Review: rob​tex​.com — DNS and Peering Tool

An aston­ish­ing resource that provide a lot details on BGP AS, IP address­ing, own­er­ship, whois, DNS check­ing and much more.

Blessay: Autonegotiation on Ethernet — It Works, It Should Be Mandatory!

EVERYONE — Autosensing on eth­er­net works just fine, and all man­u­fac­tur­ers recom­mend using auto­sensing. Why aren’t you !

Lets look at how it works and why you should be using it.

Security: ASA Version 8.3.1 Released

Cisco releases ASA Ver 8.3.1. Major changes to NAT and memory upgrade needed.

The Ten Networking Commandments

If you run a Network team using these as a basis for busi­ness plan­ning and oper­a­tional excel­lence then you won’t go wrong.

Rant: Which of These 10GB Adapters Is Not the Same ?

Look at the these net­work adapters. One for Server, and one for a Cisco fire­wall. One costs five times more than the other. Can you pick which one ?

Designer or Engineer, Artist or Painter

Are you a painter or an artist ? Are you an engin­eer or a designer ? Can you Paint with a Hammer?

DDOS — a Problem Bigger Than You Can Ever Be

Taking data from the Arbor Networks DDOS report for 2009 and apply­ing it to real life makes for some ugly choices.

Cisco Announces EOS and EOL Cisco IOS Software Release 12.4

Cisco announces the End of Life and End of Support dates for 12.4. Before IOS 15.0 is even warm­ing up, the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of 12.4 is already on life support.

Can You Learn Anything From Google or Facebook Data Centers ?

Google and Facebook have been puff­ing them­selves up about how clever they are at solv­ing tech­nical prob­lems. Is it just cheap mar­ket­ing, and is there actu­ally any­thing that Enterprise com­put­ing can learn from what they have shared ?

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 ?

Google DNS — Not Proving to Be ‘All That’

So I have been test­ing Google DNS server with the new tool that they just released. It might be early days, but it ain’t as fast as the altern­at­ives for me.

Switching Network Locations From the Menu Bar

You have now con­figured and applied the Network Profile. You can eas­ily switch between the Locations by open System Preferences, Network, and using the Location menu which is just a bit too manual for me.

Google Public DNS (and ICMP Internet Test)

Google announces a pub­licly avail­able DNS ser­vice. While using it is good, it makes deploy­ing Internet con­nec­tions and proxy serv­ers a whole lot easier and could be used for those IOS SLA mon­it­ors for fail­over Internet connections.

Configuring Network Locations in Mac OSX.

When you are work­ing in a lab envir­on­ment, you often need to con­nect your laptop to dif­fer­ent net­works so that you can test stuff. For simple change like an IP address or a default gate­way a script is use­ful. But you may want to have a much more soph­ist­ic­ated pro­file, such as dif­fer­ent proxy serv­ers and mul­tiple eth­er­net ports. And if you are work­ing on dif­fer­ent sites, each one with dif­fer­ent IP address­ing and DNS details, and maybe even dif­fer­ent proxy set­tings or 802.1x. Mac OSX has a way for con­fig­ur­ing mul­tiple pro­files for your Ethernet con­nec­tion ( or Airport wireless).

Mibi Mega Kibi Kilo — Decimal and Binary Prefixes

A mega­bit can be 1,000,000 bits or 1,048,576 bits depend­ing on whether you using decimal or bin­ary defin­i­tions. Standards have been defined to help — are you using the mib­i­b­yte and kib­i­b­yte in your documentation ?

Putty, the Command Line and NO Clicky Clicky

While it may be a per­sonal pref­er­ence for me, I believe that you should only use the mouse when you don’t know what are doing. If you have a repet­it­ive task, then click­ing the same thing over and over shows that you are poor engin­eer. Lets hack putty to work from the com­mand line.

Setting the Defaults for PUTTY

Putty is is a great piece of soft­ware. Because it works and it’s free I find it installed on most cor­por­ate desktops as the default soft­ware for ter­minal cli­ent on Windows but not every­one seems to know how to set the defaults.

IOS: “Terminal Monitor” on, Off — Logging to Your Terminal

I get asked this ques­tion just often enough to post an art­icle. When you have enabled ‘term mon’, how do you turn it off ? How can you tell it’s work­ing ? And so on.

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