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Denise Donohue, William Bell, and Renee Wagner are looking forward to the "Fall Networking Event" at MDHIMMS on Thursday, October 11, 2012. Chesapeake NetCraftsmen is one of the sponsors of this event, so if you are planning to attend, please visit our table and say hello. For more information and…

Just a quick tip for you: if you’re setting up an iSCSI Authentication Profile in UCS, you’ll want to make sure your password is between 12 and 16 characters long, [...]

Here is my list of the top ten security mistakes that IT staff makes.  These mistakes leave your network vulnerable to attack and compromise. Mistake #2:  Failure to record flow information. 

This is part 2 of my testing of egress marking on NX-OS, the first part is discussed in Testing Egress Marking in NX-OS QoS. The good news is that egress marking does indeed work. With the topology in my first test, I was unable to make egress marking work on…

I just finished the third post in a series about application performance and its impact on the network, see Defending the Network from Application Performance problems (part II), and

Recently I was Cisco Support Community, which is an online technical support forum for Cisco Systems. The content of that interview is Raider Communications, Inc.) for conducting the interview. You’re [...]

I was recently asked if the network management architecture that I described in a series of posts follows an FCAPS model or an ITIL model. (See “A Network Management Architecture, [...]

Updated: 09/18/2012I had been unsuccessful in my attempts to implement egress marking on a Nexus 7000 running NX-OS 5.2(4). Outbound policy-maps for marking are supposed to be supported in NX-OS 5.x, as stated in the Cisco documentation here http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/datacenter/sw/5_x/nx-os/qos/configuration/guide/marking.html#wp1062618 :

Are you planning to attend the 2012 Blue National Summit in Orlando? If so, you might want to sign up for Denise Donohue’s session on “Life in the Post-PBX Era”. [...]

I was looking over the NX-OS QoS configuration information, and noted that the documentation states that the permit and deny ACL keywords are ignored for the purposes of matching in QoS class-maps. Really truly? I have found that that using both permit and deny statements in ACLs is a common…

Small and mid-sized businesses, and more specifically their IT departments, continue to search for a stable backup solution for their virtualized environments. VMware, too, has offered several solutions for this [...]

One of my customers recently had an STP issue in his remote data center. He was not sure of all the details, but sometime during or after the migration of some Layer 2 links between his N7K and N5Ks into port-channels (possibly while VMware infrstructure changes were being made) his…