Resources for learning HP Comware

HP is making more resources available to help with learning Comware. They’ve added free labs and courses to the already published simulators and virtual routers. This is a good resource for those looking...

Rate my IOS?

Review schemes are useful for identifying good consumer products and applications. But that doesn’t mean that everything needs to prompt me to leave a review. Cisco has started prompting for reviews for IOS versions, but...

Big Switch Chaos Monkey Network Testing

Whenever you build a complex system, you need to test that it works as expected, including properly handling failures. It’s easy enough to do simple component failure testing, but harder to...

Operations Manager to OMi Migration Path

HP has finally announced a migration path for Operations Manager to OMi. It’s about time too. This looks like a good path. If you want to stick with HP Software for managing...

Christmas Change Freeze - Good or Bad?

We’re approaching Christmas, and for many of us, that means we’re about to enter an extended change freeze. This means an extended period when we shouldn’t change anything, hoping to improve stability. ITIL Change Management...

War Stories: Unix Security

This article is Part 8 in a 12-Part Series. Part 1 - War Stories: Loops that Permanently Broke the Network Part 2 - War Stories: Switches Lying about Duplex Mismatches...

Outsourcing Mistakes

Outsourcing is complex, and there are lots of ways it can go wrong, or simply fail to deliver. I’ve put together a list of things that I see going wrong...

Juniper SRX-110H EoL

Somehow I missed this when it was announced, but the Juniper SRX-110H-VA is End of Life, and is no longer supported for new software releases.

Wipebook - A Portable Whiteboard

It is a stereotype, but engineers really do like whiteboards. Problem is, you can’t carry one around with you. Plus there’s still a few unenlightened employers who don’t provide whiteboards....

iRules/Tcl - Watch the Comments

It’s pretty common practice to ‘comment out’ lines in scripts. The code stays in place, but doesn’t get executed. Perfect for testing, when you might need more debug output, or you want...

Complexity vs Security

Many of the ‘security’ measures in our networks add complexity. That may be an acceptable tradeoff, if we make a meaningful difference to security. But often it feels like we...

War Stories: Cursed VLANs

This article is Part 7 in a 12-Part Series. Part 1 - War Stories: Loops that Permanently Broke the Network Part 2 - War Stories: Switches Lying about Duplex Mismatches...