The Local — World’s Fastest Internet Connection ‘Used to Dry Laundry’

Magnificent. Really. A 40GB Internet con­nec­tion, a for­tune in state of art net­work gear and the quote is:
“She mostly used it to dry her laun­dry,” he told The Local.
“It was a big bit of gear and it got pretty warm.”
Moral of the Story: Never for­get that the main­stream is very dif­fer­ent from you.
The Local  —  World’s fast­est inter­net con­nec­tion ‘used to […]

Blue Coat ProxySG VIP and Cisco Switches Need Multicast Enabled

You have a pair of shiny new ProxySG boxen that you want to setup in act­ive /​ standby for high avail­ab­il­ity. You con­fig­ure it up and everything seems to work, and then it doesn’t, or other equip­ment on the same net­work exper­i­ences ran­dom problems.

What you are hav­ing is a Multicast prob­lem with your Ethernet switches, most likely your Cisco switches, that has the prob­lem. How to under­stand and solve the prob­lem after the jump.

The Five Hottest Skills for Your Networking Career — Network World

The five hot­test skills for your net­work­ing career  —  Network World: “Cliff Samuels Jr: What are the five top hot­test Cisco skills to learn today to stay ahead of the curve in a net­work­ing career? Is it VOIP, IPV6…
Neil_​​Anderson: I would say the abso­lute top five are: secur­ity, mobil­ity, uni­fied communications/​​VoIP, video over IP, and applic­a­tion accel­er­a­tion.”
My view­point
If you accept […]

Coming Soon: The Cisco Blade Server? — GigaOM

Coming Soon: The Cisco Blade Server?  —  GigaOM: “”
I am not only one who thinks that the Nexus 7000 is a foot­print to scare off com­pet­it­ors. Scroll down to the part
“While many in the industry saw this announce­ment as play­ing catch-​​​​up to the likes of Force10 in the data cen­ter switch­ing market”

Network Access Control Looking Like a Flub

While I am no expert on NAC I am deeply unim­pressed by the whole tech­no­logy. It looks like a whole bunch of trouble that is guar­an­teed to keep you up all night.
I see today that Lockdown Networks couldn’t get fund­ing and are going out of busi­ness. This sug­gests to me that you should not go any­where near NAC.

Why Didn’t Nortel Do Better ? Cisco Wasn’t Always the Top Dog.

In response to Omar Sultan at Cisco on ‘Why you want this switch ?’ . In my view, Cisco IOS was buggy,slow and the hard­ware product was a poor design, but Nortel got the usab­il­ity and tech­nical sup­port very wrong. Customers chose Cisco any­way because the Cisco TAC made the prob­lems not seem so bad.

Network Dictionary — RITA — Reliable Internetworking Troubleshooting Agent

Reliable Internetworking Troubleshooting Agent RFC 2321
Key Facts
Firstly you should con­sult the RFC for back­ground.
You don’t hit some­thing with RITA, you ‘wang’ it.
Wanging your com­puter or router may not nec­ssar­ily fix it, but you will feel bet­ter
Wanging man­age­ment or co-​​​​workers is not gen­er­ally a good idea ™

Where Are All the Features for Nexus ? Or Is It Just Me ?

I wrote this in response to Omar Sultan at Cisco on ‘Why you want this switch ?
I was look­ing the NX-​​​​OS fea­ture nav­ig­ator today and NX-​​​​OS looks (cur­rently) like a sub­stan­tially feature-​​​​free plat­form  —  check out the NX-​​​​OS Feature Navigator and con­sider what is not lis­ted here.
A couple of other things that strike me as odd:

NX-​​​​OS has a primary […]

RFC 1925 — the Twelve Networking Truths

Every net­work engin­eer should read this RFC, and under­stand what it means. Possibly, should be required read­ing for all CCNA candidates.

Network Dictionary — Markitecture

Network Dictionary  —  marki­tec­ture
1  —  Markitecture describes the attempts of mar­ket­ing borgs to give us sug­ges­tions on how to imple­ment a given tech­no­logy. The basic idea is that you are too stu­pid to under­stand the tech­no­logy so you need some mar­ket­ing col­lat­eral to show you how its done.

Describing My Job to ‘Normal People’

I went to din­ner with a group of guys on the week­end. (Yeah, I know, I am actu­ally sort of nor­mal some­times). In one of those awk­ward moments, I had to describe what I did, I am won­der­ing what you tell people that you do ?

Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) Software Version 2.1.0 Ships

I notice that Cisco has released 2.1.0 for the Cisco ACE today. A quick read of the release notes show lots of fun good­ies packed inside. These fea­tures are start­ing to ‘catch up’ with the F5.
I have installed the ANM 1.2 man­age­ment plat­form in the last couple of weeks and will post a review soon.
Release Notes here

Erasing or Clearing the Config on Your Netscreen Firewall

A short note on how to erase the con­fig­ur­a­tion in your Netscreen fire­wall. Mainly so I can find it next time.…

Debugging ScreenOS on Juniper Netscreen

Debugging on the Netscreen wasn’t all the obvi­ous to me. Because I don’t always work on Netscreens here is a note to myself to remem­ber how to do it.

Why Use Two Routing Processes in a Firewall ?

In a recent post on Two OSPF Processes on an ASA fire­wall Christian asked why you would want to do this. Here is one case of a design that needs secure routing :

CiscoSecure ACS 4.2 — Shipping

Do some research on ACS today, and real­ised that 4.2 has shipped. Releases notes at the link. Can’t see any­thing in the release notes that looks inter­est­ing, it seems to be a bug fix mostly for those folks doing PEAP /​​ LEAP etc.
Cisco Secure ACS 4.2

Bidirectional Forwarding Detection  [Cisco IOS Software] — Cisco Systems

BFD is a most use­ful fea­ture of IOS, and IMHO, a much unloved fea­ture. I notice that latest releases of IOS now have BFD for static rout­ing, but more import­antly now supports HSRP

standby bfd
Example:
Router(config-if)# standby bfd
(Optional) Enables HSRP sup­port for BFD on the inter­face
standby bfd all-​​​​interfaces
Example:
Router(config)# standby bfd all-​​​​interfaces
(Optional) Enables HSRP sup­port for BFD on all interfaces.

Bidirectional Forwarding Detection  […]

Network Dictionary — Kewl

“kewl” is the net­work geeks word that has the same mean­ing as gnarly (surfer cul­ture), sick (teen sub­cul­ture), wicked (amer­ican movies). That is, it can mean some­thing mag­ni­fi­cent, or some­thing so retarded or mind bend­ingly stu­pid as to be beneath con­tempt and vary­ing degrees in between. Not nor­mally used in exec­ut­ive meet­ings or board level […]

Next Page »