In 2007, I left Cisco after two brutal years in high-touch TAC. I honestly hated the job, but it was an amazing learning experience. I draw on my TAC experience every single day. A buddy of mine got a job at a Gold Partner, offered to bring me in, and I jumped on the opportunity. […]
Tag: juniper
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 […]
Are coffee and networks the same?
I shall avoid naming names, but when I worked for Juniper we had a certain CEO who pumped us up as the next $10 billion company. It never happened, and he left and became the CEO of Starbucks. Starbucks has nothing to do with computer networking at all. Why was he hired by Starbucks? How […]
Memories of Cisco Live
The last Cisco Live I attended was in Barcelona in January 2020. As I was in the airport heading home, I was reading news of a new virus emerging from China. I looked with bemusement at a troop of high-school-age girls who all had surgical masks on. Various authorities told us not to wear masks, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Passed JNCIE-SP: Initial Thoughts
Back to the blog, now that the JNCIE-SP is finished. I got #2332. The last time I did an expert-level exam was 2008, and I forgot just how challenging it is. I passed my JNCIP in June and it took me until November, working solidly most of the time, to get my number. It’s been […]
Juniper’s mysterious inet.3 table
When I first started configuring MPLS on Juniper routers, I came across the strange and mysterious inet.3 table. What could it possibly be? When I worked in Cisco TAC I handled hundreds of MPLS VPN cases, but I never had encountered anything quite like inet.3 in IOS land. As I researched inet.3 I found the […]