I got a request from a friend to describe the Netflow top talkers feature. Netflow is a Cisco proprietary protocol that is used to see which protocols are used in your network and how much traffic they are generating. Netflow
Cisco updates the Catalyst 2960 – Catalyst 2960-X and Catalyst 2960-XR
The Catalyst 2960 is a very common switch in any environment that has Cisco devices. A couple of years ago the 2960 got stacking via the 2960-S model. It also got the ability to do static routes which was a
Default routes in BGP
I have seen in forums and in other places that some find that the default route in BGP is a bit confusing. There are multiple ways of orginating a default route in BGP. To start this is the topology used:
NAT translation – What happened to my traceroute?
This post will describe something interesting that happens to traceroute when you are doing NAT. The inspiration for this post came from a thread at IEOC started by Nick O’neill. He was doing ip nat outside translation but I have
Networkengineering @ Stack Exchange
Some of you might have heard of Stack Exchange. It’s a site for a range of different topics based on Q&A format. Recently there was a new section started for network engineering. It was in private beta and now it
STP convergence – MST
In the comments I received a wish to compare RPVST+ with MST. RPVST+ is Ciscos proprietary STP running one instance per VLAN over 802.1Q trunks. MST is an industry standard which can run multiple instances but not one per VLAN.
Spanning tree convergence
Someone asked the other day how fast STP converges depending on PVST+ or RPVST+ or MST is running. Usually the answer for PVST+ is 30-50 seconds and for RPVST+ it’s fast, maybe less than a second. I thought I would
Routing-bits SP handbook now available
We are many CCIE RS candidates that have used Ruhanns RS handbook to aid us in passing the CCIE lab. Ruhann has now released a SP handbook as well to aid all SP candidates. Who is Ruhann? Ruhann du Plessis
Introduction to NX-OS – Basic system setup
I’m trying to learn more about Ciscos datacenter products and obviously NX-OS is a big part of that. I’ll do some blog posts to introduce anyone not familiar with NX-OS to it and that will help me with the learning
200k views
This blog has now seen 200k views since I started it. It started out slow but after a year or so it gained some pace. The blog started out describing my journey to the CCIE which I accomplished 6 months