Lonestarr13 Blog

I took my family on our first real vacation! We arrived today at Washington DC, we are staying at a Marriott Courtyard in Greenbelt, MD. It's not bad for the price. I hope to check out the NASA Goddard space flight center and the NSA's national cryptologic museum, but since I'm the only need in the family... Guess we'll see. We are only here for 2 nights and we have a lot of stuff in DC to check out first.

I'm sure everyone already knew this, but its new to me. Starting with Vista, NetBIOS is officially not recommended! It can be disabled in a Server 2008, windows vista/7 environment. It has been replaced with Link Local Multicast Name Resolution, which is compatible with IPv6, unlike NetBIOS. WINS is also thrown out the window, no pun intended. LLMNR does not use WINS. LLMNR only works on the current broadcast domain, like NetBIOS, but because LLMNR doesn't use WINS, there is no way to use it outside the broadcast domain, which is fine since you should be using DNS for that.

4 different technologies exist to ease the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Intra-Site Automatic Tunnel Addressing Protocol (ISATAP) : this tunneling protocol is meant for private networks to allow hosts on IPv4 networks to communicate with hosts on IPv6 networks. There must be an ISATAP router between the IPv4 and IPv6 networks, the hosts on the IPV4 network must have the ISATAP interface on their computers. Tunnel works by putting the ipv4 address inside the IPv6 address. 6to4 : Is a protocol intended to be used on the Internet to allow IPv6 clients to access IPv4 Internet resources. There needs to be a 6to4 host on the IPv6 intranet that has their IPv4 routers address embedded in its IPv6 address, a 6to4 router between the IPv6 intranet and the IPv4 Internet resource, there can also be a 6to4 relay to link the IPv4 Internet to the IPv6 Internet so the 6to4 host can also access the IPv6 Internet outside the ipv4 Internet.  6to4 users IP Protocol 41 encapsulation. Teredo : A tunnel

So I started studying for the Server 2008 Network Infrastructure exam.  I got through IPv4 in the study guide, even though I need to keep practicing Variable Length Subnetting. I'll probably do a post on that too for my own reference. This is just some notes on IPv6 for future reference. IPv6 uses 128bit addresses, which totals 3.4 undecillion unique addresses. The address is comprised of 8 sets of 16bit words (called blocks) separated by colons (2001:0DB8:3FA9:0000:0000:0000:00D3:9C58). You can shorten the addresses by omitting the first 0s in each block (0DB8 is going the same as DB8).  Also 16bit words of :0000:, they can be shorten to :0: The final tip is for addresses with one or more consecutive blocks of :0000:, you can replace all the zeros and colons with just 2 colons (::).  This technique can only be used once per address, the other 2 can be used more multiple times. Because each address has a standard length of 128 bits, it's easy to figure out how many 0 words

So I've started studying for the Microsoft 70-642, Configuring Windows Server 2008 Network Infrastructure. it's a LOT tougher than any other cert I've ever taken so far. I originally was hoping to be ready to take the test in 30 to 45 days of studying, but to be honest I don't think I'll be ready. I know will pass it eventually.

Today I passed the compTIA Security+ exam with flying colors! 872 out of 900, not bad for 30 days of studying the materials :). Of course having a strong interest in infosec helps too. What to do next? I'd like to continue with infosec and get maybe the Associates CISSP but I don't like all their fees. I think maybe the CCNA or Windows Server 2008?