Over the past several years, the capacity planning area for IT professionals has become much more challenging when dealing with managing active switch ports. For most organizations, the challenge is threefold: The sheer number of ports requested has continued to grow year over year. The transient nature...

After the experience with a wedged router interface (see prior post: Cisco Router Interface Wedged ), several of us at Netcraftsmen were discussing etherchannel load balancing and what to recommend to customers and how to check the setting in network equipment. James Ventre made a very good point for...

The Baltimore-Washington area has been hit with several significant snow storms this winter and those storms have impacted the operations of a large metropolitan area network. Problems range from power outages at some sites to link problems between sites. The result is that a large number of interface...

A recent PCMag article by Larry Seltzer highlighted some of the security risks within routing infrastructures and how the uniquely named Chuck Norris botnet looks across network devices and finds default passwords as an entry point to spread harmful code or take control of devices. Even though this one...

On February 18th, TechCrunch confirmed that its leading blog site was completely down for almost two hours because the site's host, WordPress.com , had been crippled by an unscheduled routing change to a core router. TechCrunch is one of millions of blogs hosted on WordPress.com, and an estimated...

After my posting about the dangers of spanning Layer 2 between data centers in my blog titled Spanning Tree Protocol and Failure Domains , Shivlu Jain ( www.mplsvpn.info ) asked about handling requests to span Layer 2 between data centers. One of his concerns was how to handle HA (High Availability)...

As I write this, we're going through another "snow event", with a forecast of high winds and 10-20 inches of snow to top the 24-36 inches that fell a few days ago - over 67 inches so far this year, which has broken all snowfall records for Maryland. One of the network operations team sent...

Buffer tuning has long been an interesting topic for me. I recently found a blog post by Brough Turner, who wrote an interesting article about a potential misconfiguration of AT&T wireless routers that cause ping round trip times to be either < 200ms or around 8000ms (yes, 8 seconds!). http:/...

Have you ever had a Cisco router or switch shutdown due to a fan failure? While looking through NetMRI 's daily list of analysis issues, I found a Fan Failure issue (it is named "Device Fan Problem" in NetMRI's Analysis page). It was really interesting to me because a fan failure produces...

Eric Krapf , editor of No Jitter , leveraged Netcordia's 2010 Predictions of Top Causes of IT Headaches into a discussion on how virtualization can impact IP Telephony. I totally agree that voice will be one of the key applications where solid management was hard enough before virtualization, but...