I’m a self professed Cisco bigot. I use the term “bigot” because that’s what the Nortel sales guy called me and the name stuck. I’ve also heard the term “customer evangelist” thrown around by marketing people — a customer who is happy with the company, and tells others about it.
Why do I willingly [...]

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It’s rare that I open a case with TAC, I’m usually able to figure things out with the help of the docs or by working at it. But this past week, I’ve been involved with several cases:
Upgrade problems - After swapping the flash in a 3660, we couldn’t store an image on the new [...]

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I got a call from someone in the company yesterday whose husband is getting retrained and is considering a career in netword administration. They asked if I could meet with him to tell him about the career. I’m happy to, but what do I say?
Netword admin is such an inaccurate term. In both the places [...]

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Just testing posts from the blackberry. I seem to get good ideas on the way to and from work, maybe posting them immediately will help!

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I just moved from Movable Type to Wordpress for this blog, mostly to get a handle on the comment spam that has been plaguing me. I made the switch sooner than I’d like, so please let me know if you run into any problems viewing the site, or finding old content.
Sean

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An interesting thing happened last week that illustrates how understanding the behaviour of a packet travelling through a network explains the cause of some rather odd traffic patterns.
It was noticed that all active ports on a certain switch would simultaneously see traffic spikes in excess of 8Mbit/s, even though these ports were normally dormant. [...]

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Routing protocols, especially EIGRP, are very good at finding ways around network faults. I remember one time where we had a LAN failure, but a router on each side of the break happened to be connecting to the same site over two different WAN links, and EIGRP shunted all the LAN traffic through that [...]

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Every so often I get books in the mail from publishers for review. I love doing it, not only for the free books, but also because people are always asking me which books are worth buying.
Normally I try to do a detailed review of the good ones, but sometimes I get backed up. [...]

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I’ve read and heard that there are some idiosyncrasities about connected routes and IS-IS when redistributing. Most recently while reading “Optimal Routing Design” and also when talking with a friend who was studying for the BCSI exam. When redistributing out of IS-IS, some routes are missing, notably connected routes. Let’s investigate.
A simple [...]

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Build the Best Data Center Facility for Your Business
Douglas Alger
Cisco Press, 2005
Synopsis
This book is a must for anyone in charge of a datacenter, be they building, expanding, or just running the operation. It provides a solid grounding in HVAC, electrical, layout, and other concerns.
Working in IT, I’m quite familiar with the inside of a [...]

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