Expert's answer

When you activate Windows 7, it will recognize the laptop based on who the serial number you are using is registered to. I am not real clear on how you got your copy of Windows 7. It sounds like you got the copy of Windows you have from a friend or contact at the company you mentioned in your question. If that is the case, you dont have a legal copy of windows and may have problems in activating it. If you dont have the retail package of Windows with the product activation key on the inside or a sticker somewhere on the laptops body (usually on the bottom of the unit), your only way of properly and legally activating your copy of Windows will be to buy a copy so that you can have a valid activation key to work with.

If you have problems activating the software, you will get a screen on your laptop that will give you a phone number or email address to use (depending on the country you are in) for activation assistance. Be prepared to give information such as where you purchased the software or other information requested by the activation folks so that they can be sure that you are who you say you are and are legally entitled to activating the software.

I havent run into many software malfunctions in the past few years to the point where I would consider it a "common" situation. As least as far as Windows itself it concerned. I have had a few problems with various applications not wanting to work right but that was usually resolved by either applying the latest windows updates or an update for the application itself.

Expert's answer

I deal mostly with Cisco switches and am not aware of any limitation in the number of subnets that the switch can handle. There may be a limitation in terms of the number of VLAN's that a particular switch can handle. For example, some of the 1900 series that I have seen have a limitation on the number of VLAN's that can be present on that switch or in the VTP domain that the switch is a member of. Later switches such as the 3700 series have a much higher limit that I dont see a way that a majority of the customers would ever hit on a day to day basis.

As to this problem on an unmanaged switch, I dont think this would be a limit since the switch is unmanaged (i.e. dumb and not able to have any changes made directly to it). Think of this like a secondary IDE drive, while it has the electronics, they are shut off when the drive is jumpered to be in slave/secondary mode.

Expert's answer

I cant speak for Wendell but I have a collection of 2610/20XM routers for my lab. Several of them have the max amount of dram/flash so that I can run just about any version of IOS that I may need to. Another reason I like the 2610/20XM's over the 1700 series is that I can rack mount the routers. You cant rack mount the 1700's from the models I have seen. That may or may not be a big issue. Also, depending on what other Cisco certs you may be pursuing, the 2600 series offer you more slot to put additional cards into for whatever type of network that you are trying to setup.

Since you already have the 2600XM router, I dont see a reason that you should return it so that you can get the 1700 router.

Expert's answer

I think I get the jist of what you are looking to do. Having a few more details on exactly what your professor expects would be helpful. It sounds like you already have a good list of projects to choose from. You mention about having to stretch the projects into one or two semesters. From your message, it is starting to sound like you are taking an independent study class where you have come up with your own project, providing periodic updates to the professor assigned to you with the end result being a "deliverable" in terms of a final report summarizing what you did over the entire semester including an appropriate number of supporting documents showing the configuration, before and after of what was done, etc.

I would take the list of project ideas that you already have and start going through them to see what it would take to bring each one of them to a successful conclusion, what is required to accomplish the goal in each idea that you have and the amount of time it would take. After you work through each of your ideas, you will quickly see which ones have the most promise and which ones need to stay on the whiteboard.

You mention about having to "stretch" the project into one or two semesters. Normally on independent study, the project is for the duration of a single semester. If your college/university is on a quarter system where two quarters would be the equivalent of a semester, that would make sense. "Stretching" a project over a semester is a little unusual. This is something that you should get clarification from the professor as well. Getting the specific criteria what is expected for a project to be one or two semesters in length would be good to know as you are selecting a possible project.

I would go to your professor and ask to see a list of what has been done over the past several years. This will be helpful in several respects. It will show you what has already been done so that you dont was time considering or proposing an idea that has already been done. If you still want to proceed with an idea that has already been done, you will be able to justify why your approach or solution is better than what has already been done when you pitch the idea instead of having to come up with a response on the fly. By going over the previous projects, you should be able to get an idea of how the professor will grade and what he/she is looking for in terms of project documentation/diary, etc.

Expert's answer

While I may not be able to give you Cisco's exact reason for having a limit on the number of port spanning configurations you can have in place, I can tell you from real world experience why the limits exist. In addition to the switch handling its port/data switching duties, having it copy data on an existing port/vlan to another port/vlan is adding additional overhead to the switch meaning additional work for the switch cpu and additional memory that is tied up, albeit temporarily, while the data is being copied from the source to the destination. Depending on the amount of traffic that is present on one or more of the ports involved in the port spanning configuration, you can run into one or both of the following problems - 1) Traffic destined for one or more of the span ports may get dropped and/or 2) Traffic for one or more of the other ports not involved in the spanning configuration may experience traffic drops. One way that you can see this first hand is to setup your switch for syslog and it will start complaining when it gets over loaded and starts dropping traffic.

As to the second part of your question about only spanning traffic based on a particular ip address. Within Cisco IOS, you can span traffic based on specific vlan's. You can also direct the traffic to be spanned to other vlan's. If you want the traffic to end up on another switch, you can use a remote vlan option that will help accomplish that task. To be able to span traffic based on ip address, ports used or something otherwise requiring deep packet inspection will require an appliance such as NetOptic's Director product line. This solution can be the best way to in a network traffic intensive applications as you wont be placing even more of a load on a switch that may already be handling as much traffic as can be expected. For more information about this particular item, you can go to http://bit.ly/75kVz.

Expert's answer

With the last change that occured to the CCNA program, Cisco introduced CCENT as a stepping stone to CCNA. You still have the choice when pursuing your CCNA as to whether you take one or two exams to get there. There are several things to look at when comparing CCENT/CCNA to CCNA. The first is the cost of the exam(s). With CCENT/CCNA, you have two exams to pay for vs only one exam for CCNA. Each Exam on the CCENT/CCNA will run $125 US vs. $250 US for the CCNA. The amount of studying that you will do for the two exams will be about the same as you will do for one exam. One thing you will want to think about is how the questions will be between the two exams. You will have 90 minutes for each of the two exams and 45-55 questions for each exam or 90 minutes and 45-55 questions for the one exam. While you will cover the same material on one exam versus two exams, theoretically, you shouldnt have any one topic in as much detail as you might expect to find it when you take the two exam route.

In the almost two years since this last change to the CCNA program occurred, I have watched the want ads and havent seen any jobs that specifically request CCENT. I still see job postings that use the CCNA as the entry point. My suspicions is that CCENT is used by Cisco as a qualifier step for the amount of certified personnel that a reseller/partner must have for the various certification levels in the Cisco Partner program. If you are looking at this as a way of collecting Cisco certifications, look at the Cisco CCNA specialty certifications for Security, Voice and Wireless that became available earlier last year.

Expert's answer

If you are looking at the Cisco certifications, you have to start out with CCNA. This is the base certification and the foundation for anything else that you are looking at from Cisco (with the exception of CCIE). Any of the CCNA specializations such as CCNA Wireless, CCNA Security, etc all require that you have the base CCNA as a prereq. CCNP requires that you have CCNA before you can obtain CCNP.

All of the Cisco certs have a 3 year (except for CCIE which has a 2 year renewal cycle). As you take higher level exams in the Cisco line, all of your lower level certs are automatically renewed. Just about all of the technology certifications have a renewal/recertification component. This is realistic because with things continually changing, your certification needs to reasonably reflect the current state of what your cert represents.

As to which Cisco cert is the best one to go with will depend on what skills are in demand where you are in India. Either way, you have to start the process with getting your CCNA. That should help get some doors open for you and increase your pay level. Once you have done that, see what the opportunities are as to where you head next - route/switch, security, wireless or voice.

Expert's answer

Has this always been a problem or did it only show up after a recent change ? Have you applied all of the patches that are currently available ? What has recently changed on the server ?

I looked up the error and unfortunately it is somewhat "generic". That is to say there seems to be more than one problem that I have been finding reference to with the information that you provided. Try restarting the server in safe mode. If this works, it will tell you that something beyond the core OS would apprear to be causing the problem.

I have found a couple of references that showed a problem similar to this and part of the resolution process appears to be going into safe mode and removing all of the .NET patches. The next step is to restart the server in normal mode and you should be able to get in. See if everything is working normally before trying to reinstall the .NET patches. Unless you have an application dependency that requires the .NET patches, it may be easier to leave them uninstalled.

If everything checks out, go ahead and reapply the patches. I have seen problems occur in the past with a bad or corrupted patch install. Make sure that you have your anti-virus software disabled during the patch install process as this might have been cause for the problem you ran int.

Expert's answer

There are several things that I would like to suggest -

1) I would install Wireshark on the app server and one of the client machines. Run Wireshark on the workstation with a filter that will only capture traffic to/from the app server in question. Repeat this process on the server with a filter capturing the traffic to/from the workstation you are testing from. Ideally you should capture at the same time on both devices. Do this at two different times - one when things are running ok and one when users are complaining about the problem. Look at the difference between the two capture and that may give you an idea of where to look next.

2) Look at when the problem occurs and where the affect users are located. If you arent already using a QOS (Quality of Service) model on your network, this might be a good time to think about implementing one. You mention that you have multiple locations. If you are using MPLS or point to point circuits, you will be able to extend this to all the officess. If you are using VPN's to connect the offices, you might be able to extend the QOS across the inside of the VPN tunnel but you wont be able to control the outside of the tunnel, so you may not be able to get the degree of control that you would like to have.

3) When looking at WAN optimization, I would suggest looking at the Riverbed appliance. I have seen this work wonders with getting more throughput out of the same amount of bandwidth. If the content you are working with is more dynamic than static, using something like the Riverbed or even Cisco's WAAS offering, WAN optimization wont really help.

You mentioned that this is a server that also talks to a database server. You may need to extend the Wireshark testing to also include the database server. Do a capture at all points at the same time during times when the problem does and doesnt occur. If you see the delays at the DB server, you could be running into a disk channel bottleneck that could be resolved by going to a faster disks, if you are using a SAN, moving the disks to a LUN that has less traffic on it, etc.

Expert's answer

CCNA should be looked as entry level qualifications to getting a job in the networking arena. I have been watching the job openings in my area lately and I have been surprised as to the positions that are looking with someone with a CCNA. I am seeing a side range of positions ranging from what I would term as a conventional networking position to one where you are dealing with a server virtualization farm or a SAN/NAS system. I have also seen positions where you are dealing with Exchange or Oracle servers where a value is seen with someone having a good grounding in network fundamentals.

As how your career will begin - expect to be the grunt or gopher of the group. You will probably do things that maybe dont belong in your area of responsibility. As you show that you are up to the task and earn your stripes, you may get to do things that you never anticipated. As you get exposed to different things, you may find an area that you would like to specialize in or concentrate on that could really let you make yourself more value to your employer.