In Praise of Vendor Lock-In
There is one really nice thing about having a blog whose readership consists mainly of car insurance spambots: I don’t have to feel guilty when I don’t post anything for a while. I had started a series on...
Read MoreTAC Tales #11: Full up
No customer is happy if they have to reboot one of their Internet-facing routers periodically, and this was one of our biggest customers. (At HTTS, they were all big customers.) This customer had a GSR connecting to the...
Read MoreProgrammability for Network Engineers
Since I finished my series of articles on the CCIE, I thought I would kick off a new series on my current area of focus: network programmability. The past year at Cisco, programmability and automation have been my focus, first...
Read MoreTAC Tales #10: Out to Lunch
When you work at TAC, you are required to be “on-shift” for 4 hours each day. This doesn’t mean that you work four hours a day, just that you are actively taking cases only four hours per day. The other four...
Read MoreCisco DCNM 10 Overlay Provisioning Part 2
Introduction My role at Cisco is transitioning to enterprise so I won’t be working on Nexus switches much any more. I figured it would be a good time to finish this article on DCNM. In my previous article, I talked about...
Read MoreThe value of a CCIE
In the final post in my “Ten Years a CCIE” series, I take a look at the age-old question: Is a CCIE really worth it? I conclude the series with some thoughts on the value of this journey. I’ve written this...
Read MoreWhy certifications can suck
Ivan Peplnjak referenced a piece by Robert Graham called “Why cybersecurity certifications suck,” which I found amusing considering that I am doing some question writing right now. I’ve certainly been a member...
Read MoreTAC Tales #9: Left Hanging
When I was still a new engineer, a fellow customer support engineer (CSE) asked a favor of me. I’ll call him Andy. “I’m going on PTO, could you cover a case for me? I’ve filed a bug and while I’m...
Read MoreTAC Tales #8: The problem with data
My job as a customer support engineer (CSE) at TAC was the most quantified I’ve ever had. Every aspect of our job performance was tracked and measured. We live in the era of big data, and while numbers can be helpful,...
Read MoreCisco DCNM 10 Overlay Provisioning
Introduction I’ve been side-tracked for a while doing personal articles, so I thought it would be a good time to get back to some technical explanations. Seeing that I work for Cisco now, I thought it would be a good time...
Read MoreTAC Tales #7: “Just slam it in!”
When I first started at TAC, I wasn’t allowed to take cases by myself. If I grabbed a case, I had to get an experienced engineer to help me out. One day I grabbed a case on a Catalyst 6k power supply, and asked Veena...
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