Layer 2 to Layer 3 Metro-E Link Migration
Metro Ethernet has made connecting different sites extremely easy for just about any level of admin. The problem is, however, it has also made for some very sloppy setups. It is nearly always a recommended best practice to route WAN links. This is particularly true when the WAN is a bottle neck in terms of throughput. If a LAN is built on Gigabit Ethernet and a Metro-E link between sites is only 40Mbps there is a bottleneck. Often LANs in small to medium sized organizations are way underutilized and this can be gotten away with. Typically the Layer 2 connection would span the 40Mbps link with little trouble. However, as traffic increases, a redundant link is added between sites, or requirements change you can find this design corners you with a need for a better way of controlling traffic flow.
Study the CCNA for Free
If you are just getting started in networking many people will recommend knocking out the CCNA certification. I would probably agree with that. Personally, when I got the CCNA I had a networking / systems admin job before hand and did just fine without the cert. The CCNA study, however, gave me the opportunity to […]
802.1Q Tunneling AKA QinQ
You are probably familiar with VLAN tagging on switch trunks and how it can be used to separate physical infrastructures into multiple logical networks. With the explosive growth of Metro Ethernet connections the ability of site to site layer two connections has now become common. It’s easy for organizations to implement as network admins are already familiar with Ethernet as a LAN protocol. The setup is simple for the customer but a bit more configuration is needed on the service provider’s side if the customer desires VLAN tagged traffic to flow over the site to site link. Lets take a look!
Native Grep and Cat Alternatives in Windows (sort of…)
If you use a Linux operating system for much you are probably familiar with the “grep” and “cat” commands and their usage. Grep is probably one of the most powerful utilities in Linux because it allows for text and regular expression searching a number of different ways. Grep is so popular that it has even […]