How to use AnyConnect to “cheat” in the CCIE wireless lab

How would you like to be able to look up the answers to some of the tasks in the wireless lab, and not get in trouble over it? Well, read on, and I’ll give you a fun tip that you may be able to use in the lab to solve parts of certain lab tasks. It’s not actually cheating, but it almost feels like it.

One of the realities of the lab is that there will be some pre-configurations on many of the devices. You won’t be configuring every last device from scratch. There’s not enough time, and they’d prefer to test you on more complex things than configuring every VLAN, interface, host name, etc from scratch. Just about anything has the potential to have some level of pre-configuration, and that includes the AnyConnect client. If you find that the AnyConnect client already has some WLAN profiles configured on it, say a silent “thank you” to Cisco because they just gave you a ton of great information.

Another reality of the lab is that they often don’t ask you to do things in the most straightforward and clear way possible. Often they use code words or phrases that need to Continue reading

HP tells cybersecurity customers to focus on people and processes

To protect themselves against cyberattacks, organizations should focus more on training their employees and improving their internal processes instead of buying new technology, according to one tech vendor.Yet, businesses and government agencies often focus on the next “silver bullet” product, unaware that most cybersecurity problems stem from flawed procedures and human error, said Art Gilliland, senior vice president and general manager for Hewlett-Packard’s software enterprise security products.“This is hard for a product guy to say out loud to an audience, but invest in your people and process,” Gilliland said at HP’s Software Government Summit in Washington, D.C. “The first thing that always gets negotiated out of every [security software] contract is the training and the services.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Welcome to the Internet of Things. Please check your privacy at the door.

It knows when you are sleeping and when you are awake. It knows when you're home and when you're away. It knows how how fast you drive, how many steps you took yesterday, and how hard your heart is working right now.It's the Internet of Things (IoT), and it is terrible at keeping secrets.INSIDER: 5 ways to prepare for Internet of Things security threats If the Web resembles the wild west when it comes to personal privacy, then the IoT is a jungle where only the fearless survive. While the privacy threats are similar, the stakes are much higher. Connected devices are collecting vast amounts of deeply personal information from our homes, our cars, and our bodies -- far more than any Web site possibly could. The kind of data that's being collected and what happens to it is governed almost entirely by privacy policies that virtually no one reads and few truly understand. Many IoT devices and apps have no privacy policy at all. And IoT security at this point in time is tissue thin, leaving your personal data at risk from external attack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Git for network engineers

What is Git?

git-logo

Git is a source control manager (SCM), also known as revision control. It manages changes to documents, computer programs and large websites. Arbitrarily it can manage versioning for collections of information.

Why is it important to network engineering? Well, currently we stick the config files in a directory and forget about them. Version control can be very regimented with commit comments and other markers, which helps to identify information. More importantly, as we move towards DevOps with open arms, we have to think about managing what we do in different ways. Just because something has been done a certain way, doesn’t mean it’s good to continue with that modus operandi.

Fear not – just because something is hidden away in a repository, doesn’t mean you can’t diff files etc.

Also you don’t have to have just local git repositories, you can have them on remote servers as well as the likes of github.com.

Before we start, be warned that this is a very simple example. You can use this for managing all sorts of configurations like core routers, firewall access-list entries, hell, even change control data. Be mindful of what you push and commit!!! Ensure that Continue reading

OCP Summit 2015: Open Networking as the Norm

Open Networking Thrives at the 2015 OCP Summit

A few weeks ago I passed my 2 year work anniversary at Cumulus Networks. In this short amount of time we’ve helped change the networking industry as a whole. This statement may seem a bit bold, but I feel it’s justified and we’ve all earned it. I’ll attempt to back this up with a few anecdotes collected along the journey — the men and women of Cumulus Networks, along with our great partners and customers, deserve the credit here.

When I was first hired, our on-boarding process was a bit … unconventional to say the least. The first week included JR (our CEO and cofounder) taking a headshot photo for the website (at that time it was just a Brady Bunch collage of pictures, not much else) and being issued a switch for “jailbreaking.” Now jailbreaking is a bit of an extreme term, but in these dark days before open networking, the software and hardware for networks were tightly coupled together. Items such as debugging headers, a soldering iron, and even a bit of swearing were all part of the installation process on a fresh hardware platform. Fast forward to today, Continue reading

Cisco VIRL Exclude From Launch

One of the few pet-peeves with Cisco’s VIRL has been waiting for a bunch of things to start, when I just needed a couple from that simulation. Not sure if this is a new update though it’s detailed...

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Group fighting ‘Net censorship in China presses on despite DDoS attack

After facing a DDoS attack, an activist group isn’t backing down in its attempts to end China’s Internet censorship.“I think that we are more confident than we were before that our successful execution of our strategy is going to lead us to achieve our mission,” said the group via email on Tuesday.GreatFire.org suffered a distributed denial of service attack last month that threatened to cripple its activities. The anonymous group, which is based out of China, believes the country’s government was behind the attack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Aerohive targets education with 802.11ac access point release

Aerohive Networks today announced the availability of the AP130, the company’s latest wireless access point to target educational institutions.The AP130 is a 2x2, 2-stream access point designed to use existing Power over Ethernet infrastructure and to run HiveManager NG, Aerohive’s cloud-based network management platform. HiveManager is generally thought to be one of the company’s key advantages in the wireless marketplace, as it removes the need for a traditional network controller.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Ruckus first to roll out enterprise 802.11ac Wave 2 AP | First Look: Microsoft’s new Spartan browser for Windows 10 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Live US 2015 – Session Schedule

This is my current schedule for the Cisco Live US 2015 event.

Most are related to my CCDE studies and a few are with technologies and products that im interested in in general.

Monday:
08:00 – 09:30 BRKSAN-2101 FCoE for small and mid size enterprises.
10:00 – 12:00 BRKCRS-2031 Enterprise Campus Design: Multilayer Architectures and Design Principles
13:00 – 15:00 BRKARC-2001 Cisco ASR1000 Series routers: System and Solution Architectures
15:30 – 17:00 GENKEY-1001 Cisco Vision Keynote

Tuesday:
08:00 – 09:30 BRKRST-2124 Introduction to Segment Routing
13:00 – 15:00 BRKSPG-2210 Designing Service Provider Access Networks
15:30 – 17:00 BRKDCT-2049 Overlay Transport Virtualization

Wednesday:
09:00 – 12:00 CCDE Written Exam
13:00 – 15:00 BRKRST-3363 Routed Fast Convergence
15:30 – 17:00 BRKRST-2338 ISIS Deployment in Modern Networks

Thursday:
08:00 – 09:30 BRKMPL-2333 E-VPN & PBB-EVPN: the Next Generation of MPLS-based L2VPN
10:00 – 12:00 BRKRST-2311 IPv6 Planning, Deployment and Troubleshooting
13:00 – 14:30 BRKRST-2044 Enterprise Multihomed Internet Edge Architectures
15:00 – 16:00 GENKEY-1004 Guest Closing Keynote: Mike Rowe

Cant wait :)

Apple, as Watch rollout looms, emphasizes online ordering

Apple is looking to eliminate the long lines that form outside its retail stores on product launch days.“The days of waiting in line and crossing fingers for a product are over for our customers,” according to a memo from Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president of retail and online stores, that was obtained by Business Insider.The memo instructs Apple’s retail employees to encourage customers interested in either the Apple Watch or new MacBook to order the products online instead of from the stores.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

That’s Using Your Embrane

BrainInABox

Cisco announced their intent to acquire Embrane last week. Since they did it on April 1st, there was an initial thought that it might be a prank. But given that Cisco doesn’t really do April Fools jokes, it was quickly determined to be the real deal. More importantly, the Embrane acquistion plugs a very important hole in ACI that I have been worried about for a while.

Everybody Play Nice

Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is a great idea that works on the principle that Cisco can get multiple disparate systems to work together to “program” the underlying network to rapidly deploy applications and create policies that allow systems to be provisioned and reconfigured with a minimum of effort.

That’s a great idea in theory. And if you’re only working with Cisco gear it’s any easy thing to pull off. Provided you can easily integrate the ASA operating system with IOS and NX-OS. That’s not an easy chore and all those business units work for the same company. Can you imagine how hard it would be to integrate with an external third party? Even one that is friendly to Cisco? What about a company that only implements the bare minimum functionality Continue reading

Juniper, VMware ride into OpenDaylight sunset

Juniper Networks and VMware have downgraded their participation in the OpenDaylight Project, an effort develop an open source SDN framework. Both are now Silver members with much lower financial and personnel commitments.Juniper was a founding, top tier Platinum member, committing $500,000 and 10 staffers to the project. VMware was a Gold member, committing $250,000 and three engineers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Forget SDN and NFV: It’s all about LSO

Do you know SDN? Do you follow NFV? What about OSS? Those are yesterday's acronyms. The new buzzword is LSO, and it's going to be huge not only for carriers and other service providers, but also for enterprise customers.Lifecycle Service Orchestration is a catchphrase that embraces the range of activities performed by a telco or other communications service provider. An LSO platform would handle everything from provisioning the customer order to controlling the delivery of the service to gathering metrics and ensuring guaranteed performance levels to remediating fault to providing usage reports to offering analytics to customers.That's a lot to unpack, but the bottom line is that LSO is going to be big. According to the Service Provider Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Overview and Market Forecast report published by the Rayno Report in March 2015, LSO will be a $2.75 billion market by 2019 and will combine technologies found today in Operation Support Systems, Software Defined Networks, and Network Functions Virtualization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Forget SDN and NFV: It’s all about LSO

Do you know SDN? Do you follow NFV? What about OSS? Those are yesterday's acronyms. The new buzzword is LSO, and it's going to be huge not only for carriers and other service providers, but also for enterprise customers.Lifecycle Service Orchestration is a catchphrase that embraces the range of activities performed by a telco or other communications service provider. An LSO platform would handle everything from provisioning the customer order to controlling the delivery of the service to gathering metrics and ensuring guaranteed performance levels to remediating fault to providing usage reports to offering analytics to customers.That's a lot to unpack, but the bottom line is that LSO is going to be big. According to the Service Provider Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) Overview and Market Forecast report published by the Rayno Report in March 2015, LSO will be a $2.75 billion market by 2019 and will combine technologies found today in Operation Support Systems, Software Defined Networks, and Network Functions Virtualization.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPexpert’s Newest “CCIE Wall of Fame” Additions 4/17/2015

Please join us in congratulating the following iPexpert client’s who have passed their CCIE lab!

This Week’s CCIE Success Stories

  • Stephan Luscher, CCIE #48074 (Data Center)
  • Adrian McCaskill, CCIE #48071 (Wireless)
  • James Cusco, CCIE #47758 (Data Center)
  • Vishal Arora, CCIE #48027 (Wireless)
  • Anton Stepkin, CCIE #48002 (Data Center)
  • George Milad Elhamy, CCIE #45875 (Collaboration)
  • Philip Pretorius, CCIE #48079 (Data Center)

This Week’s CCIE Testimonials

Vishal Arora, CCIE #48027
“I have passed my CCIE-Wireless track and my CCIE# 48027. I would like to thanks to entire iPexpert family specially Jeff Rensink for their support. I have used expertise study material of iPexpert and that has helped me a lot in passing this prestigious exam.”

We Want to Hear From You!

Have you passed your CCIE lab exam and used any of iPexpert’s self-study products, or attended a CCIE Bootcamp? If so, we’d like to add you to our CCIE Wall of Fame!

IDG Contributor Network: A better way to store solar power for data centers

As any data center operator will tell you, data centers use large amounts of power. In fact, one data center can use enough energy to power 180,000 homes.What with the costs and the eco-issues with fossil fuels, there's a race on to try to find better ways of powering these cathedrals to digital life.Many heavy data center users are looking to place their centers near sources of renewable power, for example. Facebook has opened one in Sweden that's near a hydro-electric plant.Solar is also pretty good, and wind-power turbines are another alternative power source attracting knee-jerk exuberance, despite their disadvantages, like uneven supply.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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