As I mentioned in a previous blog, the best way to go to Cisco's Networkers is to focus on a certain area and take as many classes and events as you can in that same area. I followed my own advice again this year and took all wireless classes.

I was very happy with the training and learned a lot. My knowledge of wireless was essentially limited to the channels to use in the 2.4 GHz range. So, what stuck me the most was the depth of the technology and knowledge needed to design, build, and manage wireless networks today. We're building a requirements list for an internal wireless upgrade project now so I took notes during all the classes. Here's just some of the notes I took:

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I was impressed by John Chambers keynote at Networkers the week before last, except for his purple tie and pink shirt (what?). But what really struck me was an underlying message - that I'm pretty sure John was cognizant of - but I'm not sure the rest of the audience was. That message was human freedom.

While I won't delve into my beliefs on every political issue, I happen to be a strong libertarian and constitutionalist. Above all, I love individual freedom and liberty as outlined and protected in our Constitution; be it civil, religious, or economic freedom (especially economic, which is often forgotten today).

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Since Cisco is the networking king, people often wonder how Cisco's performs. Well, I was interested in the Cisco Networkers network performance last week.

Getting on the network was simple enough. Connect via wireless to the broadcast SSID "ciscolive", then open a web browser to "sign in" to the network.

There was actually no "signing in", just clicking on the link. No terms of use or anything. Wireless coverage was decent throughout. I never had a problem connecting anywhere.

Now that Cisco Live (Networkers) is over, and we are all heading home, I thought it would be a good idea to give the event a report card in as many categories as I can think of.

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Category      Grade  Comments
------------------------------------------------------------------
Hotels        B+    I liked the selection of hotels and 
                    proximity to the conference.

Buses         C     They worked quickly, but were often 
                    full.  I had to wait 35 minutes on 
		  Thursday morning (after the party) 
		  as 5 full buses drove by. Better 
		  coordination and some express buses 
		  from each hotel are needed.

Conference    A     I liked the size of the rooms, and 

And now for the winner of the most important, infamous, and unofficial contest at Cisco Networkers....that being the vendor with the hottest badge reader girl! Yes, each year a few smart vendors realize the quickest way to get a 99.9% male audience to listen to your boring pitch about the next, great fiber optic cable is to hire one (more than one is good too) beautiful girl and put her in a tight outfit. The men will stream to your booth to get scanned.

NetQoS made an art out of this last year in Anaheim with a large booth right at the entrance to the World of Solutions and 3 or 4 buxom blondes with badge readers. Very nicely done. I got scanned twice. ;-)

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I arrived at Cisco Live (Networkers) yesterday in Orlando and attended my first techtorial on Wireless. Very interesting topic. We getting ready to do a large WLAN upgrade so I've scheduled a whole week of wireless training.

Here are some of my first impressions of Networkers this year:

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Cisco has put more effort this year into their web presence for Networkers. There are four main websites for Cisco Live this year.

First up is the main, public web site for Cisco Live.

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Since my last blog convinced Cisco to bring back the CCIE party ;-) it appears other groups are taking up the idea.

IP Expert is also hosting a party, on Monday night, a day before the Cisco CCIE Party.

This one is at:

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Cisco is demo'ing the CCDE Practical Exam next week at Networkers in Florida as part of the CCDE Practical Beta process. You'll be able to sit down and demo the new practical exam yourself and meet the CCDE development team. There is also a 2-hour CCDE session at Networkers on Tuesday. I got a sneak preview of the beta exam this week.

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At last year's Networkers I wrote a blog about how cheap the conference bag was. So, in December, I was pleased to see that my blog got to Cisco and they announced much improved conference bags. ;-)

So, in March, I issued a similar challenge to Cisco to bring back the CCIE Party. Cisco had thrown a killer CCIE party in 2005 at the Ghost Bar at the top of the Palms Casino in Vegas. I felt it was my right, as an ardent Cisco bigot, to be pampered once a year to a party of that caliber. ;-) ;-) ;-)

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You may have noticed over the last couple years that Cisco has been sending out its PSIRT e-mails with a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score included. Despite being a tad cryptic, this is a very useful tool and scoring system for quickly assessing security vulnerabilities.

CVSS scores are derived from three scores: a "base" score, a "temporal" score, and an "environmental" score. These can better be described as "fixed" score, "variable" score, and "your" score.

The base score is fixed at the time the vulnerability is found and its properties do not change. The base score includes the following metrics:

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Cisco has a new (or at least new to me) Cisco Learning Network website. It's a very nice consolidation of information on Cisco certifications, careers, and training.

The site is broken down into five main sections - Cisco Learning Home, Careers, Connections, Certifications, and Learning Center.

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Back from vacation..... ;-)

I wrote a couple blogs a few months ago about how few organization have a proactive capacity management program, but how everyone should. I'm a firm believer in the benefits of capacity management programs, but they are often the first thing to go during budgeting. Few organizations have ever had a proactive capacity management program so they don't see the benefits.

That's why I was pleased last week to receive an e-mail from a recruiter looking to hire a Network Performance Engineer. This was for a carrier size network, but with a large retail footprint. Technology ranged from Frame-Relay to MPLS to Gigabit Metro Ethernet. The job called for skills with:

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I read a Gartner report last year about Unified Communications that said the future is softphones. People have been buying pretty Cisco IP Phones for $400 a piece for a while, making Cisco very happy.

The Gartner report made the case that enterprises should stop buying expensive desk phones, which are mini-PCs (they have an OS, run Java, and can run applications), and use the real PC right next to the phone to run a softphone. This cuts hardware investment, maintenance, and operational support. That all made sense to me. Why buy a separate piece of hardware when you have a system right there that can do everything?

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I read an article earlier this year about how Comcast is planning to upgrade broadband access speeds to as fast at 160 Mbps. From almost all perspectives, this is great. Faster broadband means a better user experience, interactive applications, and HDTV.

But, what does this mean for VPN access to work? Well, first, it would seem great. Think of working remotely with the same performance as in the office. That would be great, especially for applications like VoIP, desktop video conferencing, and file transfers.

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Despite all the newstories, blogs, and speaches about the forthcoming Interent problems because of IPv4 shortage and the lack of enthusiam for IPv6, the message just isn't getting across. People aren't concerned.

Perhaps we need a new way to deliver that message. Something people can relate to and get behind....

Just plain funny!

I've assembled quite a collection of browser bookmarks over the years. My Cisco.com links form the bulk of those links. I thought it would be good to share these bookmarks. There are many pages you are just not going to find on your own, even with Cisco.com's new search tool.

I've cleaned them up too; removing obsolete entries, organizing better, and deleting all porn links....err....deleting all links dead links. ;-)

Have fun!

Cisco Bookmarks

Certifications

CCIE Online Lab Scheduling

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One of the most interesting, and least known problems that can occur on a LAN is Broadcast-Unicast (BUN) flooding. And, it can cause a lot more problems than many other typical LAN issues (like normal broadcasts, spanning-tree recalcs, etc).

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I was honored this week to be awarded the Network Professional Association Professional Excellence and Innovation Award - Corporate Fortune X. The NPA is an association for professionals in Network Computing.

NPA – Advocate for the International Network Computing Professional

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Just thinking out loud for today's blog.

• When doing your network design make sure you get the physical design right. Despite what people will say about IP addressing being right because it's hard to renumber, or having a good routing protocol design to ensure stability, the truth is those can be changed remotely. But, the physical design - how all the cables go together - cannot. Unless you want to fly people all around the world - or pay big bucks for contractors - be exacting about your physical design.
  
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At last week's FutureNet conference one of the three major topics areas was the future of the Internet. Nemertes Research, the host of FutureNet, brought a very impressive group of Internet experts to the conference to discuss the issue.

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I had a great week last week in Boston at FutureNet.

Not only did my own presentation go very well, but the list of presenters, panelists, and technology topics was fantastic.

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As part of the CCDE Beta Team, I have spoke on numerous occasions with the CCDE Program Team at Cisco and serve as their unofficial, external spokesman for the CCDE Beta process (reference the previous blogs I have done on the CCDE):

Insight on the New Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE) and Network Infrastructure Architect Certification


Insight on the New Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE) - Part II


Insight on the New Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE) - Part III

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As part of the CCDE Practical (Lab) development, Cisco had planned to run a beta test beginning at Networkers in June. This beta test would actually certify an individual as a CCDE for the few (if any) who passed. Cisco would use this beta test to track its progress on the test's development and content.

Just two weeks ago, Cisco sent an e-mail asking CCDE Beta Team members if they were available to take the CCDE Practical Beta at Networkers:

From: Cisco CCDE Team
Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 8:52 PM
To: <>
Subject: CCDE Beta Availability -- Orlando?

Dear CCDE Beta Participant:

The CCDE program team is in the process of mapping out the logistics of the beta delivery of the CCDE practical exam.

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Yesterday, Cisco announced the Nexus 5000 series of data center switches. The 5000, along with the Nexus 7000, brings high density 10GIG access to the data center.

I did a quick review of 5000 and made some quick notes.

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• It is a wire-rate, low latency (3.2 micro seconds), layer-2 only switch for data centers.
  

A couple weeks ago I wrote a blog about how I can fix anything with a tunnel. In that blog I described a situation where using a campus LAN physical box design, instead of a triangle design, can lead to black hold routing because of OSPF summarization.

The other day I received the following e-mail:

----- Original Message ----
From: Dave [dave@somewhere.com]
To: mjmorris@yahoo.com
Sent: Thursday, April 3, 2008 11:00:16 PM
Subject: tunnel article

Morris, that was a very intersting article about tunnels. How you please go into a bit of detail on how a box design can cause that black hole situation you mentioned in OSPF. Always trying to learn.

Regards
Dave

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Some organizations build wonderful networks, but fail to document anything. Shortly after entropy sets in and instability begins to pop up in the network. More likely, if there wasn't a written network architecture to begin with, the network is never built correctly and problems begin from the outset. Many engineers and managers don't see the benefit of a written network architecture until it's too late.

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"I can fix anything with a tunnel". I had a boss at a previous job tell me that one time. He proclaimed to be a "First 100 CCIE", although I never verified that. But, he did know networking.

We'd be sitting in design meetings and be stuck on a design issue and he start saying, "we can fix this with a tunnel". For example, once we had a problem with a firewall and BGP and he starts saying, "Screw it, just tunnel through the Firewall and be done with it".

I actually think I got that job because I answered a question during the interview by using a tunnel. Best I can remember the problem went something like:

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• There's a user and she's a real pain. She understands traceroute and wants her Internet traffic to go in and out this circuit.
  

I thought I'd have some fun with a blog and write about "a day in the life" of....well.....my life as Team Lead and Network Architect. Last Friday will do since it was a full day.

Got up at 5 AM, but hit the snooze till 6 AM. That's unusual since I am usually up at 5 AM so I can get to work early. I live on the East Coast, but most of my co-workers are on the West Coast, so early mornings are very nice to catch up on e-mails and other work. Things usually get moving (new e-mail, meetings, phone calls, etc) by around 11 AM Eastern each day.

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As it says in my little bio over there:

I have a lot of experience with enterprise wide area networks (WANs). This means I've spent more than a few hours, evenings, weekends, and holidays arguing with CO techs about circuits.

I wrote a blog about MPLS Carrier Diversity a few months back which included this:

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