Bob Cringely - CCIE:the Leading Men - Judge Economic Progress

Bob Cringely analyses GDP per CCIE in a country to judge their future economic progress. Who cares about the information, this is a huge push for our CCIE certification. Folks, time to think about asking for a raise! Read more

OSX:Punditry - Four Options From Apple in September - Unexpected!

I am holding on to some cash, waiting for Apple to make their September udpates. Here are my predictions for what they will release, and why. Read more

My Proposed Code of Blogging Ethics - Updated

I put some more thought into ethics and have updated the list. A part of ethics is to make me check myself before I say something stupid when I am writing. Read more

Brocade Buys Foundry ? No Great Loss. Storage Switches Ahoy!

Following my post a couple of days ago about Buying Brocade switches it seems that Brocade isn’t going to make their own, they just bought something off the shelf. Read more

Are You Ready to Purchase a Brocade Ethernet Switch ? What ?

One of the more amusing byproducts of the FCoE marketing push, is that Brocade has announced that they will producing FCoE switches for their customers. So, are you ready to buy a Brocade Ethernet switch ? Read more

Musing: On Permananent and Ephemeral Knowledge and Exam Study

Like many tech-workers, we need to ingest vast quantities of knowledge to get started in our jobs. Without that knowledge, there is no working in our business. What is unique, however, is that we continue to ingest knowledge for the remainder of our careers - often consuming large portions of our personal time and energy. Worse we even get tested on it by sitting formal examinations.

How can we manage this process to be more effective ?

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Rant: Computerworld - World’s Youngest CCNA: 12-Year-Old Irtiza From Pakistan

So a 12 year old passed the CCNA test. I suspect that many people will use this to point out how easy, or pointless, certfication is, but I believe it is a testament to education and the value of a well organised teaching system
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Rant: That Is Not an Apology CertGuard. You Have to Say Sorry!

So after Bred Reese got on the phone to Robert Williams at Certguard and told them what to do, they have contacted Ethan Banks. Ethan has returned to the web and indicates that all is well.

I am not so forgiving.

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Rant: Who Is Robert Williams and Certguard ? And Are They Moral or Just Plain Stupid ?

I won’t go into the circumstances surrounding CertGuard accusing Ethan Banks of cheating. You can read articles at other Cisco Blogs. Here is my take:

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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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Musing: On Reading and Learning From a Computer Screen

One of the other tricks I have had to learn is how to read from a computer screen. Here are my musings on learning and reading from a computer screen instead of paper.
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IOS:Open Source Lab DNS and IP Addressing

A number of Cisco Bloggers have talked about making labs available for others to use. However, part of what will be needed is some conventions to make these labs work for the largest number of people.

Following Ivan Pepelnjak posting on Private Domain Names, and an earlier posting that I made on Reserved IP Address for Testing I believe we have perfect combination for DNS and IP addresses for building live test environments, that will work for Open Source lab scenarios.

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Data Networks - More Reliable to Than Storage Networks ?

I was participating in a storage design discussion and a Storage person threw up their most common complaint about networking - “we don’t know how to build reliable networks”. Let me take a shot at that. Read more

Rant: How to Fudge Your Statistics ( or Why Ping Is Not a Good Measure)

Statistics on how leaving Media Temple has improved website performance.

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Rant: Problems With Media Temple Hosting

I have hosted this blog on Media Temple after a glowing review by some other people. It is now clear that for the last two or more weeks, the web site is often not available as they are having storage problems. It works some of the time and not at others. Some pages are taking minutes to lad.

I will be moving the site as soon as I can to a more reliable provider. I can’t be more negative about Media Temple without using profane language. How can you possibly accept days of intermittent problems!

Lessons in IT Security From the Credit Crunch

I read an article in the Financial Times Corroded to the core: How a staid Swiss bank let ambitions lead it into folly. It struck me how relevant this is to IT Security.

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Blue Coat to Acquire Packeteer-Excellent-Outcome

Fantastic news! As a long time user of Blue Coat and Packeteer, I am pretty excited about this. The Packeteer traffic management technologies is a long way ahead of the Cisco queueing strategy, and the Blue Coat product set has plenty of features that hold Cisco at bay in the WAN Acceleration (previously known as Traffic Management….sigh…queue the whale song)

Let hope this completes quickly and cleanly.

Blue Coat to Acquire Packeteer to Offer Comprehensive Solution for WAN Optimization | Blue Coat Systems, Inc.: “”

Om Malik has a few comments as well:

(Via http://gigaom.com/2008/04/21/bluecoat-systems-buys-packeteer/.)

Thank goodness Nortel didn’t get an oar in.

http://gigaom.com/2008/04/20/packeteer-bid-bluecoat-nortel/.

Wanted: Virtualization Engineer, Referee Exp. Pref. - GigaOM

A post from GigaOM on the divide between Network and Server Engineers and the use of mobility in Virtualized Servers. You know, I was just writing an article on this problem.

When you can migrate a server from one side of the data centre to another with the click of button, your network capacity must accommodate not only the migration but also the traffic that the server uses.

Looks like those fancy new Cisco Nexus switches might have a purpose after all……..(just kidding).

Wanted: Virtualization Engineer, Referee Exp. Pref. - GigaOM: “”

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