Blog

Using DNA Center (Catalyst Center) LAN Automation to make your life easier.

I am currently deploying an SD-Access fabric using Cisco's DNA Center, now rebranded as Catalyst Center. As part of this project we used the LAN automation process to build the network to all of the access switches. We had about 15 different switches in 15 different IDFs so using this process made quick work of...

Starting with Firepower 7.2, Cisco announced the ability to manage these firewalls using a Cisco hosted Cloud-Delivered Firewall Management Center (cdFMC). I recently had a project setting up cdFMC for the first time so I figure I would go over what I learned and show how to access cdFMC, how to import policies, and join your first Firepower firewall.

This post is the second post in a three-part series on QoS.  If you haven't read the first blog post, I highly recommend reading the first part here.

I just completed a Quality of Service, or QoS, assessment for a customer. While I was writing the assessment, I decided to brush up on my knowledge of QoS best practice to better serve the customer. While it's still fresh in my brain I figure I will...

Network documentation is arguably both the most important and most over looked tasked a network administrator does. A good network diagram is invaluable for understanding how a network is working, for troubleshooting when its not working, and a great source of information when onboarding new employees to the network team or, more important to me, getting vendors and partners up to speed on how...

Cisco SD-WAN (formally Viptela) is quickly becoming the go to WAN solution for Cisco customers. As companies are looking to replace their aging DMVPN solution, Cisco SD-WAN has become the logical choice. Companies can stick with the same ISR platform running IOS-XE that they already know, and in some cases can upgrade their existing routers to work with SD-WAN. But this blog isn’t a sales pitch...

You read that right! At Cisco Live this year they introduced the ability to add Catalyst switches to the Meraki dashboard. Finally a use for the unused DNA licenses! The switches are monitored in read-only mode, so you still need to manage the switches the old fashioned way, however Meraki's traffic analysis and troubleshooting tools are available for use. This is great for Catalyst owners who do...

I recently completed my Ekahau Design training and certification. During the first day of class the instructor went over wireless fundamentals. Now as an experienced wireless engineer most of the topics were ideas that I had already known, however there were a few idea's that changed the way I understand wireless for the better. Lets walk though each of these idea's together!

I am currently finishing a project where I am designing a custom Quality of Service policy for a customer's suite of business critical applications. The customer uses MPLS as their WAN and the bandwidth for the MPLS is different depending on the site; Datacenters have more bandwidth, branches have decent bandwidth, and small kiosks only have a few megabits of bandwidth. The customer noticed that...

With the explosion of wireless technology we have experienced in the last few years, wireless networks are being asked to handled more and more demanding traffic. Between laptops, cell phones, and wireless IoT devices, the importance of having your wireless infrastructure optimized has never been greater.

We have all been there; sitting down to dinner on a Sunday night, when you get an alert that one of your branches has gone offline. You politely excuse yourself from the table, open your laptop and start troubleshooting. The problem, you can’t access any of the gear to troubleshoot the issue, and the gear you can access isn’t providing any answers to why the site went down. Now you are faced with...