This is quite a new certification, as it was only released last year. The subject matter of the course is very similar to that of ISCW and SND. This should be a great help for me as my next Cisco exam should be ISCW, as I really would like to finally add CCNP to my growing list of certifications.

The following is a my current thoughts on the process flow for modeling transitions of services:

I’m thinking buying a license for OmniGraffle, as I can’t edit the above diagram any more, it seems a lot nicer than Visio which I use quite a lot at work. The only thing is the Professional version worth the extra money ?

It does greatly simplify the setting of the hostname and domain name on a server when it’s been automatically installed with Debian pre-seeding or Red Hat’s kickstart over the network. This is because both build systems use the reverse DNS entry of the server’s IP address during installations as its hostname.

Thus the host entry in the DHCPd configuration becomes the single location for the details, as in the following example:

host test-001 {

  hardware ethernet 00:0c:29:56:f3:7b;

  option host-name "test-001";

  ddns-hostname "test-001";

  ddns-domainname "local";

}

The following magic in the dhcpd.conf allows this server to co-exist with another DHCP server, due to PXE clients ignoring DHCP replies which do not contain the filename or next-server options:

deny unknown-clients;

class "pxe" {
  match if substring (option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 9) = "PXEClient";
}

And finally within a pool definition, the real magic:

allow members of "pxe";
next-server 192.168.1.2;

This allows hosts that boot with the same file name to be grouped together, which should also allow installation of *BSD systems and may be even Windows servers off the same Linux server running ISC DHCPD and TFTP.

I think the next step is to look at automatic installation of Debian and integrating dynamic DNS updates into DHCP, that way it should be possible to get the correct hostname into a Centos VM. However I’m not sure if how it will work with Debian.

• Add the following Operating Systems reports:
  • Breakdown of Operating Systems (counts).
  • Devices which are in sale Operating Systems.
  • Devices which are in support Operating Systems.
• Use a partial for the list of Operating Systems reports.
• Use partials for reports where possible.

• Add Reports Controller module.
• Add the following Operating Systems reports:
  • Devices with end of sale Operating Systems.
  • Devices with end of support Operating Systems.
• Add tests for Reports controller.

However over the last few days I’ve managed to get an import integration story working, which seems to be working. I’ve also taken the chance to migrate to Ruby on Rails 1.2.5, but there are some DEPRECATION warnings still to dealt with.

Behind the cut is the changelog.

• Use Rails version 1.2.5.
• Added list_by_purchase_order page.
• Fix some formatting issues with the side bar.
• Fix some issues in importing of data.
• Added some extra edit links to the device page.
• Add environments export and import.
• Correctly name CSV exports.
• Added Export tests.
• Added Import integration test.
• Renamed the removed_on column in Assets to retired_on.
• Many fixes from better unit, functional and integration tests.

• Built in ssh-agent support.
• The iCal and Mail integration.
• Spaces.
• New look Finder.
• Profiles in the terminal.
• Being able to map network shares from the dock.

The things that have not improved.

• Using a real UK PC keyword is still not handled correctly (I’m had a ergonomic keyboard for years).
• There seems to be no way to change to size of unread counts in the dock (annoying for netnewswire).

I’ve also just spent what seems like an age getting my keyboard back to functioning correctly, after MacOS refused to do anything to change the keyboard type with the following error (also sometimes the change keyboard type button disappeared from the keyboard and mouse section of system preferences):

No unknown keyboard connected - terminating

The only way to fix it was to remove the following file and then reboot.

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.keyboardtype.plist

Then when re-detecting the keyboard type and selecting the map from the following page, it worked correctly with the keyboard type of ISO European.

It’s been a while since I posted and this is mainly because I’ve been very busy with work and also trying to cut back on computer use for the last month.
Currently I’m managing to hold back on the upgrade to Leopard, however this is because some really important software is missing support and thus preventing me upgrading . I’m hoping that early December will give me the new shiny.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a talk at ScotRUG about StaticMatic and I’ve now ported my web site over to it from Website Meta Language. Now all that’s left is working round HAMLs handling of content within pre tags and updating the site so it looks like something created the in latter half of this decade instead of the late 90′s.

Really happy about this as I started reading about ITIL some time in May this year, just before I learned about version 3. All in all I think it’s a good improvement over version 2 and well worth doing.