BumpInTheWire.com

At least I know I’m still learning.  Of course I’m only 33 so I sure as shit better still be learning.  What I learned today was the default/native VLAN does not have the 802.1q header added to the frames from that VLAN.  Well this was news to me.  But it sure does explain why a […]

I’ve been on a mini hot streak going back to Friday when it comes to solving little nagging problems around the work place.  It started with McAfee Groupshield notifications not working.  Got that working.  Then came a little networking issue involving tagged and untagged port configuration on a switch.  Got that working.  Then tonight I […]

There are quite a few similarities between configuring a Cisco switch and a Foundry switch.  There are at least two areas though where they are similar yet very, very different:  link aggregation and frame tagging.
Let’s hit link aggregation first.  In Cisco’s world its called “etherchannel.”  In Foundry’s world its called “trunking.”  Configuration wise Foundry’s trunking is much simpler […]

Life in the technology business is volatile.  Tonight I got an email with a subject of “Accelerating the Evolution of Networking.”  I get a handful of these emails every day with subjects similar to the this one and rarely read them at the time of receipt.  For whatever reason I decided to read this one.  Needless to say I was a […]

My brain is fried.  The first two days of this week have been brutal.  It started out wonderfully yesterday morning when the SSL certificate for our Check Point SmartCenter console expired over the weekend.  I’ve spent a good chunk of both days dealing with that.  The management server is an old Windows 2000 Server box […]

Gonna find my baby, gonna hold her tight
gonna grab some afternoon delight.
My motto’s always been; when it’s right, it’s right.
How’s that for the worst intro to a post ever? I did manage to take this afternoon off and partake in a little socialization in the Power and Light district of KC. I hadn’t been down […]

I’ve got a real brain buster on my hands.  Its a real brain buster for me anyway!  We have two routers: a Cisco 1721 and a Cisco 2620.  Right now the 1721 is doing policy based routing to route traffic from a certain IP address (1.1.1.2) out a different internet link.  If I put the […]

I got squeezed today.  I just can’t seem to do anything with “the guys” without managing to get myself into some sort of trouble.  I’m a made man.
Today was just one of those days.  This morning we were doing network traces trying to figure out why a Windows client could get a DHCP address but […]

Today started well enough. We had two people at a Microsoft Server 2008/SQL 2008/Some Developer Crap 2008 launch event and it was setting up for a nice quiet day with a short staff. Then about 9 o’clock the wheels fell off. I’ve posted a couple of times, here and here, about this […]

I spent a good part of this afternoon and this evening getting MRTG running in our environment to monitor all of our switchport bandwidth. Its not a real exciting thing to do but it does have some value. The obvious value is more insight into our traffic patterns that will help troubleshoot network […]