Don’t get stuck with “speed-groups”

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I was working with a Cisco 9372TX switch, and on it I had two 40Gbps uplinks that we where using out of the available four. Talking with our VAR because we where planning on connecting in additional equipment that only supported SFP+ interfaces. So the solution was to connect to this switch  with QSFP to SFP+ adapters. Thinking this would be a simple change because we are just plugging in additional adapters on the QSFP ports we planned our maintenance window and rollback plans but I wasn’t expecting a rollback for this one 🙂   Continue reading →

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Factory Reset Firepower 4100 & 9300

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I got my hands on some Cisco Firepower 4100 units and after playing around with them I wanted to reset them to factory settings, essentially erase the “startup-config” on the FXOS. The Firepower units act a little differently than your normal Cisco IOS or ASA and you can’t just erase startup-config and reload the device, that would be too easy. I was able to find that if you do a password recovery on the unit it erases the configuration  and that’s as close as I got for a factory reset. Continue reading →

TFTP & FTP Server on Centos 7

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centos_logoIf you ever needed a TFTP or an anonymous FTP server to transfer files, logs, or crash debugs to and from your network devices it can be a little tricky if you don’t have anything setup. There are some free quick programs out there if you are in a pinch for one-time transfers but if you ever wanted to have something in infrastructure that is ready to go for this kind of stuff just follow this tutorial below. I’m using the latest version of Centos 7 minimal, we need to add some house keeping items first so let’s get started! Continue reading →

Passed the 640-916 DCICT

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It’s been a little more than year in the making since I passed my last Cisco exam the 640-911 but I finally did it and passed the 640-916. I can now call myself CCNA Data Center Certified. 🙂 If you ever get the chance to take go up Data Center route it really is interesting of all the products and services Cisco has in their portfolio. Cisco UCS, OTV, Fabicpath and FCoE are just really cool technologies to learn about. The main studying tool I used was the Cisco Official Certification Guide and I poked around the Cisco Learning Network on the Data Center study group.

So what’s next for me? Well I think its time to take another step forward and climb up to the professional level of Cisco Certifications. I don’t know when I want to start that but it’ll probably be sooner rather than later.

It’s been a little more than five years of when I passed my first Cisco certification. After finishing the Cisco Network Academy I was able to tackle the ICND1 and looking back at the ICND1 its changed curriculum twice since I took it, which is a common theme in this industry. 😉

 

 

Cisco UCS Emulator 3.1(1ePE1)

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If you are studying any Cisco Data Center certs this tool might come in handy for some hands on learning. The Cisco UCS emulator is a VM you can spin up in VMware Workstation,Fusion or in ESXi. This emulator can be helpful in understanding the UCS platform and UCS manager. You are able to push policies and alter configurations and even import/export these configurations into and out of the “real” world to apply them/test them. You can download this emulator from Cisco’s Community site: Cisco UCS Platform Emulator 3.1(1ePE1) Downloads All you need is a Cisco ID to sign in which is free to register and download.

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