CCDE – Review Of CCDE Practical Workbook By Orhan Ergun

To kick off the new year, I will give you a review of the CCDE Practical Workbook by Orhan Ergun, CCIE #26567 and CCDE #2014:17.

Orhan is a friend and has provided the workbook to me for reviewing. I would like to make it clear that being a friend or providing a product for free does not give any leverage when I review a product. I always give my honest opinion when reviewing a product.

Orhan is a CCDE trainer running the website orhanergun.net and he writes and blogs a lot about network design. He has written a practical workbook to aid CCDE candidates in their studies for the CCDE practical.

As with any workbook for any exam, your expectations must be realistic before purchasing a product. You can only get as much out of a workbook as the effort you put into your studying. A workbook is not a complete solution that will be your only source of studying. You must do additional reading, and lots of it.

The CCDE practical workbook is divided into sections such as layer two, layer three, MPLS, BGP, multicast and so on. Each section starts with some introduction to each technology and Continue reading

2015 End of Year Blog Statistics

Happy New Year! As is my tradition, here are the 2015 blog statistics as compared to 2014.

I’m pretty excited that once again readership and overall reach of this blog has increased by double digits. I’m looking forward to growing these numbers and creating challenging and interesting new content in 2016.

Here are the overall statistics comparing Jan 1 – Dec 30 2015 (first number) to Jan 1 – Dec 30 2014 (second number):

2015 YoY
2015 YoY

The number of sessions and number of unique users clipped the 100,000 mark for the first time. Session duration fell off, but I think that is a funny metric. I’ve not bothered to investigate how Google Analytics measures that nor do I understand conceptually how it’s even possible to measure how long someone stays on a web page, so I’ve never put much stock in that metric.

New vs returning visitors are basically unchanged from last year:

2015 YoY Visitors
2015 YoY Visitors

The top five browsers hitting the site is precisely the same as last year:

2015 YoY Browsers
2015 YoY Browsers

What’s interesting here is that out of the ~138,000 sessions that hit the site in 2015, Chrome was the only browser that was used for a bigger Continue reading

Getting Paramiko To Work

I’ve had a lot of struggles getting Paramiko to work and today I’ve finally managed it.
Here’s my setup:

-bash-3.2$ cat /etc/redhat-release
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.1 (Maipo)

This is fairly important.

pip install paramiko

Didn’t work for me. Some Googling led me to believe I needed the python-dev package installed. So I tried:

yum install python-dev

This didn’t work, so I had to search for it. So I searched for it using:

yum search python-dev

The above is my new favourite command. It turned up:

$ yum search python-dev
 Loaded plugins: product-id, rhnplugin, subscription-manager
 This system is receiving updates from RHN Classic or Red Hat Satellite.
 ==================================================================================================== N/S matched: python-dev =====================================================================================================
 python-devel.x86_64 : The libraries and header files needed for Python development

I then did a:

pip install paramiko

And I was done!


IGP LDP Synchronization

I implore all my readers to always remember this topic: IGP LDP synchronization. It is important to use IGP LDP synchronization to avoid blackholing, especially when MPLS networks fails to function effectively.     In the topology above, IS-IS is running in the network of the service provider. For the transport label distribution or topmost label/tunnel label, […]

The post IGP LDP Synchronization appeared first on Network Design and Architecture.

2015 End of Year Blog Statistics

Happy New Year! As is my tradition, here are the 2015 blog statistics as compared to 2014.

I'm pretty excited that once again readership and overall reach of this blog has increased by double digits. I'm looking forward to growing these numbers and creating challenging and interesting new content in 2016.

2015 Recap and 2016 Goals

Wow, it’s that time of year again! 2015 went by really quickly, and a lot has changed for me. It’s also worth mentioning that this is the first year-end recap to be published on my new github pages site! If you haven’t seen this kind of thing before, I make this post yearly to publicly track my own professional development goals. I find this helps me stay accountable to these goals, and it also allows others to give me a kick in the butt if I’m falling behind.

2015 Recap and 2016 Goals

Wow, it’s that time of year again! 2015 went by really quickly, and a lot has changed for me. It’s also worth mentioning that this is the first year-end recap to be published on my new github pages site! If you haven’t seen this kind of thing before, I make this post yearly to publicly track my own professional development goals. I find this helps me stay accountable to these goals, and it also allows others to give me a kick in the butt if I’m falling behind.

2015 Recap and 2016 Goals

Wow, it’s that time of year again! 2015 went by really quickly, and a lot has changed for me. It’s also worth mentioning that this is the first year-end recap to be published on my new github pages site!

If you haven’t seen this kind of thing before, I make this post yearly to publicly track my own professional development goals. I find this helps me stay accountable to these goals, and it also allows others to give me a kick in the butt if I’m falling behind.

2015 Goal Recap

First, let me recap some of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year, and see how well I did.

Public Presence (aka Community Contributions)

Last year I added this goal because I was doing a lot more than just blogging, and wanted to capture it all. This was a good move, since - as expected - I did quite a bit of community-oriented work, and a large portion of it didn’t take place on the blog. So, while I didn’t hit that (admittedly fairly arbitrary) 50 post number, I can say I truly feel good about what little writing I did manage to Continue reading

Looking Back: 2015 Project Report Card

In early 2015, I posted a look ahead at my planned 2015 projects, where I took a quick look at some of the self-development projects I set out for myself over the course of 2015. In this post, I’m going to review my progress on those 2015 projects.

The 2015 projects were as follows:

  1. Complete a new book
  2. Make more open source contributions
  3. Expand to a new configuration management solution
  4. Complete a “wildcard project”

So, how well did I do? Let’s take a look.

  1. Complete a new book: Technically, I haven’t (fully) completed a new book, but given that my new book project with Jason Edelman and Matt Oswalt on network automation is available now as an Early Access edition, I suppose this should count for something. Strangely enough, this wasn’t the book project I had in mind at the start of 2015, but sometimes things like this take unexpected turns. Grade: C

  2. Make more open source contributions: I expected this one to be easy, but it turns out that this is the area where my performance is the worst. I submitted a pull request to Terraform (for a docs update), but I did not make the contributions Continue reading

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