Author Archive
July 7th, 2010 by Andraz Piletic
While I was testing some new Remote Labs for a renewed CCNP curriculum (for a TSHOOT course, to be precise), I came across a very interesting but undocumented command that turns a router into a traffic generator. Even though this command was introduced awhile ago, in IOS version 11.2, please ...
Posted in In general, Technical | No Comments »
June 28th, 2010 by Andraz Piletic
Whether you are delivering a pitch to potential customers or upper management, or you find yourself in front of a dozen students while lecturing in a Cisco course, there is a good chance that you’re using PowerPoint slides for your presentation. While your audience can normally observe the slide show ...
Posted in In general, Training | No Comments »
June 7th, 2010 by Andraz Piletic
In recent weeks, I have participated in a few WebEx conferences. While those organized by Cisco mostly relied on traditional telephone connections for audio delivery, others used an integrated VoIP solution, which has a more attractive price.
While good old telephony works pretty well no matter where you are or what ...
Posted in IP telephony, VoIP, Voice | No Comments »
January 7th, 2009 by Andraz Piletic
In my previous posts I wrote about how monitoring your network can help you to detect anomalies such as infected PCs sending spam, or illegal peer-to-peer traffic in your network.
These examples have two things in common. First, such behavior in your network is unwanted, and the task of every network ...
Posted in NAT, Technical | No Comments »
December 10th, 2008 by Andraz Piletic
It had been months since the NIL Monitor group first noticed that a customer’s remote location was experiencing suspiciously high traffic every night. The traffic started every day at around 8 p.m. and stopped twelve hours later, at 8 a.m. Due to high traffic in both inbound and outbound directions, ...
Posted in Technical | 3 Comments »
October 27th, 2008 by Andraz Piletic
In my previous post, I wrote about the importance of monitoring trends in your network. Now it’s time to show you the first one in a series of interesting examples that the NIL Monitor group has come across in recent weeks.
Memory usage is normally very stable on routers. An alarm ...
Posted in CPU, Technical | 2 Comments »
October 16th, 2008 by Andraz Piletic
While hunting down the cause of a malfunction or network outage, you commonly gather large volumes of data. Information gathering is not difficult, but analyzing data and figuring out something useful can be very hard. Take CPU utilization, for example. Determining whether 40% utilization is a highly unusual condition for ...
Posted in Technical, network efficiency | No Comments »
September 25th, 2008 by Andraz Piletic
Suppose that workers at your remote offices are experiencing slow and unresponsive network applications. When narrowing the scope of possible causes, you really have only a few options. You can run ping tests all day long to find the cause of the high latency. But how can you test bandwidth ...
Posted in ISP, SLA, Technical | 1 Comment »
