Network Management Systems (NMS) So what’s it all about and how can it help me? Well as a bit of a history lesson in the early 1980s saw a tremendous expansion in the area of network deployment. As companies realised the cost benefits and productivity gains created by network technology, they began …

I have recently been building a number of devices as well as reconfiguring some old devices form stores. One of the issues in reusing pre-configured devices is that you may not know the password. Easy you say if these are Cisco devices just following the password recovery procedure by going into …

I changed jobs 2 years ago and focus more on routing and switching (NMS/OSS now sits more on the hobby list) now so I decided to start up again on the Cisco certifications (thinking of others as well). This year I have completed CCDA, CCDP and just need to pass TSHOOT to gain full CCNP. I have …

During the building and configuration of a number of brand spanking new Cisco 6509’s with Sup720-3C I decided to convert them to VSS mode before updating the IOS (mainly due to laziness and only having console access). The conversion worked a treat however when I can to upgrade the IOS with ISSU I …

I have been meaning to put this one up for a while now, the end of April has reminded me of the April fools RFCs. Yes it is a bit sad to look forward to the April fool RFC – my favourite might well be the IP over Avian Carrier ones. I do think it is worth putting this one up again, especially on the …

During some recent work we discovered a very interesting bug with Cisco 6500 and specifically their WS-X6708-10GE and WS-X6716-10GE cards. When installing the cards into 6509 or 6513 chassis it can cause an existing module to reload so if you happen to have chosen slot 9-13 you have a issue. The 8th …

The other week I can across a very useful command after we had a failure to one of our Sup720 cards is a 6509’s. The card was replaced but during the boot-up it would keep on dropping back to ROMMON, however when you type ‘boot’ it would load as expected. When I was asked to have a look my immediate …

I have been hitting a bug with the version of code we are running on our Cisco SSLM which is holding up a project rollout, as a result TAC have provided a version that it is fix on. I decided to give it a whirl in the test lab however spent a rather long time trying to work out how you upgrade the …

A little while ago I can across an issue where connectivity from a customers site back to our data centre was lost. We had 2 routers on their site set up as a HSRP pair, the issue was that the primary routers circuit was having an issue which resulted in us loosing connectivity. As HSRP was …

I have recently been doing a fair bit of work on some DNS/DHCP appliances that are based on a version of RHEL, as a result I have started to use the Bash shell alot more. In the past on Solaris and HP-UX I have resorted to using KSH and had configured my .profile to pretty much work how I needed. …