Network equipment pricing has traditionally been based around hardware, even though most of the cost comes from the software. Trends such as bare-metal switching will clarify this cost/price relationship. But are we already seeing software showing up as a clear component of the prices of network gear?
(Read more...)A reader asked how I use OmniFocus to help with studying for certification exams. Here’s how I’m using OmniFocus to help with CCDE study. This may not be the ‘best’ way, but it’s what I use.
(Read more...)I am lucky enough to be invited to attend Network Field Day 8 this September, in Silicon Valley. For 3 days, I get to hang out with some of the smartest people in this industry, talking about the latest products and developments in networking. How cool is that?
(Read more...)Network monitoring is often a reactive process. Engineers see an alarm, and take action. Alarms mean someone broke something, and it needs attention. Deal with the alarms, and all will be well. No alarms == Good. But every now and then no alarms means that monitoring is broken. Here’s an example of where this happened, and what I do about it.
(Read more...)We don’t see as many comments on blog posts these days, as most discussion has moved to other forums, such as Twitter or Google+. But this doesn’t mean that comments are completely dead.
(Read more...)Dobias van Ingen is working to get an HP Networking scripting community together. This is to take advantage of various HPN scripting capabilities, such as:
(Read more...)Counter data types are commonly used in SNMP monitoring. They are extremely useful, but there’s a couple of caveats around how to use them. Here’s a couple of issues I’ve come across:
(Read more...)I switched this blog over to using CloudFlare a few days ago. It’s all been pretty painless, and I highly recommend it to others.
(Read more...)APNIC entered their “final /8” phase in April 2011. From that time, new and existing APNIC members could request a maximum of one IPv4 /22 prefix. Once you had requested your final /22, that was it. No more IPv4 addresses for you. Or was it?
(Read more...)Fortinet makes an email security/anti-spam appliance called FortiMail. I wanted to collect spam and virus statistics from it, to integrate with our Network Monitoring Systems. Unfortunately the data is not exposed via SNMP or API, so I had to resort to some ugly code to get it working. Here’s what I did:
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