Blessay: On Stackable /​ Fixed vs Chassis /​ Modular Ethernet Switches

The debate on Stackable vs Chassis based switches has a long and proud ped­i­gree. Here is my addi­tion to the debate.

Nerdgasm: OmniGraffle on the iPad [the Omni Mouth:iPad or Bust!]

Omni Group announces their inten­tion to develop OmniGraffle for the Apple iPad

Is This the Year of 10 Gigabit Ethernet in the LAN ?

A num­ber of switch vendors have announced (and they are cer­tainly hop­ing) that 10Gb Ethernet is the THING for 2010. Really ?

Cynicism and Regret Are Powerful Design Tools

If there are two aspects of my per­son­al­ity that drive my design pro­cess, its Cynicism and Regret. Let me tell you that bit­ter tales of dis­ap­point­ment, let downs and fail­ure that make for bet­ter designs.

Cisco, EMC, VMware — Living Together Isn’t the Same as Married

A bunch of CEO’s prom­ising to play ‘nice’ with each oth­ers toys is not a con­vin­cing mar­ket­ing exer­cise. Cisco and EMC/​VMware need to merge to get big enough to com­pete with HP /​ IBM.

What the Letters on 802.1 Ethernet Standards Stand For

A recent post from a mem­ber of the IEEE stand­ard finally tells us some­thing use­ful instead of keep­ing everything a secret.

Rant:Why Is the IEEE All About Secrecy ?

I’m not happy that IEEE hides much of the meet­ing and dis­cus­sions that pro­gress the stand­ards that affect all of us. Why does it have to be a secret ?

Blessay:VTP Version 3.0 — Is VTP Making a Comeback ?

VTP Version 3.0  —  Is VTP mak­ing a comeback ?
I found this doc­u­ment at Cisco​.com today about VTPv3. What ? VTPv3 ? I had to dig into that.

Blessay: Designing Enterprise DMZ and Multilayer Firewall Clusters

In mod­ern Enterprise net­works, you typ­ic­ally have many clusters of fire­walls pro­tect­ing assets in your net­work. Since we use two or more lay­ers of fire­walls, we can put our DMZ for inter­me­di­ate secur­ity zones in dif­fer­ent places in our net­work. Lets gather together the dif­fer­ent options and con­sider the mer­its or not, and some­times how they ‘self-​​build’.

Network Diagrams:Zones on a Diagram With Visio Shape Union

The post looks at using the Union of shapes in Visio to cre­ate unusal shaped objects. Especially use­ful when try­ing to draw zones to show the DMZ in dual layer fire­wall cluster.

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.

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.

What Does ‘Ethereal Mind’ Mean ?

What does Ethereal Mind mean ?

Design: Lack of Choice Improves Client Outcomes

One of the prime cri­teria for a design pro­cess is to search for and eval­u­ate design choices. But research sug­gest that excess­ive choice actu­ally pro­duces neg­at­ive out­comes, its hard­wired into the human brain. Therefore a Network Designer needs to ensure that they are over­rid­ing their nat­ural instinct.

Configuring Windows 2003 /​ XP SP2 to Use IOS NTP Server

In cer­tain net­works, it is dif­fi­cult to get the time on your serv­ers to be exactly the same as the NTP time on your net­work equip­ment. In this case, you want to force the Windows serv­ers to use the same NTP Network time source as your routers and switches. But Microsoft Windows doesn’t under­stand NTP […]

Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) — Introduction and Comparison With F5

My new interest of the moment is the Cisco Application Control Engine or ACE mod­ule. I have just received a pair of them and plan­ning on start­ing the con­fig­ur­a­tion in the next couple of days. So per­haps some dis­cus­sion on the ACE is in order, and why I am con­sid­er­ing using both F5 LTM AND the Cisco ACE in this network.