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.
- IP addressing should be done by site, not function. For example, you don’t make 10.100.0.0/16 your global WLAN range and give each site a /25. That destroys all summarization that routing protocols rely on. You give each site a complete /22 and inside that /22 you carve out a /25 for WLAN. Same for other subnets.
- You don’t have to have a CCIE to be a great network engineer.
- FCoE is growing on me… I’m starting to like it more and more.
- Why does Cisco Unified Call Manager (CUCM) not understand the underlying network topology? In fact, except for CDP to signal Voice VLAN membership, I can’t find any software integration between CUCM and the Cisco network equipment so the VoIP environment can understand the network environment. (NOTE: running voice gateways in Cisco IOS is not integration, it’s extension).
- The Internet may melt down soon because of expanding routing tables, but don’t use public IP space from carriers. Try to get your own. Using public IP space from carriers is like being married to the mob. Once you’re in, you never get out. Carriers love to give you address space because it’s so hard to renumber. And, the only way to keep the space is to continue to buy Internet circuits from them. They’re going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.
- How long till we build a field office with just wireless? No more LAN ports in the cubes.
- How often do you have to buy stuff from other IT companies because they your stuff? I understand that too a point, but it can get silly sometimes. Sigh……
- Cisco’s CSM-SSL card is a pain to configure. Hopefully the ACE will be better when we start testing it soon.
- I know I’m extremely biased, but I think companies are going to need to consider different compensation models for their most senior engineers. 99% of engineers are individual contributors and top out at a level equivalent to a senior manager. This limits their salary, bonus, and compensation potential unless they switch to management and aim for director, senior director, or VP level. The current system isn’t going to last as being a really good engineer become more about experience than number of CCIEs.
- What about a medical approach; where the doctors are the “engineering experts”, but still are at the top of the compensation charts? Of course there are administrators running the organization, but compensation is driven to the experts.
- Why does everyone want a Cisco phone? I have one. It rings. Is it because every TV show has them (kudos to the marketing genius on that one)?
- Do you really need a jitter SLA from carriers? Honestly. Do you actually track that?
- Before you do any changes in your network, especially the big ones, take shot of the current environment. Configs, up/down status, utilization, delay, etc. That way you can rate the results of your changes. We’re often so focused on making the changes, we forget about what we have now. It looks very bad when the VP asks how the change improved the network and you have to say, “I don’t know”.
More >From the Field blog entries:
So What’s This About the Internet Melting Down?
Clearing the Air on the CCDE Practical Beta Exam
CCDE Practical Beta Test Cancelled
Quick Thoughts on the New Nexus 5000
What Goes Into a Written Network Architecture?
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