Chesapeake NetCraftsmen

Here is a recap of articles I posted in June to my blog at Netcordia:

• "CCIE Recert" goes over ways to prepare for the CCIE written exam for CCIE recertification.
• "Routing Loops" describes how the use of static routes can create routing loops.
• "Reachability SLA and SNMP Data Collection" looks at using SNMP data collection instead of pings to track reachability in a network.
• "The Case of the Failed PCI Audit" discusses a failed network audit where some devices were not being managed by the NMS

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Cisco Network Compliance Manager (NCM) is a powerful tool that can ease network and security management by automating many of the more tedious aspects. This is all on top of the policies that can be used to ensure compliance with various compliance standards such as SOX, PCI, COBIT, ITIL, COSO, GLBA, and HIPAA. Here's a list of the top features that NCM can provide for an enterprise:

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One feature with CUPS and CUPC is the ability to consume and aggregate presence information from Microsoft Exchange.  CUPS uses this information to (a) present meeting information to the IP Phone Messenger application on CiscoIP phone and (b) to provide status information to presence consumers (like CUPC) based on Calendar events.  There are some gotchas to consider.

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Recently I have been updating some custom utilities to take advantage of the Cisco SOAP API for gathering real time information about devices configured in a Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) system.  I came across an interesting feature in the response that could lead to pitfalls if one is not aware of them.

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NetFlow is a powerful tool for exploring the data flows passing through a Cisco router or switch. Even if you do not own a commercial tool for collecting and reporting on NetFlow data, you can enable NetFlow on a device, enable it on selected interfaces, and use show commands to examine the data.

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COBRAS is a set of object-oriented import/export tools for Unity and Unity Connection.  They allow you to selectively export (i.e., backup) specific application objects (e.g., Subscribers, Call Handlers, etc.) and then import them to another version of Unity or Unity Connection.  COBRAS is much different than DiRT which provides backup and restore capabilities to the exact same version of Unity.  COBRAS is geared more towards migrating data between different versions of Unity or even between applications (Unity to Unity Connection).  In total, there are 3 separate  tools:

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I've been reading up heavily on the various aspects of Cisco Nexus and Data Center technology. While I am constitutionally unable to cheerlead, I must say I'm pretty impressed with the breadth of the vision. There are some mild feature gaps and good things to come, but overall the products look like they'll meet the increasing Layer 2 design robustness needs of customers going forward. I do still intend to apply the "beer principle" -- too much of a good thing may give you a headache!

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