Blog

One of our customers recently had a network outage, but for a very unusual reason:  Someone burned a mattress near a fiber run and the heat melted the fiber. That’s [...]

    When deploying Cisco NAC for desktop computers, it is imperative minimize the impact to the end user experience as much as possible.  This helps to ensure that the NAC deployment does not get derailed by user complaints.  One way to minimize the impact is to implement Active Directory…

I’ve been learning all I can about VMWare, vSphere, and Cisco 1000v, along with soaking up Cisco’s ideas of data center virtualization. And reading up on cloud computing. Meanwhile, I’m [...]

I've done some articles for the CCIE Flyer, run by Emmanuel Conde.  I thought it might be useful to provide you these links in case you want to review them.

Just as good personal hygiene is a prime contributor to personal health, good network hygiene is a major contributor to overall network health.  Pete Welcher introduced me to the concept [...]

In the middle of a deployment, Jim Marinelli and I discovered a small surprise (to us, anyway). Recent SXH or SXI code, possibly VSS in the mix. (I’d like to [...]

OMB has mandated the Federal Desktop Core Configuration (FDCC) security configuration.  NIST has a detailed set of configuration settings in an Excel spreadsheet that can be downloaded from http://fdcc.nist.gov.  I'd like to provide an example how Cisco NAC can easily help to enforce the FDCC security configuration for a Windows…

As I prepare for another quixotic attempt at the CCDE practical, I have collected a set of test taking tips. These tips are based on talking to exam administrators, reading all the materials, studying the demo tests, and mostly, attending the preparation session given at this year's Networkers.   Of course,…

Creating custom alerts using Cisco's Real Time Monitoring Tool (RTMT) is not really straight forward.  At least not in the documentation.  However, it is actually quite simple.

Read receipt, delivery receipt, and non-delivery receipt.  Generically, they are called return receipts and, by default, Unity treats these Exchange return receipts as voicemail messages and delivers them to the voicemail queue.  When you access Unity via the TUI, you have to listen to any return receipt messages before you…

Class of Restriction (COR) is the concept where a station or line is restricted from calling certain called destinations based on business rules.  For instance, restricting common area phones from calling long distance or international locations.  There are several tiers to a properly designed COR enabled dial plan.  One such…

How do you monitor the critical components of your infrastructure?  Let’s say that your core consists of 75 key devices, plus the links that interconnect them.  It makes sense to [...]