I’ve just recorded a quick video about 10Gbps fiber transceivers, There’s a first for everything I guess. It’s a cheat sheet which describes the different transceivers, where they’re commonly found and the connectors you use. I’d love to hear your take on the video. Too long… too short, music too cheesy (yeah I know!), etc. All constructive feedback is welcomed.
RMAs….really?! Okay I’ll admit it. The returns process for failed hardware isn’t the most fascinating of topics. But it is a part of our job and you’ll need to understand the process. Moreover we expect new engineers to intuitively know about RMAs and DOAs but we never really lay out the process for them. If you get stuck with an RMA it’s going to suck. I’m documenting this process to help ensure it sucks less. The Network Sherpa blog…
I have interviewed a lot of candidates for network engineering positions over the past few years [1] . The technical interviews can cover a broad range of topics. But one topic frequently causes friction with candidates; hardware knowledge. Almost everyone who has worked for a large enterprise for a few years has interacted with a 6500 at some point or time, and frequently ‘Cisco-6500’ appears on many resumes as a skill. However, when you ask people how to choose the right line…
Part of our job as engineers is to provide the best solution to our customer whilst minimizing cost. I’m not saying we should always choose the solution with the lowest price tag, but cost should always be considered when evaluating your design. It is pretty likely, however, that your company will be a single-vendor shop. This restricts your cost-saving-ability to choosing the most cost-effective solution from your network vendors catalog. There are other ways of saving money though. I’ve been…
Overview Ternary Content Addressable Memory, or TCAM, is a critical component of a modern router. It is a powerful and fast hardware lookup engine for IP Prefixes. It is also complex, expensive and power hungry. Not surprisingly, there never seems to be never enough on whatever system you use. TCAM has historically been used to perform hardware-table lookups of Access-list, Netflow or QoS tables in routers and switches. Most of these implementations from your favorite brand-name vendors use one…
As a network engineer, you take pride in your hard earned skills, and so you should. You’ve learned how to design networks. You’ve learned how to install, upgrade and configure routers. You’ve figured out how to sniff out and fix faults. If you study your craft and hone your technical skills then you deserve to be rewarded. However, unless you can work with the people and process in an organization, you won’t get the career success you deserve. Getting Started…
The fiber transceiver industry When you buy transceivers for your switch, it is standard practice to order them from your network equipment manufacturer. However the switch vendor doesn’t actually manufacture these transceivers. There are a number of fiber interface transceiver manufacturers in the world, such as Finisar, Avago, JDSU, MRV, AOI, Delta and Wavesplitter. These vendors will supply a variant of their standard transceiver to the switch vendor for resale. The switch vendor will perform testing of that transceiver against…
Breaking the network – badly Ideally you want to avoid breaking the network, but we don’t live in an ideal world. Hopefully you have change management policies that help reduce the risk, but you work on extremely complex systems with imperfect information. You will, eventually, break the network. Sometimes you can resolve the issue quickly without much fuss. Every once in a while though, you mess up really badly. You know how this goes: You are just completing…