Not Another CCDE Study Group

The world needs more network design experts.

That's what I believe. That's what I see.
I will not call myself as a design expert. But I've been traveling intensively the past 6 months, meeting different customers in different countries, to conduct design workshops in multiple projects. I may not be the best but it seems like not many people can do what I do. Or willing to do what I do. Or combination of both.

No certification program can make you a design expert. Not even CCDE. You need all of the following three instead:
1. Network
2. Skills
3. Experience

Network or strong connection to many subject matter experts is crucial because I don't know anyone who is an expert in all the technologies and in different vertical industries. You need to know whom to ask. An expert is not the one who knows all the answers, but the one who knows how to find the answers.

Experience doing various design work can't be replaced with any certification. Experience to lead design workshop can't be tested in the exam. Experience to capture customer requirement, to present the proposed solution, and to defend it, is very difficult to be simulated Continue reading

A Christmas Binary Miracle

My brother got a little puzzle in his stocking this Christmas. It was a little cardboard booklet, and on each page was written a block of numbers, like so: BLOCK ONE 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 45 47 49 51 53 55 57 59 61 63 BLOCK TWO 2 3 6 7 10 11 14 15 18 19 22 23 26 27 30 31 34 35 38 39 42 43 46 47 50 51 54 55 58 59 62 63 BLOCK THREE 4 5 6 7 12 13 14 15 20 21 22 23 28 29 30 31 36 37 38 39 44 45 46 47 52 53 54 55 60 61 62 63 BLOCK FOUR 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 BLOCK FIVE 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 BLOCK Continue reading

A Christmas Binary Miracle

My brother got a little puzzle in his stocking this Christmas. It was a little cardboard booklet, and on each page was written a block of numbers, like so: BLOCK ONE 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 45 47 49 51 53 55 57 59 61 63 BLOCK TWO 2 3 6 7 10 11 14 15 18 19 22 23 26 27 30 31 34 35 38 39 42 43 46 47 50 51 54 55 58 59 62 63 BLOCK THREE 4 5 6 7 12 13 14 15 20 21 22 23 28 29 30 31 36 37 38 39 44 45 46 47 52 53 54 55 60 61 62 63 BLOCK FOUR 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 BLOCK FIVE 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 BLOCK Continue reading

Show 173 – War Stories From The Hot Aisle: The Nightmare Before Christmas, Part 1

“Everything is down! The whole network!! RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY!” Yes, we’ve all had those terrible days in networking, where no one can get to anything & it’s all up to you to get it fixed. At least management is there to help, stomping their feet, making demands, and whining about the dollars lost per […]

Author information

Ethan Banks

Co-host at Packet Pushers

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials and high tech since 1995. Ethan co-hosts the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over 2M downloads and reaches over 10K listeners. With whatever time is left, Ethan writes for fun & profit, studies for certifications, and enjoys science fiction. @ecbanks
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The post Show 173 – War Stories From The Hot Aisle: The Nightmare Before Christmas, Part 1 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Healthy Paranoia Show 20: SDN – Heretic of Security

The known universe has been ruled by the monolithic network device. In this time, the most precious substance in the Universe is the  ASIC. The ASIC extends life. The ASIC expands consciousness. The ASIC is vital, it provides the ability to fold space. That is, travel to any part of the network. The ASIC exists […]

Author information

Mrs. Y

Snarkitecht at Island of Misfit Toys

Mrs. Y is a recovering Unix engineer working in network security. Also the host of Healthy Paranoia and official nerd hunter. She likes long walks in hubsites, traveling to security conferences and spending time in the Bat Cave. Sincerely believes that every problem can be solved with a "for" loop. When not blogging or podcasting, can be found using up her 15 minutes in the Twittersphere or Google+ as @MrsYisWhy.
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The post Healthy Paranoia Show 20: SDN – Heretic of Security appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Mrs. Y.

Design Expert Weekend – 5W1H

This post is related to my new initiative called Design Expert Weekend.
The pilot workshop for DEW: IPv4/IPv6 Routing Design, will be held in Olaya, Riyadh, on Friday-Saturday 3-4 January 2014.

What:
Design Expert Weekend in Riyadh on 3-4 January will focus on IPv4/IPv6 Routing Design. Agenda will cover:

- IGP IPv4 and IPv6 Design (OSPF, ISIS, EIGRP)
- BGP Design
- Routing scalability and Inter-AS
- Traffic Engineering
- Routing Fast Convergence and High Availability
- Multicast Routing Design
- CCDE exam tips and tricks
- CCDE sample questions and scenario to practice ability to analyze design requirements, develop network designs, implement network design, validate and optimize network design

The other two DEW will be held in separate session:
DEW:Tunneling Design (MPLS-based L3VPN/L2VPN, tunnel protection/MPLS TE, other tunnelling include IPv6 transition)
DEW:SP Design (Physical, L2, IGP/BGP/MPLS/PIM as transport, MPLS-based services, Internet, IPTV, HA, QoS, security, management)

Why:
To help network engineers to gain real design skills. DEW can help with CCDE exam preparation, and beyond.
Our main goal is not to make you certified. But to give the real knowledge. The real skills. Then to be certified or not it's your decision not ours.

Who:
Any network engineers/architects who Continue reading

Fast Reroute Mechanisms

Network reliability is an important measure for deployability of sensitive applications. When a link, node or SRLG failure occurs in a routed network, there is inevitably a period of disruption to the delivery of traffic until the network reconverges on the new topology. Fast reaction is essential for the failed element. There are two approaches […]

Author information

Orhan Ergun

Orhan Ergun, CCIE, CCDE, is a network architect mostly focused on service providers, data centers, virtualization and security.

He has more than 10 years in IT, and has worked on many network design and deployment projects.

In addition, Orhan is a:

Blogger at Network Computing.
Blogger and podcaster at Packet Pushers.
Manager of Google CCDE Group.
On Twitter @OrhanErgunCCDE

The post Fast Reroute Mechanisms appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Orhan Ergun.

How portable is your network operating system?

Conversations are swirling throughout the tech industry about whether white box switches are disrupting the networking industry, similarly to how white box manufacturers helped commoditize the server industry. If this recent InfoWorld article, is not enough to persuade you, consider that even John Chambers himself has recently chimed in on the threat of white boxes eroding Cisco’s margins.                                                                                         

The idea of white box switching from a Pica8 perspective is to help create an operating abstraction between the “metal” (in our case white box switches from original device manufacturers, or ODMs) and the network operating system (OS) itself.  When that’s created, you have a degree of OS portability.

In a typical first meeting with a prospect, we frequently get asked if they can port a version of our OS on their existing Cisco switches. At first blush, it makes sense but let’s examine the three key issues that need to be addressed to truly Continue reading

Nexus 7k – Getting Started Examples – Part1 (basics, VDC and vPC)

For best article visual quality, open Nexus 7k – Getting Started Examples – Part1 (basics, VDC and vPC) directly at NetworkGeekStuff.

So I finally had a project with Cisco Nexus switches to finally get hands on experience on these boxes. I am no longer a fanboy of Cisco, so just practically, this article is a summary of my notes and example configurations that I have put together as a documentation for myself and now I will kind of share them with you. First of all, when I started writing this article it was November 2013 and Nexus 9000 were just released, note that this articles is based on Nexus 7000 series and not the new 9000 series. Sorry, not chance to get to 9000 yet, maybe later.

Cisco Nexu Thumbnail FINAL

Let’s get started. Similarly as with my previous IOS XR Getting Started Guide (part 1 and part 2), I will go over the very quick overview and then show basically a snapshots of configuring some elemental configurations. There is actually one advantage over the IOS XR in that the NX-IOS has and that is that it is more similar to the classical IOS we all know.

Basic commands to verify hardware, Continue reading

What is a “Best Practice”?

I see a lot of articles and even vendor whitepapers that like to throw the term “best practice” around like it’s pocket change. Truth be told, while there are plenty of general best practices that are recommended in any case, many of what a vendor will call “best practices” are usually just the most common response to an If/Then statement that represents the surrounding environment. Here’s a good example. I’ve heard on multiple occasions regarding the standard vSwitch in VMWare vSphere that it is a “best practice” to set the load balancing policy to “route based on the originating virtual port ID”.

What is a “Best Practice”?

I see a lot of articles and even vendor whitepapers that like to throw the term “best practice” around like it’s pocket change. Truth be told, while there are plenty of general best practices that are recommended in any case, many of what a vendor will call “best practices” are usually just the most common response to an If/Then statement that represents the surrounding environment. Here’s a good example. I’ve heard on multiple occasions regarding the standard vSwitch in VMWare vSphere that it is a “best practice” to set the load balancing policy to “route based on the originating virtual port ID”.

[minipost] Create a loopback hard-drive partition inside a file in linux

For best article visual quality, open [minipost] Create a loopback hard-drive partition inside a file in linux directly at NetworkGeekStuff.

TuxTIP_mergedThis article is really just a quick documentation for something that I do almost each year, and each year I must google-search how I did the last time. So from now on I will have it in my own notes …. here!

Mu current problem was that I have VPS system from a small provider hpcloud.com :) , but the base image is divided to 10 GB of system partition and another 20 GB of data partition. And as luck would have it, I needed 25 GB for data. One of the options was to buy more storage, but I have seen that my minimalistic debian hardly used more than 1,7 GB from the 10 GB system space and I wanted to make use of the remaining space.

Additionally, resizing the partition was not an option as this was the provider mandatory separation, so I decided to use a loopback file emulating a hard-drive.

What this means is that I will create a 5 GB file in the system partition, and mount it as a directory in the data partition, Continue reading

ArmA2 CWR2 mod: Winter Kolgujev + Malden Domination with Xmas extras

For best article visual quality, open ArmA2 CWR2 mod: Winter Kolgujev + Malden Domination with Xmas extras directly at NetworkGeekStuff.

Last year, I released quickly one nice modification to my custom Malden CWR2 Domination and despite being only announced really only on this blog and to few of my friends last year, I really enjoyed creating it. So this year I decided to put off some dust from it and also port it to a fully winter themed island of Winter Kolgujev from the latest CWR2 mod. Again, this is based on Xeno’s Domination and original port to Everon by OC, then customized on a scripting level with multiple features.

ThumbnailWinter

Features:

Christmas/Winter centric features:

  • Permanent SNOW FALL + FOG during the mission to have a deep atmosphere + in Malden also custom environment sounds, that is why the file is a bit bigger.
  • All CWR2 infantry units are using Winter camouflage (see pictures below, great work from CWR2 mod team to release this)
  • There are Christmas presents under a tree for your team, but be careful, if you fail to protect some girls in the base, you will loose the presents.
  • Custom Christmas carol music in intro + if you Continue reading

Hardware – Is SFP+ just a smaller version of XFP?

In the last post I discussed clock and data recovery (CDR). This post examines an application of re-timers (or CDRs) within XFP and SFP+ transceivers. I’ve previously covered the size, power and connector differences of 10G transceivers before, but this post will focus … Continue reading →

The post Hardware – Is SFP+ just a smaller version of XFP? appeared first on The Network Sherpa.

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