Troubleshooting

Most “AI-powered observability” pitches you sit through ask you to trust the model.

Dr. Deepak Kakadia got about ninety seconds into his NFD40 talk before he said the thing nobody else on the AI Ops circuit is willing to say out loud. LLMs were invented to model human behavior.

Every network engineer has that moment. You’re troubleshooting something, you reach for the tool that should exist, and it either doesn’t or it was last updated when Obama was in office.

In 2012, we saw the launch of Viptela, a pioneer in SDWAN network solutions.

Looking for the printable version? This list now lives as a cheatsheet at /tools/well-known-intervals/ — same data, scannable card layout, with a “Print / Save as PDF” button for taking it with you.

As many of you know my background isn’t in enterprise, but I currently fill that role in my $job.

Yesterday, work presented an interesting issue I wanted to share with everyone.

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.

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.

Netcat or nc, is a forgotten tool in too many arsenals these days. It lays dormant waiting at the command line to make connections across the globe for you.

As you may know, I am not big in the server world, even less into mail servers. They make me sick.

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).

One of the questions I get asked several times a week by my clients is as such.