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CCDP - Introduction

Today I am embarking on a new method of study for me.  I have been procrastinating taking my CCDP ARCH exam(300-320) for over a year now.  To achieve my goal of passing it finally, I have decided to post my study notes as I go through the exam blueprint.  Unfortunately most of the study materials for this exam are dated, or not yet in print, so as I go through this, if someone sees a glaring error, or omission please let me know so I can learn and pass it on to others.

Encouragement, brow beating and other forms of anti-procrastination tortures may be directed to me on Twitter @ntwrk80.   

Cisco Live!: Survival Guide

By now most people in the networking industry have heard that there will be a large gathering of networking people in San Diego, CA June 7-11.  For those that are going, especially first timers, here are some of my tips and tricks.

Training

This is to me the meat of the week.  The training sessions offered at Cisco Live! are some of the best training you can find.  Most of them are taught by subject matter experts from within Cisco including TAC.  Be ready for a drink from the fire hose of knowledge.

Ben's Cisco Live! Training Tips

• Download the presentations ahead of time.
• Find a good PDF annotation program for your device of choice.
• Take notes directly in the PDFs.
• Turn off your other devices during training if you can.
• Be willing to ask questions.

Networking (People That Is)

Next to the training, networking with other people has been my favorite part of Cisco Live! conferences.  It's great to have a network of people that do the same thing you do, especially when you hit a bug or problem and can suddenly get multiple people's take on it.

Ben's Cisco Live! Networking Tips

• Setup a Twitter Account
• Sit with someone you don't know at breakfast and lunch.
• Be a sponge, some of the greatest minds in our industry will be out and about, you might just learn something.

Surviving the Conference Itself

If you've never been to a very large tech conference, you might not know what you're in for so here are my tips.

Ben's Cisco Live! Survival Tips

• Wear a comfortable pair of shoes.
• Bring first aid supplies for blisters and sunburn.
• Prepare to be cold, hot and then cold again in the same day. (wear layers)
• Travel light, you'll have a lot of stuff to haul back from the conference so plan on that when you pack.  If you're able to wear XL t-shirts figure you'll get 3-4 free ones at the conference.
• Bring chargers and a power strip.  Outlets in the conference center are at a premium so be a friend and bring a power strip.

Hope to see you all there, if you're not registered yet, you still have time.  Just click here.

Still Undecided About Cisco Live? Take a Sneak Peek!

If you still aren't convinced to go to Cisco Live! this year in San Diego, perhaps a sneak peek at two of the courses will help.

BRKRST-2311P - IPv6 Planning, Deployment and Troubleshooting

(1 Hour)  Presented by Jim Bailey - Technical Leader, Cisco

April 21st

10:00am PDT / 12:00pm CDT/1:00pm EDT

This session covers IPv6 deployment and operational considerations. It begins with how network administrators can plan, design and implement an IPv6 solution, using a network readiness approach and holistic Network Architecture Strategy.

For more information and how to view the session, click here.

BRKRST-2311P - IPv6 Planning, Deployment and Troubleshooting

(1 Hour)  Presented by  Amanda Whaley - Cisco DevNet Developer Experience Lead and Community Manager, Cisco and Ashley Roach - API Architect, Cisco 

April 29th

10:00am PDT / 12:00pm CDT/1:00pm EDT

Are you new to coding ? This session will get you started using REST APIs and Python. We will cover coding basics and create some simple examples that retrieve, parse and display JSON data using the Cisco APIC-EM REST API’s.

For more information and how to view the session, click here.

Still not convinced???

If you register before June 5th, you can save $200 on registration.  It's going to be a great conference full of human networking as well as computer networking.  Here are some highlights:

• Sessions, Sessions, Sessions!!! Drink from the fire hose of knowledge.
• Meet the Expert Meet and talk 1 on 1 with a Cisco Engineer
• World of Solutions Explore the solutions of Cisco and their ecosystem partners.
• Aerosmith! Come rock out at the Customer Appreciation Event
• Keynotes Come listen to Mike Rowe and others.

Once you sign up, be sure to also sign up with the Official Unofficial Twitter List maintained by +Tom Hollingsworth aka @networkingnerd

It's Dirty Work, But Somebody's Gotta Do It

Network Engineers are known to have to work in dirty places like under desks, janitors closets (err I mean network closets), and those weird spaces in mechanical rooms in which someone decided to hide a switch or two.  Nothing though in networking compares with some of the jobs that this year's Cisco Live! keynote speaker has done.  He's cleaned poo, made snakes vomit and even greased the crawler for the US Space Shuttle.  

That's right, this year's keynote speaker is none other than the host of Dirty Jobs and Somebody's Gotta Do It, Mike Rowe!  If you haven't followed Mike recently, he's also started his own foundation Mike Rowe Works.  His goal is to bring back the notion that hard work can achieve greatness without the need for a formal higher education.  

His foundation is working to revitalize vocational training in the United States and train people for the over three million jobs that are open because of a lack of skilled labor.  Take Mike's S.W.E.A.T. Pledge today that Skill and Work Ethic Aren't Taboo.

Mike's speech should be humorous, yet poignant and very educational.  If you haven't already registered for Cisco Live!, what are you waiting for? I mean really, a week of awesome training, new and old friends, Mike Rowe and Aerosmith, can you really beat it?

Cisco Live! Social Media Hangout

Cisco's commitment to social media at Cisco Live! has grown steadily.  This year they're announcing a new Cisco Live! Bus Stop gathering area on the beautiful San Diego Bay for social media gatherings.  Below is an artist rendering of what it might look like.  More details to come as we get closer to June.  Definitely stop by and introduce yourself to your fellow Tweeps, Bloggers and Facebookers.  Put a real name with the avatar and handle.  Oh and if you haven't registered yet.... do it!

Cisco Livin' On the Edge!

Cisco Live! is always a great week of training, networking and socializing, but this year is going to put us on the edge. The Customer Appreciation Event band is always one of the things most anticipated in the lead up to the event. This year Cisco has done a wonderful job of bringing us a band that has managed to span decades and still keep going. Without further adieu... the band this year will be ...

So if you haven't already registered for Cisco Live! do it this weekend and get a grip on early bird pricing before it expires!  It's going be a blast and you don't wanna miss a thing.

Linksprinter

Last fall I had the pleasure of winning a Fluke Networks LinkSprinter 200 network tester on Twitter.  Since then it has become my go to tool.

In my environment, I have a lot of links that are poorly labeled and that are on VLANs without DHCP.  This means having to tone out or trace cables when the desktop team or server team comes to me wanting something moved to another VLAN.  That's where the LinkSprinter has been a life saver.  Now when they come to my desk, I just hand them the LinkSprinter and tell them to press the power button once they hook up the cable and wait until it either gives them a red icon or a green solid cloud.  

When they bring it back, I plug it into my spare port and within a minute I have their port reports in my e-mail.  From those reports I can easily see the CDP information and know exactly what port on what switch needs changing.  The tool also tells me about POE, speed, duplex, dhcp and latency to a cloud target.  In the field of course, I also have made use of the wireless feature to see the results instantly on my iPhone.  

I used to carry my OneTouch AT with me a lot more, but I have found the LinkSprinter to replace the OneTouch AT for many smaller daily jobs.  Both its size and its price make it a perfect tool for every engineer and technician.  My organization is currently reviewing the idea of issuing our desktop support team with LinkSprinters to help decrease problem resolution time.

If you haven't bought one, I highly suggest you head over to Amazon and get yours today.

Cisco ONE, Panacea or Another Headache?

Cisco formally announced Cisco ONE today/yesterday at Cisco Live! Milan.  At face value Cisco ONE will allow customers to buy Cisco's software and related licenses separate from hardware.  It seems to me that this could be very beneficial to customers.

One major benefit that I see is that it would appear that licenses will be easily portable between old and new hardware.  This means no more purchasing a new set of ASA licenses just because you're upgrading from a 5512-X to a 5525-X for capacity.  All of the licenses will just move to the new box.  Same would apply to a wireless controller or even switches.  

The other major benefit that I see is that purchasing software might be easier.  One of the goals of this program is to simplify by not needing 100 part numbers just to get the right software for a device.

My only concern is that this could become a similar nightmare to maintaining Cisco SmartNet or Microsoft Enterprise Agreements.  Hopefully Cisco quickly provides tools to help with inventory and transitioning to both partners and customers.

2014 in Review... and 2015 in Preview

Well another year is in the books.  Last year I made a career move and went from being the solo network and voice guy to being part of a large team of network engineers.  The change has been good for me both professionally and personally.

Professionally I'm getting to work with a lot of new technologies due to scope and scale of my new company.  Technologies that I used to scratch my head about why anyone would need them (OTV comes to mind) are now things I use daily.

Personally I can finally take a vacation and not worry about getting called.  It's nice to get completely away from work and not have to worry.  My wife seems to like the change too.  

Twenty fifteen has started off with a bang too as I have finally passed SWITCH, ROUTE, and TSHOOT to earn the CCNP Routing and Switching.  I started this path over four years ago so I ended up having to retake SWITCH this month to get everything within the three year window.  It took two tries, but after missing on the first try this month by 20 points I solidly passed this past Friday.  One thing that I've learned from this is that I need firm deadlines.  Thank you Cisco for changing the CCNP Routing and Switching exams at the end of this month!  

As for the rest of the year, well I'm working on scheduling out the rest of my planned studying and tests so that I have firm dates.  I plan on paying the fee and scheduling the exam right as I start studying to give me motivation.  First on the list is ARCH to complete the CCDP.  After that my manager has me looking at CCNA Voice followed by CCNP Voice as we're planning a 5-6 year conversion from Avaya to Cisco although I may take a slight detour to CCNA Datacenter at some point since Nexus and UCS are fresh in my list of new skills.

So basically I plan to keep learning and growing.  Pretty good goals in my book.  If I ever stop learning, I best be in the ground.

HOWTO: Beat the Capture Portal to Get Your Gadgets Online

The average person has something like 1.5-2 wireless devices according to most studies.  I'm going to extrapolate that the average geek has more on the order of 3.5-4.  When we travel, our gadgets become our lifeline to our normal home life.

On a recent business trip, I left town with my iPhone 5, Nexus 7, laptop, and Chromecast (I only take the Roku on longer trips.).  This trip though was my first with the TP-Link WR-710N travel router.  I bought this on a whim when it came up for cheap on Lifehacker's daily deals.  My initial thought was that I could set it up identically to my home SSID and plug in the hotel's wired port.

At this particular hotel though, there were no wired ports so I had to use another feature of this router.  It has a WiSP (Wireless Service Provider) option for it to use for WAN/Internet.  After configuring the WiSP interface to connect to the strongest AP for the hotel's SSID, I hooked up my laptop to my home SSID and answered the captive portal once.  From there all of the rest of my devices jumped on with no problem.

Another feature of using my own router is that I was guaranteed that communication between my iPhone and the Chromecast would be supported.  Unfortunately there was one downside to the WiSP interface.  It insisted on being configured to connect to only one BSSID which meant if the AP went down it wouldn't roam automatically to a better signal.  I've looked into using DD-WRT instead of the built in firmware to get around this, but so far it seems that this particular model is not DD-WRT supported.  All in all, my solution worked and I look forward to giving it some more road tests.

Panduit Blanking Curtain

Panduit dropped off a new toy... err tool today.  It's a sample of their new blanking curtain.  Instead of a slew of 1U or so panels to attach to a rack, it's 4U that expands up to 45U.  Of course it only works if you are blanking contiguous areas.

It was a breeze to install and it is supposed to work in both square and round hole racks.  Changing the size as you add servers to the bottom of the rack is a tool less 10 second procedure.  All in all, I think it's a great new product for data center air containment.

Installed!

Deployed!

How to Explain "the Cloud" to a Non-Techie

Tonight my cousin called me to ask for help with his business computing class.  The topic was the cloud or blah blah cloud.  He wanted to know what exactly the cloud is.

This really got me thinking.  I work with both private and public clouds daily in my personal life and career, but I couldn't at first define what exactly a cloud was in non-technical terms.

The best analogy I came up with was an apartment complex.  Renters don't need the space or resources of a whole house.  But the landlord could take on the infrastructure (ie the structure, plumbing, electrical) and the maintenance and rent units of housing to the renters.  

Anyone have a better way of explaining it?  How about the differences between public, private and hybrid clouds?  

Update... or Did Ben Fall Off the Face of the Earth?

I haven't written much since June 2013.  The first few months I can blame on a project at work.  I finally got approval to replace the aging Rolm phone system at the hospital with a shiny new Cisco phone system.  After months of planning, training and worrying we went live November 1st.  Being that the old system couldn't support a T1 to bridge to the new system, we did the cut over as a flash cut having staged the phones earlier in the week.  Overall things went well except for under estimating how long 400+ analog lines take to move and a glitch with the telco.

After the phone project had settled down, I turned back to taking care of my family.  My wife, dogs and I had been rather unhappy for some time in our current house and town.  So that led me to put out my resume and find a new job. 

This spring I changed jobs to a multi-state hospital system headquartered in the next town down on the Interstate.  It's been a great career move and I'm getting to work with a lot of technology that I would never have had access to in my previous position (UCS, Nexus, OTV, and others).  Unfortunately the house has been harder to sell than we thought, but we're hopeful that by next year that too will pass and we'll be moved down the road.

So now my plans for the rest of the year.

1. Pass TSHOOT before the exam changes.
2. Dive deep into datacenter technologies.
3. Figure out ways to make my commute productive time. 

Neuron: Using grep to return the matched text

I'm working on retiring an old 3080 Cisco VPN Concentrator.  As part of this I'm trying to figure out which L2L tunnels are still in use.  I have the device logging to syslog so it's just a matter of doing some analysis.

One of the things I wanted to do was to return just the part of the syslog that looks like this:

(L2L: <L2L Tunnel Name>)

Obviously I could grep '(L2L: .*)' filename.txt and get all of the lines that have that matched.  But that still left a lot of gunk I didn't need.  Thankfully grep has an answer.  Adding the -o switch to grep results in just the matched text being returned.  I was then able to pipe this to sort and then uniq to get my list of tunnels that had been accessed.

grep -o '(L2L: .*)' filename.txt | sort | uniq

Now comes the hard part of getting contact information for the old tunnels. 

Neuron: Batch File + Excel FTW!

Excel is every network engineer's favorite way to organize lists of IPs for documentation, even though they wish they had a better solution.  Have you ever needed to add a large amount of IPs that happen to be in order?  There is a better way than typing them by hand.

So let's say you need to list out 10.10.10.1 - 10.10.10.240...

C:>for /l %i in (1 1 240) do echo 10.10.10.%i > outfile.txt


This produces a text file with an IP per line.  Copy and past that into an excel column and you're done.  If you need something more fun like say 10.10.10.0/30 - 10.10.10.252/30 you can change the first number in the parentheses to 0, the second number to 2 and the third to 252.  The syntax is that the first is the start for %i, the second is the amount to increment and the third is the stopping point.

Mind the Gap... Between VoIP and Analog

Around five years ago my company made the decision that at some point in the future we would be replacing our phone system with a VoIP system.  As part of that decision we decided that it was no longer smart to run separate voice and data wiring on new projects.  This led us to a problem of how to make the connection between data patch panels and the existing voice 66 blocks.

Unfortunately we didn't go straight to the solution we are using now.  Our first solution was to take voice cross connect wire and terminate it with an 8p8c connector on one end and then punch down the other end to the 66 block.  For one or two links, this solution worked ok, but scaling the solution ended up with a rat's nest of cross connect cables.  

The next solution was basically the same as the first only we using CAT6 patch cables with one 8p8c cut off.  It was easier to keep the cabling neater, but it still didn't scale well as the thicker cables got in the way on the 66 blocks.

Finally we came to the solution that I want to share.  We started buying Panduit 24 port 1 pair voice panels.  These panels have a RJ-21 connector on the back that splits a 25 pair cable into 24 RJ45 jacks with 1 pair connected to pins 4 and 5 of each jack.  When combined with a 25-pair amphenol cable and a prewired 66 block, it makes a very modular and convenient way to bridge the gap between data and analog voice cabling. In this configuration I often put the voice panel with my switches as it serves as a "voice switch" in the rack. 

During the last five years this has served well and I believe that it will also help support our large analog deployment that will remain with our new VoIP system.  Hopefully our trial and error will help someone else out.

How to Waste an Entire Day Troubleshooting One Phone... and Then Fix It in Less Than 5 Seconds

So last week was a short one for me with the combination of the 4th of July holiday and some vacation time.  Unfortunately the last working day ended up being a rather long and frustrating day.  

Around 9am a ticket came in that one of the managers' phones was dead.  Keeping in mind that my phone system is an ancient Rolm/Siemens 9751 system, I started with the assumption of hardware failure.  My first step was to try a known good phone on the line.  Nope, still dead as a door nail.  I also tried changing the line to a different port on the system fearing that the line card could be the problem, but that also failed to change anything.

By this time I was figuring on a cabling issue.  Over the next 4 hours or so I toned and re-terminated the cabling from the phone to the PBX.  Normally this wouldn't take this long, but I kept getting tone to the phone, but the phone still refused to work so I kept repeating and segmenting the process.  Finally I believed that I had isolated the problem as being between the last IDF and the phone jack itself.

At this point in the day, the manager had already left for the day so I had to get the plant engineering director to unlock the office for me.  My plan was to re-terminate the phone jack hoping that there was a short in the wall jack.  The plant engineering director was a bit intrigued by my day of troubleshooting so he stuck around to help me move the desk out of the way.  As we were doing this, he started to trace where the line left the room and noticed that it when through a box on the wall with a switch.  I flipped the switch and bam, the phone worked again.  He explained that he recognized the switch as an old line switch (to switch a single line phone from one line to another) because his father used to work for the phone company.  

So now, that others may learn from my day of troubleshooting, here is what the switch looked like, after I added some labels for the future.  My lesson, expect the unexpected.

Phone Switch

Neuron: Using the ESXi CLI to Fix a VMK0 Mistake

In VMWare ESX, the management traffic for the host is sent to the interface vmk0 which is a virtual interface.  This morning while troubleshooting another vmk* interface because of a vMotion problem, I accidentally changed the dvsPortGroup (VLAN) on vmk0.  As soon as that took effect, the host was not able to be seen by vCenter.  Thankfully the guest VMs continued to run without any failure.  

Now came a chicken and the egg problem.  I needed to change the dvsPortGroup on vmk0 back, but I couldn't access the host using vCenter until vmk0 was back online.  This led me to Google to find a way to accomplish the same thing using the CLI on the individual host.  This article pointed me in the right direction for the commands.

What I ended up doing was the following:

1. Lookup the DVPort number using esxcfg-vmknic -l command.  As you can see below the DVPort currently used by a VMK* interface is easily found in the output.

2. Lookup the DVPort of a free port in the distributed vSwitch (in our case a Nexus 1000V) in the proper port group using vCenter. 

3. Delete the existing vmk* nic by using the command:

esxcfg-vmknic -d -s DVSwitch_name -p DVPort

4. Recreate the vmk* nic by using the command below with the DVPort found in step 2.

esxcfg-vmknic -a -s DVSwitch_name -p DVPort -i IPAddress -n NetMask

At this point I had my vmk0 back with the proper IP and VLAN so I was able to reconnect the host to vCenter and all was well.  The moral of the story is be careful what you're clicking on.

Cisco Live! 2013 Notable Keys to Know!

Cisco Live! is Cisco's annual customer conference.  I try to go as often as possible simply because it's the best training bang for the buck that I've found when it comes to Cisco's technologies.  Each day of the conference is started off with a keynote speech and this year Cisco is going with the following speakers.

First on Monday evening before the conference officially begins will be the Solutions Keynotes.  These keynotes will feature senior Cisco engineering experts speaking about the various product lines and their futures.  

Cisco Chief Executive Officer John Chambers

On Tuesday morning the conference officially begins with Cisco CEO John Chambers giving his annual keynote.  Mr. Chambers is always an engaging speaker and lays out where things have been and where they are going.  This year he will be joined with Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior.  Traditionally Mr. Chambers' key note tends to be heavy with facts and figures in complicated power point slides, but what he says is generally inspiring and interesting in my opinion.  I'm hoping that this year will be less about pandering to the news media and stockholders and more about the customers which make up the majority of the audience.

Cisco Chief Technology Officer Padmasree Warrior

Padmasree usually gets the technology keynote on Tuesday so it will be interesting to see what she will be presenting this year.  She is definitely a visionary when it comes to looking at new technologies.  Unfortunately compared to the Cisco Chief Demonstration Officer Jim Grubb she comes across as rather boring at times.  I'm really hoping that a Jim Grubb demo with Mr. Chambers is still in the works for Monday.

Wednesday has often been my favorite of the Cisco given keynotes.  This keynote is generally the demo of some new technology or a way of integrating existing Cisco technologies in a particular vertical.  This is generally where any big announcements of new products are made.  This year Robert Lloyd, Cisco's President of Development and Sales, will be making his Cisco Live! keynote debut.  To be honest his name wasn't on my radar until I got the information on this keynote so I look forward to seeing what he's like as a speaker.  Especially with the blogosphere buzz about him being a potential successor to long time Cisco CEO John Chambers.

Ok, so finally here is the keynote that everyone is really wondering about.  The Thursday celebrity keynote.  In the past we have been graced by the likes of John Cleese, William Shatner, and last year the Mythbusters Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage.  And this year the celebrity keynote speaker is...

Sir Richard Branson

Sir Richard Branson.  He is the founder and chairman of the Virgin Group which includes Virgin Records, Virgin Airlines, and my personal favorite Virgin Galactic.  Virgin Galactic competed in and won the Asari X-Prize to build a craft to ferry three people into space and be able to be returned to space again within 2 weeks.  I am expecting a very good keynote from Sir Richard.

Finally Carlos Dominguez will once again be the host leading us through the conference and the various keynotes.  He has a great stage presence to fire up the crowd every time he gets out there.  Last year I was lucky enough to meet him after one of the keynotes and found him as personable in person as he was on stage.  Keep an eye on his Facebook and Twitter posts as he'll probably be touring Orlando and giving away things prior to Cisco Live!

My Cisco Live! plans for this year are barely in shifting sands, but I'm really hoping to be there again.