We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.
When people in the IT field hear the term Network Admin, they
usually think about Cisco and routers. Cisco is used by a lot of big
corporations and is also used in the military,where I work. (In
home-based networks, you can to pick any brand of network device out of
a hat, because you really don't know that you're going to deal
with.)
There are basic tools that you need no matter what size your
network. Networks today are mostly platform independent, and the Mac is
a great system that interacts very well with a lot of platforms, thanks
mostly to the TCP/IP protocols.
This week we're going to go over the basic tool used to install,
configure, diagnose, and troubleshoot networks.
Up-to-date Firmware
The first thing you want to do is make sure that the firmware on
your network devices is up to date. In common consumer equipment, you
go to the manufacture's website, download a firmware file to your
computer, and then upload it to the device using your web browser.
Enterprise equipment, like Nortel and Cisco, will require using a
TFTP
(Trivial File Transfer Protocol) server to upload the firmware or IOS
(Internetwork Operating System) to the device. Mac OS X has a
built-in TFTP in the command line, but I use an open source program
called TftpServer.
This program is fairly easy to use: You start off by telling it
where your source folder containing the firmware is, and then you
simply make sure the server (service/daemon) is running and that the
permission are okay - and your ready to go. Simply point the device
you're upgrading to the IP of your Mac, and it will find the files you
have in the directory. TFTP is very simple; you have to tell it
specifically what file you need, and then it will read and write
it.
When doing a backup on a device's firmware (thus sending it to your
Mac via TFTP), you must click "create file" and name it exactly as the
one on your device. Give example on Cisco device
Serial Connections
Next, you want to access your device to finish the installation
process and fully configure it. Once again, most consumer devices are
configured using a web browser, while enterprise equipment uses the
serial connections. The common serial connections you will encounter
are 9-pin RS232 and Cisco's RJ45. Cisco uses a RJ45, which is the same
connector used in most ethernet installation, but it's actually a
serial cable - and by using a rollover cable and an RJ45-to-RS232
adapter, it's fully compatible with any computer's RS232 serial
port.
Most Macs today don't have legacy serial ports, so you will need to
pick up a USB-to-serial adapter like the IOGear
GUC232A. IOGear provides the drivers for Mac OS X, so all you
will need now is a good terminal app. A terminal emulator is a command
line shell that in the old days was a physical dumb video terminal
connected to a big mainframe. Yes, it's very similar to Mac OS X
terminal but it uses the serial connection for its input and
output.
Terminal Emulation
The long-standing king in the Mac world for that past 10-15 years is
Zterm. You start
off by selecting your interface (in our case it would be the
USB-to-Serial adapter), set up the basic settings (like the terminal
set to vt100) and connection to Data Rate: 9600, Data Bits: 8 Parity:
none, and Stop Bits: 1. I haven't had any problems access devices using
these settings.
Now we're going to move on to the diagnose and troubleshooting
stages of Net Admin. Once your devices are up and running, you can
almost always connect using your web browser and either Telnet or SSH
through the Mac OS X terminal. My favorite app continues to be Apple's
Network Utility, which you can use to find out info on any network
interface you have on your Mac. This way you can see the capabilities
of your wireless card (to see whether it is 802.11a, b, g, or n) and
also to see if your wired connection is running at 10, 100, or 1000
Mbps.
Unlimited number of pings is great when you want to make sure you
have a solid connection. Ping sends out a packet and
tells you how long it took to reach its destination and come back
again. Traceroute
is great when trying to find out how many hops or how much equipment is
between you and the destination.
Home Networks
Next week we'll be going over administrating a home network, along
with answering any question that might come up from this week's
article.
As an update to my current status I am still in the US Army and am
currently residing in Iraq. I have with me my PowerBook G4 667 MHz DVI and a Black MacBook Core 2 2 GHz while still
working with networks both LAN/WAN and, of course, my own LAN in my
living area for the soldiers in my unit.
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We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.
We believe in the long term value of Apple hardware. You should be able to use your Apple gear as long as it helps you remain productive and meets your needs, upgrading only as necessary. We want to help maximize the life of your Apple gear.
