Simon Bullen's Weblog

Networking tip of the week

When designing networks "think outside of the box" there is more to life than Cisco products and some of them are quite good and they might just be a better fit for your solution requirements !

Posted at 03:51PM Apr 17, 2007 by Simon Bullen in Tip of the Week  |  Comments[3]

Scheduled Maintenance

When carrying out upgrades always back up the config of the switch or router to either the local secondary memory or the local TFTP server.

This gives you the option to role back the upgrade without major issues.

Also, only do one upgrade or change at a time, too many changes can result in the inability to track down issues if any occur.

Posted at 01:26PM Apr 13, 2007 by Simon Bullen in Tip of the Week  |  Comments[0]

Networking tip of the week

When upgrading the code on a Cisco 6509 make sure you have a external flash card ready with the new code on. 6509's running Sup 720's do not have enough room on the on board memory to accommodate 2 images. So you have to delete and "squeeze" the current operating systems so you have room to upload the new code.

Sometimes this can go wrong and you can end up turning the switch into a brick, or in my case 2 bricks as I had my mate say "I'll show you how to do this" when my upgrade failed !

The only way to recover this situation was by using a compact flash card with the new code on, this had to be driven from Glasgow to Edinburgh as we had a customer demo the following day.

Make life easy for yourself and invest in one for your laptop bag. (and do not let any mates near your kit ! )

Posted at 02:17PM Apr 02, 2007 by Simon Bullen in Tip of the Week  |  Comments[0]

Networking do's and don'ts

I am still perplexed by some people out there that make the same mistakes time and time again when it comes down to networking. So once a week I will blog a "best practice" or "do's and don'ts" for the not so experienced out there.

So starting this week here is the first networking hint:-

If you have stacking switches make sure you have the same code on all switches in the stack, failure to do this can bring the whole stack down.
In fact one of the sweet spots of the new Cisco 3750E is the ability for switches to upgrade as a stack rather than individual units.

Until next week, have fun ..........

Posted at 03:15PM Mar 26, 2007 by Simon Bullen in Tip of the Week  |  Comments[0]