Networking Lab Experiments

Today I went out and got a table to get my rack of Cisco gear off the floor. I first went to Lowe's and bought a 5 foot long folding table but it turned out to be a little too long, so I returned it. I wound up getting a Husky portable workbench at Home Depot. It seems quite sturdy and I'll probably get a good amount of use from it, and not just to hold up old networking gear.

(There's a mirror on the wall behind the Cisco gear, courtesy of our house's original owners. It'll be replaced with drywall when we redo the room.)

The power strip that everything is plugged into came from Lowe's this morning. It's their Utilitech house brand and has two USB ports for charging devices. I should be able to power a Raspberry Pi off it.

I was working on switch configuration, including VLANs, so I wanted to have more than one computer so I could verify connectivity between hosts was working (or not working, depending on how things were setup). So, I dragged out my old MSI Wind netbook, running Windows 7.

Well, something is hosed up with the networking on it so I decided to dual boot it with Lubuntu Linux. Nowadays my work with Windows is infrequent enough that fixing issues is more of a PITA than it should be, so I figured that Linux would be less trouble.

All my config work was performed using the MacBook Pro, accessing the switch through ZOC and a console cable.

VMware Training and a New PC

Last week I attended a five day course on installing, configuring, and maintaining VMware vSphere 4.1.  My employer purchased an "all you can eat" license earlier this year, and I've been asked to implement it on one of our networks.  Since I have no prior experience with vSphere I asked my boss for training.  It turns out that we had some training credits which expire at the end of 2010, so I was able to register for this couse at no cost to my department.

I am very impressed with vSphere, as well as VMware's vSphere Client management program.  I find it well designed with a very good user interface.  It runs on Windows only, unfortunately.  I wish they had an OS X client.  At work I have a Windows 7 VM inside Paralles Desktop on my MacBook Pro which I can use.  I also recently setup a four year old Dell Precision Workstation 470n which I scrounged.  It's running Windows 7 x64 with 4 GBs of RAM so it runs much more smoothly than the VM on my laptop.

As a side note, the VMs I have running inside of Parallels Desktop have gotten a lot slower recently, especially the Windows 7 VM.  I am thinking of dumping PD and installing VirtualBox.

Because vSphere is basically a means to run other OSes as applications on a host I decided I wanted to have a way to refamiliarize myself with any number of OSes on a system at home.  To that end, yesterday I did something I haven't done in 12 years: I bought a new desktop PC running Windows.

For the past 10 years or so I've built my own machines.  I have two tower cases which are well designed and which have been used in several incarnations of motherboards, CPUs, and operating systems.  However, I just didn't feel like putting together a new PC, especially since I can now buy a very powerful system for under a grand.

So, yesterday I did some searching on Microcenter's website and purchased a PowerSpec B707 mini-tower system for $699 plus tax.  The basic specs are:

1. Intel Core i5 - 655K 3.2 GHz dual core CPU
2. Intel DH55TC motherboard with integrated video (VGA and DVI), sound, Gigabit LAN.
3. Samsung 1 TB hard disk
4. 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi (which I have disabled since I have an Ethernet connection)
5. DVD+/-RW drive
6. Media card reader
7. 300W power supply
8. Windows 7 Professional 64 bit
9. 4 GB of DDR3 RAM (expandalbe to 16 GB)

Because I bought the system with the idea of running other OSes inside VMs I wanted to increase the RAM.  I found an OCZ 4 GB kit (2 x 2 GB DIMMs) at Microcenter for $69.99 less a $20 mail-in rebate, so added that to the cart.

Microcenter allows you to place an order on their website and arrange for in-store pickup in 18 minutes, if they have the items in stock at your local store.  I did that and was in and out in about 10 minutes.

The PC came with a cheap Inland USB keyboard which I'm using currently but will probably replace due to the mushy feel.  It also came with an Inland mouse which I left in the packaging, in favor of the Logitech mouse I already had.  The machine didn't come with a monitor which was fine, I'm using an Acer AL2016W 20" widescreen LCD display that I bought last year.  I'm using the DVI port and it looks good.

The PowerSpec box came with no crapware installed which was a pleasant surpise.  It did include a trial version of ESET NOD32 antivirus which I removed in favor of MS Security Essentials, and also an installer for MS Office 2010 Starter Edition (lobotomized versions of Word and Excel supported by ads).

The machine is quite zippy for my uses: web browsing, light office use, as an SSH client, and to run VMs inside VirtualBox.  I haven't really pounded on the box yet but so far the CPU usage is minimal most of the time and I'm only using about half the 8 GB RAM that's installed in the system.

So far I've created VMs running Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows XP Pro SP3.  I unfortunately need the XP VM to run a VPN client which doesn't work in Windows 7; I hope to lose that particular need in the next few months.  My next VM will probably be Windows 2008 Server R2.

Another use of this box will be for me to evaluate various remote control applications.  I have GoToMyPC, LogMein, and TeamViewer in mind.

Windows 7 on the MSI Wind U100 Netbook

Earlier this week I decided to install Windows 7 on Hobbit, my MSI Wind netbook PC.  Hobbit shipped with Windows XP Home SP3 installed, to which I added Ubuntu Linux in a dual boot configuration.

I have a couple reasons for installing Windows 7.  First, it's a much more up-to-date OS than XP.  In playing around with it at work I've been impressed.  Second, as an IT professional it behooves me to keep up with new technology.

To install Windows 7 on Hobbit, I first needed to acquire a USB optical drive.  I bought an LG Electronics GP08LU10 8X Slim LightScribe DVD+/-RW External Drive. (11/17/09 - Link updated from NewEgg to Amazon.)  Aside from creating the recovery media, booting DBAN from System Rescue CD, and installing W7, it will allow me to access optical media more conveniently on Hobbit.  (Previously, I've copied files from CDs and DVDs to a thumb drive using another computer, or accessed discs over the network.)

I then burned an XP recovery CD.  MSI ships the Wind with an XP recovery partition but no media.  They do include a utility to create a recovery disc. 

For my W7 install I wanted a clean slate, i.e., no OSes on Hobbit's hard drive.  I selected a Custom install, deleted the existing partitions, and created a 50 GB partition for C:\.  (I later formatted the remained of the drive as D:\ after I was up and running.)

The install went smoothly and all my hardware was detected.  After installing the Microsoft Security Essentials antivirus/antimalware suite, Firefox, and a few other apps, I used Hobbit over the weekend.  (My previous favorite AV program was AVG.  The last couple of versions have become increasingly bloated.  I've had good results with MS's offering.)

I am impressed.  Windows 7 runs very nicely on this hardware (1.6 GHz Atom CPU, 2 GB Kingston RAM, Intel 4965agn WiFi card).  In fact, I'd say it runs better on Hobbit than XP Home or Ubuntu 9.04 did.

So far so good.  I'll be using this setup frequently.  But if the initial impressions hold up I think MS has a winner on its hands.