I’ve mentioned my first job as a network engineer several times on this blog. I worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, the biggest newspaper in Northern California. I was brought in to manage the network as a Cisco-certified engineer, having just passed a four-day CCNA bootcamp. Right before the dot-bomb economic crash, network engineers were […]
Tag: cisco
Cleared for nothing
I wrote this post on Feb 20, 2020, and I always thought it was an entertaining episode. FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan, who features prominently in the post, has been in the news lately as he played a major role in the Twitter Files. I will stay out of politics, except to note that Elvis […]
Must we speak in meetings?
When I first started at Cisco (the second time), I remember being in a customer meeting where I had no idea what was going on. As is typical for vendor meetings, Cisco employees outnumbered the customer by 3 to 1. Someone from our side was presenting, though I don’t really remember about what. I didn’t […]
What are we getting ourselves into?
It seems to be rank heresy for someone working in the valley to say it, but let me say it anyways. I don’t agree with the axiom of the technology industry which states that all technological progress is always good. Many in our society instinctively realize this, which is why they oppose genetic engineering and […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]