On the Frontline

Never mind the quality...

Louise Simmons — Tue, 24 May 2011 09:26:37 GMT

I am having a bit of a nightmare with a Service Provider, which, for its own protection, shall remain nameless, over a so-called QoS-enabled MPLS WAN. A fairly sizeable UK public sector organisation has been having problems with an IPT...

What price resilience?

Louise Simmons — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 12:48:14 GMT

Do you ever feel that, despite your best efforts, things just conspire against you? You really make the effort to design and build your network for resilience, you dual-home all your switches, provide two WAN links into all your remote...

Fast BGP: Whatever next?

Louise Simmons — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 02:54:54 GMT

I used to be not that fond of BGP as a routing protocol—it just struck me as too complicated and scary. Then I had to spend a lot of time with it and it became a firm favourite. In fact...

Just because you can doesn't mean you should

Louise Simmons — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 13:46:41 GMT

I have been doing some work on a WAN design for a large private sector communications organisation. As usual, the difficult bit has been pinning them down as to what they really need (not want - need) to support their...

There and Back Again

Louise Simmons — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 00:40:54 GMT

Something I’ve often had to remind people—especially when they’re starting out in networking—is that it’s very much a two-way street. Traffic has to get from one end of your network to the other—but it has to be able to get...

Access list nightmares

Louise Simmons — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:31:47 GMT

I own a chainsaw—well, I live in the country, and for a bit of light relief from networking, I chop logs and cut (small) trees down for our stove. I have never yet cut a branch off a tree while...

Why techies shouldn't do budget planning

Louise Simmons — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 15:18:25 GMT

With a lot of the projects I work on, I have to do the overall design, detailed configs and the bill of materials. It’s always a fine line between trying to spec out the best network I can, and not...

Too clever for its own good?

Louise Simmons — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 08:25:38 GMT

Sometimes it’s the most basic things that catch you out. We were recently doing some Proof of Concept testing for a large (non-UK) bank that wanted to model part of its international MPLS WAN with a view to providing Layer...

When is a wire not a wire?

Louise Simmons — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 01:25:06 GMT

In the olden days of serial and coax connections, it was dead simple for network kit to figure out if a connection went down. Everything was direct point to point, and if a cable broke or an interface failed, you...

How much bandwidth do you need?

Louise Simmons — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 01:25:22 GMT

I’m doing some work for a customer who is moving people from one building to another, and using the opportunity to move them to some newer technology. Virtual desktops, a new printing methodology, and more emphasis on collaboration tools. The...

Why is your change my problem?

Louise Simmons — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 11:25:57 GMT

I sometimes wonder if we couldn’t sue Service Providers under the Trades Description Act. I really don’t think they have the same idea of ‘Service’ as I do. One of my customers has been having intermittent problemsfor months with multicast...

Cisco, machismo and the LAN

Louise Simmons — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 10:45:23 GMT

This is just the best story. I just have to share it. A colleague has just come back from doing some network testing with a potential customer down in Cisco’s offices by Heathrow. Cisco has a set of Customer Proof-of-Concept...

Fix it, don't fake it

Louise Simmons — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:45:03 GMT

Are we all under too much pressure to get projects in and working as quickly as possible, or can we just not be bothered doing a really careful, precise job any more? Or is there some fundamental lack of understanding...

Salesman-driven design?

Louise Simmons — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:35:51 GMT

Good design practice, quite rightly, dictates that network design should be driven by business needs, not technology. Unfortunately there’s a more prevalent form of (bad) network design we have to contend with. I’ve helped out with a WAN design...

xxx

Louise Simmons — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 15:45:23 GMT

xxxxxxxxx...

How about we spread things out a bit?

Louise Simmons — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 15:24:07 GMT

Recently I was helping out a big UK finance house with some Data Centre network upgrades and just generally having a look at how they’d set things up and if it could be improved. On paper it looked not too...

Salesman-driven design?

Richard Plant — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:20:28 GMT

Please stop blaming my firewall

Louise Simmons — Fri, 28 May 2010 15:31:40 GMT

I’ve just had another of those “your firewall’s not working” calls. What a way to start the day. The scenario this time: large UK service provider running multiple hosted applications in several Internet Data Centres across the country. Application developer...

When it comes to router features, less is more

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:49:06 GMT

The other week I had a bit of a rant about people not spending enough time configuring network devices—basically letting the networks do their own thing. I should have known better.Last week I was in seeing a company that wanted...

Who is in control of your network?

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:12:50 GMT

If you want something done well, do it yourself. That holds equally true for machines as it does for other people. Just because your network equipment is theoretically capable of operating with sometimes minimal input from you, doesn’t mean that...

Stop this 'my uptime is longer than yours' nonsense

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:24:12 GMT

A very large financial institution recently wanted to install some new line cards in several of its Catalyst 6509 switches. It should have been a simple procedure. It turned into a nightmare. Because of this…switch# show versionCisco Internetwork Operating System...

Timing is everything

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:25:58 GMT

Timing is everything. Okay, there are maybe a few ways you can interpret that statement, but I’m talking about network timing here. Remember when you just set clocks locally on network devices, so they had a rough idea what day...

Testing times

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:06:41 GMT

I’ve just had a bit of a run-in with some application developers. I know; it’s happened before, and will probably happen again. But do they have to keep breaking my network?Couple of weeks ago, we got a call from one...

A quick lesson in network management

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:42:38 GMT

Why is that we can get the budget (albeit it after a struggle) to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds on new network infrastructure, and can’t get that little bit extra to buy the software to manage it?...

Pick an IP address... go on, any IP address

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 14:38:03 GMT

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The trouble with making systems easy to configure is that people who have no business putting IT in their job title anywhere, suddenly think they can manage networks, servers and applications, and they’re...