CCIE R&S – By the Numbers
When I started studying in earnest for my CCIE, I started a log of how I was spending my time studying, which books and papers I’d read, videos I’d watched, and so on. I thought it would be a neat exercise to look back afterwards at what it took to achieve this goal. I’m also somewhat self-deprecating and tend to minimize my accomplishments, so having this data is a way for me to remember that this wasn’t a small accomplishment at all.
1,041,248 bytes of digital notes taken
13,916 km traveled (8,711 mi)
1,432 total study hours
652 hours in the lab
321 hours of just reading
223 videos watched
161 hours spent watching those videos
128 PDF documents read
23 books read
5 figures worth of expenses and costs
1 completely trashed USB mouse
Beyond these numbers there’s the intangibles that went into this goal too. No vacations. Giving up free time on evenings and weekends. Not seeing friends as much. Not spending as much time with family. Maintaining focus constantly on the end goal. Constantly staying up late and getting up early.
Looking back at all of this, I realize that becoming CCIE certified isn’t just about Continue reading
Cisco Live Europe 2015 – and the year ahead
Cisco Live Europe 2015
Commonly known as the biggest networking/’networking’ event in the industry for Europe, Cisco Live has something for everyone. Some great breakout technical sessions, meet the engineer, the World of Solutions and of course this year, the DevNet hall that also had a weekend hackathon which this blogger would have loved to have taken part in.
It was pretty obvious (you would have to be blind and deaf not to notice) that whilst walking around the Milano Congressi venue that houses the event, that Cisco have cottoned on to the idea that a copy and replace of product names to ‘software defined <$PRODUCT>’ is a bit of a unique to them tide turner. There are only so many ways problems like ‘resistance to change’ and the ‘adoption of technology to a risk averse’ industry can be addressed. If everything is based on the same naming schema, then the problem becomes less of a thing. Even if people use the same product they used before with a different name, guess what, it’s now software defined and the maturity cycle is already under way. Clever move. Not that I appreciate new startups calling everything software or hardware defined. Yikes. Continue reading
Striking Gold with Copper in the Data Center
10G Ethernet (10GbE) is a very popular interconnect technology in today’s data center. It’s widely used for servers/storage devices connecting to top-of-rack (leaf) switches, as well as connecting those leaves to the aggregation (spine) switches. According to a Dell’Oro Ethernet Switch Market report published in 2014, 80% of server connections will be 10GbE-based by 2018.
In general, two types of physical media are used in 10GbE interconnects: fiber and copper. For intra-rack (server/storage to leaf switch) connections, most deployments use copper cabling as it is the most cost effective for short distances within the rack.
There are two copper cable types: twinax and twisted pair. Twinax is used in the 10GBASE-CR standard in the DAC (direct attached cable) format, which is a fixed length cable with SFP+ plugs integrated into both ends. Twisted pair, on the other hand, is something that should be very familiar to every IT person. Remember CAT cables and RJ-45? The 10GbE interconnect standard that uses twisted pair is 10GBASE-T, which is officially defined in the IEEE 802.3an standard.
10GBASE-CR with DAC is great and used in many deployments. However 10GBASE-T over twisted pair offers some unique benefits:
Distance & Interoperability
10GBASE-T over twisted pair Continue reading
The ‘Why Talented Employees Stay’ Listicle – ORLY?
I’ve seen a list entitled “Why Talented Employees Stay” floating around Twitter. The list has been bothering me, because I don’t think it’s quite…right. The list is interesting, but I don’t believe it tells the whole story. Taken at face value, I think the list could even make it more difficult to retain certain people — not less.When Worlds Collide: Digging Deeper
Now that some basic definitions of these new approaches to implement LTE in unlicensed spectrum can be agreed, delving deeper into the colliding worlds of licensed and unlicensed band services, it’s important to understand how these technologies might be deployed...Office Word 2011 – An Annoying Little Bug
Today I take a gentle swoop away from networking into the world of documentation. Specifically, I’m looking at a bug in Microsoft Office Word for Mac that drives me bonkers.
Custom Properties
The management of custom properties in Microsoft Word has never been the most elegant part of Word’s interface. The mechanism by which the property values are managed has always been a bit clunky and unfriendly, but at least in the Windows version of Word, it at least functioned as stated.
In Office for Mac however, there’s a bug when you select a property to edit. Since it’s easier to show than tell, here’s a quick video demonstrating the issue.
Now isn’t that a silly bit of coding? Yes, I thought so too! Microsoft just announced availability of the Office 2016 Mac Preview, but sadly Document Properties is not yet available:
If you find out before I do, please let me know!
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