Hooray! Passed the VMWare VCP-510 exam to upgrade my VCP4 cert to VCP5. I’m just glad all those nights reading whitepapers didn’t go to waste. I don’t deal with VMWare as much in the network engineering realm, but I figured it was best to keep it updated just in case. Have to say I was surprised to find that vSphere 5 supports Netflow.
VMWare VCP-510 Exam
February 29th, 2012NES Ethernet Adapter – Part 1
February 26th, 2012About two years ago I started lurking around the Nesdev site and toyed with the idea of somehow giving the original 8-bit NES the ability to communicate with an online host. One night I came to the conclusion that it had to be done. Why? Maybe it was the sheer novelty of the idea. Or maybe it was the case of Woodchucks I finished off that night. Maybe a little bit of both.
The original idea was to build an RS232 adapter and have a PC or Linksys router proxy the traffic to a server. The problem is that the NES spent so much CPU time processing serial data through the controller port that there was little time left to do anything else. The NES232 was functional but slow.
To get around that, you would have to put a device directly on the PRG data bus and make it addressable. Instead of 90+ CPU cycles to get or put a single byte, you could knock it down to around 4 cycles. That means you have to either run wires directly from a custom cart or interface with the expansion port under the NES.
There are a few problems attaching a device to the expansion port. One, it uses a proprietary 48-pin connector. No company ever publicly released a device that took advantage of the port. The Baton Teleplay modem did, but the company ran into problems and the device was never released. Two, you would need a custom NES cartridge that sends a chip select (/CS) signal to the expansion port when the address for the device is accessed.
Start with the first problem – the connector. I started rummaging through the boxes of junk boards. The closest thing I could find were the ISA slots from some 486 boards. They have the necessary .100″ pin pitch, but the rows are .200″ apart and the EXP port rows are .250″ apart. A trip to Mr. Tablesaw and Mr. Toaster Oven (10 minutes @ 425) provided the first few sacrificial ISA slot connectors. After much trial and error, I finally found a good way to cut them down to size. This involved cutting them down to the desired length, separating them longways and thinning out the outer edges.
The next step was to make a PCB. Since most breadboards have .100″ spacing, it was time to do some etching. More on that next post.
CCNA Voice – Passed
August 18th, 2011Pretty self explanatory! I decided to go ahead and pursue CCNP Voice certification, so I took the 640-461 ICOMM exam last week to earn the CCNA Voice cert. Going to try and pass the CVOICE exam before I go to the TVOICE training course at the end of the month. Thankfully, our director (actually VP now) is a very common sense kind of guy. I pleaded my case for training and he simply told me to find the best deal I could. As luck would have it, Global Knowledge currently has a “buy 2 get 1 free” deal. Ended up getting training for myself, one of our SQL DBA’s and our Exchange admin. Can’t beat that with a stick!
Datacenter Move Cleanup
August 18th, 2011We moved the datacenter to our new office in July. Even managed to have most everything up by that Sunday afternoon! Since then we’ve been busy doing all sorts of cleanup, mainly addressing issues that piled up prior to the move. Today I finally got around to packing up a pallet of network gear going back to Cisco as well as a pallet going to our datacenter in CA. Now we can actually walk through the storage room without having to hop over piles of equipment. Maybe we’ll be able to set up that lab we’ve been hoping for!
Bye Bye, Bossman
June 7th, 2011It’s official – my manager is no longer with the company. He put in his notice and his last day was Friday. I kinda have mixed feelings about this. The downside is that we’ve lost a crack network engineer who had been with the company over 6 years. I learned a great deal from him over the last 4 months and I’ll certainly miss having his expertise readily available. On the other hand, I’m pretty much in the same position I was in after I came on with the company. Less than a year after I came onboard my immediate supervisor left. I was able to complete most of the projects he left behind and ended up being the defacto senior admin for the next 4 years. Maybe I’ll get lucky twice – who knows?
Success… For the Most Part
April 21st, 2011Things went well in Secaucus. The routers & switches were installed and the voice & data circuits were turned up. The voice turn up was pushed back 2 days due to a misconfiguration on my part, but we got it working before the users came in. Had to cut the trip short due to a family emergency so I finished everything that needed to be done on site before heading out. Ended up handing most of the phone config work to two of our other engineers to finish over the weekend. The best part of the process was verifying the circuit connectivity. First PRI… good. Second PRI… good. Third PRI… good. Fourth PRI… not responding? Watching the ISDN debug I could see data from AT&T, but they said nothing was coming back to them. After about 15 minutes I went to the closet and popped the cover off the box where the PRIs were terminated. Lo and behold, one of the transmit pair wires was not punched down for the 4th PRI. Jabbing it with a VISA card a few times got it working until someone came in with a punch tool shortly thereafter.
After taking a day or two off, I came back in yesterday to do the data turn up on our new Naperville office. I jumped on the call with AT&T and found that the T1 interface was still showing down/down on the router. To my utmost horror, I called the local site manager and was told that the wiring vendor was still trying to locate the demark for the circuit! After a few minutes of scrambling we finally got it connected and pinging. Today we turned up the PRI and ported the numbers over. Two down!
Careful What You Wish For
April 2nd, 2011After almost 5 years with the company, I finally made Network Engineer. The day before my birthday, no less! My new boss is an old school telecom guru and an expert in Cisco routing and switching. The last two months have been like a crash course in voice and data. In a little over a week we have to set up our new corporate office in New Jersey. Unfortunately, the boss is out on leave until after the move. I ended up offering (okay, begging) to do the voice and data setup myself. I’ve spent the last week working with AT&T as well as the multiple groups who will be consolidating into the new office. This is probably the hardest task I’ve worked on in the 12 years I’ve been in IT. But if it was easy it wouldn’t be worth doing, would it?
The Miracle of Stow ‘n Go
January 18th, 2011After a horrendous ride home from Louisville we finally decided to ditch the wife’s old Grand Caravan. We were pretty pleased with it until the end, so we went with a 2008 Town & Country as a replacement. Of all the features, one stands out – Stow ‘n Go. It’s the greatest thing since Rock Sugar. Yesterday I had to go to Home Depot and grab a couple 4′x8′ sheets of plywood to build a cabinet. That would usually either mean borrowing a truck or removing the seats from the old Caravan. With the new van, it’s simple. Roll the driver and passenger seats forward then fold the middle seats into the floor. Fold the rear seat into the cargo area. Lay down tarp and insert plywood sheets. And the tailgate actually closes. Whoever designed this thing must have been a woodworker with a bunch of kids.
NES – USB Keyboard
November 12th, 2010So I decided to get back into making a peripheral for the NES. If an online NES RPG is ever made, it will probably be helpful to have keyboard input capability. Tonight I finally made that happen. Until now I’ve only been using Atmel AVR chips, but then I found the PIC24FJ64GB002. This inexpensive little gem has USB host capability as well as parallel slave port capability. Long story short, I hooked it up to the parallel port on the NES232 and injected commands from a USB keyboard into the incoming data stream. At this time the NES simply displays the incoming ASCII code on the screen, but at least it proves that the data is being received.
Cisco CCNP – Finished!
July 31st, 2010Passed the 642-892 composite exam today. Missed 2 items, but that’s okay. I’m just happy to have this behind me. Working nights and spending all my free time on this has been a killer. May take a month or so off before starting on the voice track.