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, …

Last week I had the opportunity to attend a "Cisco Meraki Masters" session at Meraki HQ in San Francisco. Meraki Masters is a program that sits on top of CMNA to give partners a deeper view of the Meraki product line, vision and roadmap. Merakify a.k.a. "Don't spend your time doing work a well-trained monkey could do." …

The problem I manage many networks and quite often I work at customer site. For every site I need and IP address, gateway, Wi-Fi network, sometimes proxy, a printer and many other unique network settings. Change IP address on Windows is a process that takes too much time and many clicks. The automation I used to use …

Today we'll see Docker networking with a very specific target in mind: bridge container to the host network. This isn't supposed to be the way of work of containers: a container should be created to run a single application so container networking, from the point of view of a Network Engineer, is essentially a Port …

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 …

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 …

Log analysis is important to both troubleshoot and understand network devices behavior. Tail/less/grep are great tools that can help to filter and search hundreds or thousands lines of logs. If you prefer a GUI there are a couple of alternatives that can fit well. For windows users only Log Expert is a great choice …

A few days ago a customer called worried by the flow control counters increasing on his Cisco 4510 switch, he just sent me this asking for an explanation: CORE_4510#show interfaces flowcontrol Port Send FlowControl Receive FlowControl RxPause TxPause admin oper admin oper --------- -------- -------- -------- -------- …

Last week I passed PW0-105 exam and obtained the CWNA certification: I work with wireless network since 2005, I began installing some SoHo APs and in the last few years I designed and deployed many bigger networks, some of which are challenging high density environments. I read many Cisco documents about wifi design …

Networking is awesome but some tasks may be quite boring and repetitive. For new campus network installations a lot of time is used just to put a basic initial configuration template on switches. Each vendor has its proprietary method to distribute configs automagically but sometimes the effort to setup the system is …

This means two things: I'm CCIE for over one year now I need to prepare again the written exam The last day to test the v4 edition is June 3, 2014, I've passed that exam twice so I expect a little effort to pass it again.

Ten years ago I've passed my first Cisco exam: CCNA! What was supposed to be just a marginal skill for a junior systems engineer became both my job and my passion. Ten years and 21 Cisco exams later (and a bunch of other vendors), with 2 labs in Brussels, 1 FAIL and 1 PASS, I'm still excited about networking and I hope …

IPv6 is the evolution that everybody know must be done one day but not today. Unike the Millenniun Bug that had a clear deadline, IPv6 adoption is a topic that I often discuss with clients but nobody is really willing to do it, even in a test environment. I studied IPv6 in many Cisco certifications but since they're …

Questo post e' dedicato ai networkers iscritti al CUG di AreaNetworking.it per condividere la mia esperienza del Cisco Live! 2013 a Londra. Ho visto diversi messaggi in ML e dato che la risposta sarebbe un po' lunga e magari puo' interessare a piu' persone ho deciso di scrivere direttamente un post qui. Ho avuto il …

Huawei network devices are becoming more and more popular in European market lately. It all started with 3G adapters, then mobiles, and now I see routers and switches deployed in many locations. For a project I'll deploy in the next few weeks I had the opportunity to attend an Huawei training. Huawei provides a …