Everyone talks about how moving to Cloud-based services can reduce CapEx, and that you only “pay for what you need.” People seem to assume this is a Good Thing, and to my mind, it probably is. But many businesses are obsessed with reducing OpEx, not CapEx. In fact, they will use all manner of tricks to move expenditure to the CapEx bucket. Why is that, and what might it mean for “Pay as you go” models?
(Read more...)HP IMC is great at backing up your switch configurations, but it can be very frustrating when it doesn’t work. Here’s a list of steps I go through when debugging device backups:
(Read more...)I’ve been reading more about OpenFlow recently, and something that was pointed out to me was that OpenFlow offers features that could give us deeper insights into our traffic flows, without necessarily modifying them. Whilst not being a full replacement for NetFlow/sFlow, it would be far better than just guessing at what an application is doing. I’m pretty excited about the possibilities.
(Read more...)How much monitoring should I do for services that I’ve outsourced? This question comes up frequently with my clients. They’ve paid someone else to manage a service for them, and they’re wondering if they should just leave all monitoring to the service provider. They’re paying for it, so why have a dog and bark yourself? This applies to all sorts of outsourcing agreements - it might be for a simple SaaS-based service, or it might be a complex network environment that you designed and built, and then handed over to a third party to manage.
(Read more...)The default logging style for Cisco IOS-based devices is to insert the system uptime in the log entry. This makes it basically useless. Here’s some typical log output:
(Read more...)A good customer of mine needs to replace their Service Desk system. Having a fair idea of their requirements, I asked them if they had looked at $(insert very well-known player here).
(Read more...)Cisco made some announcements about SDN certifications at Cisco Live US, in June this year. These didn’t seem to get a lot of attention at the time, perhaps due to little detail being available. A few more things have started to come out, but it’s still not full released. What might these SDN certifications be like, and will they be in demand?
(Read more...)Microsoft patches are released on a (mostly) monthly cycle, and other vendors have started following suit. When this first happened, people treated it like a major event. But I think that it is now treated as “Business As Usual”, and maybe it’s time for the headline-writers to realise this.
(Read more...)Juniper recently released 12.1X45-D10 for the SRX-110. The key new feature for me was DHCPv6 Client support - finally! It’s still new, and buggy, and I wouldn’t rush it into production, but if you need DHCPv6 client support, it’s here. These are my notes on how I’ve configured it to get it working.
(Read more...)IMC has a predefined list of over 6,000 devices. This list maps sysOIDs to devices, so when you add a new device to IMC, it will say “this is a Cisco Catalyst 3560 Switch”, or a “HP MSM 760 Wireless Controller”, etc. Here’s a sample of what that list looks like:
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