This is a great reference for those who don’t set up Cisco routers on a daily basis!

Executive Summary:
Working with a Cisco router and the Cisco Internetworking Operating System (IOS) is a great way to experiment with networking concepts and gear and could be good for your career development. Learn the basic steps of setting up a Cisco router to provide Internet access to a small network.

Working with a Cisco router and the Cisco Internetworking Operating System (IOS) is a great way to experiment with networking concepts and gear and could be good for your career development. You can get some hands-on IOS experience by setting up a Cisco router at the Internet edge in your test lab at work or in your home office. A Cisco router allows you greater flexibility (with more granular controls than the Linksys or NETGEAR hardware commonly used in home offices) if you later want to expand your setup to include, say, a Microsoft ISA Server firewall on the back end.

Let’s go through the basic steps of setting up a Cisco router to provide Internet access to a small network. I’ll assume you have some basic IOS knowledge, including how to log on and how to save and clear configurations. I’ll also assume that you have a solid understanding of networking, including what Network Address Translation (NAT) is. I won’t cover items such as setting up Secure Shell (SSH) access and hardening access lists. You can expand into those areas as you feel comfortable and want to experiment more.

Here’s the rest of the article;

To reduce the effect adware and unauthorized programs have on the enterprise, we have been removing administrator access for most users. In order to perform admin tasks, I need to use the secondary logon as outlined here (copied from Microsoft site here.)

TLC

Install the Windows 2003 Resource Kit tools. Run the Command Shell.

cdburn.exe d: c:\yourimage.iso

ENTER

Done!

I found this article on TechRepublic while searching for just such a tutorial! I have put it here for my (and your) reference! 

Takeaway: E-mail has become a mission-critical tool in most businesses. See how Nslookup and Telnet can help diagnose problems when e-mail doesn’t go through.

Here’s the full article on my site.

Found this little gem on MSDN:

CD/DVD data burning on 2008.

Insert blank disk

run cmd prompt as administrator

format <drive> /fs:udf

Drag and drop.

Manually eject when done.

TLC

We have migrated slowly toward Dell servers and workstations. Almost all of our servers are Dell, and probably half the workstations. I’m looking for a client and server management solution, and Dell offers a free version of it’s client management suite.

QUOTE Regarding the software:

We use the Dell Client Manager Suite in our NS setup extensively. We make use of the several of the key features including but not limited to:

1. BIOS Configuration Policies - All BIOS configurations can be remotely changed silently to meet a set criteria. It was wonderful when we finally started using PXE and WOL (Had a lot of static IP addressing that impeded this initially) we simply set up and tested the policies and applied them. As machines checked in, WOL and PXE was enabled, NIC set to first boot order, silent chassis intrusion, etc.

2. BIOS Update policies - You can set up jobs to update the BIOS revisions and execute them remotely without having to make a desk side visit.

3. Hardware Monitoring - You can set up alerts to monitor for HDD space, failures, memory changes, etc. and email or take automated action, such as run a script or job. We do not currently use Help Desk Solution, but I could see value add here.

4. Real Time System Manager enhancements - Similar to BIOS Configuration Policies except you can do it on a case by case basis.

5. More in depth Dell specific inventory information - provides more detailed information about the Dell Specific hardware and provides more Dell  specific canned reporting for Inventory Solution.

I can’t really recommend it enough if you are an all Dell shop. Some of the gotchas:

1. Make sure that your machines meet the minimum supported models lists. This does not include any of the Inspiron class machines. The latest revision only covers the Optiplex 270 and up, Latitude D600 and up, and Precision 3?? and up. Also, when rolling out the Open Manage Client Instrumentation for the first time, it may require a reboot even if the documentation says it does not after the initial installation, and it does not adhere to the NS Agents Reboot Action settings such as allowing the user to delay the reboot. I found this out the hard way, but I continue to be employed. Live and learn. let me know if you have any other specific questions, please feel free to ask. I hope that this helps.

END QUOTE:

Decided to go the way of the dark side: Microsoft Hyper-V instead of VMWare. Installed Windows 2008 Server on the new machine. As mentioned in my post about Win2K8 Server as a workstation, I am very impressed with the stability and speed of the new OS.

The glitch came when trying to install our legacy Network AV (Trend Micro OfficeScan 8.0) software on the x64 OS. Enter Hyper-V. Created a VM, loaded the OS from an .iso image (very slick.) NOTE: load the SP2 version of W2K3 R2 and then install the ICs from the ISO image that is automatically mounted to the DVD drive. That fixes the mouse issues you may have if using TS to connect to the HOST and run the GUEST OS from there! Confused? I was too. HERE is a msdn blog post regarding the issue.

Next I need to get the network going on the guest OS so I can load Trend Micro.

TLC

UPDATE: For the Palm issue, it was simply an update to the ROM and VersaMail. I suspect the second user had a password sych issue. All good now! 

After successfully upgrading to the SonicWALL NSA 4500, I now (3 days later) suspect it is causing problems with my Palm users. Two users are having trouble synching their email. We are using Exchange Server behind the firewall and have everything set up for secure communications (SSL Cert, etc.) All was fine until today. Here’s the odd thing–only these two are having problems so far! MY Palm device sychronizes fine. The SonicWALL log shows an entry denying SMTP authentication, so I’ll start there. There is also the HTTP timeout issue to pursue, where MS recommends increasing the time-out values.

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After manually setting up the new NSA 4500, my test is successful! We have 6 sites connected via fiber, a 100MB Internet connection, and a security network on another separate port on the firewall.

All working very well!

TLC

I have always been an early adopter of new technology. I jumped on the Vista bandwagon and have been pleasantly suprised at how few problems I’ve had compared to the horror stories in the news. Having said that, I do recognize the performance hit I’ve taken, and in my search to improve I came across several articles and blog entries touting Server 2008 as the DESKTOP OS to beat!

My Vista machine has stopped playing flash and is giving me errors with some Adobe applications. So here I go, leaping in without a life vest. I’ll be loading Server 2008 onto a Dell Precision 490 Workstation with a dual core 3Ghz Xeon and 4 GB of RAM, SAS hard drive, and Nvidia Quadro 3450 graphics card.

There’s an MSDN blog post about it here, and I will be following the suggestions outlined there.

It will at least be interesting! Follow my project here.

TLC