In the Cisco World, Expect Anything
In January of 2011 I started a blog on wordpress.com. I originally I called it systemstechblog (not very original, right?) Since this was on wordpress.com, you can blog for free and so with that a writer was born! 😂
In March of 2011 the website changed names to ciscoskills.net. For a decade I really was just focused on Cisco products and configurations as well as at the time following my progress in Cisco certifications. It's a good history read but I eventually moved off the website in 2021 with Ten Years being my last post on the site.
I haven't done much with it since then, besides discontinue the domain of ciscoskills.net and copied over my content. Below are the posts that I wrote from 2011-2021. This blog has some useful info, but its also been aging...as with the technology I was talking about in that time.
This blog was the first and its not the last, this content helped me study and learn from where I am today, and its a part of this place so learn and enjoy some history.
A new year, a new plan and a new direction, its been ten years since I started this thing and I have to be honest I loved everything about it. 2020 was crazy... I think were getting close in seeing an ending, but everyone's life has been affected by this. My work/home life has changed. My priorities have shifted, and because of that this website is going to go static for a while with an unknown date of return. It's time for change.
It's like clock work...around this time the seasons are changing..autumn colors are out, and the colder air reminds us that things are changing around here, embrace it! One thing that I've been working with is AWS Transit gateways, a common theme this year is all cloud! AWS Transit Gateways make it easier to move towards that!
Something that I've been pondering while working from home and I think everybody is doing this... re-evaluating their priorities. I like to call it the loop, we get so caught into repetition...its our comfort when things are predictable but when something comes along and changes our lives, good or bad we have to adapt to those changes and potentially change our life direction.
I've been stuck in more ways then one this year...working from home indefinitely seems to be the status quo right now, and I'm in "tunnel" mode for most part. Most of these projects I'm working on all of common theme.. connect on-premise to more cloud resources! One way to do that is using VTIs. (Virtual Tunnel Interfaces) VTIs which are not new...been around for a bit, Cisco IOS had the feature available like 10+ years ago! We only got introduced into this technology with ASA when version 9.7 (2017) and above arrived....
Well..couple of things have changed these past months that have had a lasting impact on everyone on this earth. A single reminder that we all share a common home on this place, even though we sometimes think were world's apart from each other.
Every year I think about goals, either how to conquer them, reflect on them, and recently change them. We all have been there, we have a plan in our head that we follow for a handful of years or even decades... something happens... all of sudden things change. It's this change that I believe is so important to life, we can't and shouldn't be static, we have to change in order to grow ourselves.
Welcome Back ;) Think about this for a bit, its been years ago when we first configured the our Cisco FMCv in our virtual environment perhaps this is running for years with no problems. (Lucky us!) All of our firewalls connect to it, policies are pushed correctly, IPS rules are updated correctly and we even have URL filtering turned on some devices, and upgrades work out of the box, it just works, again lucky us! We have remote backups working but we never needed them...
Graylog has been through some changes last time I talked about them, hitting version 3.0 in February is awesome and one of things that make Graylog run well is Elasticsearch backend. Although Elasticsearch is not too hard to setup it usually runs better on bare metal, so there is cost of that as well as maintenance of the cluster is important, updates and upgrades. Depending your team experience you may not have time to learn it or run it the way it should be. That last thing you want is your logging setup to go down because of poor maintenance. So in this post we will walk though setting up a Graylog Server and using AWS Elasticsearch service for our backend. Without having a quick Elasticsearch cluster Graylog experience suffers, so let's get started.
Well we finally got an answer, Cisco is upping their Certifications and making some big changes. The CCNA track is taking a hit as all of the secondary exams under CCNA are being retired. If you are studying for any of these CCNA secondary exams keep in mind these won't transfer over after February 24th 2020. If you complete any current CCNA/CCDA certification before February 24, you’ll receive the new CCNA certification and a training badge in the corresponding technology area. (No idea what a training badge is)
If you are CCNP or trying to become one there are some migration tools to you can look at: CCNP Route Switch Migration Tool
Additional Information: Certifications - Training & Certifications - Cisco
Personally I think its a good thing but there is definitely a change, CCNA is the odd one out unfortunately. If you are in the programming space Cisco DevNet gets their own certification track in February 2020. This is something that Network Engineers have been dabbling in for a while now. More to come I'm sure ;)
So you have a this nice multiplayer switch, and want to take advantages of all of the features it has to offer. Well there are two different types interface ports on these type of switches. SVIs (Switched Virtual Interface) and "routed" ports, fundamentally they are same and clients/users wouldn't be able to tell if you were using/going through an SVI or a "routed" port. However they are different and in this post we'll talk about these two and when and were it would be recommended to place an SVI or a routed port.