What's New
The title say's it all. I'll point out new items of interest here or on other web sites. You may have noticed my strong love of networks and OS Administration, and politics! What a mixture!

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HTTP Site (Keith Marx.com for public use) is available.
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Source links to sites for technical consumption, click on Technical Links.
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Web site hosting for family and friends only.
Are you into Sco Unix? Check out pcunix.com and tek-tips.com
A new interest, Golf, not sure why I want this much abuse, but I am having fun trying to master another trying skill. Maybe some future progress reports. Right now the basics are getting ingrained, like grip, stance, aiming, SWINGING! UGH!!. Have done a few public courses around town, Indian Creek - WOW, Tara Hills, Applewood, Westwood, Grampa's Woods (cute, well hidden, 9hole, par 3 course for hookers and slicers!).
Future Content
My experiences with Qwest in acquiring a Frame Relay circuit and it's capabilities. Quick update here, a most satisfying experience. Nearly 100% dependable uptimes, very low configuration problems. Ip Revolution are our Frame Network Consultant's. Kudo's to their professionals in setting up T-1's and DS0's in all of our locations. We employed Cisco 1720 Series Routers.
8/30/02 - An update to our Frame Relay experience almost a year later. So far Qwest's services have been up the promised 97% of the time. It seems we experience PVC's going belly up every once in a while. I find Qwest to be fairly good at coming up with answers when needed, but get a bit frustrated with all the other companies passing blame among each other when trouble happens. Intermedia connects Qwest and Alltel Circuits, so we have three players in the games when troubles occur. Just make sure you have your ckt numbers and a good supply of phone numbers, and stay on top of the bunch! IP Revolution has gone through a few changes (with tech having severe troubles). It seems they have shifted resources around a bit, and let a few people go, so they are not as on top of the game when troubles occur. A meeting in a couple of weeks should clear up some confusion for the future. But otherwise, I'm pretty satisfied with Frame Relays, and their fairly good consistency, and dependability. A good choice for small to medium companies that have to connect their offices together.
A new Dell Server employed as a SCO Unix Server. It's at Power Edge 4400 Series server employing Dual 1.13 GB processors and Raid 5 Ultra Scsi with 2GB of RAM. It Screams!!!!!!
Update 8/30/02 - Wonderful piece of hardware so far and runs at a blazing speed!! I will definitely buy more of these boxes!! (Until I find out how good the hardware support is over the next three years, anyway!)
Update 10/27/02 - Have to add another PVC to our network has proved to be an interesting new experience. Since I have dealt with IP Revolution in the past, I have had a lot of faith in their abilities up to this project. Since them I have learned that it is much more lucrative to deal with Qwest directly, and here is why. Price - they were half of IP Revolution for a new PVC. Secondly, knowledge of their network. Ip Rev swore up and down that Qwest is not a local ILEC in Cedar Rapids IA. This is totally wrong!! Qwest serves the whole area!! Speed of service. I waited 60 days for IP Rev to bring up our original Host site and three PVC's. Qwest is turning up ckt in 15 days from signing contracts! Response times from IP Rev has been abysmal!! I need them to set up the host site for our new T-1 and set up PVC. No call yet. Looks like I'll have to get my CCNA!!
6/25/03 An update. Had to move our Lincoln CPE to another location, as we moved. What a run around. You need to have an inside person to get butts moving to complete this!! All went ok, and ahead of schedule. I found that talking to the right people on both sides of the CKT made things go very smoothly.
7/7/03 Made my first network wide configuration changes to my Cisco's. All went fine. Now pursuing one more new configuration called Traffic Shaping. Have learned that our Hub circuit I was getting congested at certain times of the day. This causes the frame switches to drop packets causing total stoppage of traffic flow. Have to configure routers to pay attention to FECN's and adjust accordingly, shaping traffic.
9/21/03 Traffic Shaping did the trick, not one single problem with traffic flow now!
4/01/04 Frame Relay CKTS out the door!! We made the decision to bring all of the companies locations under 1 communications contract which cut our Cell, Data, Local Pots, and T-1 long distance costs right in half!! And so far, yes it's true!! We now how a T-1 in each of our locations, and a second T-1 in two of our larger offices. One is for Voice Services, the other for data. Our data now traverses the Internet using IPSEC VPN utilizing Pix firewalls, and routers. It took me a couple of weeks to "get up to speed" on IPSEC and ISAKMP tunnels. Wow, I am amazed at how persistent the connections are maintained, with little or no dropouts. Initial launching of the network went without too many hitches! We are utilizing Pix 501's in larger offices now and Cisco 831's in our smaller branches. I will soon employ a Cisco 1720 at the head end to achieve a Fully Meshed Network. Right now it's hub and spoke. All spokes can browse the head end and vice versa. The problem is that the spokes cannot browse each other. Cisco engineers are usually pretty good when a problem came up, and were prompt in solving problem. Split Tunneling is a bit complex and Access Lists are very critical in splitting the correct traffic through the tunnel and to the internet. Speeds are lightning fast compared to Frame (no surprise here!). More to come..................
Norvergence declares bankruptcy!! Around early July Norvergence went under, and we were left running our butts off to restore some of our old services and re-establish all network functions. As of 8/1/04 all is fine. We established DSL's in 4 of our 5 branches, and a wireless link in our other branch. Some important observations, DSL's are not enterprise class services, which means when you go down, you are S.O.L, Joe Blow down the street and your DSL is down!! Forget response times and guarantee's from the phone company!! All in all the service is fast and delivers what it's cut out to be. We are still maintaining our VPN's over the DSL's. More to come in this saga!!.......
03/12/05 - On track with DSL's and Wireless services in two offices. Wireless, take it or leave it. Dsl's a little better. Getting rid of pieces of sh__! Cisco 831's! Very bad with noisy, undependable dsl's and wireless.. If a service interruption occurs, routers will most likely fail to restore IPSEC connects to headend for VPN. I am now swapping 831's for PIX 501-Bun-k9-10 user boxes. The FOS seems to be much more persistent about re-establishing IPSEC connections with headend. 831's have confirmed bug in IOS according to Cisco (Newest IOS versions). It will take 90 day's to correct!!!!???? B.S., we are nixing those boxes now!!
Overall network dependability is very good, with occasional crash every couple of days..
Would recommend this method of connection to any small to medium enterprise needing cheap connectivity between small branches (2-50 users).
7/1/06 - Network growing quickly, new owners have purchased company, more mobile users coming online. Employed new ASA 5510 in Omaha. Went to fully meshed VPN's, all branches browsable. Will be testing a mobile configuration using DIGI Connectport. Amazing technology! Our trucks will have office connectivity, via vpn, full time through the Verizon Wireless Network. More updates as we test and employ new configs.

Default Server History

As of 07/01/01 this web server was
equipped with Front Page 2002 Server Extensions.
This will allow full use of the new Front Page 2002 extensions!

As of 12/5/2001 - This server "SAMMY" has been upgraded to a
blinding speed!! She is now a Pentium II 333Mhz Socket 1 Processor
and 193mb of Ram. She was a Cyrix 233 MMX. Hope the upgrade
helps to speed up downloads and page delivery!
10/22/02 - Announcement!! This server is now using the Windows.NET Enterprise RC1 Operating System!! So far so good. The hardware remains the same as above. This New Server OS should be very familiar to anyone who runs 2000 Server. RC1 is very much 2000 with the flavor of XP!!!

12/22/02 - Upgraded today to RC2 .Net Server. Please report any problems to webmaster@keithmarx.com.

1/30/2003 - Back to 2000 Server. Had hard drive crash. Beta test over. .Net Server is going to be a great product, but it still needs some tweaking. I did add some significant hard drive space though.

5/25/03 - Server and associated equipment relocated to new space. New quarters are going to work out wonderfully!

9/20/03 this is a new server, Joe, he is a 1GB PIII with 512MB RAM, Sammy was downgraded to domain controller and some admin functions!
8/1/04 Sometime around July 24th 2004 my server coughed up a motherboard and went down. Went out to obtain new hardware for repairs and ran into some interesting problems. First of all, in order to upgrade I had to replace my old SDRAM with DDRAM (ok, no big deal, happens all the time), but to add insult to injury, I also had to replace the stupid video card which was a slightly older AGP Graphics card, with a new one. What kind of a scheme is this!! Then upon restoring my machine, I had problems getting Windows 2000 server to play along with this new graphics card made by ATI. When I would re-patch with SP4, windows would stall just before giving me my logon prompt, and no services would start. Since I log in remotely, I have unloaded the video drivers totally, and am living with a very vanilla resolution and color setting!!

06/12/05 - New server hardware and OS. Now an Athlon 2.8 with 512Mb and Server 2003! Very well written and much more secure!!
Sept 7, 2007 - Introduction of Virtual Server Technology. Wow! is all I can say. Now I can run a separate version of IIS in it's own server space. Thanks to Microsoft's Virtual technology (free to the user), you basically should never have an outage, unless you have a hardware failure. But recovery is a breeze. Copy VHD - virtual hard drive back to new install, install Virtualization software - 1 minute, then set up a few easy parameters, and whammo! Your back up!
If you want to download the software go here, there are two versions Virtual PC and Virtual Server. If you want to run your old windows install on top of say Vista, like I do, you can use Virtual PC, Virtual Server works best in an install of Server 2003, and has features designed for maximum uptime and server flexibility (plus the ability to run any Microsoft Server technology!)
Note: You must have an Enterprise version of Windows server to run up to 4 virtual machines. You must have a valid Windows OS to run in a Virtual PC install.

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What's New The title say's it all. I'll point out new items of interest here or on other web sites. You may have noticed my strong love of networks and OS Administration, and politics! What a mixture!

What's New
The title say's it all. I'll point out new items of interest here or on other web sites. You may have noticed my strong love of networks and OS Administration, and politics! What a mixture!