I know the notes have been coming far and few in between. I apologize to those who count on my detailed notes to help them on their studies. However, things have been exponentially busy and taking detailed notes have been very hard to do. That doesn’t mean that studying has stopped. In fact, I just about finished reading the 600+ pages of the BSCI Study Guide. So now I’m going back to where I stopped taking notes and slowly add more of them here. They will not be as quick and often as I used to do but I still plan to keep them coming. I’ve relied very heavily on them during my last 2 tests and they worked effectively for me. So I’ll try my hardest to keep them detailed.

Here’s a brief outline of what’s keeping my busy these days:

• MRTG – I’ve been spending some good quality time with this very nice tool to monitor traffic loads on our routers. And the great thing about it is, it’s free. I’ve spent a good amount of time getting it setup on my Windows desktop as well as a linux setup dedicated for monitoring (more on this below).
• SNMP – In order to really capitalize on the power of MRTG, one has to know SNMP fairly well. In fact, MRTG doesn’t work if SNMP doesn’t run properly. At least that’s my experience. So getting SNMP to work on our routers required some time to research, read, learn and implement. Somehow, getting it to work on our pix was also a bit of a challenge. But it works
• Linux – I’m as newbie as newbie can get when it comes to Linux. So bringing up a Linux environment from scratch and getting MRTG to run on it was quite a bit of a fun challenge. I’m finally able to get one to run Xubuntu on an old 600Mhz Pentium III laptop with 256MB of RAM. Oh the nice thing about it: mrtg runs after rebooting the machine without doing anything. I dont know how it does it but I’ll surely find out soon enough when I break and fix the machine again over time. I’m also trying to test out different distros with as small a footprint as can be especially with the amount of resources I have (un)available. So far, I’ve tried SliTaz and DSL but haven’t used them enough to give an intelligible opinion of them. Recently I’ve also been reading up on least resource-intensive ways of running dynagen/dynamips on linux. And I must say, I’m pretty excited about trying it out. They say you can run a small installation of linux and have 8-10 routers running without killing your machine. That sounds awesome and can’t wait until I can get it to work on my home computer.
• Lastly and most importantly, did I mention that we are pregnant again? We are now 3 months in and the last couple of months have been especially hard. She has been tired all the time and was feeling sick for a good month or so. That also affected my studies because I had to take over most of her share of household duties such as cooking and baby-ing the little monster. But now she’s feeling better (’cause now she’s cooking again ). Which also means I get to study as close to my usual pace again. We’ll see how things develop.

As far as notes go, I’ll try to keep them coming, but if they don’t, you’ll know why. Or won’t.