Although the ISR G2 announcement from Cisco seems like more of the same, but faster and stronger, there are significant improvements related to voice and video that are worth mentioning. Here is a table that shows them:
When the ASA Botnet filter feature was announced I thought that it's an interesting concept and is definitely worth trying. One of the interesting concepts that this feature introduces is the ability to monitor your outbound traffic and to know if there are flows in it that should not be allowed. This is an option with dedicated devices but the firewall is usually focused on inbound traffic and not outbound. Botnets make it important to know what is going out as well. Read more
In the last Network World magazine, I came across an article called 'ROI doesn't always pan out with unified communications' and while reading through it, a few topics came up. To begin with, one must differentiate IP Telephony from UC, the vendors make it hard for us by naming everything the same, but some products are IPTEL, some are UC and some are Video conferencing. When trying to identify an ROI justification for a project, this is an important observation. Read more
How are you tracking the IOS status in your network? It isn't an easy task, even for veteran network engineers (as posted by others before here). With all the bugs, security issues and what not, one can easily get confused.
When I found myself in the situation of deciding if it's time to upgrade or not - and what are the potential issues (open bugs) I'm letting in if I don't upgrade - I decided to revert to an old friend and logged on to Cisco Works Lan Management Solutions. Read more
Getting your mobile phone to ring when your desk phone does is pretty easy, but before walking through it you should understand what makes this functionality work.
The common ground to all the phone numbers is a user account, we need a user account that is allowed to use mobility and is associated with the desk phone and the mobile phone, and this tells the system to link a desk phone to a mobile phone.
Having seen many times where the terms mobility and single number reach were used to describe different aspects of this family of features, I decided to add my voice to this aspect, in the context of Cisco's UC family of products.
When talking about Single Number Reach, usually the meaning is that a call to one's office number will ring on his cell phone (and optionally on other selected devices) simultaneously. By doing so, there is no need to advertise multiple numbers, or to miss calls that came to your desk phone when you were out.
Call center supervisors are always busy, they need to monitor the queues, guide the agents, make sure customers are getting the answers they need and in a timely manner. Back in the days, when I was a support engineer, it was always an intense schedule and taking a lunch break or attending a short meeting was always a complicated task. In those days, I wish we had the tool that is now available for free if you are using Cisco's Contact Center Express (UCCX). Read more
Cisco's virtual partner summit is still on, but some important announcements were already made:
The 19 global honorees were selected from more than 60,000 Cisco channel partners worldwide for their outstanding performance in 2008. Thirteen were recognized for global excellence, and six for excellence in a specific geographic region. Read more
Here is something that is worth sharing, how to get a VPN client to automatically connect to the VPN destination (ASA, VPN concentrator etc.). This can help in situations where you need to mimic a VPN appliance (ASA5505) using a windows box. Read more
Check this out:
Unity 7.0 was just announced in January and Unity 8.0 is almost getting into early field trial (late June 09 is the D-day). Gotta love Cisco's version upgrades, software subscription never looked more attractive.
Seems like there are some interesting features in there: Read more
It’s been some time now that I was curious about open source IPTEL. Known in many names but all comes back to the Asterisk mother ship. Since it’s an open source application, it can save the potential customer some money.
I started by trying to find the most simple way to get a filing for the application, without dual booting my laptop to Linux, and without installing and patching a Linux version and then installing Asterisk on top of it. VMware allowed me to run the software as a guest operating system and the simplified distributions of Asterisk did the rest. Read more
The last couple of days has been full of articles related to IT skills (http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/040609-10-tech-skills.html), jobs in demand (http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/40333), the importance of a computer science degree (http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/040609-hot-tech-skills.html) and more. Read more
The last post in this series is touching some of the other tools you can make use of when assessing a network. Not trying to cover it all, but to point some more useful utilities and commands.
First one is ‘Show process cpu’, you must always be aware of the CPU status and to make sure it is not overloaded. It is also important to have some sort of SNMP monitoring application running and looking at its utilization. You can add the ‘history parameter to the end of the command line and get historical info that shows utilization in the last 60 seconds, 60 minutes and 72 hours. Read more
What else is important when you are logged in to the router/switch? We talked about the ‘show version’ command, there are more important things to check. Memory for example. Read more
So far in this series of blogs ( Basics, Tools and SNMP) I didn’t get vendor specific, the methods were applicable to any SNMP compliant network. In the next few entries it’s going to be Cisco specific, based on the well known IOS command line interface. Read more
In my previous post I explained how to use Wireshark (or any other sniffer) to get a basic understanding of how your network performs. This does not require any knowledge of the current addresses or network devices, which makes it a good starting point. With that being said, it’s a very limited starting point since in a switched environment; you will only be exposed to the traffic which is in the vlan that you are connected to. In that vlan you will only see broadcasts and multicasts. Read more
This relates to the NW post at:
http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2009/011209-cisco-asr-1000-router-test.html
This is an interesting review of that new router, definitely a good indication of the device’s performance abilities. One comment I’d like to add to it is that the ASR is designated to replace the 7500 family of routers, more then it is expected to replace the 7200. It has far more horse powers then a 7200, so it might be considered an up-scale or upgrade to it but not a one to one replacement. Read more
Was catching up on blogs when I found the Cisco Subnet entry called Is VoIP dead?. wow, really, am I in a dying specie of IT? did the recession finally got to my back yard? reading into the post and following first level and second level links, I realized it is perhaps a good story, but not the end of the world. Read more
The first and most accessible tool is a packet capturing application, known as a sniffer or a protocol analyzer. Any network engineer should have one of those installed on his laptop. Commercial or freeware, just make sure you have one. In here I’ll use a freeware protocol analyzer, windows based, called Wireshark. Some might know it by its previous name, Ethereal. It’s a free distribution which I’m used to, there are others, but since it is not a protocol analyzer review, Wireshark was selected. Read more
How can you know if your network is doing fine? Should you worry about upgrading your backbone next year? Do you get slow responses because your network is not up to what you do with it? Those questions are a common concern for many of the customers I got to know along the way. So how do you know if your network is doing fine? What are the vital signals of a functioning data infrastructure?
Two approaches can be taken in tackling this challenge: Inspecting the network devices or using independent network inspection devices. Read more
Avner Izhar is an experienced IT professional; he has 14 years of experience in the networking area, on multiple continents, and has filled positions in post sales, pre sales and training. He currently holds CCIE in Voice (#15999), CCSI (#31623), CCVP and others. He is also the author of two CCIE voice training related books: CCIE Voice Technology Workbook and CCIE Voice written study guide, both published under NLI. When he is not blogging for Network World, he work as a Consulting System Engineer for World Wide Technology, Inc., a leading systems integrator providing technology and supply chain solutions to customers and suppliers around the world.
Through this blog, Avner will share his personal experience and assist junior and senior engineers in their IT tasks.
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