Well we have known about this for quite awhile. I have mentioned it to clients and my internal support folks at my company. But wouldn’t you know it we are a day past the new Daylight Savings Time implementation and I’m getting calls and frantic people running back to my desk wondering if the sky is falling. It is funny I have had my home network (Cisco 1760, Cisco 3640, 2 x Cisco Cat 3500XL, PIX 501, 2 x Ubuntu Server, 3x Win XP Workstations, Asterisk Box, and about 5 other little project boxes in various states of not working) up to date and ready for the change for more than an month. I should mention that I missed my VX6700 WM5 phone thanks to Verizon just notifying me on friday that there was a problem. But anyway I’m going to post the work around commands and the link to Cisco’s DLST site for my reference for what will probably be a 6 month battle to find all the devices at clients that do not conform. Maybe some of you will get some millage out of it also. Good luck and fight the good fight :) Read more

All of us who work on routers and switches have had to do a show interface command.  Some of the information we gleam form that command is straight forward.  Other little tidbits aren’t quite so forthcoming with their purpose or meaning.  This is the case with teh reliability x/255 txload x/255 and rxload x/255.  If your like me you have learned over time the reliability of 255/255 is good and much of anything in txload and rxload is bad.  Well thanks to NetPro Forums and Cisco Docs here is the answer.  Enjoy. Read more

This is another one of those posts that is mainly for me but hopefully some of you might get some millage out of it also.

When using L3 Access Lists on Routers or L3 Switches to manage traffic this is the best way to look at things; View your Physical Interface or your VLAN Interface as its own little firewall (inside/outside). Do not however confuse the L3 access-lists at Stateful they are not! If you have both inbound and outbound ACL’s defined you will have to make changes to both sides to allow new traffic through!! Back to the INSIDE/OUTSIDE idea though. Read more

Wow…crazy past few days.  We have had lots of snow and bitter cold temperatures here in Ohio this week.  That has led most of my education clients to be closed since Monday.  While this may not be great for them it has allowed me to get into their buildings and perform some major upgrades that have been stalled to activities in buildings.  However I guess while I was transitioning a school to a new IP address scheme and implementing routing and VLANs the a big chunk of the internet got slammed.  I only bring this up because as we speak I am connected using my XV6700 as an EVDO modem because it appears my education clients are down due to a DDOS attack upstream of them.  Not allot more to say just figured I would cover yesterdays story and throw in my current headache.  However the one good point is that I have proven my investment in my XV6700 as valid as a source for testing VPNs and as emergency internet access during outages.

Well if you have not yet figured it out this site is going to be dedicated to the networking community. I have been part of this community now since 1996 in some capacity. Currently I am a Networking Consultant for an upscale integrator in Columbus, Ohio. I am spinning this site up for several reasons.

1. I would like to chronicle my path from a network administrator up through my certification process for Cisco and other networking Vendors.

2. I would like to share the information I learn along the way. This is a career field in which you must never stop learning. There is simply to much to begin with and it just keeps growing. I strongly believe that we in the Enterprise Networking/IT field do not live in a vacuum. Very few network shops ever are the first to do something. For that reason I think it is important that there is an easy to use resource to find the solutions to a problem that others have already concurred or at crossed paths with.

3. Because doing something new (ie. This Blog) never hurt anyone and it will help me grow my skill set.

4. I hope to shed light on little known products and/or solutions that I have come across in an effort to not only ease the pain of network administration for other but to give credit to those who work hard to create solutions (both free and commercial) for us.

I might get off to a somewhat slow start we will have to see. But over time I plan on adding lots of features to this site. Shortly I will have a Guestbook and I encourage anyone visiting this site to not only register and comment on what find here but to also sign into the guestbook with a public email address and some information about yourself and your specialty. Networking is not a purely technical endeavor, but social as well. As a group we are a influential and vast repository of information as an individual we are nothing more than a host in a sea of routers.