[et_pb_section admin_label=”section”][et_pb_row admin_label=”row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Text”] I’m somewhat recovered from an exhausting week. I spent last week with a team of 10 others locked up in building 4 at Cisco writing a book using the book sprint methodology. Several of the TMEs who report to me got together and wrote a book on Software-Defined Access earlier […]
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 […]
Where I’ve been, and what a TME is
Jesse, a recent commentor, asked why I haven’t been posting much lately. In fact, my last post was August of 2017. Well, there are several reasons I don’t post much these days. In part, I’m not convinced anyone is reading. It’s nice to see a comment now and again to realize it’s not just spambots […]
TAC Tales #12: SACK of trouble
When I first started at Cisco TAC, I was assigned to a team that handled only enterprise customers. One of the first things my boss said to me when I started there was “At Cisco, if you don’t like your boss or your cubicle, wait three months.” Three months later, they broke the team up […]
In Praise of Vendor Lock-In
There is one really nice thing about having a blog whose readership consists mainly of car insurance spambots: I don’t have to feel guilty when I don’t post anything for a while. I had started a series on programmability, but I managed to get sidetracked by the inevitable runup to Cisco Live that consumes Cisco […]
TAC Tales #11: Full up
No customer is happy if they have to reboot one of their Internet-facing routers periodically, and this was one of our biggest customers. (At HTTS, they were all big customers.) This customer had a GSR connecting to the Internet, with partial BGP routes, and he kept getting this error: %RP-3-ENCAP: Failure to allocate encap table entry, […]
Programmability for Network Engineers
Since I finished my series of articles on the CCIE, I thought I would kick off a new series on my current area of focus: network programmability. The past year at Cisco, programmability and automation have been my focus, first on Nexus and now on Catalyst switches. I did do a two-part post on DCNM, […]
TAC Tales #10: Out to Lunch
When you work at TAC, you are required to be “on-shift” for 4 hours each day. This doesn’t mean that you work four hours a day, just that you are actively taking cases only four hours per day. The other four (or more) hours you work on your existing backlog, calling customers, chasing down engineering for […]
Cisco DCNM 10 Overlay Provisioning Part 2
Introduction My role at Cisco is transitioning to enterprise so I won’t be working on Nexus switches much any more. I figured it would be a good time to finish this article on DCNM. In my previous article, I talked about DCNM’s overlay provisioning capabilities, and explained the basic structure DCNM uses to describe multi-tenancy data […]
The value of a CCIE
In the final post in my “Ten Years a CCIE” series, I take a look at the age-old question: Is a CCIE really worth it? I conclude the series with some thoughts on the value of this journey. I’ve written this series of posts in the hope that others considering the pursuit of a CCIE […]