Tuesday, May 15, 2012

How would you answer?

My older sister just called from her meeting with a group of other women from her church.  They wanted an answer to what would seem to be a simple question:  What is the cloud?  Is it a physical thing?  Bear in mind that my sister, by her own admission, doesn't really "get" computers.  I answered that it is both a physical thing (servers, data centers, cables, routers, and so on) plus a virtual thing (applications and storage, for example).  They wanted to know if it's something that floats in the air like a traditional cloud.  I said no, not really.  They wanted to know if things in the cloud are permanent.  I said they can be.  They wanted to know if those things could be destroyed.  I said yes, but, thinking of Scott Thompson, I said "Don't count on it being destroyed."  They wanted to know if the cloud itself could be destroyed.  I said, "It's theoretically possible, but it (the Internet) was engineered back in the 60s to withstand nuclear war, so don't count on it." 

How did I do?  What would you say to a group of intelligent people who don't really understand computers and networks to answer questions like these?

Thursday, May 10, 2012

How to Configure a DMZ on a Cisco ASA 5505

For anyone interested in Cisco ASA training, I've updated the procedures for configuring a DMZ on a Cisco ASA Security Appliance.  The config file is here at www.soundtraining.net/dmzconfig and there's a new companion video on our video channel at www.soundtraining.net/videos.  Here's the video: 

 


There were some old configs in my book, The Accidental Administrator:  Cisco ASA Security Appliance, so this simply updates them for current ASA software versions.