Contacting server and signing in...

Apparently Office 365 has this neat feature where your password expires but it doesn't want you to know. This morning I logged into my computer, grabbed my first cup of coffee of the day and sat down.  About 30 minutes later I got an email informing me that I was not signed into Lync.  And sure enough, the client is sitting there still saying "Contacting server and signing in..."

Free CCNA Resources 2.0

Do you want to become a CCNA with little or no cost out of pocket beyond taking the exam(s)? Between my own attempt at the CCNA and my association with forums and blogs where we eat, sleep and breathe Cisco networking, I have collected a number of free resources that I have collected together here in once place in hopes that it will be of help. I'll try to keep this list up to date as I find new material. Feel free to add a link in the comments or let me know if a link no longer works. Most importantly, PLEASE let me know if I was fooled and listed something here that is less than reputable. Happy Studying!

The exam hasn't changed real drastically from the 640-802 version, some tweaks but nothing drastic. So don't be scared away from anything written specifically to that exam.

Networking on Alienvault as a HyperV Guest

The information here was compiled while using Alienvault 4.6 and I know that 4.3 required the same steps. If you're using a different version, you may need to take different or additional steps. If you're using a newer version, perhaps this is all sorted out already.

Stuck Disc in Nintendo Wii

My daughter has friends over today and they wanted to play an old Nintendo Gamecube game on the Wii as there is no working Gamecube in the house. Naturally it wasn't reading, and it wouldn't eject either. These are the little 2 inch mini CDs. She thought she remembered us putting a second disc in there last time this happened, but that one got pulled in as well, and now we have two discs in the Wii.

I grabbed a putty knife out of the garage and pushed it in, on the right side of the disc slot as you're looking at it. I pressed the eject button a few times, and the first disc came out. Grab it immediately or it will get pulled back in. Same process and the second disc came out as well. They're both a bit scratched up from the ordeal, but they should be fine.

The Savior 

Hyper-V replication across the WAN

I've recently been working on Hyper-V replication across the Internet to give our clients the option of maintaining an offsite copy of their server in our data center. Everything was going smoothly up to a point. I set up a site-to-site VPN connection between them and us, built an Active Directory two way trust between their domain and ours, and then tried to enter their Hyper-V host into our System Center Virtual Machine Manager system.  This is where I ran into a road block.

Workstation Unable to Join Domain

I had a computer that would not join a domain. No matter what I tried, it would come back with "The following error has occurred when trying to join the "abcdefg.com" domain: network path not found."  I tried just about everything I came across while searching on Google:

• Disable Windows Firewall
• Run ipconfig /registerdns
• Run dcdiag on the domain controller
• Verify FSMO roles of the domain controller
• Verify reverse lookup zone in DNS
• Ping domain.com 
• Verify _ldap._tcp.dc._mscds.domain.com in DNS