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.