I was working with a Cisco 9372TX switch, and on it I had two 40Gbps uplinks that we where using out of the available four. Talking with our VAR because we where planning on connecting in additional equipment that only supported SFP+ interfaces. So the solution was to connect to this switch with QSFP to SFP+ adapters.
I got my hands on some Cisco Firepower 4100 units and after playing around with them I wanted to reset them to factory settings, essentially erase the "startup-config" on the FXOS. The Firepower units act a little differently than your normal Cisco IOS or ASA and you can't just erase startup-config and reload the device, that would be too easy.
If you ever needed a TFTP or an anonymous FTP server to transfer files, logs, or crash debugs to and from your network devices it can be a little tricky if you don't have anything setup. There are some free quick programs out there if you are in a pinch for one-time transfers but if you ever wanted to have something in infrastructure that is ready to go for this kind of stuff just follow this tutorial below.
It's been a little more than year in the making since I passed my last Cisco exam the 640-911 but I finally did it and passed the 640-916. I can now call myself CCNA Data Center Certified. :) If you ever get the chance to take go up Data Center route it really is interesting of all the products and services Cisco has in their portfolio. Cisco UCS, OTV, Fabicpath and FCoE are just really cool technologies to learn about.
If you are studying any Cisco Data Center certs this tool might come in handy for some hands on learning. The Cisco UCS emulator is a VM you can spin up in VMware Workstation,Fusion or in ESXi. This emulator can be helpful in understanding the UCS platform and UCS manager. You are able to push policies and alter configurations and even import/export these configurations into and out of the "real" world to apply them/test them.
I still consider myself a rookie in this field even though I started my "official" career in the Network/IT space 5 years ago. Why is that? Is part of the reason because of the rapid push that applications are demanding from the infrastructure? For example if we want XYZ app to be ready for testing today and production in a week how would you be able to stand that up manually? You can't, it really could take weeks to be ready for just testing and that doesn't fly anymore.
In this configuration I'm at looking at using Microsoft NPS 2012 R2 as radius server and I’m going to skip the installation of NPS because it really is just a next, next, finish installation. In this demo I already have this NPS system connected to a Windows domain, my goal is to create role based access on Cisco IOS routers while using radius to login. I’ll have a couple for active directory accounts each them will represent different types of allowed access to these IOS routers. One account will get full administrative access while the other will only get read access, how cool cat is that ;)
Well its 2016 and you still have that one-of-kind Cisco ISR 2811 or 3845 running in the environment? You followed and installed Rancid, all the new stuff works like it should but when you try to connect to that “one-of-kind” 2811 with Rancid it closes the connection... :/
Testing a network’s throughput is a good move, if you are testing a new service you stood up or making sure you getting what you paid for. iPerf is good free open source tool when there isn’t really a need to use commercial more expensive tools. In this short tutorial I’ll go over how to configure iPerf which is a CLI tool so let’s get started.
Let's start out 2016 with setting up a logging system called Graylog. If you have not used Graylog before then I encourage you to check it out. This is an open source log management system and is pretty flexible as it can capture, index and analyze almost anything. Once up and running this system can be scaled out for an enterprise wide log management system. High availability, clustered, and replicated is what Graylog thrives on. In this demo I am going to have two systems. One is the Graylog server, web server and will also have a Mongo database. The other system will be an Elasticsearch node which is what will have the actual data stored in and indexed. For bigger “production” ready setups you just scale this out to separate systems.