CCIE Candidate

As promised (or threatened, depending on your point of view) yesterday, I’d like to toss out an analysis of the Change from Heck.
Problems and mistakes:
I ran into many problems during the change, and a few before.  As I mentioned in part 1, the maintenance started at midnight.  At about 3.30am I called a coworker to [...]

Ahhh winter in Los Angeles, when the air gets cold enough to make you don your winter shorts, and the occasional drizzle makes you glad your sandals are made to get wet. But a recent winter night saw me up late in what I have come to refer to as the “maintenance from heck” (its [...]

Just a quick blurb on NANOG, which ends tomorrow technically, but is pretty much over (just doing breakfast).  One coworker was unhappy with the amount of new and educational material presented.  He was right, there wasn’t that much new and hardcore information.  But there isn’t supposed to be.  NANOG is about schmoozing and making contacts, [...]

I’m going to be at the upcoming NANOG in downtown LA.  If anyone wants to hang out at the conference, or maybe go see some famous place like the Sunset Bar and Grill, let me know.
http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog44/index.php
“We hope you can join us in Los Angeles from October 12 through October 15 for NANOG44. The meeting [...]

We recently had the chance to poke at the Nexus 7k (and 5k, but that platform us much less interesting as it’s just L2) both in our own lab and in Cisco’s Customer Proof of Concept (CPOC) lab in San Jose.  I must say the experience in the CPOC really reaffirmed my belief that the [...]

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was attempting to conquer MPLS via a book called “MPLS-Enabled Applications”.  This was a pretty big mistake.  By the 10th page I realized that this book is not at all for MPLS noobs.  At that point I stopped wasting my time and started plunking away at IE’s [...]

So I’m trying to start the learning process again for MPLS.  The biggest stumbling block has been life as usual, but I packed up all my video games and hurt my knee (unrelated, I’m not *that* out of shape), so gaming and training are tabled for the moment.  Work is insane as usual; about a [...]

Every now and then I learn something simple that’s just … rad.  That’s right, I said it.  The adjective from the heady days of Corey Haims and that other Corey is worth reviving for some stuff.  Today a co-worker sent our team a simple traceroute output.
cs1#traceroute mac 0015.f91c.4200 0017.08d1.4418 vlan 507 det
Source 0015.f91c.4200 found on [...]

We have a decent nation-wide backbone at work. It’s touching five major cities (well, four plus Phoenix) in three time zones, and the pipes are reasonably fat. The problem is it wasn’t set up correctly. In fact much about our backbone was just done … meh. One of the main problems [...]

My co-worker just finished his 2nd Service Provider lab attempt (results not in yet) and IM’d me:
“if i find the guys who told me sp will be easir after rs, i will f***’em up”
Figured that was as good a way as any to start a post here.
At any rate, my previous post described a problem [...]

Hey *, Keith here.  Long time no type.  Anyway I’ve been meaning to write this up here since it’s good information to have, and with Ethan’s post regarding 10G ethernet this seems like the perfect time to get off my duff and do so.
Working at MySpace means tons of high-speed links everywhere.  Typically we’ll have [...]

So since a couple of people have asked, I guess not everyone is reading the groupstudy mailing list. I passed the lab on my first shot last Thursday. It was just like everyone warned me it would be - tough, but fair. Also it was more straight-forward than most of the vendor [...]

Today’s lesson - on multiple points of mutual redistribution, always use tags. Even if you think you can do it without them, just use them.
When I finished reading the lab through and updating my diagrams, I looked at my IGP redistribution requirements and knew I was going to take a beating. I think [...]

Back in the saddle again
Just thought I’d stick another song in everyone’s head. At any rate, after moping around this weekend I realized that I wasn’t bored, and I sure as hell wasn’t overconfident or finished preparing - I was burnt out. I had been drilling for something like 9 days straight and [...]

Random tip of the day - When you’re at a restaurant with your wife and she asks you if there’s anything on her face, “nothing worth mentioning” is not the right answer.
I seem to be going through phases. Last week I oscillated between panic and calm, now I’ve moved into boredom. I just [...]