One Throat to Choke, or Any Silicon You Want: Cisco at NFD40
Cisco showed up to NFD40 selling two different pitches in the same session, and nobody on stage reconciled them.
Cisco
Cisco Viptela drops the ball
In 2012, we saw the launch of Viptela, a pioneer in SDWAN network solutions.
Mandatory Cisco DNA Licensing – is this the Future??
With the release of the new 9200 series switches many enterprise organizations are starting to look towards the future. Cisco has also been looking towards the future… of their profit margin.
PNDA provides scalable and reactive network analytics
During Networking Field Day 15 our friends from the Linux Foundation, including Lisa Caywood, briefed us on a recent “acquisition” from Cisco.
Intel Atom SoC bricking more than Cisco products
Looks like the culprit in the recent Cisco debacle is the Intel Atom “System on Chip” (SoC) that Cisco used in it’s gear.
Cisco goes public with Clock Signal Component Issue
A couple months ago many engineers started hearing rumors regarding an ISR 4331 recall, and problems surrounding the device.
ASA v9.4 Elliptic Curve Cryptography with TLS1.2
With ASA version 9.4 Cisco has added support for Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), which is one of the most powerful types of encryption in use today.
Cisco Live 2015 – Mike Rowe Announced as Keynote Speaker
Cisco just announced to the Cisco Champion community that the guest speaker for the keynote is going to be none other than …… Mike Rowe!!
Cisco Live 2015 – Customer Appreciation Event Featuring Aerosmith!!
Yes, you heard me right. Aerosmith! One of the most looked forward to social events for Cisco Live has always been the Customer Appreciation Events (CAE).
Cisco VIRL released into the wild
After much waiting from all of us, Cisco has released, on “cyber Monday” no less, VIRL.
AS-Path Filtering
Before we get into the how, let’s talk about the why.
Cisco ISR 4000 – Now with more licensing!
This week at Interop NYC, Cisco launched it’s ISR 4000 Series. This is a new approach for them focused on delivering services to your branch offices.
Installing VMware tools on Cisco ACS
As of ACS v5.4 Cisco has finally included VMware tools for their ADE OS.
Using Deny ACEs in your PBR ACL on your Nexus 7k
Quite a while ago I had a need for some network duct tape… Policy Based Routing while useful should only IMHO be used as a temporary fix.
Cisco ASA Packet Captures for Fun and Profit
As many of you know my background isn’t in enterprise, but I currently fill that role in my $job.
Double NAT – Cisco ASA 8.4+
Recently I was faced with an issue outside my normal expertise… those of you that know me realize I am anything but a security engineer. But in reality, you must always expand your horizons.
Cisco Nexus 2000: A Love/Hate Relationship
My feelings towards the Nexus 2000 Fabric Extender (FEX) are hardly a secret. The myriad of design choices and platform limitations present engineers with some rather difficult decisions.
CCIE Potential
INE published a great info-graphic on the earning potential of Cisco’s certifications and I felt the need to share it here.
QinQ: IEEE 802.1Q Tunneling
In situations where service providers want to offer transparent LAN services that preserve a customers VLAN tags across your Layer-2 network, this amendment to the IEEE 802.
Cisco IPS Fun
Since I’ve recently had some fun working with the Cisco 5585-X and the IPS blades, I wanted to document some of the information I learned while getting them online.
MDS Fibre Channel Switching Basics for Network Engineers
Recently I’ve been lucky enough to be challenged with learning a bit about Fibre Channel Switching, but I’m even luckier in that I’m getting to know it on a set of MDS switches running NX-OS …
Cisco Systems Awesomesauce aka Full Tilt Boogie
First of all, I want to say thank you to everyone from Cisco Systems for inviting us into the CCIC (Cisco Cloud Innovation Center), this was an amazing room to hold our discussions.
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.
BPDU – Blog Post Data Unit?
My most recently collection of interesting bits of data found out on the blogsphere/internets. Due to my lack of time, I’ve decided to recycle what I find out on the ‘net and share it here.
Best Practices and Securing Cisco IOS
Everyone has different views on hardening IOS, and while I do not claim to be an expert, these are the practices that I commonly use when bringing up a new device.
Network Duct Tape Gone Wrong
As many of you may know, I’m in the middle of a huge network redesign, last week our new firewalls finally arrived and it became time for us to start migrating services onto the edge network I’ve been …
Nexus 7000 vPC Features
Next generation data centers across the world are taking advantage of Cisco’s Virtual PortChannel.
NX-OS 5.2(1) for the Nexus 7000
Rather quietly, at least I never heard anything, on July 29th, Cisco released NX-OS Version 5.2(1) for the Nexus 7000 platform.
Cisco Increases CCIE Lab Cost
This morning several CCIE candidates received an email stating that on August 1, 2011, Cisco will be raising the cost for the CCIE lab from $1,400 to $1,500.
Cisco Live 2011
It’s been a tough week since I left Las Vegas.
IP SLA Basics
IP SLA is a function of Cisco’s IOS enabling you to analyze a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for an IP application or service.
My Cisco Live 2011 Schedule
I finished up most of my registration for Cisco Live 2011 / #cl11 yesterday and figured I would put up a copy of my schedule.
Time-based ACLs
Ever since Cisco released IOS 12.0.1T we’ve had the ability to broaden the reach of the extended ACL to allow the influence of time.
Remote Configuration Tip
I got asked a rather interested question the other day.
IP Multicast Routing Concepts
Can you imagine a video conference taking place on a primarily T1 based WAN? Multiple copies of the same video stream being unicast from the host to each participant.
SVI Autostate
Switch Virtual Interfaces, or SVIs on Cisco IOS use a feature called autostate to determine the interface availability.
Nexus 1000v – Out of Ports on a Virtual Switch?
Yesterday, work presented an interesting issue I wanted to share with everyone.
BGP Essentials – The Art of Path Manipulation
Most enterprise networks use BGP to peer with their Internet Service Providers if they want to be multi-homed.
Introduction to the Nexus 1000V
The Nexus 1000V is a software-based Cisco NX-OS switch that integrates into VMware vSphere 4 and operates inside the VMware ESX hypervisor.
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?
ASA v8.4
Less than a year after changing the rules with ASA version 8.3, Cisco has released a new OS version 8.4.
IOS Embedded Packet Capture
Tired of setting up SPAN sessions? Need to do some packet analysis? Since IOS 12.4(20)T Cisco has made Embedded Packet Capture (EPC) available.
Nexus Virtual Port Channel (vPC)
The Nexus 7000 and 5000 series have taken port-channel functionality to the next level by enabling port-channels to exist between links that are connected to different devices.
Setting up a Cisco Access Server
Whether your networking lab has 3 devices or 30 an access server, also commonly called a terminal server, is the vital connection between you and those devices.
HSRP, VRRPd, and GLBP Compared
In the world of first hop redundancy, we have plenty of choices. In order to make the right decision for your network you should know the basics regarding all three.
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.
Petition Cisco for Educational IOS Licensing
Greg Ferro of Etheralmind.com has started a petition asking Cisco to embrace those who pursue Cisco’s certifications a legal course of licensing without the cost of building a home made space shuttle.
Working with the Embedded Event Manager (EEM)
Cisco IOS has plenty of gems contained within, but few are as fun, and as endlessly useful as the Embedded Event Manager, or EEM.
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.
Using the Cisco IOS Archive Command
The Cisco IOS archive command is not only very useful in keeping configuration archives, but it can also be used to log commands entered into the router, along with their user name.
Introduction to Private VLANs
The concepts behind Private VLANs are in fact rather simple, but it is quite easy to get discombobulated in the details.
Bidirectional Forwarding Detection
Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) is a UDP-based protocol that provides fast (very fast!) routing protocol independent detection of layer-3 next hop failures.
Measuring Cable Lengths on a Catalyst Switch
A while back, I was playing on a 3750 switch in a customers lab and came across something I’ve never seen before. It seems that some Cisco switches have a built in Time-domain reflectometer, or TDR.
Using Discontiguous Wildcard Masks in ACLs
Unlike subnet masks, wildcard masks allow you to use discontiguous bits which enable you to match on a range of values.
Using Regular Expressions on Cisco IOS
As a followup to my previous post on Regular Expression Basics, I wanted to give a few examples on using them on Cisco IOS.
More BGP tricks
At times, the ‘rules of BGP’ don’t fit the needs of our productions networks. When we get into today’s production networks how often do book configurations apply? I’ll tell you one thing.
Cisco VOIP Basics – Call Broadcast for Cisco CME
This is the fourth and final part of my Cisco voip basics series. ( Parts 1, 2 & 3 ) Our goal in this series has been setting up a working voice gateway that you could use in your home office.
Connecting Dynamips to your local network (OSX)
Ever wanted direct network access to your Dynamips lab? Have you ever needed to lab something that used the SDM, but you run Dynamips under OSX?
Policy Based Routing
Policy based routing is the process of altering a packets path based on criteria other than the destination address, commonly referred to as ‘policy routing’.
Using /31 subnets for point-to-point interfaces
Recently a “colleague”, I use that term very loosely here, was reviewing my recommendations for changes on his network.
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.
Cisco MPLS VRF Configuration and Demo
A while back I asked everyone to vote on what topic they wanted to see next, and by no surprise almost every voted for MPLS VRFs.
Route Selection
One of the most common questions I get concerns path selection within the router.
Cisco VOIP Basics – Cisco Dial Plans
This is the third part of my Cisco voip basics series. ( Parts 1, 2 & 4 ) Our goal is to help you configure a Cisco voice gateway that you could use in your home office.
Cisco VOIP Basics – Installing Cisco Call Manager Express
This is the second part of my Cisco voip basics series. ( Parts 1, 3 & 4 ) Our goal in this series is to setup a working voice gateway that you could use in your home office.
Testing TCP Connectivity on Cisco Devices
Ever thought you might be having some Layer 4 connectivity issues? Pings as you should know are ICMP transmissions and ICMP is a Layer 3 protocol (commonly used to send error messages).
Cisco VOIP Basics
This is the first part of my Cisco voip basics series. ( Parts 2, 3 & 4 ) VOIP is obviously becoming a large part of networks, even now part of your CCNP requirements are basic voip knowledge.
Configuring a Cisco Router as a Frame Relay Switch
One of the most effective lab setups uses frame relay as its primary transport method. This is a configuration that many people use and praise for its ease of setup and maintenance.
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.
Setting up VOIP lab
This week I’ve started setting up a VOIP lab to explore the technology and when I’m done, I plan to integrate it into my home network.
Demystifying Cisco Config Register Bits
Ever accidentally set your config register to a random value that isn’t in the Cisco documentation? No? Neither have I, but one day I encountered someone on #cisco that had.
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?
Working on my new lab setup
So, I purchased a couple extra routers, and a second layer3 switch from @usedciscoguy. He gave me a really good deal and I plan on purchasing a 6500 series switch from him as soon as I can afford it.
Cisco IOS Naming Conventions
As I started building this lab, I realized that I had to find a refresher course on the IOS naming conventions.