Learning something new each day.

Lately i have been making it a goal of mine to watch a TED video a day. I do this in order to expand my horizon and learn things that i normally wouldnt pay much attention to. Something as foreign to me as a music conductor explaining how to perform a piece of music, what it takes and why he does it, makes me a more informed human being.
Read more...

Spanning-tree revisited

In this post i will shed some light on some spanning-tree info that has been floating around. But also an explanation why i choose a non-obvious answer to an IPexpert question. Specifically 2 things. The first one is the selection of ports and what _exactly_ selects the root port.
Read more...

Back from trip.

I am back from our company trip to Dubai. Dubai is a fantastic place. Its my first time in the middle east and it left a great impression. The whole city struck me as a proof-of-concept kind of city. They decided they wanted to do something great and they went ahead and did it.
Read more...

Some thoughts on Openflow

It seems that everywhere i look, be it on twitter, google+ or my regular reading list of blogs, Openflow comes up alot. What is Openflow? Openflow is an initiative to create a protocol and an API infrastructure to improve overall functionality of your network.
Read more...

Quick Tip: SPD

One of my friends told me about a feature called SPD and whether i knew about it. I didnt so i decided to read a bit more about it. SPD stands for Selective Packet Discard. As the name implies it has something to do with discarding packets.
Read more...

Thoughts on the SSL/TLS โ€“ Beast

It seems like every day, there are some vulnerability or crack announced on the geek news-outlets. For some reason, the recent publication of an exploit of a flaw in the SSL/TLS implementation in some versions, made me extra curious and it made me think a little harder about this whole security business.
Read more...

Time people.. Timeโ€ฆ

Being a network consultant means getting access to lots of customers using a range of different equipment. One thing thats common for almost all of them, is the fact that the time is not in sync throughout their devices. As you may know, this is a real issue when you are trying to sort out a problem.
Read more...

Some time has passed.

Some time has passed since i got my CCIE number. I have spent the time reflecting on the time that has passed since starting my CCIE journey. I will write down my journey in more detail later on for those who are interested.
Read more...

#29189

Hi everyone, I am happy to announce that this week i passed the R&S CCIE lab exam. CCIE #29189. Its been a long journey for me. Working full time, not taking any dedicated time off work to do so, has been challenging.
Read more...

IOS IPS

In this article i will try and setup a very simple example using Cisco IOS IPS (Intrusion Prevention System). As before, a simple topology consisting of 3 routers will suffice. They are configured as follows: Topology for IPS example. R1 will act as our source host.
Read more...

Thoughts on the Skype / Microsoft deal.

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.
Read more...

Over selling and underdoing.

Warning: The following is primarily a rant! You might not find it applicable in your situation, or you might simply not care. You have been warned ๐Ÿ™‚ Having been a consultant for a while now, i am constantly amazed at how solutions are made up and what is sold simply because it has a buzz-word in its title or description.
Read more...

Beginning of March

I have received the rest of my routers (1841s), I have also received the memory and flash upgrades for them all (256meg memory and 64mb flash). The guy who sold them to me was very helpful and it turned out he had the cables that i needed as well (some Smart-serial to Smart-serial, as well as some DB60 ones).
Read more...

New setup.

So i have decided to extend my rack functionality. I have the nessecary switching capacity, but what i need are the “correct” routers. Because of that, i have so far purchased 4x 1841 + a 2811. I still need 3 more before its in order.
Read more...

First shot = Failure.

First shot = Failure. So i had my first lab attempt on tuesday the 2nd of November. Boy was it hard ๐Ÿ™‚ Unfortunally i didnt pass this time around. I did very well in the troubleshooting part, but the configuration part, got the best of me.
Read more...

www.gns3vault.com

I wanted to point your attention to gns3vault.com. Alot of students use GNS3 (front end for dynamips) to do alot of their lab work. Rene Molenaar created this site, which is basically a site with free labs that you can download and practice on.
Read more...