Before we begin: These instructions will only work on the most recent phones/OS’s. The latest Blackberry OS (v. 5.0.0.411)was leaked out on the internet, but any of the new phones (Bold 9700, etc. will work as well). More info available at http://crackberry.com/leaked-os-5-0-0-411-blackberry-bold-9000-and-blackberry-curve-8900

So, let’s begin:

Assuming you’ve installed the new O/S already, or you have one of their newer phones (I think most of the new ones with the trackpad instead of the trackball should be fine..haven’t tested any other than the Bold 9700 though.

Start by going to “Manage Connections” and select “Set Up Wi-Fi Network” then choose “Manually Add Network” (you can also scan, does prettymuch the same thing).

If manually adding, the network name would be CAMPUS-AIR

On the next screen, set the different values as follows:

• Security Type: PEAP
• Username: <your student number>
• Password: <your network password>
• CA Certificate: <choose any certificate, you’ll be ignoring it anyways>
• Inner link security EAP-MS-CHAP v2
• Token: <none>
• Disable Server Certificate Validation: CHECKED

Now you can save the connection, or if you don’t want to save, just click connect.

That should be it..

Feel free to comment!

Thanks to Albert and Drew for helping/validating things for me

Open Network And Sharing Center

Click "Manage Wireless Networks"

Click on "Add"

Click on "Manually create a network profile"

Fill in the choices with this information

Now, it will have added it, but wont connect, because you need to make more changes

Click on the security tab, and make sure the settings are exactly as shown

Click on the settings tab next to the PEAP dropdown and make sure the settings look like this

Press OK and close the window, going back to the old window, and press advanced settings. Make sure the settings are the same as above.

After you close the windows, you should get an authentication box like this. Type in your network username and password. You may have to do this a few times (I'm not sure why..)

If all goes well, you should have connected! If you’re having trouble, feel free to ask me in person, or leave a comment.

OS of choice: VMware ESXi 4.0

Now, I haven’t used any of their competitors products (Citrix XenServer, or Microsoft Hyper-V), but I must say that ESXi is quite easy to install, and to use.

Why virtualize?

Well, in my case, I only needed to have 1 box for an entire lab, including (soft) routers, a few servers, and a couple of clients to test out stuff.

This saved me so much money…especially in terms of power and equipment: instead of having several boxes, I have one box, with one power supply, that’s utilized very efficiently.

For those of you that are students like myself, and want to toy around with different operating systems interacting with each other, but don’t want to have the overhead of running several physical machines in your house, I highly suggest this.

If you’re not too sure on how to get VMware ESXi set up, just google it, there are a lot of tutorials for installing ESXi.

Just be careful about you’re hardware; make sure everything’s compatible with ESXi or whatever virtualizing platform you may choose to use.

Good luck!

Cisco seems to making quite a bit of headway with their products, like with the Nexus switches for datacenters; working to eliminate technologies such as Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), and by adding tagging for Virtual Machines (VM) frames.

Also, it’s nice to see how much is going into becoming “green”. Even small things like the shirts we were given to wear for the Cisco Academy were “eco friendly” using bamboo; same with the hats that were given out to everyone. Companies like Fluke were concentrating a lot on temperature gauges, power efficiency meters, etc. 

Cisco has teamed up with CBC to come up with “One Million Acts of Green“. Basically, it’s an initiative that Cisco came up with for the average person to be more eco-friendly. From the One Million Acts of Green website:

It’s not about overhauling your life; it’s about one act from each individual amassing to a million. It can be as simple as switching to compact fluorescent lightbulbs, starting a recycling program, or walking to work. You can do one act – or you can do all one million! It’s up to you. 

One resource that I wasn’t made aware of until today is Cisco’s Design Zone . Apparently it has a lot of interesting content, such as best practices. I haven’t verified this for myself, but it’s still worth a looking into.

I’ll throw a picture of something from the forum later.