In this article in my series, Ten Years a CCIE, I discuss the challenge of building and maintaining a lab, and the question of building versus not building a physical lab. Acquiring Gear As I mentioned in a previous post, GNS3 was not available at the time I took the CCIE exam. This meant that […]
Routing and Switching: An exam in flux
In the second article in the “Ten Years a CCIE” series, I discuss the Routing and Switching written exam, and the changes to the CCIE exam in the early 2000s. Passing the written As was most common in the early 2000’s I attempted my Routing and Switching exam first. Having passed the CCNP exams, my […]
The CCIE Mystique
In my first article in the “Ten Years a CCIE” series, I discuss the mystique of the CCIE certification which made me want to attempt the test. Learning about the CCIE My first vague awareness of the CCIE certification came in 1999 while I was a Master’s student in Telecommunications Management at Golden Gate University […]
10 years a CCIE
When I approached my tenth anniversary of first passing the CCIE routing/switching exam (November 2004-2014), I had the idea to post some short reflections on the exam, its value, and my personal experience being a CCIE. I hoped that, although the nature of the exam has changed quite a bit over the last 10 years, these […]
Tac Tales #5: MWAM
New Year’s resolutions are made to be broken, and I haven’t been keeping up with my resolution to do more blog posts. Now that I am back at Cisco, I am focusing on programmability and automation, and I do have a lot to say. However, in honor of my return to Cisco, I thought I would […]
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 […]
TAC Tales #4: Airline Outage
I don’t advertise this blog so I’m always amazed that people even find it. I figured the least-read articles on this blog were my “TAC Tales,” but someone recently commented that they wanted to see more… Well, I’m happy to oblige. The recent events at United reminded me of a case where operations were down […]
Hub and Spoke with BGP
In my previous post, we saw the theory behind hub-and-spoke VPN. We saw how H/S involves multiple VRFs with cross-importation between them, and we traced the basic flow of a route advertised from one spoke to another. Next, we are going to look at two options for configuring H/S VPNs. In this post, I will […]
Hub and Spoke VPN Part 1
One of the JNCIE-SP exam objectives I found difficult was hub and spoke VPN. Conceptually it’s not easy, and as is often the case, the documentation is only somewhat helpful. This series of posts is designed to walk you through the concepts of hub and spoke VPN, as well as its basic configuration using BGP, […]
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. […]