/dev/blog0

I took the 640-801 test and got my CCNA on the first try. The Mrs. sacrificed a lot (leaving me alone to study, household projects went unstarted and those started, unfinished etc.) and to her I will be forever grateful. It was Cisco’s changing of their CCNA path that really drove me to complete the test prior to them changing the required info around. Next up will be the CCNP, but I can study without putting my family second.

I’ll finally be able to get started on the many projects that I’ve back burnered over the 2 years or so that I should of been studying for my CCNA. I’d usually come up with a good idea or something to upgrade somewhere and my ‘I shouldn’t be doing this because I don’t have my CCNA yet’ would promptly stop me.

Now that I’m done with my studying (for a while) I’m in the process of brining a (new to me) Dell PowerEdge 2550 online as my main server as it has dual processors, gigs of ram & hardware RAID array. It’ll have a few more mhz, but ultimately the SMP, more ram and SCSI Ultra3 HDD arrays will make it shine. It may not be the latest and greatest but it does have power & storage redundancy.

My back burner currently consists of -

• **DONE** ReGroom my wiring rack – I’ve only had time to make quick changes and additions while studying, never really focusing on neatness.
• Upgrade server hardware & to latest version of Debian and get that ready for production.
• Move all my domains over to the new box – Dreading this.
• Need to figure out ETRN prior to moving the domains – Not I’m not sure if I’m going to use a new IP address or just try to reuse the current one. An ETRN service would always be nice to have anyway.
• Try to centralise the installs of WordPress, Gallery, etc. – So future upgrades would be a matter of changing just one install vs. searching for all of them. Upgrade 1, upgrade all.
• Setup a video relay server to stream pushed video from another location under Linux. Make it as simple as a transition for the end viewers as possible. Currently using Windows Media Player. Need this in order to:
• FInd a good non-managed dedicated hosting company to host my church’s site. Our site currently lives on a Windows server that we don’t have all the keys to. This has been difficult in the past as I’m not able to really get in there and figure out why thing aren’t working.