Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

When asked what my test network looks like, I often say “Amazingly similar to my production network!” However, with CML, I’m able to have a fairly decent test network I can make with a little bit of time. And while, yes, there are ways to use Ansible to deploy inside of CML, I’m instead creating a small network (three switches/routers and an Ubuntu management server) in order to learn Ansible with no risk. You will find a link to the YAML for CML and instructions inside.

Ward Cobleigh from VIAVI and Chris Greer from Packet Pioneer presented at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live 2025 on using AI for PCAP analysis. In this post I review the results and conclusions, and provide some of my own observations. When I do my part, I am talking out of my butt here, so it’s not impossible that I’m way off the mark when I voice an opinion. I am also not an expert at AI, just a pessimistic network engineer, so that tends to color my viewpoint.

I’ve hit every year since 2013, and made it to San Diego this year for another Cisco Live! It was fun, but … there were some noticeable … “things” …

Work finally got me a licensed version of CML. There’s a free version out there that limits you to five Cisco devices, but a basic licensed version will get you 20 devices. Here’s my experiences so far.

Opengear was the one non-Cisco presentation for the Wednesday, June 5th presentation at Tech Field Day extra (#TFDx) of Cisco Live 2024 in Las Vegas this year …

In an effort to solidify concepts I might need to know for the exam, we look at things from a different point of view. Why Spanning-Tree bridge priorities are the way they are (at least in Cisco-land).

My experiences and review of Cisco Live 2023, including two of those days being spent with the Tech Field Day crew participating in Tech Field Day Extra. Also, a bit about me and why it took almost a month to get this review up.

Who is it? Well, let me just say it’s entirely possible that this year I’ll be staying all the way through to the end …

Registration is now open for Cisco Live 2023, including conference hotels. Here’s what I know so far … which is mainly just a summary of key points from the website.

Catchpoint and Kentik presented their solutions for network observability at Network Field Day 29. Both solutions seek to provide the necessary evidence to say “It’s not the network”, but with different philosophies. I try no to show too much opinion in this post as to which one seemed more complete to me, and encourage you to watch both presentations for yourself.