Goodbye firstdigest.com, welcome ipnet.xyz

I hope you’ve noticed that when you access firstdigest.com (or a link associated with this domain) you’re getting redirected to ipnet.xyz. No, I didn’t got my blog hacked.
I’ve decided to go ahead with another domain for this blog.

If you ever had to curiosity to read the About page (yes, it needs badly an update), you’ve seen that around 2007 when I bought firstdigest.com, the plan was to use it for a kind of review blog (travel, food, social life, etc.) FirstDigest (inspired by Reader’s Digest name) seemed like a good name and to be fully honest was the only one free and for an acceptable fee.
Remember this was pre-ICANN-era generic top-level domains and there were limited readable names for .com or .net.

That project went well (please feel the sarcasm). It was mostly because I had no idea what to write about and no time to do proper research. Instead I was more drawn to write about topics that I deal with everyday in my network engineer life.

Since I had the domain already, I said why not to use it. The name never fit the topics on this blog, but I’ve made the best of it. And here is 10 years later, I’ve decided to change it. I was thinking for a long time to adapt the domain name to the topics of this blog, but I never took the time to do it.

The difference between 2007 and now is that you have other possibilities due to the surge of new TLDs. However, premium is premium and names like net [dot] something is still expensive. This is why I’ve came with IP Networks (ipnet). Looking at various TLDs, the .xyz seems to be good one. If it was good enough for Alphabet (aka. Google), it sure does the thing for me. Still, it may have some people raise an eyebrow wondering, holy cow what is .xyz, but at least the domain name match the topics of this blog.

Due to the large number of links pointing back to firstdigest.com and because most of my visitors are coming via a link posted somewhere, I’m keeping this domain alive with a 301 Permanent Redirect to ipnet.xyz. I think I’ll get some impact from search engines like Google, but eh, I’m not that keen on statistics. Is not like I’m making a living out of this blog :)

Now to get back and write something which is actually interesting for the tech savvy ones out there.

New GNS3 1.0 Beta 1

It appears that there are some significant changes ongoing with GNS3.

As mentioned by the GNS3 CEO and co-founder Stephen Guppy on 11th of August 2014, the new GNS3 will be more polished and will migrate to a multi-vendor emulation platform. For those using this tool, it’s a well known fact that GNS3 was mainly focused to emulate Cisco platform, evolving to support vPC and VirtualBox virtual machines.
 
They have a new very polished website accessible at new.gns3.net where you can also download the GNS3 1.0 Beta 1 software.

I did grab a copy of the Beta 1 and installed on a Windows system (the only one which had right now on hands). You can see a screenshot below.
 
GNS3 1.0 Beta 1
 
To be honest, first impression is that not much did change, except some buttons / icons here and there. Of course this just after a quick look from my side. I will test the software in the next days and come back with an update.
 
If interested, you can check the press release from 26th of August 2014 for more details about upcoming changes in the GNS3 organisation.
 

[Twitter IT] Cisco Live 365 – Cornerstones of CCIE Success

Cisco Live 365 describe this as:

“Anthony Sequeira, CCIE, CCSI educates students on four key cornerstones for success in the journey to CCIE. These cornerstones include technical knowledge, study and lab strategies, proper mindset, and physical wellness.”

I can tell you it’s not essentially a technical knowledge session, and Anthony Sequeira mention this couple of times during presentation. Nevertheless this it’s damn good for your CCIE preparation and exam itself. What Anthony Sequeira does, he tries to “educate” the attendant behavior pre and during the exam so he or she won’t go crazy. If you have a Cisco Live 365 account (it’s free to subscribe) I would recommend this presentation.

[Friday Tech Fun]: Light painting WIFI

For most of us, network engineers, the IT world means anything but art. Still, it seems that out there somebody think Wifi can be use to generate art. And they did a pretty good job.

Timo Arnall, Jørn Knutsen and Einar Sneve Martinussen had this idea to explore the invisible terrain of WiFi networks in urban spaces by light painting signal strength in long-exposure photographs. A four-metre tall measuring rod with 80 points of light reveals cross-sections through WiFi networks using a photographic technique called light-painting.

What they achieve, you can see below:

Immaterials: Light painting WiFi from Timo on Vimeo.

You can find more about this project here:

http://yourban.no/2011/02/22/immaterials-light-painting-wifi/

[Twitter IT]: Cisco ONE OpenFlow / SDN

I just upgraded to WP 3.4 and apparently you can now embed tweets in your posts. I will do this from time to time, when there is something that really capture my interest. I will add the [Twitter IT] prefix to this posts. IT in this case is not coming from Information and Technology, but from my short form of Interesting Tweet.

As this feature was just launched and I found a nice article thanks to Mr. Ivan Pepelnjak, his article will hahonor to be the first tweet added on my blog.