Vent

In just 3 days time I will be leaving for Cisco Live 2019 in Barcelona. Im thinking about what sort of event it will be and what to expect in term of announcements.

Especially one thought keeps reappearing and thats the thought of the transformation of Cisco. It is no longer a company with a future in just selling hardware. It itself has been disrupted by the emergence of “everything software” and merchant silicon.

I really like this paragraph, because almost everyone wants to imitate google. Why? well, the answer to that questions seems to be what everyone is missing!

Google’s solutions were built for scale that basically doesn’t exist outside of a maybe a handful of companies with a trillion dollar valuation. It’s foolish to assume that their solutions are better. They’re just more scalable. But they are actually very feature-poor. There’s a tradeoff there. We should not be imitating what Google did without thinking about why they did it. Sometimes the “whys” will apply to us, sometimes they won’t

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I am currently reading Team of Teams, an excellent book!

In it, it highlights an interesting fact that I think is very relevant for the networking world and that is the difference between something that is complicated versus something that is complex.

New Server:

So I just completed a purchase off eBay for a new server for my lab purposes.

For a while now I’ve been limited to 32Gb of memory on my old ESXi server, which is really more like 20Gb when my regular servers have had their share. Running a combination of different types of devices, each taking at least 4Gb of memory, doesn’t leave much room for larger labs.

This post is my follow-up on a recent discussion on twitter.

Working for a VAR (Value Added Reseller) is not always the glamours life some make it out to be.

Working as a consultant, what you are really doing, is being the CEO of your own service company.

Why do i keep focusing so much on Cisco, when there are clearly alot of different vendors out there with similar products and technologies?

There are several reasons for this.

1. I began the professional part of my networking career with Cisco.

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People often ask me why i keep studying and when i will be “done”.

To me, this type of question seems odd, because i am committed to lifelong learning.

I am of the opinion that going through life without learning something all the time would be a life wasted. I think this goes back to the early explorers. Discovering new things, whether it be a new continent or simply a piece of knowledge really excites a certain type of people.

I just had a chance to go ahead and read Mr. Greg Ferro’s ebook called ”Arse First Method of Technical Blogging“.

The book is being published by Leanpub (leanpub.com), an independent publisher and the readers will get free updates to the book as they become available.

Yesterday brought with it another Java security breach. It is security breach that doesnt yet have a fix for it (0-day), so short of disabling Java on your computer, you are out of luck.

Im continually amazed that we keep running this piece of software, but I guess I shouldnt be, given people’s track record of running insecure software (think older Internet Explorer browsers on windows).

Just wanted to share another great motivational video

Its been a rough week. I have been finishing up projects and getting rid of loose ends.

I have also been giving a couple of lectures on IPv6 (Basically primers) to customers as well as some information on basic failover configuration in IOS. The advent of 3G and low cost gives alot of new opportunities for customers.

The picture below should be put into a frame and put onto the desk of everyone in the IT industry.

By day, I am a consultant, so I have quite a few stories that relate to this picture.

Lately i have been watching a Ted video each day. I find this fascinating as i learn stuff in areas i would not normally be looking.

I can highly recommend this to anyone in order to stay informed on whats going on in our world.

My take on the Microsoft purchase of Skype.

Only last week i attended a mandatory briefing of Lync, Microsofts all-in-all wonder for communicating.

Basically its a PBX, IM-server, Video-conferencing, Outlook-Integrator kind of a product.

Basically they have taken alot of code from alot of different half-done products and thrown them into one big pile and put alot of marketing money behind it.

I wanted to take the opportunity to pitch in on the discussion thats presented in this article by Ivan Pepelnjak:

http://blog.ioshints.info/2010/07/p2p-traffic-is-bad-for-network.html with the headline of “P2P traffic is bad for the network”.

I agree with the headline… Somewhat… P2P is bad for the network, in the sense that it causes congestion and because of that, it makes using the net a bad experience for everyone else.

Well, I broke the spanning-tree topology at work today. It was not one of my proudest moments 🙂 I was playing around with the very delicate portfast command, which states in all its glory:

“%Warning: portfast should only be enabled on ports connected to a single

So, test is scheduled for tuesday, and im looking through and updating my notes. My plan is to look through all of my notes on the morning, trying to pick up on anything I might have missed during my studying.

I read on Slashdot today, that a “Jack Thompson“, walked out of court, apparently because he was being disbarred for 10 years. I couldnt quite remember who he was, but then it dawned upon me, he’s the smock thats been trying to ban what he thinks are violent games, because he’s of the opinion they are bad for society.

I just purchased a Rack from Dantrak UK. I need some sort of solution to mount the gear I have and will be getting. I cant have it all lay around the floor. They (Dantrak UK) is basically a reseller of Dantraknet.

I like sunny weather when its moderate, but temperatures in the 25+ Celcius range is a bit too much for me. Especially when I need to spend time in front of my computer. I will need some kind of cooling solution this summer for sure.

Interesting indeed.

Im writing this on my 3rd HP laptop in 2 years. This is a company owned laptop, because if not, I would never have purchased another laptop from Hewlett Packard.

My first HP laptop was a so called NC8430, which is in their line of business laptops. It replaced a T20/T21 (I have forgotten), which was 3+ years old, and still working fine. The NC8430 has a 15″ display, 256mb graphics card, comes with 1 gig of ram (which I had upgraded to 2gig right away), and as far as i remember, a 60 or 80 gb harddrive. It also had a 2.0 ghz Core 2 duo processor from Intel. Pretty nice machine from reading just the specs. And thats where the story takes a turn for the worse.

Been having alot on my mind lately. Ive been writing down the topics I want to give my opinion on, but just havent gotten around to actually elaborating on them. I will try to rectify that over the comming days.

Trip to China cut short.
For some reason I fell sick in Amsterdam and had to go back to Denmark. Im out sick until friday where I will get to see my doctor.
Im quite convinced that what I experienced was a panic attack that just wouldnt go away for some reason.

I will be leaving for China tomorrow. Will be going with my favorite coworker, along with my boss, his boss and bookkeeping guy. We will travel from Billund to Amsterdam, and then from Amsterdam to Shanghai. Alot of flying. I will be back friday night.

So Ive hit a snag in my learning process. There is a question on one of the chapter tests, that I simply cannot work out. I know the answer, but I simply cant figure out how to that answer. It is really pissing me off.

In recent months ive re-experienced what its like to have a bad teacher.

Im currently taking a CCNA certification, and anyone who has taken one, know there is ALOT of material to go through. To have a good teacher help you with questions and problems would be a huge help. Unfortunally I am not in a position to say I have a good teacher.

Okay, so Im fed up.

I dont like Idols. I dont like Can you dance. I dont like The stage is yours. I dont like complete ripoffs, and basically reruns of the same old, same old. It is simply not something you can call a classic, and keep watching over and over again. It lacks creativeness and any innovative thought processes. So stop it!

This is what the white house looked like during Earth Hour:

Earth Hour – An hour where alot of citizens around the world turned of their lights to save electricity, and thereby showing their concern for the environment.

There was no Internet connection at my second hotel, that actually worked. I really do think its a necessity to have a good and reliable Internet connection for your visitors.

Watching TV and reading books used to be what you could do in a hotel-room, now however, the Internet is the main source of information for many people, so why not give your hotel an edge and use it as a selling point?

I am sitting in a hotel room once again, and I am going to be sitting in one until thursday. How do you feel about hotel rooms, and what do you do in one of them?

I normally spend most of my awaken time by my laptop, which it is critical for me to have an internet connection. I am quite concerned that the hotel I will be staying at tomorrow, does not have an internet connection, in which case I will be spending the evening watching movies I suspect. I always bring a portable harddrive or two with me with interesting stuff loaded onto them.

Arthur C. Clarke passed away today at his retreat in Sri Lanka. Besides fighting the nazi’s by helping develop radar facilities, he is also behind many of the conceptual ideas behind space travel and sci-fi in general. He was always very philosophical about mans role in the universe, advocating space splunking whenever possible, and was of the belief that we would reach Mars by 2000. Alas, not everything worked out the way he had hoped, but he was a great thinkerer in the area nevertheless.

I just learned that a local handball team (HF-Mors), apart from being sponsored by various sponsors the normal way, by having their expenses and training gear taken care of, also got their mortgage/rent paid. I think this is crossing the line for a small time handball team. I think the sponsorships should cover broadly for more exotic things as well, not just the mainstream stuff like handball/football.  If the sponsorship is primarily to gain revenue, then it should be seen that way, but these sponsorships are being pushed to the public as being good for the local community. I disagree.

A 16 year old kid was recently beaten to death for no apparent reason.

Senseless violence an indication of a worse society? I think so.

I have no more to say about this than whats already been said.

We should all be ashamed.

A plane from Copenhagen to Amsterdam, was cancelled yesterday, because of fear of terror.

A group of middle eastern men (all of whom are airline pilots in an Iraqi airline), was the cause of the fear to a Dutch man. One of the middle eastern men, had to use the restrooms, and, like me, you and everybody else, left his luggage (carry-on-bag) with his friends. This apparently was a cause for alarm, the police was called, the plane cancelled, and all for nothing.

America’s war on tourism: airlines to foot the bill for fingerprinting foreigners as the leave the US

Scotland Yard wants DNA samples from 5-year-olds in case they grow up to be criminals; Oyster card records to become part of “war on terror”

Please dont try this at home, but if you do, id like to see the outcome:

“we think a life without internet may be worse than one without money.” — Gizmodo

Been doing alot this week. Mainly been studying some more. Couple of important chapters, I need to get down really well.

How do you get hard information into your brain, and get it to stay there, and understand it for good? Im not sure, but Im starting to think that writing down things manually really helps me personally.