Author: Cisco Kits The Cisco router lab is one of the most difficult labs to build because it touches on so many different pieces of equipment. When you are building your Cisco CCNP lab, it is pretty easy as three Cisco routers and three Cisco switches will put you in …

Author: Andres Villalva Attending our weekly data center project meeting the other day, one of the network engineers was confronted with an incomplete action item against his name. He responded light heartedly by declaring that we were speaking to a ‘virtual instance’ of himself and that this particular instance had …

 The Twelve Days of Christmas Vacation for a Network Engineer (As sung to the tune of 12 days of Christmas) On the first day of Christmas Break my NETWORK gave to me A dead switch in my spanning tree On the 2nd day of Christmas Break my NETWORK gave to …

If you’re like me your biggest tool that you use day to day is Visio.  I use it constantly to create all of my network diagrams for every network I create. But what do you do if you don’t have Visio?!?!   Visio isn’t cheap software and not every network engineer …

Well it was bound to happen.  The CCIE has been de-throwned.  No longer is the CCIE the pinnacle of certifications.  There is a new cert in town and its name is Cisco Certified Architect. I’m actually kind of surprised its taken Cisco this long to come out with a certification …

Managing large network installation projects can be pretty daunting.  Keeping track of your progress and making sure you don’t miss any steps along the way is crucial.  ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) as well as Cisco’s PPDIOO both provide a network services lifecycle frame work to help ensure that when …

Need Visio Stencils? Have you ever been in the middle of a Visio diagram and realized you didn’t have a stencil for a particular Cisco network device?  Or how about needing Visio stencils for a Juniper or F5 load balancer?  Or any device in your data center? Wouldn’t it be …

With the advent of new technologies as well as the ability to have multi-layer switches at the access layer, Cisco is starting to change the game.  New network designs are pushing layer 3 routing out to the access switches creating a routed edge. Most campus and data center network designs …

Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting… Otherwise Known as AAA (triple A).  Most people who have had to implement AAA on a router or switch probably know very little about the commands they copy to the router config.  Most simply grab the AAA configs from another working router or switch and be …

Many engineers (at one time myself too) believe they understand wild card masks. If you ask someone they will most likely tell you that a wild card mask is just the opposite or reverse of a subnet mask. Unfortunately this isn’t quite correct. Yes, at first glance a wild card …