Vi is arguably the best text editing software in the world. There, I said it… deal with it! It should be noted that while many people continue to refer to Vi simply as such, Vim (Vi improved) has been the standard since around 1998. Vi? Old and busted. Vim? New hotness. Vi isn’t an editor […]
SNMP can save your life
Ever get locked out of a router or switch that is many hours or even days away? Recently, I had the pleasure, again. For some reason, be it the consultant that was turning up our MLPPP session on site, the engineer who was working with the consultant, or a random case of configuration corruption…. a […]
Remote Configuration Tip
I got asked a rather interested question the other day. An engineer needed to make remote configuration changes to a router, but do the commands he needed to run, he would be disconnected in the middle of his configuration. He asked me if I could write an EEM, or TCL script to make the changes […]
OSPF Graceful Shutdown
Striving to reach that last 9? Looking for a way to increase your uptime while still being able to do maintenance on your network? Wish you could shutdown your OSPF neighbors like your BGP peers? Ok, enough sales talk. Achieving HA uptimes when you need to do maintenance is far from simple, even if you […]
BGP Tips! multipath load balancing
Previous thoughts on load balancing BGP were that it is not a load balancing protocol and in order to achieve any sort of balanced traffic you would have to perform some sort of route balancing. These days with BGP finding its way into our core IGP ( think MPLS VRF WAN ) a number of […]
More IOS Tips
Learning the particulars of Cisco IOS is one of the most valuable things a network engineer can do. These skills will be the basis of everything you do on the lab and on your network. The following is a collection of things that most everyone uses these days. Prevent timeout on the serial console. You […]
IOS ACL Resequencing
This is one of those tricks you wish you learned about 10 years ago, but never did. You know how easy it is to mess up a nice looking access list. You get one setup on the router, and then you end up tinkering with it over the next month and the next thing you […]
An Essential Alias for Forgetful Engineers Like Myself (updated)
How many times a day do you issue a show command from configuration mode ? If you’re anything like me, its enough to get annoying. Luckily Cisco has given us the ability to user define aliases, here is a simple solution to this issue. Router(config)#alias configure show do show While this fixes part of the […]
Cisco IOS Tips and Tricks
So, I’m sure these have been posted almost on every networking blog under the sun, but who knows, right? Here are a few tips and tricks to help you move around the IOS a bit faster, find information faster, and locate problems… faster. Tony MattkeNetwork engineer turned management currently servicing the enterprise data center market. […]
