Blog

If you have recently migrated to a Cisco UC appliance model or plan on migrating, you may have asked yourself this question.  Cisco provides some recommendations in their various installation guides.  I happen to like copSSH myself and I thought I would provide some information on the application and how…

Recently I have had a few customers that needed to have a basic queuing function but did not want to have a Contact Center/ACD application in their environment.  In one instance, the customer was led to believe that they would need a UCCX server to do basic queuing.  This is…

With most network management systems and network security systems, SNMP is a critical component. One great tool for checking SNMP functionality is net-snmp. This tool works with Windows and Linux. From a security perspective, this net-snmp can be used as another troubleshooting tool to ensure that Cisco MARS and Cisco…

I became aware of the Resilient Ethernet Protocol (REP) a few weeks ago and have been reading about it.  The Cisco documents position it as a replacement for the Spanning [...]

You probably know a couple of ways to use BGP in an enterprise environment. Most commonly, BGP has been used in the enterprise to provide connectivity to the Internet, supporting multihoming [...]

David Hailey recently posted a blog on the differences between Integrated Message and Unified Messaging.  After reading Hailey's blog I was reminded of a design discussion with a customer over messaging options on Unity Connection.  With Unity Connection you have multiple options on how you handle voice messaging for a…

Utility services like DNS, DHCP, NTP, AAA, and Applied Infrastructure blog under

I’ve been working with two customers that I’d describe as “rural fiber network providers”. For background info, see the blog about Rural Fiber Networking. As I noted there, one of my [...]

I’ve been working with two customers that I’d describe as “rural fiber network providers”. Their designs and business objectives differ somewhat. (For more about one, Google “Michael Minnich” and “fiber [...]

I just spent some time on an interesting and somewhat obscure ASA troubleshooting problem. It ended up being resolved by a note in some of the Cisco web pages, something [...]

Do you have security policy requirements that need to be enforced on your routers and switches?  One option to accomplish this task is to periodically check the configurations of all routers and switches. This approach is painful and time consuming.  Another option is to use an application to automate this…

I’ve read a number of threads about this topic online and am surprised to see that a lot of folks only tend to focus on the technical differences between Integrated [...]