Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

$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.

Attempting (in my scatterbrained manner) to cover all the bases of an interesting issue I encountered recently and failed to fix without assistance. It illustrates why I’m not a CCIE yet, and why, no matter what you see, you shouldn’t assume anything when working through odd issues.

A revisit to an earlier post and why what I outlined there was a bad idea. Using Bank Chaining, while allowing you to use more banks for ACLs, has its penalties …

Two things covered in this post: what I learned about how “auto-summary” on RIPv2 works, and also some particulars about RIPv2 (and possibly other routing protocols) and how it advertises routes to neighbors.

Cisco Live 2015. Yeah, there are things I can say about it that are negative. But even with all that, it was, for me, the best so far. Here’s my review and a few pictures …

Just a couple of notes for myself that Google didn’t make as clear as it should have for me.

Restating what I’ve pulled from other sources, and clarifying that there actually is a difference. It’s commonly said that “E2 routes will not include path cost,” but that’s an oversimplification of the difference and a somewhat misleading statement, because, in some cases, path cost is considered. Here’s the scoop.