Posted on Thursday, 6th April 2006 by sean
Due to my own laziness, I let my CCNP expire over a year ago, which means I have to start at the bottom. I finally passed the CCNA today.
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Posted on Monday, 27th March 2006 by sean
Turns out we had a bad CSU/DSU on a T1 link recently, the thing that made it more difficult was that it was internal to the router (WIC-1DSU-T1) Troubleshooting serial links is done by testing different parts of the links by looping endpoints. The basic procedure: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk713/tk628/technologies_tech_note09186a00800a754b.shtml The difference between loopback dte, loopback remote, and [...]
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Posted on Friday, 10th March 2006 by sean
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 pay [...]
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Posted on Thursday, 9th March 2006 by sean
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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Posted on Thursday, 23rd February 2006 by sean
I got a call from someone in the company yesterday whose husband is getting retrained and is considering a career in network administration. They asked if I could meet with him to tell him about the career. I’m happy to, but what do I say? Network admin is such an inaccurate term. In both the [...]
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Posted on Thursday, 26th January 2006 by sean
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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Posted on Sunday, 22nd January 2006 by sean
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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Posted on Monday, 16th January 2006 by sean
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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Posted on Monday, 26th December 2005 by sean
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 office [...]
Posted in Routing | Comments (0)
Posted on Saturday, 17th December 2005 by sean
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. Here [...]
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