On the Frontline

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...