Category: How To’s

Cisco Live – Attendee Guide(s)

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I’m writing this from a couple of different perspectives about attending conferences.

  • Cisco Live – This is written based on Cisco Live events but is useful for any vendor / technology (or even other industry/profession) conferences.
  • First time attendee / non social person
  • On-site attendee
  • Remote attendee

I’m going to try and mold these elements together with the obvious point that there are things in person that are different remote so I’ll try and separate those into different groups while keeping a high level ideas/concepts together.

Onsite/In Person Attendance

This can be very overwhelming on many fronts. Depending on the size of the conference it’s a sensory overload. You often have some sort of show room floor like the World of Solutions at Cisco Live. It’s like being at a concert full of people you don’t know as well as a car dealership. Ton’s of conversations, and tons of selling but take a step back and breath. Lot’s of awesome can come out of it.

First off, listen! Ambient learning/queues are great. You’ll hear a lot of very smart people talking, conversations and topics that might peak your interest. Which brings Second!

Dig into that, if a conversation, topic, product, etc. intrigues you dive in. Remember you are all there for the same reasons and it’s highly unlikely you will get pushed out of or denied part of a conversation.

Third, as overwhelming as it is it’s a great way to make connections both in person and eventually remotely through the years to come. The best part is perspectives. You often get to learn different cultural perspectives as attendees come from all over the world. You can gain inspiration on the way things might be done elsewhere and once you build that connection your might even get some great recipes to try out 🙂

Don’t overdo it on learning classes. It’s easy to burn yourself out by making the entire conference about the classes offered. I’m not saying don’t do them as they are wonderful and ran by very smart individuals but you can spend the entire week trying to soak up all that knowledge and miss out on the social interactions/perspectives/fun/learning.

With that keep an eye out for things like the Social Media Hub and Certification Lounge. Let’s not forget the store where often our favorite cert guide authors do meet ups. These are great places to get in on conversations and discussions and as I’ve said there isn’t a conference I’ve went to where people turn you away.

If you get invited to a dinner/happy hour do it! This is part of why I say don’t wear yourself out on just doing classes because these events happen and again, you’ll make awesome connections and have good discussions even if you just passively listen and say a word here and there.

I guess I am trying to say the TLDR: for in person attendance is to leverage the aspect of learning (the classes/sessions) that might be relevant to you right then, but also take a deep breath in the morning, and interact. You’ll meet fellow industry colleagues, industry rock stars, and ultimately make friends and learn a lot along the way.

Remote Attendee

So the stars didn’t align and you can’t attend Cisco Live in person. That doesn’t mean you are going to miss out on all the news and hype coming from the convention center floors. There are a few key ways to stay involved.

Live Broadcasts:

Cisco Live has quite a few live broadcasts of key events such as keynotes, panels, and innovation talks. The best part is……they offer these for free! They don’t even require a login to watch! “How do I watch these?” you ask. Simply go to the homepage for Cisco Live. They conveniently have a page with the schedule and even ICS downloads so you can add it to your calendar and block that time off distraction free! To see the schedule and information go to the Cisco Live broadcasts page linked below!

https://www.ciscolive.com/global/attend/broadcast-agenda.html

There are many other broadcasts that happen during the events. Often broadcasters such as Tech Field Day and various live steamers on platforms such as Twitch and YouTube live stream within the means they are allowed. I can’t speak to any of them with confirmed streams but encourage you to check them out.

Social Media:

I can’t say this enough. JOIN. I’m not asking you to post, or be active (it would be awesome if you did though) but there are a lot of us on platforms that will be barraging twitter with the hashtag #CLUS. Also keep in mind the hashtag #CISCOCHAMPION and possibly even #CISCOLIVE. It’s been a change over the years with more platforms outside of X(Twitter) such as BlueSky, Mastodon, etc, however vendors and the conference itself leverage social media heavily during the events. You can also follow specific individuals and companies you find interesting and will get a lot of information about new technologies from both Cisco and various vendors. A lot will come straight from the World of Solutions floor as well as keynotes and sessions. Keep up with the tags and follow them to keep up on the event.

More common now with all the interactive streaming/broadcasts are rooms on platforms such as Webex and Discord. Find communities you can join and keep up on the interaction and updates from individuals that are on site or even remote but might be following different channels/websites then you.

Blogs

A lot of individuals in attendance write blog posts. While I will admit that most of the time they aren’t updated daily during Cisco Live many will post within the following week. Also, often blogs from both attendees and companies are scheduled to be published as announcements and releases are made during the conference. These blogs are often linked in social media posts and you can utilize various utilities to keep updated on new posts.

VLOG/Video Content

On top of regular text social media platforms there is a growing number of live streamers and Youtube (etc) content creators. I haven’t talked specifically to any but in years past there have been numerous daily updates from the conference on various medias. Keep an eye out for them!

INTERACT!!!!

I’m stressing this. This is why I also send pleas for you to join Twitter/BlueSky/Mastadon/etc and follow people. You will find that a lot of the most prominent posters on twitter (specifically look for #CiscoChampion) are quite happy to ask questions on your behalf or seek out an answer for you if possible. We don’t bite! We are social for a reason. Secondly, Tweet at @CiscoLive. They have some incentives for remote attendees and I’m not going to lie….that social media team is the best in the biz. They rock and will respond to the best of their abilities!

I look forward to hearing from you! Please do not hesitate to ask me questions on twitter. I can be found by following @mattouellette. Enjoy the show! Don’t forget to block out time on your calendar to watch or catch up on the events you have high interest in!

General Summary

Global ideas that cross both onsite and remote attendance:

  • Don’t overwhelm yourself
  • Listen and join in
  • Interact whether its social, technological, project, vendor, etc related
  • Make connections
  • Hear experiences and share yours with your industry peers

As a bonus a fellow Cisco Champion whom many of you may or may not (okay you probably do) know, our friendly trainer & author Wendell Odom gave me permission to link his video for attendees new to/studying for CCNA with a perspective of remote attendance. Please note I did not watch this video until after I wrote this so there may be crossover but no intention of idea stealing as we share what we do because we like to help but he’s a much more seasoned veteran of this industry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfea2qOavJM

Additional tip: If you are remote you are likely working on other tasks. This is where the streams from the official event, or live content creators are great because you can have them up in the background and if something perks up your ears, you can stop for a minute to watch/note the topic and visit it later. This leads back to my previous post about learning methods and ambient learning.

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Just Write (Type) It Down: A Note Taking – Study Strategy!

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Okay sorry about that! The title is (but also isn’t) misleading. I’m going to write this from an I.T. perspective but in all truth it applies to anything you may be studying.

In the field of I.T. it’s a given…You will always be studying/learning new things. Only always as some would say. Things move so fast, and tasks, technologies, plans, procedures, etc are always changing. It’s really the same in any field to be honest.

One thing I was taught well back in early elementary school was to write it down because writing it down helps you remember it. Well in my case two things, I’m a south paw (aka left handed) and yes I have that stereotypical left handed writing that even if I write the word “the” on a piece of paper odds are tomorrow I can’t even read it 🙂

The second thing is it’s such a digital world and well, I’m kind of a technology guy so I choose to type out my notes. For a few reasons such as be able to search them, and the ease of sharing them with others. Or even collaborating on note taking. And as noted above to be honest, so I can actually read them later!

I’m going to write this as my strategy for note taking using a specific platform/software, as well as based on a self paced course. At the end I will outline at a high level the same(ish) strategy for things like exams or specific technology or books. I’m hoping to get a guest write up from someone that still prefers to hand write their notes because I think that’s a super fun way to do it I just can’t because my handwriting looks like I gave PacketPup a pen and piece of paper.

In my case I prefer to use Microsoft OneNote. For me it makes it simple to share across devices, collaborate, organize, and search. Also allowing me to export to PDF’s or whatnot for storage/archive purposes. I’d like to hear from others what platforms/software you use for digital notes and how you use them. If you’d like, we can set up a guest post to share.

My outline for this is going to based on the (currently) free Junior Cybersecurity Analyst self paced course on Cisco’s Networking Academy (NetAcad).

One of the first things I do is create a new OneNote notebook titled the same as the course (etc) I’m following. This helps because then I have a notebook for every Topic/Course/Book/Exam/Technology I study.

I won’t bore you with the first step of creating a notebook in OneNote as I have a hunch I can put a Benjamin on a bet you all know how to do that even if you don’t use the application. So we’ll start with my process of organizing.

First thing is first I peek at the courses outline or (exam blueprint/book chapter/topic structure). Usually (not always) the self paced learning plans anywhere are organized into a hierarchy of the course as a whole, with sub courses and within the sub courses modules (whatever term they use) and within a module topic areas.

That’s how I like to organize my notes. I build a notebook, within the notebook I create what Microsoft OneNote calls section groups for each course in the learning path in the case of this Cisco NetAcad course. Then within the section group I create a section for each module. In the section I then create individual pages for each sub section within that module. At that point I use bulleted notes on the individual page for the sub topics. That sounds complicated but can be modified/adjust for the different types of studying as mentioned above with book chapters/topics, exam blueprints, days of instructor led training etc. As an example look at the screenshot below outlining the notebook/section group/section/page/bulleted notes hierarchy. (Note titles based off Cisco NetAcad course not my own)

I’m curious to your organization structure while note taking. I would also as mentioned enjoy a handwritten note taker to do a guest post. I know some like individual notebooks for every topic/course/book and some like to use those adhesive flags to separate sections in said notebook but would love to share those strategies as well but as I said…..I have Dr.s handwriting being a southpaw so I can’t read what I wrote down yesterday 🙂

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Keep Moving: Balancing Learning Multiple Things

Reading Time: 4 minutes

As we all know, being a worker in information technology is dedication to continued learning. Forever and always. No matter your field of focus. Whether it be workstation/os, networking, wireless, servers, storage, security, or maybe multiple of those and more…it is a never ending grind. This honestly applies to any job/industry but I’ll write this post kind of on an I.T. concept.

That grind crosses multiple arenas. For one, there is simply personal growth. We all have something we want to learn because it intrigues us. From what I see from I.T. colleagues is we always have something we just want to learn/play with because we are curious people. We have to keep our brains moving. It might be an older technology or concept but something that sparks our brain and we want to tackle it.

Additionally there is learning to keep up on what’s new. This is a key thing in the I.T. industry because everything is always changing. This is certainly a challenge that kind of crosses paths with the above of being curious about something new to us that intrigues us. On the same note it’s key in our industry to stay up on what’s neat and new and becoming prominent in the industry.

There is another thing that triggers learning. That is our day to day/day job. Having worked in retail, corporate, and consulting you never know what’s going to pop up. Maybe your business is buying a new I.T. product that you need to help integrate. Or maybe transition to a new technology like from a traditional WAN to an SD-WAN solution. As I once had to do add in a TAP-AGG solution to our main network. That required learning that product/solution.

So how do you balance all of these learning area’s at once. It’s challenging for sure because you want to learn what intrigues you, what’s new in the industry, and what’s required of your day to day job tasks. It’s key to keep things straight and separate in a way.

I’m going to continue this post with the assumption you play in all of those arenas. The first thing that is key is time. This can be a tough one. Hopefully if you need to learn something for your job your company will let you set aside time during your day to focus on that. This can also come into play with learning to keep up with industry new trends. That last one is quite dependent on how your employer views emerging technology and keeping it’s staff up to date.

When it comes to the idea of learning new things that intrigue you for personal growth that more likely requires you using your own personal time. My best advice for this is use “down” time to your advantage. That may be your drive to/from work (or other places), lunch time, waking up an hour earlier, sitting in a waiting room (Doctor, car service, etc) for some sit down learning time.

There are multiple ways to leverage all this time. Drives can be a great time for listening to what I’m going to quote/unquote as “podcasts”. This could be a literal podcast, listening to a video such as youtube, udemy, other training platforms (please don’t watch and drive but leverage listening). Lunch and waiting rooms are great for watching video’s. Most videos from companies/training platforms/video bloggers are short and you can get one or two in.

We all have a life outside of this industry. Some of us have significant others and kids to take care of that may have functions going on in the evening. Family to meet up with from time to time for different events. Friends and Family to meet up with for a beverage or dinner. Sports and hobbies are a thing for us all. Maybe even a show/sport you like to watch. For me a key is to walk my dog as A: it’s good for me to get some exercise, B: it’s good for her as she is a senior dog so it keeps her moving and her joints health, and C: it’s a great time to clear my mind and even get the occasion interaction with neighbors and their kids. Don’t give any of that up. For me, I try and spend 30 minutes before bed reading something, but don’t stay up too late and be tired the next day because that doesn’t help.

Now to keep balance between studying multiple things set a schedule. Maybe that extra hour in the morning is the “keep up with the industry” time. Then your driving time/waiting rooms/lunch time is for the “what I want to learn that intrigues me” time. Since it’s a “just for you/fun” learning effort those distracting times can be good as you don’t have to be AS focused. Hopefully if you need to learn something for work you get that time as part of your job to learn it. The key is to set certain time’s for certain learning tasks to keep them separate and not be jumping back and forth between focuses during a sprint.

With that, keep boards on apps such as Trello. Break down what you are learning into chunks and keep track of it. That may be chapters in a book, videos, topics on an exam blueprint, or sections of a vendors training outline. I like to use Onenote and keep notebooks broken down into sections for whatever I’m trying to learn. I know some people prefer to do hand written notes in notebooks as it helps them with retention writing it down. Do what works for you but try to keep track. Keep a schedule and mark things off as you complete them.

The TL;DR is that in this industry there is always something to learn from some reason or another and often we have to juggle learning multiple things at the same time. This is fine but you have to dedicate time to each and use that time to focus as opposed to bouncing back and forth between things you are learning. You can’t tie your shoes and rake leaves at the same time. You need to give them each their own committed time.

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Learning something new? Make a plan!

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Learning something new is always a task and challenge. Maybe you are studying for a certification. Or maybe just want to learn a new technology or concept. That most daunting task of learning is following through with it and complete it. It is easy to get side tracked and halted or maybe just complete stop and forget about it. One of the best things you can do to keep forward progress is to make a plan. Lay it out and organize it. It’s like a recipe. Make this first, then this second, then put it all together. I’ll go over some things I do for my plan.

The first thing I do is plan time. Set aside time for learning/studying/labing. We all have lives and things to do like laundry, dishes, mowing the lawn, etc. Many have kids with events and sports to go to. This can be a hard thing to do. For me I choose to wake up early to give myself an hour of study/lab time before breakfast (or maybe during breakfast). Maybe you choose the first hour after dinner or an hour after the kids go to bed. Being a NHL fan all the games are in the evenings so after making dinner and doing dishes it’s game time which is why I choose the wake up early method. Maybe you don’t watch much TV so evening may be better. But choose a time and map it out daily.

Leverage weekends! Unless you work on weekends or have migrations/cut overs etc there is more time in the day. In the summer it’s great to just sit on the back deck enjoying the sunshine and warmth and study/learn. For me I get great quiet time lounging around in the summer and since I’m in Michigan in the winter well, you just snow blow the driveway and then relax from the work so it’s good quiet time.

Another thing is “wait/bonus time”. Maybe you have a doctors appoint and are sitting in the waiting room. Or maybe getting an oil change/maintenance at a car shop or dealer. Some have kids at sporting practice. This is a great time to read blogs about your study subject or documentation. Short clips around the topic are great.

A lot of us eat lunch at our desks or at a company food court. Maybe you go out to a fast food restaurant or quick food restaurant to fill your hour lunch break. This is also a great time for blogs or technology documentation reading.

The next thing I do is pick my material. We all learn differently so this is an important decision. For me I usually pick a book, a video course, and a way to lab. You may use all of these or maybe you are just a reader. The important thing is to gather the material you need to study the topic. This is a pivotal point to laying out your plan.

From here I break things into chunks. If studying for a certification this is easy as it usually has a published blueprint for the exam. Even within that blueprint you can break it down even further. Maybe it’s a video course that has modules already broken down for you. Or if it’s a book it can be broken into chapters. You can further break these down into topics within a chapter or module. I like to take these chunks and make a Microsoft OneNote notebook with sections and pages for each topic I break down. I lay the sections and pages out based on my breakdown and leave them empty. As I study I take notes and fill in the pages. This acts like a check list as I proceed down the breakdown I made. If there are notes in it, I attempted/completed it. You might prefer a task board or excel sheet for this. Do whatever works for you.

You can do the same thing with just studying a technology/product. Most products have features that you are going to study. You can break your study plan up into the individual features. For example a firewall you might break it down into firewall rules, connectivity options, protocols, NAT options, and now-a-days some SD-WAN options. You can break your studying up into chunks.

Finally set a goal. This might be a successful deployment (I did this back in the day with a Gigamon deployment which was a device/company I never deployed before). Or if it’s a certification give your self a goal date to take the exam. Pass or not setting that goal date gives you a driving point to keep you motivated to make sure you stay on your study schedule. If you are like me and tend to get distracted another possible motivator is to actually pre-book the exam. This means you already dropped the cash and have to do your work. Or set a deployment date if you are just learning something for work and no exam. Motivate yourself!

For me it’s a chapter/module/chapter/feature a day if possible for whatever I’m studying. Whether certification or just learning a new technology. No, it’s not always possible but it’s a goal to push for.

The short story is set yourself up for success. We all have busy days and life’s and adding in studying something new is tough to fit in our daily schedule. Below is a short list of this post.

Schedule and set aside a time for study
Pick your study materials
Break down your focus (certification or technology) into chunks
Create a checklist (OneNote sections and pages, excel spreadsheet, etc) to cross off
Set a target (date for exam, date for deployment, etc)

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Cisco SD-WAN ISR 4k Getting Started – Part 2 – Bootstrap Process

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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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Cisco SD-WAN ISR 4k Getting Started – Part 1 – Upgrading Code

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Upgrading from IOS-XE to SD-WAN Code

Recently I was building out a lab to iron out a migration onto the Cisco SD-WAN (Viptela) solution. As part of that process existing ISR 4k routers were going to be used at the edge devices. This process, while fairly straight forward, came with a few “gotchas” and “snags” that I had to work through. In this post I will cover the upgrade of the ISR onto SD-WAN code. In the next post I will cover the bootstrap process as well as a couple of caveats related to vManage and the ISR4k routers.

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Cisco Live US 2019 – Explorer Guide

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I’ve been lucky enough to attend Cisco Live twice with both instances being on the full conference pass. This year, due to out of pocket expenses and the overall higher cost of San Diego I am attending on the lower cost Explorer Pass. In years past I purely interacted with Cisco Live remotely. This guide is intended to combine the best of both to assist in making the most of the Explorer pass. With that in mind, lets get some housekeeping out of the way.

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Remote Troubleshooting Crossed Fiber Using Port Channels

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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ATA 190 Recovery Firmware Page – ATA 190 Will Not Register

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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Python + XLRD SecureCRT Import

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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