I learned something new at CiscoLive: hsrp preempt delay and why it should be used. In the Resilient Campus Design session, the presenter discussed factors and configurations that make a network more resilient. HSRP is often used in campus networks as a first hop redundancy protocol. If one router or...

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...

I've done a number of network assessments in which I find that the customer insists on manually configuring the interfaces for full duplex. I did a little research on the topic and found an interesting paper by Jim Eggers and Steve Hodnett at Sun Microsystems ( http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0704...

Scott Hogg of Global Technology Resources (GTRI) did a nice blog post for Network World way back in April, 2009 about High Expectations of Network Availability (http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/40827) and a slightly more recent one in May, " Forget Five-9s -- Go for 100%! " (http...

One of the best sessions I attended at CiscoLive this year was titled "BRKRST-3365, Unified HA Network Design: The Evolution of the Next Generation Network" by John Cavanaugh, Chris Cornwall, and a whole team of contributors. They talked about the High Availability (HA) network designs that...

Some network management systems track reachability by pinging network devices. In fact, at a Networkers a few years ago, the Cisco IT team talked about using 5 second pings to measure network availability (what I prefer to call reachability) in the Cisco corporate network. In addition to pings, most...

I attended a Cisco event yesterday titled "Cisco Tech Days." It was an all-day seminar by Cisco SEs on two areas of technology: Advanced Campus Topics Branch-WAN Topics It was a good day of presentations (I stuck with the Advanced Campus track). The presenters are regional SEs, which means...