Starting the day at 5AM: Day 1

Day one of waking up at 5AM

The start of the day has been awesome.  I never realized how little time I had during the day to work on things I wanted to work on, or how much I could get accomplished during a good hour and a half of quiet time.

I'm currently studying for the CCENT.  Because I'm busy all day long and don't really have time to actively study, I've decided to passively study.  Well...  passive is the wrong word.  I generally spend a lot of time driving around during my day.  Rather than listen to talk radio or music, I've chosen to make my own audio CDs.  Kind of like books on tape, but made by me.  So each chapter gets read, recorded, and transferred to CD.  Program wise, I use Audacity with the Lame plug-in.  Lame is an MP3 codec.  

My car has a 5 6 disc CD changer built in.  It accepts regular or MP3 CDs.  But it doesn't have an 1/8" line in jack.  So CDs are my only choice.  For the last few weeks, I've been listening to chapters 2 through 5.  I finished off chapter 6 this morning, and will create the CD for that today when I have time. 

My CD production is nothing special.  Just me recording.  So if I yawn, there is a yawn in the recording.  If I get an email, you can probably hear my phone indicating this.  But it works perfectly.  I've heard in numerous places that learning is just a matter of listening to the same thing over and over again.  I'm aiming for this approach at the CCENT.  Much of the first section of the CCENT is theory and technical information about how networks do their work.  But in the end, the information doesn't really help me at my job.  And that's the entire purpose of going for a CCNA. 

FYI: CCENT is "Cisco Certified Entry-level Network Technician".  It is the first step to passing the CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Administrator). 

My goal in getting a CCNA is to understand the routers and switches we use in our stores.  As an IT Technician, my job is to fix many things, and most of them I know a little bit about.  But fixing equipment I don't understand is quite annoying.  Especially when I've got the owner of the company staring at me asking why I don't have it working yet. 

Of note...  I was sitting there laughing to myself. 

Cisco switches can block off devices based on MAC address.  We've been having troubles at a location, so I wanted to see which workstations were causing problems.  Workstation 1, 2, and 3 are at static IP addresses.  So I used PSTools to check the ARP table on work station 3, which should know the location of workstation 1 and 2.  But it didn't.  So I used PSTools again to ping workstation 1 and 2.  Now, workstation 3 knows the MAC address and IP of workstation 1 and 2.  So I can then equate the MAC address to a port number on the switch and identify which device is plugged into each port.  Now, I can read the table and equate which workstation is doing what. 

And I did all this from a remote site without ever leaving my desk.  Sometimes, being IT is awesome.