Quite often cable management is something that starts well when a new IDF is deployed and then gets messier over time.

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I read a lot of discussions about complexity in networking and IT today that include a large amount of FUD. Topics range from "we'll all lose our jobs because abstraction" to "you can't fix complexity" to "welcome robot overlords" ;-)

White boxes and their impact on enterprise networking is a hot topic today, with many point of views.

The last update from Dave Temkin, VP of Network Architecture ad Netflix, put more gasoline on the flames:

**Update April 2018: the original tweet was deleted, the message was:

Super proud of my team - today they …

When a customer calls with a problem or request I often see a chance to investigate a technology, learn something new or apply random skills to find a creative solution.

This time is about an ASA, customer noticed too much traffic on the Internet facing interface. Syslog, Netflow, bandwidth monitoring and any other …

In episode 13 of the Network Collective podcast around minute 26 Jordan Martin asks:

Aren't we all just following a trend?

The discussion topic is how to mentor juniors in a learning path to grow their skills and be experts eventually.

The question can be translated as:

Are we creating fake (IT) news/trends or is it …

This week I've attended the Network Automation Seminar organized by Reiss Romoli.

The speaker was the great Ivan Pepelnjiak! I was happy to meet Ivan again after NFD16.

At the event I joined old and new friends: Andrea, Nicola, Paolo and Tiziano.

Are these networkers or programmers? ;) @ioshints @adainese @nmodena …

Day two of NFD16 started with Apstra and their intent-based networking system.

Intent concept is not as broad as SDN but still vendors have different views of this meaning.

According to Apstra an intent is "the definition of the expected outcome". The sum of the intents of a network is the source of truth. …

Second part of Tech Field Day NFD16 day 1 continues with Arista.

Getting ready for @AristaNetworks #NFD16 pic.twitter.com/SCWXVGsR2l

— Gian Paolo (@gp_ifconfig) September 13, 2017

Arista's presentation included 400G (hist: it's fast!), EOS programmability, Network Automation and Telemetry, Routing Architecture …

First day at Tech Field Day NFD16, I'm quite excited to be here among fellow network engineers to share our views on products and technologies.

I'm planning to post my takeaways for each vendor with variable lengths based on my knowledge and interest of the specific product.

Today's first presenter is Veriflow. Let's …

Welcome back to AirPiConsole blog post, this is part two.

If you read part one and followed the configuration steps you should now have a fully working Raspberry Pi Zero W connected to your WiFi network.

You should also be able to connect via Bluetooth to get a console connection without knowing the IP address of the …

As a network engineer I spend a lot of time with my laptop connected via serial cable to various devices.

Physical serial connection is needed for initial device setup and sometimes per customer's security policy I can't access the network, so I can only use out-of-band management. I also configure many devices at …

I'm happy to announce I'll join a great team of professionals for 3 days of pure networking awesomeness in Silicon Valley:

Great news: I'm a #NFD16 delegate! https://t.co/WuziopJtKc Can't wait to join such a great team of professionals!

— Gian Paolo (@gp_ifconfig) August 11, 2017

NFD16 is part of Tech …

Summertime usually means a busy period for Network Engineers, customers are on holidays and we have the opportunity to performs all the changes that impact network connectivity.

For me this usually means core switch replacement.

Today I was moving a configuration from an HP8200 to a Cisco 4500, taking care of all the …

Ansible has been around for I while but I didn't had a chance to play with it so far.

Now the time has come: I manage enough IOS devices with homogeneous configurations in multiple sites without Cisco Prime. Any change is a pain, it's time to automate all the things!

My environment

I run Ansible inside Bash on Windows, …