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 […]
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 […]
TAC Tales #9: Left Hanging
When I was still a new engineer, a fellow customer support engineer (CSE) asked a favor of me. I’ll call him Andy. “I’m going on PTO, could you cover a case for me? I’ve filed a bug and while I’m gone there will be a conference call. Just jump on it and tell them that the […]
TAC Tales #8: The problem with data
My job as a customer support engineer (CSE) at TAC was the most quantified I’ve ever had. Every aspect of our job performance was tracked and measured. We live in the era of big data, and while numbers can be helpful, they can also mislead. In TAC, there were many examples of that. Take, for example, […]
Cisco DCNM 10 Overlay Provisioning
Introduction I’ve been side-tracked for a while doing personal articles, so I thought it would be a good time to get back to some technical explanations. Seeing that I work for Cisco now, I thought it would be a good time to cover some Cisco technology. My focus here has been on programmability and automation. Some of […]
TAC Tales #7: “Just slam it in!”
When I first started at TAC, I wasn’t allowed to take cases by myself. If I grabbed a case, I had to get an experienced engineer to help me out. One day I grabbed a case on a Catalyst 6k power supply, and asked Veena (not her real name) to help me on the case. […]