Yes, I failed.  I think it’s pretty typical when you’re at Cisco Live, you stay out drinking and smoking cigars until 01:00, then you sit the exam at 08:00 the next morning.  Considering the situation I put myself in, I wasn’t very optimistic about passing, but I figured I had maybe a 40% chance to pass since I didn’t really even study.  Are you sensing a theme of ill-preparedness and self-sabotage?  Yeah, me, too.

Cisco Live is obviously the biggest networking event of the year, and Cisco likes to use all the attention to show off some of their new gear.  I must say I was impressed with some of the Enterprise offerings including the 6807-XL, the 6880-X, the 4451-X, and the Sup 8-E for the 4500-E (check out the Nexus 7700, too, even though they aren’t Enterprise class).  Those boxes definitely gave me a bit of a tingle when I was checking them out, but my eyes opened up when I saw the 3850 in one of my sessions and on the show floor.

While walking through the World of Solutions, we ran across a big black truck with lots of antennas all over it.  It was obviously an emergency communications vehicle of some kind, but I was really surprised to see it was a Cisco truck.  It turns out that Cisco has a Tactical Operations group (Twitter) that was formed to provide disaster responders with much-needed communications for EMAs, fire, police, medical, etc.

The big truck was the NERV - the Network Emergency Response Vehicle (PDF link).  It’s full of traditional HF, VHF, and UHF radios that the ham radio operators usually bring to these disasters.  This is a necessity when all phones, cell, and Internet are down.  It could be the only way fire fighters are able to call for reinforcements or the only way a hospital can call for more supplies.  The NERV, though, takes it to the next level.  On top of the radio gear, it is equipped with satellite uplinks for Internet access, wifi, and digital voice and video through UCS Express, IP phones, and Telepresence.  Analog voice is always the first method of communications restored via battery- or generator-powered gear, but an area will eventually need a network with voice and video.  That’s where the NERV comes in.

Yes, I went to Cisco Live and survived.  It was the social event of the year, but the main focus is learning about the cool, new stuff.  One of the booths I visited was a demonstration of Cisco Active Advisor.

This is a cloud-based (BINGO!) application that keeps an eye on the lifecycles of your IOS devices.  Using the web interface, you can scan a range of IP addresses from your machine and have your gear automatically added to the service.  Once in there, you can see, among other things, the warranty and support contract information for your device.  If your contracts is about to expire, it’ll let you know via email.   It also tracks any vulnerabilities that may apply and emails you if any are detected.  This beats trusting your reseller to send you renewals or watching an RSS feed for PSIRTs and field notices.

I just got through a big weekend.  We upgraded our main production firewall, but the process had a few twists.

The old firewalls, a pair of ASA 5520s, were running at about 80% CPU during the day.  That’s high enough that even I cringe when I saw the utilization in ASDM.  It was obviously time to upgrade to something with more beef, but we also wanted something that will last for years.  After looking around and getting some quotes (that made me jump back in my seat), we finally decided to go with a pair of 5555Xs.  These guys give about 10 times the throughput of the 5520 with about 8 times the memory.  Seems to match the requirements.  Now for the complications we had to work through.

I’m all set up to go to Cisco Live in Orlando this year.  Good thing, too, since I couldn’t make it to San Diego last time. It’ll be a great and fun time as usual, and I’m quite excited.

As it turns out, ARRL Field Day happens to be the weekend leading up to the festivities.  I’ve been in contact with the local Orlando club, and they say the attendees are more than welcome to join them.  They are meeting at the City of Orlando Emergency Operations Center, which is about 20 minutes away from the Convention Center.

I spent the last of my Juniper exam vouchers on the JNCIS-SEC exam and passed by the skin of my teeth today.  Since I took a new job last month that’s 100% Cisco, this is the last Juniper exam I’ll take for the foreseeable future.  Too bad, too.  I really like the Juniper exams.

At my previous job, we were 90% Juniper with a whole mess of SRX firewalls around the world.  Since this exam is really about that platform, it was pretty logical that I should do alright on it.  Of course, a large part of the blueprint was on IDS and UTM, and I have no experience there.  For my entire career, those type of devices have been handled by other groups, so I had some studying to do.  That’s where I ran into problems.  I have absolutely no interest in IDS.  I have no interest in UTM.  There’s nothing about content scanning and analysis that interests me at all.  I promise you all that I tried my best to read up on these topics, but I was asleep after 10 words every time I tried.  After rescheduling the exam twice to try and study a bit more, I finally decided it wasn’t worth the trouble and just took the exam…and passed.

There are a few ways to leak routes in and out of virtual routers in Junos. On the list is a cool feature called the logical tunnel interface.

So, what am I talking about?  One way to separate traffic on a router is to use virtual routers (VRs) so that you wind up with multiple routing tables on the same router.  This separate traffic, but you will usually (read: always) have a demand to get traffic from one VR to another.  There are a few different way to do that (see rib-group, instance-import, next-table, et al.), but one really cool way to do it is through logical tunnel interfaces.

I quit my job…by design.  I start a new gig on Tuesday and am getting back to the world of Cisco.  As a last nod to Juniper, I decided to use an exam voucher I had and take the JNCIS-ENT exam.  Easy pass.

The content was right along with the exam objectives, so there were no surprises.  Most of the topics are things I’ve done a thousand times on the job.  There were some things, though, that were beyond my experience.  IS-IS was the big one.  The very first question I got was about IS-IS metrics, and I had absolutely no clue what the answer was.  Nor did I have any clue about the other IS-IS questions.  I went 0-for-3 on those guys.  The only other problematic topic was HA, which didn’t really surprised me.  I was able to answer the VRRP questions, but  I’ve never done any GRES, ISSUe, RTG, etc., at any point in my career.  It wasn’t surprising that I didn’t do too well on those.  Everything else was cake, and I only missed 6 questions in my comfort zone.

Yes, I know I’m late.  Just remember I’m lazy, and it all makes sense.

This year I’ve decided to go a little more practical with my goals.  Instead of “get this cert” or “learn about that”, I’ve decided to take some steps to help myself.  That is, in order to learn and advance, I need make sure I give myself the opportunities to do so.  Damn, that sounded like some crap from a marketing department, so let me use my own words.