In May 2007, I purchased a 32″ Element LCD TV for my master bedroom with an extended warranty.  The main reason I chose the TV was for its’ price point, $600, at Circuit City.  Mind you, I never really purchased anything at Circuit City and decided to go with this TV over a Vizio model from Costco.  For the past 2 years, I never had an issue with the TV since it worked fine for just watching shows and movies.  The only thing that really annoyed me was the display menu when programming features, but other than that, I was pleased with what I had purchased.

A few weeks ago I was moving TV sets around the house to accommodate my lab studies.  Initially, my study room had a 19″ monitor and I decided I wanted more desktop space for my dynamips telnet sessions — apparently 15 maximized sessions weren’t enough for me.  I had acquired a 32″ Polaroid TV from work almost a year ago and decided to finally take it out of the garage, move it to my bedroom, and re-purpose the Element as my new desktop monitor.

As a quick test, I connected my laptop to the Element during the Windows boot-up process.  The LCD screen came up pink so I started fiddling around with the display settings and checking the wiring, which eventually checked out fine.  I decided to shutdown the laptop so I could reconnect the VGA cable before the boot-up process.  I didn’t happen to see it, but my wife stated she saw a message flash on the screen:

The VGA signal has been lost and as a result the TV will power off

A few seconds after the message appeared, the screen went black and the Red Light of Death appeared!  The TV was rendered unusable at this point.  If you Google around, you’ll notice anyone that has this model connected to a computer and shutdown while connected has run into this same problem.  No matter what you do, you won’t be able to restore it, so make sure you don’t make the same mistake.  I’ve been told by some TV buffs in the forums that there may be an RS-232 interface inside the casing, but you’ll have to open the TV up for your own edification.  IMHO, even if there was a port inside, you would still need to find the right hex codes to input in order to restore the TV.  The documentation for the TV is practically non-existent.

Rather than go down this road of tearing open the case, I decided to see what my extended warranty covered.  My support case is slightly different than others in that even though Circuit City was now out of business, there was a 3rd party vendor close enough to my house that was maintaining their extended warranty contracts.  Thankfully enough, I purchased this warranty at the time of my purchase.  Usually, I don’t even bother to waste the extra money, but wanted some peace of mind considering this was a non-standard brand.

After faxing a copy of my receipt, the 3rd party vendor finally came by this morning and picked up the TV.  Hopefully they’ll sort out the issue and send me a new one soon so I can start maximizing on my desktop sessions, otherwise, I guess I’ll have to live with the 19″ monitor for studying.

In my attempts at being more environmentally friendly and sticking with the ‘GREEN’ theme for technology, I’ve found that my retention for information has suffered.  I had personally chosen to keep all of the study materials I owned in a digital format.  I figured since I stared at a monitor all day that I could continue to do so by the time I get home from work and just read the labs in pdf format.  IMHO, not having a hard copy or any printed material at hand is a difficult way to learn anything which is why I’ve decided to start making hard copies.  When I was studying for my R&S lab, I used to take the printed copy of the full-scale labs and read through them similar to reading a newspaper or a book.  While flipping back and forth between the task requirements and diagrams, I would visualize the types of solutions I could implement and take notes of any alternative methods.  If a task seemed vague, I would mark it with a question mark as a reminder for myself to lab it up and find out the answer.

Aside from having printed materials at hand, I’ve slowly been fighting my way back into study mode since New Years.  Work has kept me extremely busy to the point where I don’t even want to look at a computer screen by the time I get home at night.  To keep my interest level and spirits up I’ve been perusing through everyone else’s blogs.  At this point in time, my motivation level isn’t as high as I would like it to be (i.e. 7 out of 10 if had to guess).  I’m almost fully committed and ready to take the plunge again as to devout my weekends back to geeking out.  I know my window of opportunity to take the Security v2.0 lab is quickly closing.  The format is expected to change to v3.0 in mid-April and I expect to have made my next attempt by then.  My personal goal is to make an attempt no later than March 20th.  The reason for this is so that if I happen to blow it, I’ll still have enough time to make a 3rd attempt.  To be honest, I haven’t booked my seat yet but found that there are still seats opening up each day.  My plan is to circle around and gauge my comfort level in 3 weeks of this posting.  Once I know for certain, I’ll send my $1400 payment for my San Jose lunch reservation.

For those of you that are wondering, I’m using the InternetworkExpert materials along side the NetMetric Solutions material.  My plan to reinforce and solidy my understanding of the security technologies is to create my own mini-labs that I can share out on this blog.  This will give me the ability to discuss and share the materials without violating any of the copyrights.

A few days ago, Ivan posted an article about ‘An Online Network Diagram Drawing Tool‘.  This free utility was originally created by Andrew Yourtchenko and is pretty slick in a sense that it runs off a web server and works in linux.   The only system requirement that is needed to run the applet is Java.

To help save CPU cycles on the hosted server I decided not to post the location of the online version, but rather the offline version only.

Another free diagramming tool specifically made for Windows is ‘Network Notepad‘.

I’ve finally decided to move away from configuring all my emulators on the CLI and use GNS3.  The primary reason for using a GUI over the CLI is ease-of-use.  Whenever I run into a unique routing problem or need to conduct a proof of concept on a technology at work, I found that the whole process of generating a .net configuration was time consuming.  Using GNS3 allows me to quickly point-and-click my way to a new scenario in just minutes.

After downloading the source files, I attempted to run ./gns3 and encountered the following error message:

[root@CTSLA-NMS19 GNS3-0.6-src]# ./gns3
Can’t import Qt modules, PyQt is probably not installed …

To satisfy the installation requirements, I needed to install or update a few of the dependencies:

[root@CTSLA-NMS19 GNS3-0.6-src]# yum -y install python sip qt4 PyQt4
Loaded plugins: kernel-module, refresh-packagekit
livna                                                    | 2.4 kB     00:00
updates                                                  | 2.3 kB     00:00
fedora                                                   | 2.8 kB     00:00
Setting up Install Process
Parsing package install arguments
Package python-2.5.2-1.fc10.i386 already installed and latest version
Package sip-4.7.9-1.fc10.i386 already installed and latest version
Package 1:qt-4.4.3-10.fc10.i386 already installed and latest version
Resolving Dependencies
–> Running transaction check
—> Package PyQt4.i386 0:4.4.4-1.fc10 set to be updated
–> Processing Dependency: libQtCLucene.so.4 for package: PyQt4
–> Processing Dependency: libQtOpenGL.so.4 for package: PyQt4
–> Processing Dependency: libQtWebKit.so.4 for package: PyQt4
–> Processing Dependency: libQtGui.so.4 for package: PyQt4
–> Processing Dependency: libQtDesigner.so.4 for package: PyQt4
–> Processing Dependency: libQtHelp.so.4 for package: PyQt4
–> Processing Dependency: libQtSvg.so.4 for package: PyQt4
–> Processing Dependency: libQtAssistantClient.so.4 for package: PyQt4
–> Running transaction check
—> Package qt-x11.i386 1:4.4.3-10.fc10 set to be updated
–> Finished Dependency Resolution

Dependencies Resolved

================================================================================
Package         Arch          Version                   Repository        Size
================================================================================
Installing:
PyQt4           i386          4.4.4-1.fc10              updates          2.7 M
Installing for dependencies:
qt-x11          i386          1:4.4.3-10.fc10           updates           12 M

Transaction Summary
================================================================================
Install      2 Package(s)
Update       0 Package(s)
Remove       0 Package(s)

Total download size: 15 M
Downloading Packages:
(1/2): PyQt4-4.4.4-1.fc10.i386.rpm                       | 2.7 MB     00:11
(2/2): qt-x11-4.4.3-10.fc10.i386.rpm                     |  12 MB     00:47
——————————————————————————–
Total                                           254 kB/s |  15 MB     00:59
Running rpm_check_debug
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Installing     : qt-x11                                                   1/2
Installing     : PyQt4                                                    2/2

Installed:
PyQt4.i386 0:4.4.4-1.fc10

Dependency Installed:
qt-x11.i386 1:4.4.3-10.fc10

Complete!

Once PyQt4 was installed, GNS3 opened properly.