Blog

While doing some other research recently, I ran across the Bridge Assurance feature in Cisco gear, which was new to me.  Cisco has been working on ways to avoid STP [...]

Cisco VSS Dual-Active Detection – In my last blog, I explained how to configure VSS. In this article I’ll explain how to configure Dual-Active Detection. This is an important function [...]

You know sometimes I like to write lists.  Not shopping lists or "to-do" lists but lists that help me decide on or better define something in particular.  For example, before I got married I sat down with pen and paper and wrote down everything I liked and didn't like about…

We recently had an interface wedge on a customer router, with some interesting repercussions.  The network topology is shown below. Every day from about 8am until 6pm, a 250Mbps – [...]

Starting in October I began writing a series of articles about the AXL SQL Toolkit that Cisco provides with the Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM).  I started the series because a friend of mine wanted to know more about how to get more granular "views" on the CUCM database.  In…

Every once in a while I get asked if there is a better way to distribute firmware to phones across the WAN. The obvious driver is the general performance (or lack thereof) for the standard TFTP approach when handling a large number of requests. This is one of those questions that usually…

MARS and Cisco IPS are synchronized for the official IPS signatures created by Cisco.  This is done through the automatic updates that occur on the IPS side and on the MARS side.  On the IPS side, this done by configuring “Configuration > Sensor Management > Auto/Cisco.com Update” within IPS Manager…

A previous article took a look at Port-Based EoMPLS on a 6500. In particular, the MTU and LDP (MPLS label protocol) setup is discussed there. It is not repeated with [...]

Co-worker Pete Welcher recently helped a customer whose network experienced a spanning tree loop (i.e. a melt-down).  Several things can be learned from thinking about the experience and how to [...]

Cisco VSS Configuration – Looking to install VSS ? Well, recently I had the opportunity to install VSS in a customer’s Data Center as part of a complete network migration [...]

Have you ever lost a device configuration because you forgot to save it to NVRAM and the device later rebooted, perhaps due to a power outage?  More than likely some [...]

I just finished reading a brief interview that Terry Slattery did with Train Signal Training on