Tuesday 27 October 2020

Jack Ma's 10 Rules for Success

 Jack Ma's 10 Rules for Success

Jack Ma
Read about him here.
  1. Learn from the mistakes of others
  2. Focus on quality, not quantity (size).
  3. Be the first
  4. Prepare for the Future
  5. Respect Your Competitors
  6. See challenges as opportunities
  7. Believe
  8. Surround yourself with greatness
  9. Live Healthy
  10. Have fun

 

SOURCES

Thursday 22 October 2020

If it were not for God, I would not be here today!

Every now and then someone may face a life-changing moment that will leave a lasting impact upon their lives. These experiences can also have an effect upon our faith and belief in a deity that exists beyond our imagination. A God like no other, the One that brought all things into existence. My wife had an experience last year while giving birth to our beautiful third baby - a girl and here is her testimony of how God worked through the life of others to save hers. 

**********************************************************************************

If it were not for God, I would not be here today. I would have been dead and gone on this date 17 June. #mytestimony God is not done with you yet!

Photo of Tabu @1 month old.

Figure 1. Tabu Airi. Named after my late bro.

 

After I gave birth to my princess, I told my mum I needed to go; please mummy just let me go... I gave my back to my family, my husband, my kids and the world off course! I lost 2 and half buckets of blood on that day. My mum held her faith up to her throat and never gave up praying to God pleading to keep my heartbeat. As I struggled through that moment, I heard my mum praying, casting all those women who passed away came calling for me to go with them. I kept telling my mum with that weak voice, mum just let me go, and I need to go...

 

I experienced that 5 minutes of RIP. I had total Peace that moment. I could not hear a word from my mum, I could not remember yesterday and I had no worries for tomorrow, just total darkness and fine Peace! After those 5 minutes of total darkness, I felt tears rolling down my cheeks; I knew God was not done with me. It is as if He said, Rosemary, I am not done with you yet. I could not sit up, my body turned pale. Then my mum went asking Doctors, Mid-Wives and Nurses for a blood packet. They responded by saying we do not have any blood available now and in fact, there was nothing in the Blood Bank. 

Tuesday 20 October 2020

Setting up a SOHO network with VoIP and Data services in Packet Tracer

A simple tutorial on building a small office home office network that can be expanded via a wireless bridge to perhaps another building or room. This tutorial was used by my students to build a network with actual hardware for the IS/MCS 2020 Symposium. The setup is not very complicated and can be useful for small organizations or schools. 

Here is a short video of one of my students demonstrating the functionality of the setup.


The tutorial here shows you the configurations for the simulation in Packet Tracer. NOTE: Simulated network in PT works fine for most of the configs however it is not guaranteed everything will work well in actual hardware as IOS and config commands may vary. You may have different IOS version. PT does not have Engenius so TP Link devices were used in PT to simulate them so additional documentation will be included as a follow-up to this article (Part 2).

So here goes Part 1 of the configuration. (Note that the much of the tutorial will show the config commands and little explanation. I am assuming you have basic to intermediate level understanding of network concepts, otherwise this could end up as a very lengthy tutorial)

For the actual hardware configuration, these were the following devices that were used.

Device Model

  • x1 2900 Series router
  • x3 2960 Catalyst switches. (you can use 2950)
  • x2 Engenius wireless bridges (ENH202)
  • x4 Cisco 7945G/7960 IP Phones
  • x2 TP Link Wireless AP

You could simulate this setup by opening a blank PT file and add the following devices shown in the image below. Alternatively, you can download the completed network file here.

Figure 1. The simulated setup in Packet Tracer

PART 1

Task1: Configure basic settings on all routers and switches. 

I generally keep the same settings and change passwords where security is of concern. Documenting configs is helpful for future reference. So the configs below will generally be the same across all routers and switches.

hostname __________ (you can use your own hostnames)
no ip domain-lookup
enable secret in40matic
domain-name informatics.net
service password-encryption
banner motd @
***************************
Device managed by Informatics
Unauthorized access prohibited!
***************************
@
line con 0
password In4matic2020
login
line vty 0 4
login local
transport input ssh
username admin password adminpass1234
crypto key generate rsa general-keys modulus 1024
wr

Task 2: Configure VLANs on all 6 switches

Configure VLANs to separate data, voice and management traffic on the Layer 2 devices, the 4 switches. Create the following vlans;

  • Data #10
  • Voice #150
  • Native #99
  • Management #100 (optional) 
config t
vlan 10
name Data
vlan 150
name Voice
vlan 99
name Native

Task 3: Configure EtherChannel on the switches as shown in Figure 1.

Although not required for a SOHO, its good practice to design and build the network with scalability in mind. Having said that we will configure etherchannel to increase the trunk link bandwidth to at least 200MB. 

Sw1

int range fa0/1-2
channel-group 1 mode desirable

Sw2

int range fa0/1-2
channel-group 1 mode desirable 

Sw3

int range fa0/1-2
channel-group 2 mode desirable

Sw4

int range fa0/1-2
channel-group 2 mode desirable