On Passing My CCIE Exam in 2001 - Day Two

So its the second day, I haven’t slept much. I am stressed. I ring the family to check that everything is fine, and get ready to go for the second round.
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On My CCIE Lab Exam in 2001 - Day One

When I passed my CCIE in 2001, I remember both the jubilation and exhaustion of the moment. Also the loneliness, after all, my wife and children had been without a functional partner and father for more than year, and they were not there with me at the final moment.

Let me explain.

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What Is a CCIE ?

Originally published at Techtarget when I sent it to them for fun. Reproduced here because I wrote it, and it still seems funny today. Note it is derivative from some joke that was around at the time.

Interestingly, much of the puns on CCIE study topics are forgotten technology as modern CCIE’s no longer study Token Ring, DLSW, Appletalk and other fine technologies.

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Fixing the Unfairness of TCP Congestion Control | George Ou | ZDNet.Com

You MUST READ the excellent piece of technical journalism. Includes real diagrams and accurate technology on fixing TCP flow control now that the VJ fix isn’t working. Also relates to the Net Neutrality debate.

Fixing the unfairness of TCP congestion control | George Ou | ZDNet.com

Bob Briscoe is now the person I would like most to meet and have beer with. Look at the papers he has published. These are worth studying if you are CCIE or a candidate.

Single Internet Connection but HA Infrastructure - Using Bridging Instead of Routing

Introduction - The Design Constraint

The customer had decided to build a hosting platform, but could only arrange for a single internet connection to that site due to location. However, all other hardware was duplicated for high availability. After considering the options the following diagram was prepared showing the first pass at the design. This was the Internet Connection (100Mb Ethernet) connected to the router, then connected to a switch, which was interconnected by trunk to a second switch. The first layer of firewalls is then connected.

In this design, the router and the first switch are single points of failure as shown on the diagram

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Reserved IP Address Range for Testing - RFC 2544

I have been looking at a multi host data centre and am using MPLS to securely share certain resources and considering what architecture considerations for Network Management.

Lets define the problem. Network Management is software and servers that collect data from my network equipment and presents it to me in some useful form. Add to this some documentation and process support tools such as a wiki that holds documentation or a service such as helpdesk package.

The servers have to have IP addresses but what addresses to allocate ? If I use something from the RFC1918 addressing then it is possible that a given VRF might need to use that range. I don’t need the hassle of buying and maintaining routable addresses (although for a very large data centre this would be easy enough to do).

So I spent some time researching the RFC’s and found this little gem.

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