Category: Education
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Being in my current situation I am jobless. In fact I’ve been jobless for the longest I’ve ever been and the lack of interest in my job site profiles is really starting to bother me to the point that it’s just racing thoughts all around my brain about all sorts of different focal points.
One of these focal points is continued learning. You see, a large reason I left to go to a VAR was to be forced to stay on the forefront of new topics and technologies of interest in the I.T. field. Now that I am in a situation where I’ll be strong handed into any job I have to try and convince myself to not rationalize this fear I have.
That fear is getting stuck in an enterprise role where nothing moves fast and you get stuck in legacy technologies without the ability to move forward. However, I know this isn’t true as I have quite a few friends in enterprise roles that can school me on many new technologies. The truth is I can keep up in my free time with tools such as books, lab environments, video courses, etc. Which would then put me in a position to advise and help drive the enterprise role towards modern technology and idea’s and still progress myself as well.
That’s it, that’s my quick take.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/quick-take-continued-learning/
Reading Time: 5 minutes
The Bootstrap Process
In the Part 1 of this series we covered the first step to converting and ISR from IOS-XE onto the Cisco SD-WAN platform. We will continue from there with my story of frustrations and the discovered caveats and need to knows. Starting first with bootstrapping the ISR.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/cisco-sd-wan-isr-4k-getting-started-part-2-bootstrap-process/
Reading Time: 5 minutesLast year I was involved in assisting a datacenter core and access-layer refresh. In this case the IDF’s were reusing existing fiber patches and the run to the datacenter stayed in place. however, within the datacenter core equipment was placed across the room required new cross connects to be ran to the new core cabinet. When the cutovers began to take place the IDF’s were spread out over a large campus. Meaning troubleshooting by walking back and forth to check cabling was extremely time consuming and inefficient. Since all the IDF’s were connected via port channels I was able to figure out which runs were crossed and go fix them all at once using only the ether channel show output. I’ll walk you through the process now.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/remote-troubleshooting-crossed-fiber-using-port-channels/
Reading Time: 3 minutesAs it turns out, albeit I don’t do voice as my career focus, I decided to help out a team member and took ownership of an issue that came up. It was a phone that wasn’t working, one that was attached to an ATA 190. After I tracked down the device I typed it’s IP address into my web browser and found it in a Recovery Firmware state. What us traditional Cisco route/switch guys would consider “ROMMON” as a loose equivalent. In this case it is important to note, since the device wasn’t function on proper firmware and was in recovery mode, the IP address of the ATA is actually in the Data VLAN at this point, NOT the Voice VLAN.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/ata-190-recovery-firmware-page-ata-190-will-not-register/
Reading Time: 8 minutesFirst of all a disclaimer. I am NOT a programer. I promise this could probably be cleaned up considerably by someone that actually does programming. Also, It may require some tweaking to work on your system. This is tested on Mac 10.12.3 and SecureCRT 8.1*
I’ve always loved using SecureCRT. I often find myself needing to add anywhere from a small to a large number of sessions to my list. Especially in my current role. I had remembered in my past at an old roll where I used Windows as my primary OS (work issued) that I had discovered a forum that had a python and VBS script to import sessions out of a CSV. Now that I am running on Apple I sought out that old forum and grabbed the python script. Drats!!! The python script doesn’t work on my new version of SecureCRT for Mac (8.1). Then I started thinking. Most of the time clients give me a nice spreadsheet of IP addresses. This got me thinking, why not write my own that uses Excel. So here it is!
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/python-xlrd-securecrt-import/
Reading Time: 4 minutes
tl;dr – THANK YOU ALL!
Yesterday morning I opened up my Spark app and was surprised to see I was added to the Cisco Champions room. I checked my e-mail and saw nothing. I knew it was being announced soon do to some twitter chatter. After validating with members it was true. I was selected as a 2017 member of Cisco Champions. I’m going to say I’m blown away even still today. I am absolutely honored to be part of such an amazing group of individuals. It has caused me to sit back and think about how I even came to know the people I look up to. So how did it start?
Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/cisco-champions-2017-a-reason-to-reflect/
Reading Time: 3 minutesI love when tools make my life easier. A conversation came up online the other night and I had shown someone a quick summary of the awesome power of Sublime Text. They wanted to know how I made the magic happen in that video. I felt I should and share it with everyone via a blog post. Here’s a quick video of my uses along with a description of what you can do with it, as well as how to make it work.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/config-ease-with-sublime-text-snippets/
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe other day someone joked that I should write a post about plugging in a cable, or at least something to that extent. Then I started thinking about it. It’s actually a good idea. Everyone has their own way of cabling up a rack of patch panels and switches. Most of us would love to get the exact right length cables for the job however, that’s often not the case. There is a patching strategy I like to use when you are stuck using a box of 7 foot cables when all you really need are 3 foot cables. None the less, we all want it to look as neat as it can when we are done. I’m going to show you my practice when it comes to patching which can be easily modified whether you’r racks follow a panel-switch-panel-switch arrangement or a panel-panel-switch-switch arrangement.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/back-to-basics-patching-a-switch/
Reading Time: 4 minutesA colleague and I have been debating over a few months the topic of troubleshooting. My initial stance on the topic was that you CAN teach troubleshooting. However, as time has passed working with particular individuals I have came to a realization that you CANNOT teach troubleshooting. My belief now is that some people simply have a mind that thinks in logical sequences to rule out options and others don’t. While I’m sure this post may cause some heat towards myself the point isn’t to say anything bad about anyone. My point is that some individuals have a very effective troubleshooting skill set, while others simply have a set rubric of tests that if exhausted, results in a complete halt in process. I’ve come up with four items that impact an individuals ability to troubleshoot effectively even after the initial checklist has been exhausted.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/you-coach-not-teach-troubleshooting/
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Windows for Network Engineers
Part two in my series of apps for network engineers across the three major platforms. I previously did the post for Mac when I first refreshed my laptop and purchased my first new Mac in 8 years. Issued by work, my daily laptop is a Windows machine which is fine with me. I would prefer to use Mac but give me a machine that has the tools I need and I’m fine. So with that in mind, I am going to list my favorite Windows tools for Network Engineers.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.packetpilot.com/apps-for-a-network-engineer-part-ii-windows/
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