Blessay: IT Training Lessons From the Olympics

While the current Olympics is about as interesting as reviewing firewall rules, the current success of first world nations shows that money CAN buy you success. I’m hoping IT Managers can learn training lessons from this. Read more

Enterprise Cloud Computing - Build Your Own With Cisco VFrame - Why Wait ?

I can see some value in external Cloud Computing, but why not just build your own with Cisco ? Take a bunch of leftover machines, that old storage system and get a demo version and make your own. Read more

Cisco Security Manager - Shortcut to Restarting Services

If you work with CiscoWorks, you often need to restart services for changes to take effect. This tip shows how to chain the stop and the start together on Microsoft Windows. Read more

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.

Abstract

This memo documents the fundamental truths of networking for the<Internet community. This memo does not specify a standard, except in the sense that all standards must implicitly follow the fundamental truths.

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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

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On the Death and Rebirth of IOS - Why Did It Take So Long ?

The market has been commenting on the rise of Juniper for some years and the fact that Cisco has not been able to stop them growing. Well, we can now see that Cisco was listening to the stock market by spending a lot of time and money developing a new operating system. Oh yeah, and some new hardware to run it on. Read all about the Cisco ASR 1000 here.

IOS performance limits

Its been clear for a long time that the conventional IOS had hit a wall in performance. The monolithic kernel has been subjected to any number of hacks to improve performance (fast switching, CEF) but ultimately, it obviously had to be discarded and a new approach built that supported modularity, improved upgrade, and other serviceability features. This has seen the release of NXOS (Nexus 7000), IOS XR (CRS-1) and now IOS XE for the ASR1000. You can probably also include IOS SX as used in C6500 and other switches as another.

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Is the Cisco Nexus 7000 Needed Today - or Tomorrow ?

No doubt that the Cisco Nexus 7000 switch is a fine piece of technology. The performance and throughput is welcome, and clearly offers some fine new capabilities such as virtualisation, ISSU, better OOB and so on. I am sure that everyone can perceive the positive messages, lets face it, Cisco isn’t going to be shy in telling us about them.

However, lets consider the issue from the perspective of the architect/designer and how Cisco has positioned this in the marketplace. From an architecture perspective, I will need to commit a substantial capex to the product and a much larger amount of resource cost to transition a network to use the product. Even if I am building new data centres (and thus have no legacy), changes to operating standards, procedures, management tools and other orchestration issues present substantial barriers to adoption.

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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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Custom Sizing Your MMC RDP Console

Following on from yesterdays post I was looking at some of the options and realised that you actually set the size of you RDP console.Since I use a Mac Book Pro with a wide screen the standard resolution are not very helpful, and I like to have fixed size windows, changing them to use the available width is a good thing™
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Multiple RDP Consoles - Who Knew ?

I have been working with Windows folks for a long time, and I have not seen this tool used before. As a networking guy maybe I missed it.

I often deploy a number of Windows servers to monitor and manage networks (typically with open source and Ciscoworks). I recently discovered the MMC Snap-in for Remote Desktops which makes my life simpler by letting you switch between many consoles at once on a Windows desktop. This is a quick overview on how to configure this for yourself.

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