Mine the Harvest

The CCNA (Cisco Certified Networking Associate) class I am taking at St. Pete College required a paper and presentation as one of its primary projects. My two lab mates and I decided to have our area of focus be on Linux (yes – surprising I know) and its role in a network environment. The paper and Power Point presentation are here. This was an introductory presentation to enlighten students new to networking or IT on the roles Linux plays in networking and environments such as data center, enterprise and small to medium business. 80% of the audience had no experience with Linux, so this was definitely an introductory talk.

The talk gave more emphasis than the paper on how Linux is widely used for services such as DNS, internal / external web hosting / Wiki / Company forums, file server, mail server, etc. and how many Open Source Linux applications could provide cost effective solutions to smaller businesses with budget constraints: for example, using a spam assassin cluster rather than a licensed / annual fee anti spam appliance. We particularly focused on Cacti and Nagios for network monitoring via SNMP. Most of these students are not likely to see vendor or 3rd party network management software suites like Ciscoworks in the real world and thus these products are more realistic and making them aware of them lets them know what types of free management tools are available. Deploying these type solutions in a small to medium business which may lack any existing monitoring is a huge improvement and gives the students the ability to offer technologies that their future employers may not be aware of.

We also presented several basic Linux networking utilities and discussed how live CDs can be used to test and troubleshoot without needing local access to hosts to install software or even log in credentials. The talk emphasized that as students learning the Cisco IOS commands, they were predisposed to finding Linux command line tools extremely easy to use – certainly no more difficult than the IOS they have spent the last four classes learning.

Our presentation went extremely well. Each was to be limited to :10 and we were close to that, but at the end we asked for questions and talked at least another :10 – a great sign, especially considering we were the last presentation (the eigth) of the night! Getting that much response so late at night was fantastic. We also had about half a dozen people come up after class asking additional questions about Linux!

Our intention was to educate new CCNA students on what Linux can do for them in network support and management and I think it went extremely well. More potential follwers on the Path of the Penguin.