Two years ago I published my Ten Years a CCIE series. Actually, I had written the series a couple years before I published it, but as I say in my introduction to the series, I felt it was a bit self-indulgent an uninteresting, so I scrapped it for a while. The original pieces were dictated, […]
TAC Tales #14: Stuck in Active
Everyone who’s worked in TAC can tell you their nightmare case–the type of case that, when they see it in the queue, makes them want to run away, take an unexpected lunch break, and hope some other engineer grabs it. The nightmare case is the case you know you’ll get stuck on for hours, on […]
Book Sprint
[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 […]