A day in the life of a Systems Admin

 Technology in Manufacturing The tech topic I am interested in is technology in manufacturing.  The office I work supports a manufacturing plant, and I have witnessed many changes in processes as technology has improved.  Some of these improvements lead to requiring fewer people to complete the same tasks, but more often than not, these improvements have provided opportunities that wouldn't have been available otherwise. Fundamentals Early manufacturing tools could be considered using binary, 1's, and 0's.  Manually switching a lever that releases steam is an example of a switch.  Later on, relays took the place of manually flipping switches and could be used to perform these simple tasks.  Programmable logic controllers, PLCs, replaced relays and allowed building more complex results accepting more input and output.  As technology has become less expensive tablets have become more popular using USB connections for input and output on Windows-based dev...

Traveling a Network using Ping and Tracert Ping In this post, I will review some things that the tools ping and tracert can assist in network troubleshooting. The outcomes of ping tell you a couple things right away. 1) DNS resolution. Before ping can even determine what, it is connecting to, it needs to know where it is going. When you run “ping google.com,” the very first line returns the IP of google.com based on your DNS server's query. 2) The replies measure the response time to get the reply from sending x bytes to the destination along with the packet size sent and TTL. Packet size can be adjusted for testing networks where jumbo frames are in use. 32 bytes is the default all networks support. The TTL tells you how many routers your packet went thru to get to the final endpoint. if a packet's TTL gets to 0, the router will drop the packet. TTLs function is to help keep the network clean from traffic getting caught in a loop. 3) Statistics. This tells you that based on se...

Information – Individuals and Organizations Information is critical, and its importance is relative to the individual or organization. Ex. You may not be concerned with your BMI, but your employer's insurance may be looking for ways to offset their costs by increasing employee's deductible. Since obese individuals tend to have more costly medical needs, individuals may be penalized with a higher deductible. Individuals also need to be concerned with their online presence. Everything we do online is tracked and recorded, so do not put anything online that you want to keep private. Individuals also need to be aware of app requirements. Applications require you to give them permission to access your data, including your contacts, activity level, weight, food intake, location, or access to online social media sites. Users need to be wary of what they give access to as this information is often sold to other 3rd parties. Organizations also need to be careful about protectin...