Wireshark capture banks

Studying packet captures is one of the best methods to learn the operation of protocols in any of the 7 network layers. It doesn’t matter if they were made in wireshark, tshark, tcpdump or any other program.

Thanks to the work of very good people we do not need to create the conditions ourselves and make these captures. There are several “capture banks” available for us to enjoy and learn from:

Continue reading

Angolan CCIEs: How many?

As I was writing another post I realized it’s been a while since a 2 year old could count he number of CCIEs in my country.

Jeriel Atienza and André Malungo were for a long time the only Angolan CCIEs, but today the numbers are quite different.

I do not plan to make this the Angolan version of the CCIE Hall of Fame page but you can  find below the current list of Angolan CCIEs that I could find: Continue reading

CCNA Data Center – My Journey

On April 11th 2017, well on the edge and on the last day before the old CCNA DC exams expiring I finally gog my CCNA Data Center certification, more than a year after starting the studies.

Was it hard? Yes, but no so much for the content.

The idea

My journey started with the decision late 2015, with some experience and after putting my hands on some Cisco Nexus switches I decided to go ahead with certification. Continue reading

Running Cisco UCS Platform Emulator on VirtualBox

My studies of Cisco Data Center technologies have led me to Cisco UCS (Unified Computing Systems). To manage a UCS domain Cisco provides us with the UCS Manager software. This software runs on switch-like devices called Fabric Interconnects acting as the “doorways” between the UCS domain and “the world”.

For all of us studying and needing to understand it without access to a bunch of expensive servers, Cisco was kind enough to create the UCSPE (UCS Platform Emulator) as a free downloadable virtual machine.

Since I’m not a good friend of VMWare and can’t have a bare metal hypervisor, my “playing” focuses mostly on Virtualbox but there is a small detail that must be taken care of:

Summary

Problem: After importing the UCSPE appliance you can’t access the GUI even after changing adapter 1 to Host-only or Bridge. Continue reading

CCIE program evolution

If you are preparing yourself for the CCIE certification and haven’t passed the written yet… you better hurry up because from July 25th 2016 there will be new content.

The networking world is changing and concepts like SDN, NFV, API’s, virtualization, DevOps and network programmability taking more and more space every day.

As a consequence of this change, Cisco announced end of last year the introduction of new content for all written CCIE exams.

The new content is called Evolving Technologies and has topics like: Continue reading