The importance of designing things the right way the first time - and the problems that pop up if you don't.
The things they don't teach you in school, but are necessary for the job - and the lessons I've learned.
You can never stop learning - A bit on certification studies and random new technologies.
A little about the magic that happens in the background - and sometimes saves the day.
A few weeks ago I got my hands on a Cisco UCS C220 M4 server – which I’ve set up in a lab to install and test Cisco’s Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure Software (NFVIS). I really wanted to get this running on an Enterprise Network Compute System (ENCS) box, but you can’t always get everything what you want :). The
Just over a year ago I posted that I was starting work toward the CCIE R&S exam. My original goal was to take the written exam by June of this year – so what progress have I made, and where am I at now? Well I ended up missing the original goal I had set. It’s now October and I
With the release of Android 9.0 recently, Google enabled a big change for how user’s can protect their privacy: DNS over TLS. While the concept isn’t brand new, it also hasn’t exactly exploded in usage either. This is going to start changing as Google rolls out the new version of their operating system that not only comes with the feature,
The future is APIs! SD-EVERYTHING! Automation! Orchestration! Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning! Sound familiar? It’s all part of the messaging going around in just about everything IT-related. With as much as you keep hearing about it, you might think that it’s all anyone is doing anymore. Yet it still just seems like not a whole lot of people are really
Back when I bought my Synology NAS in 2012, I picked up 4 Seagate 3TB drives. Yes, they’re the same model (ST3000DM001) that BackBlaze reported about in 2015 since these drives have an unusually high failure rate. I even managed to have one drive fail within the first few weeks, but I didn’t think much of it – just submitted
This post has been on my mind for a while now. I’ve worked as a network admin for long enough, and opened more technical support cases with vendors than I want to think about. Over the years I’ve developed my own process for how I handle those support cases in an effort to get a quick and efficient resolution. Some
We have some new F5 load balancers in our environment, which means I need a method of grabbing regular configuration backups. There are a number of methods out there, but I’ve opted to use SolarWind’s CatTools software since we already own it. The config I used is based on this blog post. It’s a great write-up on how to back
I have always said that I’m not sure I could write code for a living, but I do really enjoy writing scripts that make my life easier. Today’s post is a great example of that. The ease of use offered by the Juniper SRX firewalls and JunOS is something that I wish I had in all of my networking infrastructure.
When I started in networking, I never would have thought that security would be such an important part of my job. However, it has become something that I’m involved with almost every day – tasks like applying security configurations, participating in audits, or spending a day chasing down the latest vulnerabilities. It’s already become second nature to watch for what’s
Over the past two years we have made a ton of progress shifting datacenter infrastructure from 1G to 10G+. A majority of this has been through a vendor migration back to Cisco for switching – and specifically using the Nexus 9372 line. These boxes come with 48 ports of 1G/10G SFP+ and another 6 QSFP ports that hit 40G. Late