When Star Trek, Fashion and Politics collide

—Warning— Not Networking Related —Warning— 

Finally Fashion suits political policy. 

While browsing the BBC News website this morning I came across something rather amusing, an article about the new ANC (South Africa’s Ruling Party) leather jackets that were on sale. While matters of fashion don’t particularly interest me I decided to take a quick look and discovered these monstrosities. 

So if you’ve just passed your CCIE, you want to make a statement, be seen (day or night) or just start a new part-time job as a runway beacon at the local airport go on over to http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?doc=pbf/forms/order.html and get yours now! 

A small sample of the errr... interesting garments on sale.

 

 —Warning— Not Networking Related —Warning—

Packetlife.net Community Lab

Stretch along with Open Labs and the PacketLife community have started to offer an excellent, free, lab. As per the site the Packet Life communiy lab provides free access to modern networking equipment for training purposes.A list of equipment that is currently in the lab includes:

• F1 Block A Cisco ASA 5505
• F2 Block B Cisco ASA 5505
• R1 Block A Cisco 2811 (2xWIC-2T)
• R2 Block B Cisco 2811 (2xWIC-2T)
• R3 Block A Cisco 1841 (1xWIC-2T)
• R4 Block B Cisco 1841 (1xWIC-2T)
• R5 Block A Cisco 1841 (1xWIC-2T)
• R6 Block B Cisco 1841 (1xWIC-2T)
• S1 Block A Cisco Catalyst 3550-24
• S2 Block B Cisco Catalyst 3550-24
• S3 Block A Cisco Catalyst 3550-24 (Inline Power)
• S4 Block B Cisco Catalyst 3550-24 (Inline Power)

To view the current lab topologies and technical details please visit http://www.packetlife.net/wiki/packet-life-community-lab/

For more information regarding the lab please visit http://www.packetlife.net/lab/

Well done packetlife.net for providing the networking community with such a great resource!

Cisco’s Network Emergency Response Vehicle (NERV)

I came across a rather interesting video on youtube today, regarding the Cisco NERV.

Communications are always vital. During natural and other disasters, however, they become an absolute necessity. Cisco is in the IP communications business and identified a need for a ready-to-go, plug-in solution for command center communications during emergencies. The outcome: The Network Emergency Response Vehicle (NERV). Basically, a mobile communications vehicle that can act as a command center for your on-the-ground disaster management, as well as a central processing center for all the communications going on for that effort.  -blogs.cisco.com To read the rest of this article please click here.

Utilizing Layer-3 Switches within an Enterprise LAN – Part I

As many small branch office/head office LANs are deployed, IT departments make the decision to build a pure Layer-2 LAN network. This is often done for many reasons such as reducing network complexity, reducing equipment cost, as a result of limited in house skills to deploy Layer-3 devices, etc. This design tends to scale quite nicely until the IT department is faced with certain challenges including, wanting to segment the LAN into various broadcast domains as broadcast traffic has begun to affect network performance, the ability to filter Inter-VLAN traffic without having access to the networks Layer-3 devices and the desire to add and remove new VLANs and facilitate Inter-VLAN routing without the involvement of their ISP (who typically controls the sites CE routers in the majority of MPLS VPN deployments).

In this post I would like to introduce the following scenario and in later posts we can discuss the proposed network design and migration strategy.

Scenario:

• The ACME Corp Head office in Johannesburg South Africa originally started off as a small 30 host LAN.
• Over the two years their LAN has grown to well over 400 hosts, including servers, printers, end-user workstations and more.
• Broadcast Packets, particularly from their server farm have started to affect overall LAN performance.
• The ACME IT Department require the ability to easily filter Inter-VLAN and Intra-VLAN traffic without involving their ISP.
• A large Amount of Inter-VLAN traffic is expected.
• The ACME IT Department require a clear demarcation point between their LAN and their ISP, so that faults can be quickly isolated to either the ISP CE device and/or WAN or the ACME LAN.
• The ACME IT Department require the ability to migrate hosts to new VLANs within their own timeframe with minimal involvement from their ISP.
• The site currently has two ISP managed CE devices, a 2801 terminating a 1984k leased line and a Cisco 877 terminating a 4096k ADSL backup link.
• Any proposed solution should allow for full redundancy between the two WAN links
• Currently the network is utilizing Cisco 3560 switches used in and Collapsed Core and Cisco 2960 Switches used in the access layer.

 

In part I of this post we have established the clients requirements, in the next post we will explore the current configuration on the clients equipment and propose a new design and migration strategy….