Currently I’m doing a lot of consulting for companies that are working on a Datacenter project, most times in combination with some Storage solution and probably we slip in some UCS (Unified Computing System, do NOT think of it as UC stuff).

Therefore it’s good to expand thoughts and knowledge and I bought a stack of books related to Storage and Cisco Datacenter solutions. Besides that it’s a little personal thing to see if I can combine the current studies for Security and also try to pursue the CCIE Storage as well. It’s a difficult choice, since there are quite some rumors going on the internet, that suspect a change to CCIE Datacenter and that Cisco would drop having a CCIE solely based on the MDS switches. With the current Nexus portfolio, it really removes the need for certain type of MDS switches and position the MDS line only in the Fibre Channel core of a network.
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The command line interface of the Cisco ASA security appliance is quite different than the regular IOS CLI. Still it has a lot of things that are the same. Other things are quite different and are considered harder on the ASA. In this blog post I’d like to introduce a couple tricks that make life easier on this device.

Show running-config

At first it’s not that special of course to display the current running-config of the box, but when you issue a question mark there are tons of options.

Rack1ASA1# sh run ?

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This blog post will explain you all the differences in EtherChanneling that you can get. It’s known that you can get any type of wicked configuration on the R&S lab, especially since there are 4 switches, which are probably fully meshed with multiple links.

Why?

Etherchanneling is used in networks to have both redundant links and a double (or more) bandwidth link to another Catalyst switch. It also helps in forming a loop-free path and overcomes the issue of having 1 link in blocking (as you would when using Spanning Tree). On some router platforms it’s also possible to bundle links, but most times this doesn’t really work and you could run into problems while using it on different IOS versions.
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After I passed the CCIE Security Written exam last Thursday I’d like to give a brief overview of how the exam is compiled and what you need to know for it.

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A few weeks ago on the 3^rd of September it was exactly 1 year ago I received my digits. In this article I would like to tell you how the last year was and how the CCIE changed my life completely!

I took the exam in San Jose, CA. Mainly because I was in the US a couple weeks for studying and vacation. During my studies there I felt really good about my level and really had the feeling I was in ‘the zone’. It was in the time that you could still reschedule your exam 30 days before instead of the current 90 days.  With that 30 day limit I was just within reach of rescheduling my exam to about 5 days after I finished the bootcamp I did.

I took a couple days off and did some really touristic stuff and really had a good time in San Francisco. After a good day in the Cisco Building C in San Jose I went home with a very neutral feeling. At 11.30pm I got the e-mail. YES I passed, #21946.

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