Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

So my source at Cisco Live 2018 (who I think we all dearly love but also still are quite scared of) has sent me some more information.  It’s a veritable cornucopia of information, including tidbits about the the Customer Appreciation Event (CAE) bands (yes, plural), Cisco Store, Social Media Hub (including important times to be around), and even more about the Social Responsibility Opportunities.  So, in order of importance to me (interspersed with what people have actually been asking me about), here’s the new info!

So yes – spending a lot of time with the new load balancers and finding out all sorts of things about their operation I didn’t know about, that (at least in this case) were fairly easy to fix.

The thing is carrying actual, important, production traffic now.  Most if it is short lived web-based stuff; short enough that the transfer completes well before a failed session establishment on the firewall is noticed.  But someone was noticing, and it took me doing many packet captures to figure out exactly what was going wrong (and realize it was actually my fault).

One of my worst weaknesses as a network admin is that (mostly due to a weird conflux of laziness and time restrictions) I tend to not read up on a topic as much as I should before I implement; or at the very least, I don’t retain what I do read and put certain settings in without considering that there might be serious ramifications. Such is the case with vPC; I don’t know it as well as I should, and I trust it even less, but it’s being used in our data center (DC) networks heavily. So it was that during the load balancer migration I’m in the middle of, I came across a case where vPC made a packet capture lie.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. If I’m not busy at work, I’m avoiding anything related to work. One issue I’ve been working on for a long time has involved a load balancer migration from one vendor to another. I ran into an issue which was brought about by the new vendor claiming our configuration was supported … only to find later on that it was not. This is not wholly their fault – we’ve been doing load balancing in possibly an unusual way for quite some time. Read on for the hows and they whys, and why you occasionally have to watch out for Ethernet doing exactly what Ethernet does.

Yes, it’s been a year, and I haven’t really touched the site all that much. But as Cisco Live is right around the corner, I did the Internet version of meeting in a dark parking garage with a source, and got some information about Cisco Live 2018. Check out the scoop!

Cisco Live was in Las Vegas again this year, and it was hotter (in more ways than the weather) than last year! I learned quite a bit and had a lot of fun. But fair is fair: There are things I would like to see changed. Still – if you’re a networking professional that touches Cisco equipment, going to Cisco Live is a benefit you can’t ignore.

So – I’m going this year. Flight, hotel, classes all booked (just need to squeeze in possibly a CCNP TSHOOT exam and I’m all set). But I have some news hot off the presses: I know who’s going to be giving the closing keynote! And of course, some additional social gaming has been added to this year’s event.

While not for certain yet, it’s at least in the plans that I go this year. Cisco Live is once again in Las Vegas this year, so read on for my preview, advice, and some official information courtesy of the Cisco Live team!

My loving wife, with her birthday fast approaching, caught word of these things and wanted a set for herself. I of course figured I’d get us both a set and see what they were like.

I was waiting for my Pebble Time 2 Kickstarter reward when the word came down: Pebble was stopping all hardware production and being sold to Fitbit. In a moment of weakness I spent way too much money on an Apple Watch. Here’s my review after one day.