Category: Networking

What a trip!

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So I chose to tweet if I should write a post about how I got to where I am. I got a bit of feed back to do it so here it goes.

It all started growing up as a kid. My dad spent his entire career at the telco. He started out climbing poles and getting stung by yellow jacket nests hidden in transformers while he was roped in and spiked in so he had to climb down slowly while being attacked. After his hard work on the lines he ended up working in the CO’s as a senior guy. He used to take me fishing but if we were ever near one of the CO’s he would stop and fix something he knew needed fixing. The way he would entertain me when he was working on it was an empty block, a cable tool, and some leftover cable. I’d sit there and terminate cable for fun. There is a good chance I still remember the floor tile on the raised floor they hid a case of soda in to keep it cool.

In fact, I still remember two of my favorite toys were promotional aluminum toy GTE trucks that were coin banks. I still have one of his original GTE buttsets he gave me when I started my network career. He went to school for electrical engineering and is an active HAMM radio operator.

Anyways from there I went to elementary school, Junior High, and eventually High School. The first two were mostly filled with sports, broken bones, and stitches. (I’m really good at ER visits now days). The biggest thing about those early days was my early access to computers and the internet. Since dad worked at the telco we were early adopters in my town of computers and the good ol’ dial up internet. Who remembers callwave internet answering machine?

Come to High School and I found music. Technically the music started in 6th grade where we had to try out for instruments. I really wanted to play trumpet but I sucked at it and they handed me drum sticks so in Junior High I ended up in percussion. When I got to High School I got introduced through friends to a lot of punk rock, asked my band director to let me take the drum set home during summer, pissed my neighbors off, and taught myself how to play drum set. Thanks Mr. Bishop for letting me steal the High Schools jazz drum set to teach my self how to play rock music.

At this point I was a High School percussionist in the symphony band and the marching band. I decided to join a punk band which was overall an adventure. In the end I ended up traveling around a 3 state area playing concerts with the band, recording a CD in a lake side cottage, and started getting tattooed. Played in front of record executives at the Hard Rock Cafe in Cleveland Ohio. Of course I was also a skateboarder so spent a lot of time thrashing the town. All of which my parents were great fans of (Sarcasm).

During that time I did all the odd jobs to make money to travel around with the band and afford gear. I worked as a stock boy at a convenience store gas station the town over. I worked as a roofer under the table where the rule was “3 feet before you hit the ground if you fall off you are fired”. Liability you know since I wasn’t on pay roll. Worked as a logger for an old High School teacher during the summer. Worked 3rd shift one summer through a temporary services company at a business that made peg board (yes that stuff to hang your tools on in your garage) for a summer. Then a Jimmy Johns opened up in town. I worked a while making sandwiches and delivering sandwiches and got tired of it.

The band ultimately broke up. Guitarist moved to the Detroit area and my bassist moved to Texas. So I broke down and applied at Staples and my local community college. I ultimately got the job at Staples and got into college. I went into a program that was labeled as “Network Administration”. It was more or less a glorified program that should have been called “Help Desk Associate”. Classes started with basic computer work following the CompTIA A+ and Network+ blueprints. I picked it because I was around computers and networks growing up. It just felt natural. Ultimately I ended up working myself up to an Easy Tech at Staples after passing those two exams and gaining those certifications. I finally achieved my Associated Degree and got engaged to my fiance. That’s when I quit college and decided not to chase a 4 year degree. Instead I kept working and she graduated and wanted to go to a college 5 hours away from our home town.

We went to visit the college and ultimately decided to look for an apartment instead of living so far away from each other and her paying for a dorm. I eventually told my parents what I was going to do and they accepted my fate of quitting chasing a 4 year degree, getting engaged, and moving. I somehow got a transfer to a Staples 30 minutes away from what would ultimately be our first apartment.

That’s the year I started chasing further learning. I was working odd hours at Staples and my fiance was working hard at college. I somehow managed to pay for two people to live off a retail store income and her to go to college. Proud of myself for fighting through that. While she was studying, I was studying and ultimately got a few more certifications.

Fast forward I got tired of the 30 minute drive as it was getting costly paying for two people to live and only me working so I started applying to everything I could find in the area we lived. Then I got a call from two guys that were starting a call center for computers in their basement. I took the shot and accepted their “interview”. They asked to meet at a Starbucks so I said sure and we scheduled a time. What a risk that was. I met them there and they were in full blown suits (pants, dress shirts, ties, suit coats) and SANDALS……..

Either way they offered me a spot and after some thinking I decided to take it hesitantly but sometimes you have to take a chance. Luckily before I started a healthcare company in the area called me about a help desk position that actually offered benefits, a steady job in an office, and had facilities all over the county. So I turned the guys call center down and joined the healthcare company.

I worked help desk for a few years and they promoted the one network engineer to an I.T. Manager. Slowly he quit doing network tasks so I asked if they would send me to a CCENT training course. They eventually said yes and that turned into an awfully awkward situation. The course was in person and an hours drive away for 5 days in a row. As I didn’t really have much disposable income I needed to stay up in the city an hour away. My then wife somehow set up for me to stay on her friends couch up there who was an ex girlfriend of mine. That was super awkward but I pushed through.

After the training I bought the book (Still have it. Thanks Wendell!) and starting studying to take the exam. Eventually I passed CCENT and starting taking over network tasks. Then I started taking over Server, VMWare, and Cisco Voice tasks. So ultimately I got studying and certified in all of those because I didn’t know what my next move would be. There were more certs involved but no one wants to read what is already a long post and read about every exam I took and when I took it. (If interested you can see everything I achieved here.

After all the time I spent the healthcare company got bought by a 3 county hospital system will 2 hospitals and dozens of specialty clinics. They transferred my role to a “Network Engineer II” role where I shared an office with the level III voice technician. I ended up building clinics networks, rolling out an entire layer 2 refresh, migrated from P2P VPN’s to DMVPN, and built a backup data centers network. Shhhh….. There was a bit of voice in there with some UCCX scripting and an analog line to VG224 migration (42? VG224s) and a telehealth setup to call manager complete with video.

Eventually I got bored of all the VLAN changes and chasing down of MAC addresses and a friend of mine put my resume into a VAR. They ultimately called me and I did the awkward thing of doing a technical interview in my car during lunch. I got the job and started the fun.

At that VAR I built networks for the states board of water and light, built an entire new high schools network from the ground up (I’m talking them pouring the foundation and once the building was done I build the IDFs), refreshes for Universities and water sanitation plants, fixed the department of transportation multicast issue’s for their highway camera system, migrated a dental insurance companies DMVPN to Viptela SD-WAN and many more projects. Got sent to a Viptela training in Atlanta, did SD-WAN training through Silverpeaks partner program. Then ultimately got let go because of a lack of new projects coming in.

Back to the drawing board. I did some searching and fairly quickly got into another VAR who ultimately let me go fairly quickly for the same reason. Lack of new projects. I’ve been unemployed ever since (over a year and a half now) but luckily because all of my hard work I was able to save enough to survive that long. It was quite the adventure being laid off that long. The stress got to me and I ended up spending a week in a mental health facility for hallucinations and having two seizures.

While being laid off I didn’t stop. I used cash back from my credit card to buy some books and Udemy courses and have continued to study and read. I’ve been able to mostly keep up on things thanks to all my friends on twitter (somehow during all this adventure I grew to over 2k followers) and all my great friends in the Cisco Champions group (Member since 2017).

The TL;DR……don’t give up and keep on pushing. I kept pushing and went from odd jobs to getting to meet awesome people, do cool projects, and keep on trucking.

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Quick Take: Whiteboard on Webex

Reading Time: 2 minutes

This is a quick take blog post on my preferred white boarding method on Webex (Or other meeting platforms). It’s quite simple but has a nice benefit.

With the Work From Home (WFH) increase and the use of sharing your screen more and more white boarding ideas/sample diagrams was always difficult for me with a mouse. This quick post outlines on an Apple computer a quick way to whiteboard with a shared screen.

Disclaimer: I don’t own a windows computer so can’t confirm the functionality on that platform.

Requirements:
1) Apple Computer
2) Apple iPad
3) Apple Pencil (version that works with your iPad model)
4) Microsoft OneNote
5) Meeting Software

Benefits:
1) Hand draw diagrams and notes just as on a whiteboard
2) With the use of Onenote diagram/drawing/notes are saved for future reference
3) Onenote page can be shared across platforms and exported for e-mail/sharing purposes
4) Printable

Steps:
1)Connect iPad to Apple Computer via USB
2)Launch QuickTime Player
3)Select New Movie Recording File>New Movie Recording

4)From the drop down arrow next to the record button select your iPad (based on name). In my case PacketPilotiPad

5)Launch OneNote on your iPad
6)You can now share your screen/application dependent upon your meeting software capabilities to share out your iPad screen.
7) Use the multiple Pen colors and your Apple Pencil to whiteboard as if you were in person
8) Enjoy the benefits of your whiteboard session being saved to OneNote and easily shareable and saved across platforms

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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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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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Cisco Champions 2017 – A reason to reflect

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?

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Bulk enable PIM via TCL

Reading Time: 3 minutesI’ve been working on doing some multicast labs lately and am constantly resetting my lab devices to their default configs and starting from scratch. As many of us know, to enable PIM on all of your interfaces you must go into each interface and enable it manually. There is no default command to enable PIM on all interfaces. We know PIM should be enabled 1 to 1 with interfaces involved in routing making this a boon. With that in mind, and the fact that I am rather comfortable with the concept of needing PIM on the interfaces, and likely speak and type this command in my sleep, I decided to make it easier and modify a previous TCL script I had written to enable PIM on every interface that has an IP address assigned to it. With the great “Send to Chat” feature of SecureCRT I can do this across my entire topology on one fell swoop. In a real world environment, you could use a tool like Solarwinds to push this out to your devices.

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Apps for a Network Engineer Part II: Windows

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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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Route-Targets Explained

Reading Time: 3 minutes 

As I began to study MPLS L3VPNs I was excited to start flinging my fingers around the keyboard. However, I ran into a little snafu during my learning. All of the videos and configuration example I was finding didn’t separate the difference between the Route Distinguisher (RD) and the Route Targets. Most of the examples simply matched the RD to the Route Targets and/or used the same Route Targets for both import and export. This left me feeling like I wasn’t really understanding what those commands and numbers were accomplishing. I decided to make a visual representation to make it easier to understand.

Router-Target Policy Visualization

Router-Target Policy Visualization

To make this concept easier to understand we first need to know that the RD does not dictate what routes a route will import or export into it’s PE-CE routing process. The purpose of the RD so to add an additional label to prefixes so overlaps can be inserted in the BGP table and shared amongst the various PE routers. For example, my RD of 65000:8 indicates any routers in the BGP table from my customer vrf would indicate a prefix of 10.20.30.40 as 65000:8:10.20.30.40. This means if another vrf with a different RD of 4242:42 could also install 10.20.30.40 in the providers BGP table as 4242:42:10.20.30.40.

Now that we are clear on the use of the RD we can move onto the Route Targets. There are two route targets we define in our VRF policy. The import and export targets. Many examples and videos show these as the same (which is a perfectly valid configuration) often times matching the RD. To clarify exactly what they are used for I have used three different Router Targets. I am going to correlate their indicators with colors to make the example easier to visualize.

Routes exported from the headquarters use 30:8 which we will call the “Blue Routes”
Routes exported from Branch 1 will use 10:8 which we will call the “Red Router”
Routes exported from Branch 2 will use 20:8 which we will call the “Green Routes”

This exporting is done by the PE routers connecting to the CE routers. The CE routers in this example our peering via eBGP with the PE routers inside of a VRF. The VRF configuration on the PE routers is what indicates the Router Target identifier to export. At this point we can write a policy of which routers should be allowed into the individual CE routes using the VRF Route Target import. Lets follow a case from the HQ to Branch 1.

HQ CE peers with its PE router which has a VRF policy stating to export its routes as the color Blue. These routes are passed around to the other PE routers. When the Branch 1 PE peer receives the routes it sees that it’s VRF policy is stating to export its routes as the color Red as well as import any routes that are colored Blue. Back at the headquarters we have our VRF policy set to import both the Red and Green routes. Branch 2 does the same as Branch 1 but swapping out Red for Green.

By writing the VRF policies this way we have created a Branch to HQ connection while not passing routes Branch to Branch. In my diagram I show the routes coming into the CE routes as it is the ultimate end goal however, please keep in mind that the VRF configuration is done on the PE routes.

I hope that by using simple colors for the routes it has simplified the reasons we use the RD, and the import and export Route Target. I found it difficult to understand the true use of these configuration when they were using the same value for the RD as well as the import and export Route Targets.

 

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Synapps Paging Delays – An HTTP/TCP Wireshark diagnosis

Reading Time: 5 minutesThe Scenario goes like this: A Synapps – SA Announce paging and messaging server integrated with Cisco’s CUCM hosting around 30 phone to phone paging groups. The paging had been working fine for months and out of no where one of thirty particular groups was putting in multiple trouble tickets over multiple days that the paging isn’t working.

So begins the troubleshooting and diagnosis. My first action was to monitor the paging server as it has a real time display of who is calling a paging group and which group they are calling at in given time. When I was monitoring this I could see multiple people calling multiple groups including the one in question. So this brings up one of those “what gives” questions. Are they just doing something wrong up in the area. Time to take a trip and raise that pedometer count.

I arrive in the area and try and locate and area where I can visually see and hear multiple phones. Easier said than done but in this case I was the only one available to work on the issue and knowing that the paging server will activate the speakerphone and mute lights when a group the phone is a member of is called this was my best bet and understanding what was going on. After making my first test page I can see that lights on the phones I can see are immediately lighting up, however I can’t hear audio. As I stand there dumbfounded with the phone still off hook all of a sudden the audio starts picking up the background noise. However, paging shouldn’t have a 6 second delay before you can start talking. Six seconds is a long time to wait after hitting page to start talking. So whats going on? It’s only one group experiencing this. What is different about their group? Time for a deep dive in the diagnostics world. Enter Wireshark.

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Trouble shoot with TDR

Reading Time: 5 minutesThis article is another example of trouble shooting by putting multiple pieces together. While it relies upon existing knowledge of the environment in which the article is based it should prove to be a good example of a trouble shooting process that will hopefully be able to spark some creative thinking the next time you have a problem that needs to be resolved.

The scenario starts out with a user ticket stating that the phone isn’t working. After some fact gathering the below details and possible solutions were outlined.
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