Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

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.

A) A Week With Friends
B) Summer Camp

C) A Learning Experience

D) Cisco Live 2016

E) All Of The Above

It’s been my experience that “ip access-group <acl> in” is rarely used. Most of the time, people look at the “out” form of the command. In this post, I will explain how to view the different directionality of the “in” vs “out” and then review the issues that you can encounter with respect to DHCP and HSRP when it comes to ending an “in” ACL with a “deny all” at the end.

Related to my previous post about “The Network As A System”, during my time on call, I got another request that stated: “I need a port opened between 10.0.0.24 and 10.0.0.56. I know they’re on the same subnet, but I’m getting timeouts when trying to connect between them.”

The thing is, they weren’t on the same subnet.

We have an on call rotation at $JOB where, for a week, a given engineer is responsible for responding to after hours phone calls as well as tickets and ACL requests. During a recent turn of mine with the football, I got an ACL request that didn’t make sense, and after working it through with the DB Admin that made the request, I figured I’d write this. It’s sad that it’s probably mostly networking people that read the blog, because they already understand everything this will explain. It’s the DBAs, Developers, and other IT support personnel that could benefit from what I go over here.

$JOB’s Cacti multi-server infrastructure has been running fine on Cacti 0.8.8b and UnifiedTrees 0.8. However, Cacti 0.8.8f is out and the trees are done quite differently. It’s time to update $JOB’s Cacti infrastructure and to make UnifiedTrees compatible, it had to undergo some major changes.

$JOB is getting into some new and interesting stuff; stuff that, if you’re not an Internet Service Provider, could be a bit of a black box to you; you might be used to your ISP saying “Here’s a cable, your equipment is on the other end”. Here’s what we’ve been working on and what I’ve been able to make of it so far.

In which I regale you with a tale involving the salacious behavior of the Catalyst 6500 when compared to the more chaste Nexus 7K line.

We ran into a “time” situation at work, and I learned quite a bit about how NTPD works, and what exactly all the information in ntpq means. This has to do with the “Leap Second” that was instituted on June 30, 2015.