As a holder of many technical certifications every few months I have to renew some.

When possible I try to renew the certifications with a new track instead of doing the newer version of the exam I've already done.

This time was the turn of HP ASE - Network Infrastructure 2011 to be renewed as HP ASE - FlexNetwork …

This post is part of a series about Docker, including:

• Docker Introduction

• Docker: Install software inside a container

• Docker Volumes

• Docker Networking - bridge container to host NIC

We started with the basics and moved on with adding software, using volumes and then bridging a container to the network.

As a …

In the last post we saw that any file system change inside a docker container is lost if not committed to the image.

What if we want to share data between containers?

We can use Docker's Data Volumes and Data Volume Containers.

In the first post of this series we left with a running Ubuntu 15.04 container.

Now it's time to install software inside the container.

Docker and more generic Linux containers technology are a hot topic these days. The website says "for developers and sysadmins", I am neither of the two but I can still find some useful applications for containers as a Network Engineer.

Let's start from the basics.

Quick tool: PingInfoView

PingInfoView is a small utility that allows you to easily ping multiple host names and IP addresses, and watch the result in one table. It automatically ping to all hosts every number of seconds that you specify, and displays the number of succeed and failed pings, as well as the average ping …

A quick batch script I did to backup configuration files of multiple Alcatel Omniswitch via FTP.

In the switch flash all configuration files are named boot.cfg so the script renames each file appending the IP address of the device to avoid conflicts.

We start creating a file iplist.txt with all the IP of switches to …

Today I've attended a Meraki technical training course at Cisco offices.

The training was organized in short presentations of product features followed by hands-on labs based on all the products available today.

I was suprised to find not only people from small companies or system integrators but more that 50% of the …

Just a quick post since I speak with many network engineers and I notice some confusion about this topic.

Are all 4 pairs of an Cat5e cable used?

The answer is.. it depends.

For gigabit speed 1000T all four pairs are used.

If 100TX speed is enough we can of course split the cable and double the connections without …

This week I attended a two days training of Cisco DCINX9K.

The training is focused on Cisco Nexus 9000 switches in NX-OS mode.

NX9K can run two different software images, the full ACI image with all the cool SDN stuff and the traditional NS-OX image with some cool features like Python, Rest API, VX-LAN and more.

Now …

NeDi and Observium are two of my favourites network monitoring tools.

I do like to deploy both, they complete each other and since they're free there is no need to choose. The only problem with the use of two tools is the integration.

Observium has a limitation with host discovery: a device can be discovered only by …

Switch configuration includes many tasks, some of them are just boring and error prone.

Vlan port assignment on access switches, excited huh? There can be many vlans (clients, printers, access-point, security cameras and more) and it may not be easy to plan the assignments before the actual installation. …