So many listeners have written in with questions, suggestions and worthy advice that we felt it was time to do another “Answer Your Questions” session in what will become a regular feature of the show.

This week, Greg and Ethan join with Russell Heilling Russell and Tom Hollingsworth .

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This week, we are sponsored by Ascolta Training

• Tom is in the final stages of his CCIE Lab and talks about his latest attempt and some of the lessons that he learned and his $1400 coke can.
• Helmuth relaises the limit Twitter 140 characters and asks about using Ethernet WAN circuits to directly connect workstations or should you use routers ?
• Talk a little bit about how the IEEE resolutely opposes changing the Ethernet frame format and why they have that view.
• Renee asks why we talk the impact of silicon in networking switches and its impact on switch and network design.
• Joel Wheeller asks about whether In-Band or Out-of-Band management and they Pushers talk over the entire issue. This detours into a discussion of SNMPv3 vs SNMPv2.
• Thanks to all the listeners who have written in to say thanks, it helps to keep us motivated.
• Gary Linderbergh discovered us and asks how we get our information about the industry and we discuss our preferred techniques.
• We get deeply into the Braindumps and their impact on exam questions. Ethan makes the very good point that exams are becoming “Trivial Pursuit” questions searching for obscure facts and data that make it very difficult for those learning normally to complete and be successful and this drives more people to the alternative. Until the vendors commit significant resources to solving the problem, this seems unlikely to change.
• A shout out to GNS3vault.com and Tom gives them a glowing review.
• Martin asks for some general advice around the vendor TAC / Help Desk / Tech Support organisations and we put our own experiences around this.

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