Top Female Astronauts of China

Wow you have to be smart and hot to be chosen as the next Astronaut of China. Really? Perfect teeth, for the photo ops I bet. Another criteria, having given birth naturally, so that cosmic rays don't affect reproduction or rather their reasoning was, to prove that biologically all systems were functioning. Ew.

Can you wear makeup in space? Image Source

The original article mentions that there were two top candidates selected from a list of top fighter pilots. Some folks were upset that requirements for higher education wasn't mentioned.  My opinion is that I'd rather have a good pilot fly the spacecraft; if they've made it this far, they definitely have an impressive resume. Last I heard, Chinese people are all about having that Dr. in front of the name, and the extra degrees and fancy industry qualifications. Therefore, by default to be a pilot you have to have a university degree.

I have a friend who would indeed meet all the other specs, writes: "The article itself doesn't seem to say that they need to be photogenetic (though the photo certainly implies that), but rather have a body with certain biological standard, none of which applies to looks. What I'm naturally skeptic about are their "scientific" claims as to why these standards are necessary in space."

What makes the best astronaut for the mission?

Here is a more balanced view of reporting on mothers for female crew selection.

Forever Stocks to Buy

Bill Gates buys $571 Million dollars in stocks on this ticker. Are you gonna read on? He calls these kind of things, like Mastercard and the Deer & co (farm equipment) his Forever stocks, things that you could hold on to forever.

What are Warren Buffet and Bill Gates buying.

Personally I would consider Cisco a Forever stock, and for sure Lululemon. I'm just bragging because I made over $200 in one day on that stock the other day. I bought the shares at $71 and it went up to $72-something. I say something cuz I'm obviously not managing my own money, too busy studying for these Cisco exams but there you go. Imagine if I had bought these in 2009 when they were $9 something a share, and then they split at $100 a few months ago.

My friend works at Cisco in Silicon Valley Kanata and he writes the Cisco IOS. They get stock options so that's pretty awesome.  He was explaining to me this new thing with delivery of wireless in a metropolitan area and enabling mobility by having the user keep the same IP. The cellular bandwith is getting to congested so it sounds like folks in Hong Kong are moving over to the internet routing. Sounded really impressive, I'm not in mobile or wireless but that sounds really neat.

I won't be rich like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, just working full time hours on routers and switches but atleast I know what is powering those supercomputers at the NYSE, forever!

ICND 2 Flashcard: Frame Relay

Frame Relay allows the expansion of the WAN with less hardware by providing virtual circuits; less costly than running multiple leased lines like HDLC and PPP.

For example Router 1 (DTE) at your company site has to connect to Router 2 (DTE) at the other site. In between is the Frame Relay cloud. The Router 1 connects to one switch (DCE) in the cloud, and the other Router 2 connects to anothr swtich (DCE). Router 1 could also connect to a Router 3 and so on.

One router is an access linl which can support multiple virtual circuits to send data to multiple remote routers. Each link is a virtual circuit. The data link header and trailers on each frame. The header holds ad address filed called a DLCI.
DLCI - Data Link Connection Identifier

The notes for this section are taken from the first CCNA Bootcamp course I studied in 2003 by Marketbridge Technologies in Hull-Gatineau. http://www.marketbridge.com/#  The company has grown and changed alot over the years from offering courses to consulting services, but the owner remains the same so it's probably the same company.

Two Frame Relay encapsulations: Cisco and IETF
Cisco is the default, and it means that you have a Cisco router on each end of the Frame Relay network. If you don’t have a Cisco router on the remote end of your Frame Relay network, then you need IETF encapsulation.

Frame Relay is a cost efficicient technology, for intermittent connection from LAN or between endpoints to major backbones or a public WAN.  A permanent virtual circuit (PVC) is formed, enabling the customer to perceive a continous, dedicated connection without having to pay for a full-time leased line; the ISP determines the route each frame travels to its destination and can charge based on usage.  Think of it as shared bandwidth, a portion of the dedicated paid bandwidth to allotted to each user; allows the user to exceed the guaranteed bandwidth if resources are available

However for a truly private network, Frame Relay would run over leased lines over T-1 lines. A dedicated connection during the transmission period is required, but without a steady flow of transmisions, so it is not often used for voice or video.  The data units are in frames in variable sizes.

Packet based switching.
Frame relay is based on the older X.25 packet-switching technology which was designed for analog voice. Frame relay today is fast packet switching because it operates in the Layer 2 data-link layer and not so much Layer 3 network even though a frame can carry packets of Ethernet and X.25 Error checking or resending is up to to the endpoints to evaluate.

DLCI - Data Link Connection Identifier

I really like the description of a frame-relay map and how it joins an DLCI with an IP address much like ARP mapping MAC address to IP. See the IP-to-DLCI mappings with the command, show frame-relay map (IARP is default on Cisco routers).

Possible network topologies
Hub and Spoke: one hub many spokes used with sub interfaces
Partial Mesh or Hub and Spoke - routers do not have a VC to all other routers

Full Mesh: each router has a logical circuit to every other router

Hybrid: Two remote routers may have VC to each other providing full mesh connectivity between them and the hub. The other remote routers may have only one VC back to the hub.
Frame-Relay LMI
Frame-Relay used the Local Management Interface (LMI) protocol to generate keepalives and obtain a status on the virtual circuits.  LMI message formats: Cisco (DLCI 1023), ANSI or Annex D (DLCI 0), and Q.933A or Annex A (DLCI 0?) containing info regarding -

• Keepalives
• Multicasting - Multicasting uses the reserved DLCIs from 1019 through 1022.
• Global addressing - This provides global significance to DLCIs, like a LAN
• Status of virtual circuits - This provides DLCI status.

Possible states for the circuits
Active - the circuit is up and running
Inactive - possible cause, circuit to CO (frame switch) is find but remote end is down
Deleted - circuit to CO not working, interface down or cabling issue, no LMI

Congestion Control in Frame-Relay
DE - Discard Eligibility, mark for packets exceeding the CIR
BECN - Backward Explicit Congestion Notification, tell source to slow down transmission
FECN - Forward Explicit Congestion Notification, tell destination there was congestion in the cloud
An excellent summary of everything you need to know about Frame Relay for Cisco CCNA, written like a study blog with network diagrams. The style of writing is like an instructor speaking. Click here.

usage: conf t
encapsulation frame-relay

Scenario
There are seven remote sites to connect and only one serial port on the router. Instead of seven leased lines, frame-relay might be a good soluction to statistically multiplex multiple logical circuits over one physical interface to save money.

Access rate The maximum speed that the Frame Relay serial interface can transmit.

CIR The maximum bandwidth of data guaranteed to be delivered. In reality, it’s the average amount that the service provider will allow you to transmit.

For example if the T1 is carrying an access rate of T1 (1.544Mbps) and you're paying for a CIR of 256Kbps. The first 256Kbps of traffic you send is guaranteed delivery. Beyond that, it's a “burst”— a transmission that exceeds the guaranteed 256Kbps rate and up to the T1 access rate (if that amount is in your contract). I believe this sounds like the whole discussion about paying for bandwidth usage and doing away with unlimited with the CRTC ruling??

Obviously if the combined committed burst (the CIR) and excess burst sizes, known as the MBR or maximum burst rate when combined, exceed the access rate, then the packets will be dropped, depending on the service provider.

ICND2 Flashcard: EIGRP

EIGRP = Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol

It is a Cisco proprietary, Advanced Distance Vector metric. Some folks may refer to it as a hybrid routing protocol, but it is truly not.  EIGRP uses Hello packets, much like a link state protocol

Advertised distance - EIGRP metric for blank to reach network
Feasible distance - the metric to reach neighbor + the advertised distance

Features of EIGRP
Rapid convergence using Diffuse Update Algorithm (DUAL) guarantees loop free paths and backup paths.  If the primary route in the table fails, the best backup route is added to the table immediately. If no route exists, EIGRP queries the neighbors.

Reduced bandwidth by not sending the entire database and instead using:
Partial updates: only include route changes, incremental updates and not the whole table
Bounded updates: only send updates to routers affected

Multiple Network Layer Support can do Appletalk, IP, IPv6, Novell (IPX)

Less Overhead by using multicast and unicast, not broadcast. The ip address 224.0.0.10 is listed in my notes

Classless Routing
The mask is advertised for each network as this provides smaller subnets and efficient use of IP addresses.  The protocol can also support discontiguous subnets and VLSM (variable length subnet masks)

Load Balance
The protocol allows load balancing on equal (by default) and unequal cost paths. Caveat, for unequal cost paths, variance must be specified.

EIGRP does equal metric load balancing by default up to four equal metric routes. This means the variance value is 1 (default).  The routing table can have 16 entries for the same destination.

Configuring EIGRP
usage: conf t
router eigrp 100 (automonous system 100, 1 to 65535 possible)
network 10.0.0.0
network 192.168.10.0 0.0.0.15 (the wildcard mask can advertise subnets now)
no auto-summary (what does this do?)
variance 2

Verifiy EIGRP
show ip route eigrp
show ip protocols
show ip eigrp interfaces
show ip eigrp int fa 0/0
show ip eigrp int 100
show ip eigrp topology
show ip eigrp topology all-links
show ip eigrp traffic (this command lists number of packets sent/ received; HELLO, updates, queries, replies, ack etc)

More about the Variance Command
This command allows unequal metric load balancing, metrics being
* bandwidth
* delay
* reliability - the most reliable based on keepalives
* load
* K value - calculation method and AS number must match

Troubleshoot EIGRP
show ip eigrp neighbors
show ip int brief (shows which interfaces are active)
show ip int fa 0/0 (see ip subnets)
show ip protocols (see routing for networks)
show ip eigrp int (check for the process id and the same K method)
debug eigrp packets

show ip route (displays all the routes and eigrp is labeled)
show ip eigrp topology (shows the router id with the highest IP address which should be the loopback 0)