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KD:

Having your CCNA certainly wouldn't hurt: It'll help give you a good grounding in the OSI model, the math you will need to be comfortable with in handling a network of any size, the basics of routing, etc.

There are several areas that you can look at moving onto from there. Which ones will depend on your focus in VoIP and the the hardware that you will be running it on.

Cisco has several options worth considering. A newly announced certification, CCNA Voice, might be the next step - you'll need to have your CCNA for this. CCNA Wireless starts to move you into VoIP specific parts of Cisco Unified Messaging. Depending on how far you want to take it, at least on the Cisco side of things, you can then look at CCVP, which is a series of 4 exams taking you deeper into the VoIP world.

There are a host of other VOIP related certifications that you can pursue from companies such as CompTIA, Lucent and Alcatel. What you should consider pursuing will depend in part as to what hardware platforms you plan on being involved with or would like exposure to.

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If you are connecting the XP and Win98 computers with a cable going directly from one computer's ethernet port to the other you will need to use a "null-modem ethernet cable" rather than a standard ethernet cable.

If you are going through a hub or router then you would use regular ethernet cable.

If you are using the proper cabling then after double checking that your physical connections are securely in place open up the control panel on the XP system and dig down into the System/Hardware/Device Manager applet and expand the Network adapters section of the tree and verify that both cards are listed there. If they are not both listed in the Network adapters list you may need to find the missing adapter under the big yellow question mark section and delete the device from the list, reboot, and re-install the driver software.

If they are both in the Network adapters list check the properties of each to ensure that there are no conflicts listed in the Resources panel of the Properties dialog. If there are conflicts identified you may need to change settings on one or the other network adapter to eliminate the conflicts.

Another possibility is to use a hub and the single working network adapter in the XP box along with Internet Connection Sharing to connect the Win98 machine to the Internet by setting up Internet Connection Sharing on the XP system, connecting both machines to the hub, the hub to the internet, and aiming the Win98 system's gateway address at the XP machine.

Expert's answer

There are several things to look at. The first is to get a copy of inSSIDer from the folks at MetaGeek.net. I used to suggest Netstumbler but it doesn't have support for WPA. If you can see your access point (AP) with inSSIDer, that would indicate that the AP is OK and the area you need to concentrate is your laptop.

You don't mention the version of Windows that you are running on. If it is XP, you really want to install XP SP 3, because it fixes several wireless-related problems. If you are on Vista, make sure you have the latest patches installed. Make sure that you have the latest firmware installed on your AP.

You may need to taking things down a step or two on your AP depending on how hard you have it locked down. If you have broadcasting turned off for your SSID, try enabling it just to make it easier for the laptop to find the AP. If inSSIDer shows the SSID for your AP, try using the wireless survey functionality that is included with most to see if it also sees the AP as well. I like using different apps that do the same test just to make sure you get the same results.

If you have encryption turned on at the AP (and you should), temporarily turn off encryption to see if it is a setting problem between AP and your laptop. Depending on the type and level of encryption used, you might have a setting problem between the two devices that could explain the problem. For example WPA and WPA2 are similar encryption methods but you can't use WPA to talk to WPA2. Depending on who made the wireless card in your laptop (it is probably Intel), go directly to the wireless-car vendor's Web site and get the latest drivers (it's possible that the latest drivers are not on the laptop vendor's website).

Look for things in the immediate area of your laptop and access point that may have changed. If you have a cordless phone, see if it is in the same frequency range as your AP. If the phone is labeled with something like 2.4 somewhere on the phone, try removing power from the phone and see if your wireless problem goes away. If that fixes it, you will need to change out your wireless phone to one that uses either 900-Mhz or the 5-Gigahertz range.

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This Cisco security presentation discusses using Netflow with CS-Mars and indicates that enabling Netflow 5 and exporting data can increase CPU load on the router between 15 and 20 percent and that Netflow traffic may represent between 1 and 1.5 percent of the network traffic being monitored. The Device Configuration Guide for Cisco Security MARS, Release 6.x says that NSEL, which is an adaptation of Netflow 9 can transmit much of the same information in a less CPU-intensive, more secure, and more bandwidth-efficient way. The performance difference between using CS-MARS or the Netflow Collector Engine is going to depend on the hardware and which version(s) of software you are running.

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The easiest way to become a CEO is to start your own company.

Rising from a director level position to a more senior management or CxO level position otherwise is not something I have a lot of experience with. The people around me in corporate settings who made that move to the next level successfully were invited upstairs so there may be some validity in your statement about who you know versus what you know. The key seemed to be ensuring that senior management knows you well enough to have good knowledge about what you could accomplish beyond meeting the expectations of the current position. I have also seen people move from Director level positions in large enterprises to CxO level positions in small or mid-market enterprises where the companies they moved to were comparable in size and complexity to the department or division they were in before.

Perhaps there are readers with more experience than I who can share their wisdom on the subject.

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