Chesapeake NetCraftsmen

In October 2009, Dr. Pete Welcher presented these slides at a Bluesnet Network Advisory Group meeting in Santa Barbara, CA. This presentation covers RF (radio frequency) essentials you need to make Wireless LAN (WLAN, WiFi, 802.11) work well. Click this link to review the  RF for 802.11 WLAN (784 KB) seminar PDF.

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In October 2009, Dr. Pete Welcher presented these slides at a Bluesnet Network Advisory Group meeting in Santa Barbara, CA. This presentation covers some of the acronyms and basics of Wireless LAN (WLAN, WiFi, 802.11). Click this link to review the  WLAN Basics (654 KB) seminar PDF.

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In September I discussed a feature called "Call Forward Unregistered" or CFUR.  The point of this feature is to allow administrators to specify special call handling rules when an SRST enabled device was unregistered.  I wanted to use CFUR as an example to illustrate how Local Route Groups and other CUCM7x dial plan features can be leveraged to simply admin tasks and improve an overall dial plan architecture.

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Part 2 of my experiments with VRF-Lite, which provides more thoughts on whether the customer edge (CE) device should run one or more VRFs. (Part 1 is available here CE Design Options When Using VRF-Lite End-to-End, and discusses using the CE as a "fusion" router to support dynamic routing the customer routing process(es) with the shared service VRFs by using multiple EIGRP processes on the CE without any VRFs.)

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I've been testing some end-to-end VRF-Lite configurations, and I've been thinking about whether the customer edge (CE) device should run one or more VRFs. Like many design choices in networking, the decision to run VRFs on your CE devices depends on your application and your network.

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A colleague of mine asked if I would do a blog on using the AXL/SOAP interface to execute custom queries for administrative purposes.  I thought that this would be an interesting topic to cover.  Though, it isn't something that can be fully addressed in one blog.  So, I think this will need to be a series of blogs/articles.  For Part 1 I think we will discuss the basic table structures and some key tables that are commonly queried by admins.

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 That's "Ethernet over MPLS" to you!  My blog from a couple of days ago mentioned that the Catalyst 6500 with Sup720 has great forwarding performance with EoMPLS, without adding any specialized hardware such as the SIP or ES cards. See http://www.netcraftsmen.net/resources/blogs/extended-vlan-mitigation.html for the context.

In this blog, I intend to write (briefly, I think I can manage briefly...) about the basics, then show the lab tested configuration snippets.

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Recently I fielded a request from a customer to explain how they could restrict access to the Corporate Directory and Personal Directory from an IP phone.  I checked into it and found that CUCM 7.x introduces a few changes that actually allows administrators to properly address requests like this one.

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This blog is a quick summary of some port-related tidbits I've run across recently. 

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This article is triggered by some recent work I've been doing. We are migrating a customer with an old Nortel switching infrastructure to a high-speed Cisco 6509-based infrastructure with a lot of 10 Gbps links. Our design calls for Layer 3 (routing) to the closet or server zone. There are some nifty Spanning Tree mitigation techniques coming (or replacements that allow use of many paths in a L2 infrastructure). That technology is not quite here yet.

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