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How to pass CCNP ENCOR (350-401) On your First Try

Tips for passing the Cisco CCNP ENCOR Exam from someone who recently passed.

Tips to Pass ENCOR 350-401 First Try

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Sorry for the bit of rambling, just wanted to make a quick off the cuff video to talk about my experience with the exam and taking it at home. I hope to come back and edit this page later with more tips and resources, but for now….I need to go study this CCIE material!

Until next time! Thanks for tuning in. Make sure you get on the email list if you aren’t already.

You got this exam in the bag! Get scheduled and get passed ASAP so we can study CCIE together!

EIGRP Feasibility Condition, Offset Lists, and Variance

This post and video lesson will help you fully understand EIGRP basics such as successor routes, feasible successors, EIGRP feasibility condition, variance for unequal cost multipathing, and more!

Hey hey! Today I made a video to keep from going quarantine crazy. Has the EIGRP feasibility condition ever confused you?

Have you ever wondered what the variance command is all about, or what a feasible successor is?

Well in this EIGRP Lesson we will discuss all of these things! First we go over some key EIGRP terms and then we have a lab exercise in using an offset list and variance command to implement unequal-cost multipathing.

To make the best use of this lesson, you should have a basic understanding of configuring EIGRP. This is great studying for CCNA, CNNP ENCOR / ENARSI.

Subnetting Tutorial: Find the Network Address Given an IP

I wanted to make a subnetting tutorial that showcases my absolute favorite shortcut for finding the network address given an IP and mask.

This video shows in my opinion the fastest way to find the network address where an IP “lives”. This comes in handy when troubleshooting on the CCNA exam. Check the Video out below:

CCNA GRE Tunnel Lab – OSPF, GRE, and EIGRP

This lab will challenge you in topics such as Multi-Area OSPF, EIGRP, GRE Tunnels, DHCP Helper, Static Routes, and more!

This CCNA level GRE Tunnel lab will test your skills in the following domains:

IP Addressing
Multi-Area OSPF
EIGRP
GRE Tunnel Configuration
DHCP & DHCP Helper
Static Routing

Take a look at the topology below to get started on the lab!

CCNA Packet Tracer Lab | Static PAT and ACL – Can you do it?

This lab challenge will test your skils in OSPF, Static PAT, ACL’s, DHCP, and other network configuration basics.

This CCNA Packet Tracer lab challenge will improve your skills in OSPF, Static PAT, ACLs, and more basic skills such as IP assignment, etc.

You can set this up as a Packet Tracer lab, and if people are interested in this type of thing I can provide file packs with solutions, etc. Let’s start by taking a look at the topology below:

Automated Robocopy Backups With Email Notification

What happens is you schedule a task to run the first Robocopy script. Based on the error level output one of two things happen: a success or failure. If there is success you run one batch file, if it fails you run another.

The other week I was horsing around and came up with this method of backing up some files on Windows using Robocopy, and automatically sending an email of the results based on success or failure using Robocopy’s error level output codes.

There’s basically 3 parts that make this thing work:

The Robocopy script or scripts
Fail or Success send email script
Powershell scripts to send the email based on success or failure

That second batch file runs a PowerShell script that sends an email (saying success or fail in the subject) and attaches the Robocopy log.

Let’s dive in 🙂

Automatic WordPress Backups from DigitalOcean Droplet to Local Machine

This post explains how to implement automatic WordPress backups from a DigitalOcean droplet to your machine of choice using SSH/SFTP.

In this post I want to detail my way of implementing automatic WordPress Backups on a site hosted on a DigitalOcean VPS. I am looking for advice on how to improve this setup from efficiency and security standpoints.

Requirements:

DigitalOcean droplet running LEMP/LAMP stack (web server) and a WordPress site
SSH Key Authorization between server and backup storage machine

Python Development Environment: Django with Postgre on CentOS 7

My thought process and steps taken to setup a development environment for learning django/python development.

My focus for the past year and a half has been mostly on networking, security, and systems administration / break fix type topics. However I have recently decided to dive into programming. I decided to start the journey into python, and I wanted to combine that with django for web app development. I quickly found how important it is to setup a Python Development Environment.

How To: Install a Solid State Drive in Your Laptop (Asus Q551L)

This how to will run through swapping out the storage device in an Asus Q551L laptop, but the process must be similar on many machines.

SSD stands for Solid State Drive. According to this article from PC World upgrading to an SSD from an HDD will provide “massive” performance improvements that are immediately noticeable. I would have to agree with that especially in terms of time to boot!

Today I’m going to walk through replacing the storage on an Asus Q551L laptop with a Samsung 860 EVO with 1TB capacity. The process is probably similar on many laptops though. Here is what you will need:

Using Windows PowerShell to Compute File Hash (Bonus: automatically compare it to a given value)

Learn to use Windows PowerShell to calculate hash checksum values, and automatically compare the output to a given value!

Being interested in security, you can’t help but hear about “hashing” and “file integrity”. I was aware that you can download third party software to calculate file hashes using different algorithms such as SHA256 and MD5, but I wasn’t aware you can do it in Windows PowerShell.

The coolest thing is how simple it is. Keep reading to learn how we do it!