For my regular readers, as I like to say, all 2 of you, I’ve noticed that the theme I switched to a few months back does not display well on mobile. In particular, my last post had code blocks which get cut off when viewing on a mobile browser. Now that I’m not a manager-type […]
Category: Uncategorized
Art of Network Engineering
I’ve been a little busy lately, and frankly sometimes topics to write about come fast and furiously, sometimes they don’t come at all. Meanwhile, I had a chance to sit down with the team over at the Art of Network Engineering podcast. I was really enjoying their interviews with engineers around the industry and I […]
Interviewing #3: Technical Assessment
We all have weaknesses, and one of mine is that I’m good at starting things and bad at finishing them. Two years ago (gasp) I had started writing a series about technical interviewing. I wrote two posts (here and here) on the subject and never finished. A recent commenter asked for me to keep writing […]
Theme Changes
I started this blog in February 2013. Amazingly, I’m closing in on ten years. It’s certainly turned out differently than I expected, and I haven’t written as much as I’d liked. In 2016, I hired a company to update the blog and design a new theme. Maintaining your own WordPress blog is a lot of […]
Moscone Microwave
My first full-time networking job was at the San Francisco Chronicle. Now there isn’t much to the Chronicle anymore, but in the early 2000’s the newspaper was still going strong. It was the beginning of the decline, but most people still took their local newspaper as their primary source of news. Being a network engineer […]
TAC Tales #13: All Zeros
A common approach for TAC engineers and customers working on a tough case is to just “throw hardware at it.” Sometimes this can be laziness: why troubleshoot a complex problem when you can send an RMA, swap out a line card, and hope it works? Other times it’s a legitimate step in a complex process […]
Why certifications can suck
Ivan Peplnjak referenced a piece by Robert Graham called “Why cybersecurity certifications suck,” which I found amusing considering that I am doing some question writing right now. I’ve certainly been a member of the chorus of complainers in the past, in various venues, but I have to say that my experience on the writing end […]
Goodbye Juniper, Hello Cisco
I feel a bit of guilt for letting this blog languish for a while. I can see from the response to my articles explaining confusing Juniper features that my work had some benefit outside my own edification, and so I hate to leave articles unfinished which might have been helpful. In addition, WordPress is not […]
The joy of being an “expert”
Ah, the joys of being an “expert.” I had forgotten what happens after you pass an exam like the JNCIE. One of my colleagues starts grilling me on various topics for which I am unprepared, since they weren’t covered on the exam. MX architecture, MC-LAG, MX virtual chassis, etc. Be careful what you wish for. […]
Blogging on hold
For the handful of people who come across this blog and have posted comments, thank you very much for the kind words. This blog is on hold for a bit while I finish up my JNCIE-SP, which I am taking in a couple weeks. I’ve come across a lot of excellent blog post topics from […]