CORE-IT PROS – Trying to Help

I just watched this video and it felt like the kind of tech content I enjoy most: casual enough to follow over a coffee, but packed with practical ideas that made me want to pause and try things myself. What I liked right away was that it did not get lost in marketing buzzwords. The presenter focused on real-world results, showing the actual setup, the workflow, and the small technical details that usually get skipped in shorter videos. It came across less like a polished ad and more like a fellow tech enthusiast sharing what worked and what did not.

As I watched, I found myself thinking about how many of these concepts apply to my own home lab and networking projects. The video walks through the process step by step, explaining not only what to configure but also why those choices matter. I appreciated the attention given to troubleshooting, performance considerations, and the little tweaks that can make a setup more stable. Those are the parts I usually learn the most from because they mirror the issues we run into in real environments.

One thing that stood out to me was the balance between simplicity and technical depth. The presenter avoided overwhelming jargon, yet still discussed the underlying technology enough that I felt I was learning something meaningful. Whether it was networking behavior, system configuration, or performance tuning, the explanations were practical and easy to connect to everyday IT work. It reminded me that good technical content is not about sounding complicated; it is about making complicated things understandable.

I also liked the hands-on style of the demonstration. Seeing the commands, settings, and results in real time made the video feel much more authentic than a slide-based tutorial. I could imagine following along on my own equipment, which is a strong sign that the content is useful. If you enjoy experimenting with routers, servers, virtualization, Docker, or general home-lab technology, this video has the kind of practical workflow that encourages you to open a terminal and start testing.

Some people might think that walking into an unfamiliar network, with unfamiliar staff to work on an issue that has them stumped is easy. I know it’s a no-brainer when I word it that way, but that is exactly what it is like for external consultants with every engagement.

There are many layers of issues to address when you first walk into a client site but the number one priority for me is to ensure the I.T. staff understand that I am here to help. Many times I explain that the only way I can identify the root cause is with their help since I am not familiar with their network.

In this video, Laura Chappell talks about this exact issue which also helps when you work with various other departments, divisions, or subsidiaries within your current place of work.

Attend the www.COREITPROS.com conference with Laura Chappell, Mike Pennachi, Tony Fortunato August 22 - 26, 2022

IOT DNS Analysis

 Attend the www.COREITPROS.com conference with Laura Chappell, Mike Pennachi, Tony Fortunato August 22 - 26, 2022

IOT devices are being added to networks at a blistering pace. Everything from smart plugs, light switches, light bulbs, appliances, thermostats, video doorbells, cameras, and many more.

In many cases, the installation procedure is simple; plug it in, pray, and it ‘should’ work. If it doesn’t, try it again and if that fails, blame the network because it worked at home.

When it comes to corporate environments there are so many things that can prevent a device from getting internet access. If you're lucky it will be something trivial like a TCP/UDP port number being blocked. Other times it becomes a more involved troubleshooting exercise and could be an IP address/DNS name is blocked or flagged as suspicious.

In this video, I take a trace of an Ethernet-attached camera and walk you through how I filtered out the camera traffic and what value we can get from the DNS requests made by it.

How Network Firewalls Promote Open Source Security (by Gilad David Maayan)

 What Is a Firewall?

A network firewall is a firmware or software that monitors traffic and prevents unauthorized access to a network. It uses predetermined rules when inspecting incoming and outgoing traffic to identify and block threats. 

CORE-IT PROS - Ethernet jokes

 for those of you who wonder what Laura Chappell, Mike Pennachi and Tony Fortunato chat about, well networking, packets and terrible ethernet jokes.

Here's a bit of fun from one of their many calls and 2 jokes you might find amusing..

Attend the www.COREITPROS.com conference with Laura Chappell, Mike Pennachi, Tony Fortunato August 22 - 26, 2022

IP Camera nmap and Connect

 Attend the www.COREITPROS.com conference with Laura Chappell, Mike Pennachi, Tony Fortunato August 22 - 26, 2022

In this video we review some packets and then I show you how I used nmap to determine what ports are open.

It is becoming more common for vendors to avoid using standard port numbers like 80, 23, 443, etc. when this happens, you might be forced into using the vendors ‘discovery’ or ‘management’ software.

In this example, this camera vendor randomizes the http port number when the camera is configured for DHCP (default). I also noticed that even if I reconfigure the http port number, it still randomizes it as long as dhcp is still enabled.

Configuring a static ip address took care of this issue and now the static http port number is remembered. I thought you would like to read about how I figured out the http port number to access. I reached for another tool in my toolbox; ‘nmap’ (https://nmap.org/). I use nmap to perform subnet and udp/tcp port scans.