FreeCCNAWorkbook.com in Packet Tracer - Section 4

In this previous post, I began to look into working through the Free CCNA Workbook in Packet Tracer.  I had worked through the first three sections, and found that while there were some unsupported commands here and there, there was not anything missing that I would consider to be a show stopper so far.  So moving along, I have worked through Section 4 tonight and here's what I found. For reference, I am using the latest version of Packet Tracer for Linux available from the NetAcad website at the time of this writing, which is version 6.2.  Your results may vary on the Windows version, but I doubt it.

FreeCCNAWorkbook.com in Packet Tracer Through Section 3

I had a discussion with somebody on line a while back on the feasibility of working through the labs at freeccnaworkbook.com using Cisco Packet Tracer. After a little back and forth and a lot of thought on the matter, I decided to give it a try rather than continue to speculate. Since I haven't used the program in years, I logged into my NetAcad account and downloaded the latest version (6.2.0.0052) and installed it on my desktop. And no, I will not provide you with a copy, so don't bother asking.

Login failed. The login is from an untrusted domain and cannot be used with Windows authentication.

I encountered this problem today on a server running SCVMM 2012. I found a lot of things online suggesting a lot of different possible solutions, but none of them worked for me. Most of the possible solutions involved configuration errors with authentication, but this has worked fine for some time, and only today started giving this problem. Besides that, this server hosts the databases for a number of other apps, and none of those stopped working today, so after a quick check over the SQL Server settings I was left scratching my head.

Yast2 Modules Not Loading in OpenSUSE Leap

I finally upgraded my system from 13.2 to Leap 42.1. There were a few problems along the way, but overall it was a smooth upgrade. I remembered to remove the nVidia drivers, but forgot to disable the nVidia repository so it installed a driver that no longer supports my trusty 8600GT. After figuring that out, networking wasn't working but just needed quickly reconfigured, same for sound. But the one thing that was stumping me was yast2 failing to load any module in GUI mode. No matter which I loaded, I would get the error:



Run command: /sbin/yast2 sound &
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'YUIPluginException'
 what():  Couldn't load plug-in qt
YaST got signal 6 at file /usr/share/YaST2/modules/Wizard.rb:782
 sender PID: 3605
/sbin/yast2: line 440:  3605 Aborted                 $ybindir/y2base $module "$@" "$SELECTED_GUI" $Y2_GEOMETRY $Y2

A quick visit to Google resulted in multiple posts stating that yast2-gtk was needed but isn't getting installed. I use KDE but let's give that a try. zypper in yast2-gtk and nothing changes. So let's try zypper in yast2-qt. This results in libyui-qt6 providing yast2-qt is already installed. I forget why now, but I did a rpm -qa | grep libyui and saw libyui6, libyui-qt-pkg6, etc. So logic would dictate at this point I need libyui-qt7 as well, so I installed that and bingo, it installed a couple of libraries and the sound module now loads. Software management started to load, but then threw up an error that qt-pkg could not be loaded. So zypper in libyui-qt-pkg7 (another package that I had the corresponding version 6 of I overlooked the first time) and I appear to be back in business.

Hope this helps someone. There's a lot of posts stating you need newer version of one package or another, but none that really specify exactly what to install.

AlwaysOn Availability Groups and User Accounts

I recently built a AlwaysOn Availablity Group for my companies database server on SQL Server 2012. With three databases for mission critical applications running on the database server, we needed a little more protection than a weekly backup that we can restore.  So I took two fresh servers, installed Windows Server 2012 Standard and SQL Server 2012 Enterprise on each and found this link, which is a great place to start when building an AlwaysOn Availability group.  There's a couple points that were either missing or noted so briefly that I missed them, but it pretty much covers everything from end to end.  There's also an ebook called "High Availability Solutions" downloadable from Microsoft with a lot more information and detail.

Exchange Server component Mailbox role: Mailbox service failed.

The short version of this story is READ THE LOGS!  Now here's the long version.

I was trying to install Exchange 2013 in my lab environment and kept running into this error consistently. I scoured the Internet and tried everything that was suggested for anything even similar, with no success. At one point I even scrapped the VM and built a new Server 2012R2 VM from scratch, and the same thing happened. The Exchange setup wizard would fail at about 97% into the Mailbox role installation with the following output. It's not all here, because its ultimately wasn't of much use.

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