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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...

In the modern networking world routing protocols fall into two distinct camps, Link-state and Distance Vector. Being a network consultant I often have customers asking me which routing protocol is better so I figure I would create a post comparing the different routing protocols.

What is Zero Trust? Zero Trust is a framework and attitude towards IT security that centers on the idea that we in the IT field cannot trust anyone or any device on our network. Many systems administrators are well versed in this model. Every employee is assigned a domain joined laptop that is locked down via Group Policy. Those employees are tracked via a user identity using their AD profile...

Last week was the long-awaited Cisco Live 2019! And two of our wonderful engineers wrote up their thoughts on the week. For a quick recap check out Dominic Zeni's overview of the week below and if you want a more in-depth recap check out Trevor Butler's deep dive into the Cisco Live 2019 World.

For the Short Attention Span Readers:

Another year, another Live! Building Bridges was one of the...

Two years ago Cisco introduced the Catalyst 9000 series switches as the next generation of campus switches. Every Catalyst switch family had an equivalent 9K to replace it; the 3800s were replaced with the 9300, the 4500s were replaced with the 9500, and the long standing 6500 chassis switches were replaced with the 9400. Cisco was consolidating all Catalyst switches into the 9000 series, well...

When we think of security the image of firewalls, anti-malware protection, and the latest and greatest in network access control pops in our head. With Cisco ISE servers providing NAC services, ASAs providing firewalling on our network edge, and AMP for Endpoints providing malware protection on our laptops we think we are secure. But are we? Have we forgotten the very first line of security?

This year’s AWS re:Invent has come and gone. This year 45,000 people from around the world descended on Las Vegas for one week. Participants were treated to a myriad of breakout sessions, labs, certification exams, and parties (it is Vegas after all). For the first time re:Invent spanned multiple convention centers. The Sands Convention Center was the main center with the Mirage, Aria, and MGM...

On Monday Mathy Vanhoef and Frank Piessens, from the University of Leuven, published a paper disclosing a series of vulnerabilities that affect the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and the Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) protocols. These vulnerabilities described a set of scenarios where a malicious user can perform a man-in-the-middle replay attack on wireless users connected to the network using...

You have been working as a network administrator for your company for a few years now. In that time you have been asked to complete a handful of network projects; a new office turn up here, replace some switches or a router there. The whole time you work from old templates or, in the case of replacement gear, just copy and paste the old config. Have you ever really stepped back and looked at the...

Recently I deployed Cisco’s AMP for Endpoints for a 50-user organization. For the uninitiated, AMP for Endpoints is Cisco’s cloud based, enterprise grade, advanced malware protection software that is deployed to each end device in the network. Each endpoint reports back to the central cloud controller and is managed by the controller. Cisco integrated AMP for Endpoints with Cisco’s ThreatGRID to...