Unemployed

In March 2014 I was a team lead for a small networking team in an Angolan ISP. After 5 years contributing the best I could to get the company of it’s feet, the time was coming for the progression many wished in their professional careers. I was invited to be the head of IT. Niiice!!! Continue reading

Perfection

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The best way to learn…

Ever since I was a young man my father always told me:

“The best way for you to learn something is to accept the challenge to teach someone”

Teaching was never on my list of strenghts. I ran away from it the best I could until years ago, where I learned that the above statement was in fact true and I started to lose the fear of public speaking. It is only when you try to teach someone you find out the little details we are still missing.

 

Recently I started a similar challenge, not because I was asked to, but because I offered myself to strengthen the knowledge on both sides, the one who teaches and the one who learns. Its a “win-win situation”. A “customized training” to a small group of employees about the fundamentals of routing and the OSPF protocol up to CCNP level.

So… It’s now time to find out a bit about what I still know and refresh whatever has already run away.

Back to the basics!

Books + Books

And remember:

“Knowledge is nothing unless shared and put into practice”

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

Follow my blog!

I updated the mail subscription service for the blog. The service I used before, Jetpack, had some issues:

  1. The e-mail is sent immediately. More than once I had an e-mail sent when I didn’t mean to publish
  2. Language. All subscribers get updates in both languages, one e-mail per language. This is annoying for anyone that doesn’t understand one of the languages and even for those who understand both.

For this reason I migrated to Mailchimp, which besides being able to send a single daily e-mail whenever there is a blog update, also allows me to send e-mail to all subscribers whenever there is a need even without publishing a blog post.

All subscribers of the previous service were added to the new service subscribed to both languages. If you want to change the language, click on “actualizar preferências” or “update preferences” in the end of the e-mail.

If you wish to subscribe, fill the form at the right of this page ou in the form at the end of this post and make sure to choose which languages you would like to get e-mails. Continue reading

There goes 2016

And there goes another year. Just yesterday it was January 6th 2016 and in a few moments it will be 2017. As its common for many people its a time to evaluate what went wrong and what can be done differently in the new year… but that’s not what I’m going to write about.

Continue reading