Featured Articles

Early Death of Cisco VPN Client Forces VPN License Fees

Cisco has ceased development on the IPSec VPN client, and shifted to pushing the SSL VPN client. But that costs up to USD$125 per VPN client. Is that good for customers ?

Design Tip: Cisco Retail Price List, Creating Your Own Price Estimates

Not everyone knows that Cisco publishes their Price List every month. And for designers who want to quickly evaluate various design it is an essential part of your design toolkit. We look creating your own price estimates using Excel and Cisco Price List.

Network Fabric:TRILL for Server and Network People. Welcome RBridges

TRILL is a key network technology for enabling Cloud Computing by allowing for better migrations of VM’s, and better utilisation of the network switching fabric and much improved stability of the Data Centre Server Fabric.

Network Diagrams: Drawing Freehand Curves (and Then Fixing Them)

Continuing on with absurdly popular posts about making diagrams in Visio. Lets draw a line in freehand. It will be broken, because we aren’t artists so lets talk about how to fix it.

5 Things About Cisco Announcement and a Wrap Up[Post Prandial]

So Cisco announced it Intel Servers today. Its kind of exciting if you are into Data Centers and Virtualisation. They have done something very different.

Network Diagrams: VLANs and IP Subnets

One of the most common items that we need to draw are VLANs and Layer 3 segment. Lets look at one way to create a useful shape.

Network Diagrams: Drawing the Background Shape

This post looks at how to draw the background shape and shaping following my previous posts on drawing network diagrams.

Random Posts

Bookmarks for 22nd September Through 15th October

These are my links for 22nd September through 15th October:

• ∞labs · Afloat – utility to get better control of application windows in OS X. Donationware and definitely worth using.
• A Consultant’s View Of The Enterprise Storage Market | Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat – Stephen Foskett, who focuses on Storage Networking is more

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Domain Tasting Looking Dead – At Last ICANN Is Doing Something

ICANN posted today that AGP deletes are down 84% which means that abuse of the so-called “domain tasting” system is looking dead.

ICANN | AGP Deletes Down by 84%

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Real CCIE’s, Real People Scholarship | Internetwork Expert

Real CCIE’s, Real People Scholarship | Internetwork Expert: “”

Now that’s supporting the community and putting something back. Best of luck to all hopeful Mendicants.

(Via CCIE Pursuit.)

Hosting Problems With Mediatemple Again

I’m continuing to have problems with Mediatemple who are my hosting provider. Their hosting appear to be dropping connections in middle of page loading. If you are NOT experiencing this can you let me know ? Comments, Contact Me or Twitter would be great.

Loading Policy Configuration in the Local File

A common question in the Blue Coat forums is “how do I load this config snippet into configuration. The question most often comes from people who are new to SGOS and have been using the Virtual Policy Manager. This quick note shows you how to load a config snippet that removes the X-Bluecoat-Via header

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MAC,OS X and Networking

OS X:Terminal Break for Serial Console on OS X

A quick note on how to issue a terminal break character when using screen on OS-X.

Tip:ASDM Works on OSX

A workmate expressed surprise when he saw ASDM working natively on my MAC today. Which made me think, maybe you didn’t know either. And I took a photo to prove it.

Nerdgasm:SRS WOW for iTunes – Magic

If you listen to music on your computer (not iPod) then this tool is a must have.

Design and Architecture

Early Death of Cisco VPN Client Forces VPN License Fees

Cisco has ceased development on the IPSec VPN client, and shifted to pushing the SSL VPN client. But that costs up to USD$125 per VPN client. Is that good for customers ?

Design:Choosing Firefox for IE6 Compatibility

Recent discussions about legacy software requiring IE6 means that we will deploy Firefox instead of Internet Explorer.

Design Tip: Cisco Retail Price List, Creating Your Own Price Estimates

Not everyone knows that Cisco publishes their Price List every month. And for designers who want to quickly evaluate various design it is an essential part of your design toolkit. We look creating your own price estimates using Excel and Cisco Price List.

The Case Against FCoE and Fibrechannel – A Reasonably Complete View

A number of storage bloggers have been questioning the relevance of FCoE and why would you bother with it. Given the size of marketing budgets pushing FCoE and the reality distortion this generates, lets look at the case AGAINST FCoE.