CCNA Studies - continued...

I've finally been able to get some time to get back into CCNA studies. Decided to put my GNS3/dynamips setup online, as well as my notes as I make progress. Not sure if it may be useful to anyone as there is already a lot of good resources out there, but I figured this way I'll have access to it online as well instead of getting into the server at home.

Basically at the moment am going through the Training Signal videos that I borrowed off a friend, who is now doing his CCNP. So the labs at the moment are from the videos, by Chris Bryant... he has an awesome blog with lots of videos, tutorials and practise exams -http://thebryantadvantage.blogspot.com.

I started the lab prep work by trying to setup a Frame Relay hub and spoke topology network on GNS3. Speaking of dynamips, its heaps faster to load the IOS if the image has been expanded already. I found Zipeg http://www.zipeg.com quite useful for this purpose.

Anyways, I built a frame relay network on GNS3 and it would not work. So I upgraded to the current version of GNS and tried again. Still no go. Frustrated I posted an angry message on twitter, facebook and linkedin and gave up on this temporarily...

Make ringtones from your iTunes music

It's really sucky how you cannot use your existing iTunes music as your ringtones. I mean you have already paid for the music so why not let you use it directly. Instead you either need to buy them as ringtones off the iTune Store or convert them.

The simplest way I found was to use iTunes itself to perform the conversion for you. Basically you need to listen to your music and determine how much of it you'd like to use for your ringtone, convert the song, import it into iTunes and then sync your iPhone.

Here's the step-by-step using iTunes 9

1. Launch iTunes 9
2. Select Music and listen to the song
   
3. Determine the start time and end time of your ringtone (recommend 30 seconds)
4. Right-click the song and select Get Info
5. Select the Options tab
6. Click on the start and end times and type in the start and end times
7. Click the OK button to close the dialog box
8. Right-click the same song and select Create AAC version
9. Note a new version of the song with the same name
10. Right-click the new song and select Show in Windows Explorer
11. Select the AAC version of the song and press the F2 key to rename the file
12. Rename the file extension from *.m4a to *.m4r
13. Close the Windows Explorer window
14. Right-click the new song and select Delete
15. Left click the File menu and select Add File to Library
16. Browse to the file, select it and Click Open
17. Finally sync your iPhone