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Don’t Get Trapped by Traps

This blog post is written by Steve Francis, Founder and Chief Product Officer, LogicMonitor. LogicMonitor is a SaaS-based IT infrastructure monitoring company, monitoring the performance, capacity and availability of thousands of different kinds of devices and applications for thousands of customers. Where possible, we don’t rely on SNMP traps – and neither should you. “Why […]

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The post Don’t Get Trapped by Traps appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Sponsored Blog Posts.

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HTIRW: The Business Side of DNS (1)

So your host queries a DNS server to map the name to a location (an IP address), which sets off a chain of queries across a number of servers throughout the Internet. But who pays for all these servers, and how do they make money? To understand the answer to these questions, we need to […]

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Wireshark 802.11 Display Filters

Wireshark 802.11 frame type and subtype display filters to quickly sort packet captures.

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CRS/ASR Switching fabrics

At the moment I’m going through whitepapers, Cisco Live 365 presentations and IOS XR fundamentals learning about switching fabrics.

Its a steep learning curve, but in its own way its quite fascinating.

There are a lot of acronyms to be mastered, so later on i will post a list that might serve myself and others when looking at these sort of architectures.

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How and Where to Learn Python

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Learn PythonHow? That’s a bit of a loaded question, since many of us absorb information differently. However, I will put down what’s worked for me...

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How Much Are You Worth?

"I have a CCIE. But why my salary is not as high as expected?"
"I've just passed CCIE. Why don't I get salary increase?"
"Why my salary as CCIE is far below the market's salary survey?"


Have you heard such questions before?
It's 2014 and I'm surprised I still get emails from time to time asking either one of those questions. I thought the answers are straight forward. But in case you are one of them who sent the email, please allow me to enlighten you.

Most companies pay you based on "perceived value". It's based on opinion of your value to the company. It may have little or nothing to do with the salary range in the market. And it depends on the your ability to satisfy company's requirements.

The opinion can be shaped based on the certification that you have. It may use the market's rate as guideline. It may include your experience into consideration. And usually the opinion is associated to the internal company's rank and salary range.

Now let's go through the following questions:

Do you think you deserve your CCIE?
Do you really have the skill set of a CCIE, Continue reading

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Like it or Not, You ARE in the Customer Service Business

Like it or Not, You ARE in the Customer Service Business

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by Andrew McFarland, VP of Customer Care - April 29, 2014

Unless you work in research and development, where the value of your work may not be realized for many years, you are in the customer service business. That’s everyone from sales to finance to engineering.  

I find this statement is a great conversation starter because it invariably gets mixed reactions.  

Sales people and customer service representatives who are already close to the customers nod politely at this self-evident truth. The statement causes barely a ripple, because people in these roles meet with customers each day. They hear about customer goals, needs, and problems and help address the variety of issues that customers face.  

People who work in supporting roles like human resources or finance often respond with raised eyebrows. The accounts receivable group may only rarely meet with the customers who pay the bills. And human resources teams, for example, sometimes fail to recognize that their efforts to establish retirement and insurance plans impact the quality of talent a company can attract. They may miss the connection between hiring the best people and strong financial Continue reading

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Using EEM to Remotely Change a WAN IP – Part 2

In my last EEM post I provided a simple means to change an IP address and default route of a Cisco router using a script that makes the change without requiring interactive user input. This is helpful if you are remotely changing a device’s WAN/Internet IP and waiting for some on-site hands to move a cable over to a new ISP or WAN SP connection. That first script, however, would make the change and then exit. What would happen if the new Internet connection had a problem, or the on-site help couldn’t move the cable for some reason? Proper testing and preparation should help you avoid most of those issues but you just never know.

One way to deal with this possibility is to issue a “reload in 10” before kicking off the EEM change script. If the change can’t be completed, the router will reboot back to its previous configuration. That’s fine, but I like to avoid a full reboot whenever possible, and “reload in” has always been a rather clunky rollback mechanism.

Another idea mentioned by Jody Lemoine in the comments of the last post, is taking advantage of the newer configuration archive and rollback features. While my Continue reading

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OpFlex – is the abstraction in the right place?

It's been a few weeks since Cisco announced OpFlex and I've just finished gathering my thoughts...

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OpFlex – is the abstraction in the right place?

It's been a few weeks since Cisco announced OpFlex and I've just finished gathering my thoughts...

What is OpFlex

It's a protocol for delivering policy to endpoints. Policy is declarative, based on promise theory and can therefore scale well vs. imperative models (like OpenFlow)

What does this all mean

Kyle Mestery assures us that OpFlex is not an OpenFlow killer and while I agree, I'm starting to have my doubts. Vendors have been dragging their heels when it comes to implementing OpenFlow due to its pipeline and table structures not being a good fit to current hardware. OpFlex offers them a way out as they no longer need to care "how" something is implemented, just that the "promise" is kept (read: policy is enforced).

I can see Cisco deploying OpFlex across their entire portfolio and declaring victory - we've got SDN. Who cares about OpenFlow? This begs the question of whether OpFlex is just a move from Cisco to protect it's core business?

Why I care about OpenFlow and you should too

The future of networking is "Open"

The key benefit to using OpenFlow is disaggregation. It's beneficial to everybody for the proprietary stack to be broken down to allow Continue reading

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AirPcap

Wireless traffic packet capture is not easy as wired traffic. Linux and OSX have several solutions but if you’re stuck with Windows the first problem is to find a compatible adapter. My choice is AirPcap, fully compatible with Wireshark and…

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The Cost of Software Licensing in Networking – Is the Price Worth It ?

I've been evaluating Cisco Nexus products for a customer. So far, its taken 10h20m to check which licenses are required for each platform. And I'm still not confident that it's correct and accurate.

The post The Cost of Software Licensing in Networking – Is the Price Worth It ? appeared first on EtherealMind.

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OpFlex – is the abstraction in the right place?

It's been a few weeks since Cisco announced OpFlex and I've just finished gathering my thoughts...

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RIP Net Neutrality

It's been an interesting couple of months in the ongoing tensions between Internet carriage and content service providers, particularly in the United States. The previous confident assertion was that the network neutrality regulatory measures in that country had capably addressed these tensions. While the demands of the content industry continue to escalate as the Internet rapidly expands into video content streaming models, we are seeing a certain level of reluctance from the carriage providers to continually accommodate these expanding demands within their networks though ongoing upgrades of their own capacity without any impost on the content provider. The veneer of network neutrality is cracking under the pressure, and the arrangements that attempted to isolate content from carriage appear to be failing. What's going on this extended saga about the tensions between carriage and content?

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Top 5 Reasons The Evaluator Group Screwed Up

It’s been a while since the trainwreck of a “study” commissioned by Brocade and performed by The Evaluator Group,  but it’s still being discussed in various storage circles (and that’s not good news for Brocade). Some pretty much parroted the results, seemingly without reading the actual test. Then got all pissy when confronted about it.  I did a piece on my interpretations of the results, as did Dave Alexander of WWT and J Metz of Cisco. Our mutual conclusion can be best summed up with a single animated GIF.

 

But since a bit of time has passed, I’ve had time to absorb Dave and J’s opinions, as well as others, I’ve come up with a list of the Top 5 Reasons by The Evaluator Group Screwed Up. This isn’t the complete list, of course, but some of the more glaring problems. Let’s start with #1:

Reason #1: I Have No Idea What I’m Doing

Their hilariously bad conclusion to the higher variance in response times and higher CPU usage was that it was the cause of the software initiators. Except, they didn’t use software initiators. The had actually configured hardware initiators, and didn’t know it. Let that sink Continue reading

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Blessay: We Need To Buy Infrastructure Dolls Not Babies For The Private Cloud

The future of private infrastructure ownership is moving to a new model combines the old with the new that I describe as “dolls and babies” where the major transformation in infrastructure ownership is the transition from having babies to owning dolls. Infrastructure as Babies Enterprises buy infrastructure like people have babies. It takes months to […]

The post Blessay: We Need To Buy Infrastructure Dolls Not Babies For The Private Cloud appeared first on EtherealMind.

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Coffee Break 7

This is “The Coffee Break”. A podcast on state of the networking business where we discuss vendors moves and news, analysis on product and positioning, and look at the business of networking. In the time it takes to have coffee break.

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Coffee Break 7

This is “The Coffee Break”. A podcast on state of the networking business where we discuss vendors moves and news, analysis on product and positioning, and look at the business of networking. In the time it takes to have coffee break.

The post Coffee Break 7 appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Coffee Break 7

This is “The Coffee Break”. A podcast on state of the networking business where we discuss vendors moves and news, analysis on product and positioning, and look at the business of networking. In the time it takes to have coffee break. Topics  Cisco Reveals OpenFlow SDN Killer:OpFlex protocol for ACI offered to IETF, OpenDaylight Researchs […]

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The post Coffee Break 7 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

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Blessay: Overlay Networking, BFD And Integration with Physical Network

Lede: In discussions with a stealthy networking startup today, we were discussing how their overlay network technology for the SDN WAN was able to to detect network blackouts and brownouts in the physical network. Their answer was to run Bi-directional Forwarding Detection (BFD) in the overlay tunnels. Now you have effective quality and service detection in the overlay network.

The post Blessay: Overlay Networking, BFD And Integration with Physical Network appeared first on EtherealMind.