Recently I have been working on a solution to provide Wholesale Access to hosted VMs. Several of my customers have “Cloud Environments” – call it IaaS, virtualisation, a fad or whatever, this is something that I have been asked to come up with a solution for more than once. To explain the requirements outlined in...

I was recently called into a new customer’s network to help recover some passwords on some Cisco switches and to map out the network structure. Unfortunately nobody had any idea of the last time the switches had had their configs saved or even when the last time the switches had been power cycled. From what...

It’s seems to be the craze this week to write all about our tool bags. Stretch wrote an article on it, followed by Jeff Fry‘s blog post and Tony Mattke over at Router Jockey. Not to be out done (and ever the trend setter) Jennifer Huber wrote her post 18 months ago! So I guess...

Ok all, Im going to let out a secret. Long ago when I was a small child (long before I dreamed of being a janitor), when people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would answer: “I want to be a swimming pool”. Cute, no? I guess not, but...

Last weekend I was interviewing a potential new staff member for a job we have going, and we started discussing various vendors strengths and weaknesses. I put forward that I would question buying hardware from a vendor who just copies everyone else and doesn’t innovate on their own undertaking. The response from one of the...

So I woke up this morning to a couple of people on twitter talking about my Data Centre 3.0 presentation from NZNOG in January. I was really confused why people would all of a sudden start talking about this 2.5 months after it was presented. As I was leaving work tonight I checked my RSS...

I havent blogged at all for March (and this is only a very brief one) because I have been very busy studying and it seems to have paid off! I managed to get the first step towards my CCIE R&S exam out of the way last week – I passed my CCIE Written exam 🙂...

A couple of weeks back, when we recorded Episode 33 of Packet Pushers Podcast, one of the items we had on the list of topics to discuss was that of multi-vendor networks and the recent Gartner report on the topic. Due to various reasons this topic was taken off the list, but I still had...

Driving home the other night I was listening to the latest episode of the podcast “Coffee with Thomas”. This episode had our host, Thomas Jones, interviewing Steve Chambers of ViewYonder (and also a history of great vendors!). During the interview, Steve made the following comment: It amazes me that people criticise Cisco for not be...

As some of my readers may know, I have spent the last week and a bit in Phnom Penh (Cambodia), setting up the new office for my company (eintellego). I had never been to Asia before this trip – outside of a couple of lay-overs in Japan in 2002 and 2003, or the 45 mins...