Category: Networking

Tech Phrases I Love To Hate (and Hate to Love)

I’ve always been interested in how we use language. Why do we choose certain words over others? Why do we speak one way, but write our emails in a completely different way?

In particular, I’ve always been fascinated with dialects and colloquialisms, and our beloved tech industry, a veritable cornucopia of eye-rolling and groan-worthy jargon, does not disappoint.

Here’s a list of some of my favorite tech industry phrases. It’s a few of those short rhyming phrases (or almost rhyming) that we use a lot, but it’s not a list of every tech marketing word I could think of. Frankly, I don’t think I have enough cycles to synergize such a digitally transformative list anyway 🙂

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Is Cisco Software Defined Access Intent Based Networking?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about intent based networking – trying to define it – identifying its core tenets. Without a library of IETF drafts to go by, I listened to vendors explain their platforms, I read their whitepapers, I explored their solutions trying to figure out the commonalities among them and pinpoint exactly what they were all really trying to do.

I believe I came to a pretty good conclusion. IBN is a closed loop system of analytics, orchestration, and continuous validation. And in that process micro-configuration is abstracted from the network operator and replaced with higher level macro-configurations otherwise known as “intent.”

Using that definition, is Cisco Software Defined Access intent based networking?

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Stable Connection

Last night my buddy, Kermit the Frog, and I were hanging out talking about that Twitter conversation yesterday all around BGP – how bad it is – how great it is.

Either way, it got us thinking about all the crazy times we’ve had working with providers over the years setting up new BGP adjacencies.

Kermit decided to write a song about it, and since I’m not a great singer, Kermit took that part, and I just ran the soundboard.

He calls it “Stable Connection.”

We hope you like it.

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Fix Stuck Application Server in Cisco ISE

Once in a while the Cisco ISE web service doesn’t start after a reboot of the server, and though less frequent, sometimes the service just stops in a running production server. This means the Admin portal is unavailable, though ISE may be working properly otherwise. In this post I’ll go over a couple commands that can help.

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What Most Network Operators Really Want

Agility.

Nimbleness.

The ability for IT to change at the pace of business.

These are a few bullet points used by vendors, marketers, and some technology analysts to describe the main goal of IT today. The ability to deploy services quickly sounds great, but I’m not sure this is truly top of mind for most network operators.

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Teacher to Engineer: My Career Change Story

I graduated college in 2001 with a degree in English and no strong direction for a vocation. After graduation I spent a few months working on the customer service desk at a supermarket while I thought through my next step. After what in hindsight was very little deliberation, I decided to go to graduate school for a Master’s degree and become a high school English teacher. Though I loved literature, writing, and being in the classroom, that became a short-lived career. After only a few years teaching Julius Caesar and T.S. Eliot, I started searching for something new.

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Simplifying Data Center Interconnect with 128 Technology

Data center failover is an expensive, complex, and sometimes fragile component of a network design. Solving this one problem usually involves almost every other team in the IT department, and it’s inexorably linked with the very day-to-day operation of an organization.

How will a business recover from a data center outage?

How can mission critical applications move seamlessly between data centers?

How will our end-users reach an application in the event of a failover?

These are just a few high level questions that, along with very technical and legal requirements, will guide the actual design of a data center failover plan. The answers will determine bandwidth, routing protocols, storage, virtual environments, security, hardware platforms, and every minutia of design right down to how DNS will be propagated and what OSPF metrics are set to.

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Troubleshooting DTLS Handshake Error Joining Cisco 2702i Access Point to 9800 Wireless Controller

Recently I tried to join a Cisco 2702i access point to a 9800-CL wireless controller but found an issue that needed to be fixed prior to it joining successfully. I also recently joined a Catalyst 9115 access point right out of the box and experienced no issue at all, so my theory is that the 2702i had config still on it from when it was previously joined to a 5508 WLC. In this post I’ll go through the few steps I took to fix the issue and successfully join the 2702i to the 9800-CL.

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How to Plan for a Network Cutover

A network cutover is often the culminating event for networking projects. All of the planning, staging, testing, and configuration leads to this brief yet critical change window. Though there are a variety of cutover types and activities, I’ve found that there are some fundamental principles that apply to all of them.

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The Changing Face of Imposter Syndrome

Imposter syndrome is the topic du jour for blogs and podcasts, so I’m almost reluctant to write about it. However, I want to share something I realized about myself that breaks from the conversation at large about this popular subject.

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Networking and Tech Podcasts You Should Be Listening To

I believe continual professional development is absolutely necessary for workers in the IT industry, and for a network engineer like myself, blogs and podcasts have helped with my own professional development as much as formal training courses.

Below is a list of the technology-related podcasts that have been my go-to when driving the many miles I travel per month. Most are networking-related, but some cover information on security, cloud, virtualization, etc.

There are more out there, but these are the handful I always seem to gravitate to. I’d love to get your recommendations for podcasts I should be listening to, so please let me know in the comments.

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Level Up Your NetOps with Apstra

There’s a lot of hype around intent based networking. Some vendors seem happy to slap the term on anything that moves. But intent based networking, apart from the marketing hype, is a very compelling shift in network operations that I truly believe network engineers, architects, IT managers, and CIOs must pay attention to.

You see, especially in large environments, network operations is difficult to do well because of inconsistent practices, a lack of visibility, inefficient device-by-device configuration, and limited vendor tools. It’s a real problem that needs to be solved.

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Intent Based Networking Hype: Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater

I got very interested in intent based networking a few years ago when the term was relatively unknown. However, in the last year or so the term has been adopted by a variety of networking vendors and applied to technologies that I believe have very little to do with intent based networking.

The term has become part of the current marketing narrative leaving a bitter taste in the mouths of many engineers and technical individuals. However, I believe it’s very important to consider that intent based networking is not simply the use of a new buzzword by networking vendors. IBN stands on its own as a new networking paradigm, despite it being hijacked by marketing teams.

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Deploying and Configuring the Cisco 9800 Virtual Wireless Controller for the First Time

Deploying the new Cisco 9800-CL wireless controller is fast and easy, and by using the built-in workflows, a new wireless network can be deployed in only a few minutes. In this post, I’ll review how to deploy the virtual wireless LAN controller in VMware ESXi and stand up a very simple WLAN. We’ll also take a look at some potential gotchas and some noteworthy differences between how the new WLC is configured compared to the AireOS WLC.

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Not My Problem – Or Should It Be?

A phrase that really bothers me is “not my problem.” Usually I hear it in conversation with someone who learns of a problem but immediately seeks to absolve himself of any responsibility for the cause or responsibility to help.

I believe a networking professional, whether in pre-sales or working in the field, should have a deep understanding of networking concepts and strong technical experience. But also important are the soft skills necessary to build trust with customers, encourage strong relationships with account managers, and develop camaraderie and collaboration among teams. The words “not my problem” undermine those relationships and therefore shouldn’t be on the lips of a networking professional, let alone any sort of professional.

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Hopeful with a Dash of Skepticism: Cisco 9800 Wireless Controllers

Only a few years ago, Cisco tried their hand at a converged access wireless platform with, among other devices, the Cisco 5760 Wireless LAN Controller. To this day, I have nightmares about that box. It wasn’t fully functional, and it had huge code issues. Today, in spite of AireOS being a stable, highly functional, and well-known WLC platform, Cisco is trying it again with a range of WLCs in the 9300 and 9800 series.

However, will this brave attempt prove to have the same fate as the 5760?

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Bridging the Gap Between the Classroom and Real-World IT

This week I taught my last class as a part-time adjunct instructor at a community college. I’ve been there for six years – 12 consecutive semesters. Each term, alongside the actual curriculum, I incorporated my work experiences and lessons learned about the reality of working in IT. Making the class meaningful from a real-world perspective was very important to me.

For my very last class, I chose not to cover anything in the textbook or any of the bullets on the syllabus. Instead, I introduced my students to systems and network automation. What may seem old news to you and me was brand-new to my class, and I don’t believe this is the exception.

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