Author: jac

Aaron does lots of stuff and, therefore, does nothing well. He's trying, though. https://masto.ai/@aconaway

Let’s talk [tag]audit[/tag]ing for a bit. It’s important to have an outside person look over your [tag]configuration[/tag]s every so often to be sure you didn’t do something stupid, so, every quarter or so (mostly so), I bring in someone to…wait a minute. It would cost…

Let’s set up a scenario. You have a single [tag]router[/tag] that terminates your T1 to the Internet for your company. You serve your own website and email, but you’d like to be as secure as possible and use ACLs on the router to lock stuff…

Have you even looked at the first few lines of your [tag]Cisco[/tag] [tag]switch[/tag] or [tag]router[/tag] [tag]config[/tag] and wondered what those “service” lines were? Yeah, me, too, so I did a little research through the web and through some audit tools to figure a few out.…

We all have limited budgets these days. Long gone are the days of unlimited resources and uncontrollable expansion of the network, so it’s important that any network dude or dudette pay attention to the open-source world. Below is a list of stuff I use at…

I assume you take every word I say to heart and that you’ve been using Dynamips/Dynagen for a few days now, right? Good. That’s a start, but let’s break down a simple lab to make sure everyone’s on the same page. I run my labs…

I’ve run across articles for these apps a thousand times, so I thought I’d get in on the action. Dynamips and dynagen are a pair of apps that make simulating Cisco routers very easy. I use them constantly at the office (and even at home…

I had an article a few weeks ago about the Cisco CSM, which is a load-balancer module for the 6500 series switches. This thing is a pretty good device, but monitoring the connections to each VIP and RIP is not very straightforward. If you have…

We’ve done some tracking with HSRP in other articles, but there are lots and lots of ways to use object tracking on an HSRP device. In our example network, we tracked the interface, and, if it went down, we decremented the standby priority. What if…

I like [tag]layer-3[/tag] [tag]switch[/tag]es. They give some great flexibility and bang-for-the buck, but most people overlook one issue with these things that can cause security problems. Most people configure the [tag]VLAN[/tag]s, put an IP on the VLAN interfaces, and put it in production, but the…

Cisco’s Content Switching Module (CSM) is an application accelerator. Or is it an application networking service module? I hate those fancy buzzwords — it’s a load balancer. It’s a module for the 6500 series switches that lets you load balance services in any VLAN and…