-hole can be, let’s look at the 24-hour stats for my home network below. Keep in mind that there are 5 of us here, I work from home, and we stream everything on Rokus.

A little over a year ago Juniper released Juniper vLabs. What vLabs is, is a place where you can safely lab and learn on Juniper virtualized hardware. When it was first launched there where about six labs available:

If you check out Juniper vLabs today, you will find 20 labs available across five different topic areas. With these labs, and I did test out a few, you do need to “reserve” them and you get them for about 3-hours. Everyone that I “reserved” was available immediately and ready to go in about 15 minutes. I did receive e-mails when I reserved when the lab was ready, and when I ended it.

On Tuesday of next week (15-Jan-2019) I will be part of an amazing group of people who are lucky enough to meet with Cisco’s Service Provider team.     

This event will be streamed over on the Tech Field Day website.  Some of the topics that Cisco will be presenting on include:

• Track down what switch and port a network element (Computer, Server, WAP, etc) is connected to?
• Find out what VLAN a port is in?
• Does the port support PoE?
• Check to make sure DHCP is working?
• Find out what speed and duplex a port can operating at?
• Do you have connectivity to your gateway and the internet?

The  LinkSprinter 200 tool can do all of that and fast! I used it for a network migration the other day and it saved us hours of work.  Normally we have to trace cables to find where printers are plugged into so we can change VLANs and port configurations.  Normally this takes about 10–20 minutes per printer,  with the LinkSPrinter we were able to get all the printers done in about 10 minutes.

Ok I finally tried it –  swapping in a T-Mobile SIM into an Apple iPad Air that was running a AT&T SIM for cellular data –  and you know what, it works!

It was as easy as ording a Bring your own tablet T-Mobile Nano SIM at –  http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/sim-card?cm_sp=tmo_landingpage-_-yorktown-_-prepaidSIM

I got the card in a few days, popped out the AT&T SIM and insterted the T-Mobile SIM and set the SIM up for the iPad.

Here are some quick screen shots after I swapped the nano sim. I used a paper clip to pop the old one you, worked well.

First –  screen shot of my iPad with the ATT Cellular Data

]]>https://hugo.fryguy.net/2013/12/27/cisco-csr1000v-for-home-labs/Fri, 27 Dec 2013 14:00:40 +0000Fryguyhttps://hugo.fryguy.net/2013/12/27/cisco-csr1000v-for-home-labs/

I have been using the Cisco CSR1000V for my home lab setup for a little bit now.  There have been some questions on how to set this up for a home lab and I figured I would cover how I am using it.
For this post, here is what we are going to build –  a three (3) node CSR1000V network and three (3) vSwitch Networks to connect the CSR1000Vs together.  We will also configure the CSR1000V to have connectivity back to the “home production” network so that we can SSH/Telnet to these routers when we are labbing.

Obtaining the CSR1000V Router Software

To obtain the Cisco CSR1000V you need to download it from Cisco at this LINK and click on the Download software as seen circled below

Back at Cisco Live 2013, there was some chatter around the Insieme deal and the potential to see a new switch from Cisco during the event.  I think even Greg over at EtherealMind was hoping for some more juicy Insieme announcements at Cisco Live as well ( see post –  http://etherealmind.com/musing-predicting-what-insieme-might-announce-at-cisco-live/ )Well, what we actuall got at Cisco Live was the Nexus 7700 switch and the Gold Cisco 6608 Catalyst Switches, not the hoped for Insieme switch.

Then today I saw that there an article posted over on NetworkWorld ( http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/100213-interop-cisco-insieme-274455.html ) in regards to the Insieme Nexus 9K and Hardware Defined Networking that caught my attention. There is another article there –  http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/cisco-nexus-9000-aimed-40g –  that has some output from a 9508 switch as well.

]]>https://hugo.fryguy.net/2013/09/19/cisco-asr9904-series-router/Thu, 19 Sep 2013 13:06:31 +0000Fryguyhttps://hugo.fryguy.net/2013/09/19/cisco-asr9904-series-router/

Ok, not new information but kind of new information to share.

Back in June during Cisco Live Orlando 2013 during the session BRKARC-2003 –  Cisco ASR9000 System Architecture there where some slides that discussed a couple new ASR9000 series routers, the ASR9904 and ASR9912.

The ASR9904 is supposed to be released in October ’13,  and that happens to also coincide with the rumored IOS-XR 5.1 release of code.  Well, to date only the ASR9912 has been announced ( http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps13288/index.html ), but with the recent release of the IOS-XR 5.1 Release Notes on Cisco’s website, the ASR9904 is listed there as can be seen in a snippet from that file:  ( the original pdf release notes can be found here http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/routers/asr9000/software/asr9k_r5.1/general/release/notes/reln_510a9k.pdf )

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