Categories
Computing

Boot Camp fun and Home Networking

Part of the changes at home with the new arrival on the way, mean that I have had to store my PC (something that I am surprisingly not sad at doing, considering the dust it attracted and the heat that the 500w PSU generated, more than 90 minutes and the room was horribly warm) and having to vacate the spare bedroom/office, I have located all files from my PC to a nifty WD NAS device and all is working well so far.

I decided to take the plunge and bootcamp the 2014 MBP I own to cover both needs with OS and found out a few things the painful way, I realised mainly that because I work in IT, I am non-compliant in following instructions and thought I had read enough to know that bootcamp assistant would only be needed by me to partition the disc for installation and I stick a normal windows USB stick to install it onto my machine, two days I fiddled for a couple of hours in the night wondering why it did not work and had a persistent message about being unable to install onto a GPT partition, I tried everything I thought would work including me downloading the bootcamp files to stick on the USB sticks.

I decided late last night to just follow the wizard and let it build the installation stick as it wanted after reading the assistant and lo and behold it hit gold and worked fine, so I am finally up and running, though I still have to work out how to get windows to play ball with the retina resolutions and font sizes.

I also realised the other day that I had to install a small switch in my house, as the connected devices had gone over the connections supplied on the Superhub, so the home network is expanding now to a surprising size, especially with our location needing a home wifi/3G access point to be able to make call on our mobile phones.

Categories
Computing

Lab up and running

After a bit of progress with Packet tracer and a little bit of frustration at some commands not working, I decided to try and grab some cheap equipment on eBay, I am following some CBTNuggets and the tutor recommended some equipment I set about trying to source second hand, but I ended up having better luck than that, I finally noticed a UK supplier selling lab kit on sale on eBay.

I now own an 1841 Router, 2x 3550 switches (their the better L3 switches than the 2900 series, and an assortment of cables (power/USB-Serial/Console/LAN) so good for other CCNA Certs and beyond.

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I had a bit of fun with the connecting the USB/Serial cable that I bought off eBay, as it wouldn’t work initially and I had to master drivers on the Mac and find a decent freeware terminal program, but its all up and running now and makes better sense of what I am doing.