Ahhh… It’s Sunday – just a few days after Cisco Live 2011 has come to a close and I am still recovering!  Why am I still recovering one might ask? Well, my liver needs time to recuperate, the 3 hour time difference is a killer, leaving at 7 AM and getting home at 6PM is tough, and just all the information and knowledge gained last week is still soaking in!  I will admit – it was an AWESOME experience this year!
So I see I owe you a recap for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  I will start with Tuesday first..
 

Tuesday

Well my first class on Tuesday was BRKRST-3045 – LISP and to my surprise this was a LARGE class!  I would guess that there was close to 1000 people in attendance for this one, blew me away!  LISP is a cool protocol that I blogged about some time ago here – LISP – Say What?. They covered the protocol and the components of it in detail, the operation of LISP as well as some Use Cases.  It was a great class and has generated a few new blog post ideas – so the future looks bright for this one!
After that class it was a quick break over to Tom’s Corner ( NetworkingNerd ) that was basically a table outside of the registration and World of Solutions entrance.  It turned out to be a great meeting place for all the Twitter people out there, and we had a crowd!  We usually met there before going to a class, session, WoS, or anywhere else – nice common place that was easy to get to.

Just a quick update… I will try and update the blog this weekend as time allows, if not this weekend then definitely on Monday.  Been a long and tiring week – and best of all an awesome one! Have quite a bit to share about the experiences over the day as well as many new post ideas.
Was great to meet many of you – really appreciated (as well as humbled) by all the compliments and kind words.
Hope you all have a safe trip home and hope to see you again next year!
Thank you,
Jeff (Fryguy)
 
PS – I will fix the IOS 15 post as soon as possible, I am hearing it is kicking back errors – and I think that is due to the sheer size of the matrix.  See what I can do.

Well, Monday is in the books now – and it was a great start to the conference.
The day started with breakfast with Ron Fuller  – @CCIE58581 on Twitter and he  is also one of the authors on the NX-OS and Cisco Nexus Switching.  It was really great to put a face and voice to the name as he and I have chatted over the past year and such, but never had that change to meet – until now.
After breakfast with Ron, I headed over to the Pearson Vue testing center to take the free test that I signed up for.  Not sure what I was thinking when I scheduled the test for 8 AM on a Monday, but I am glad I did.  I can now say that I am a CCDE candidate – I am now allowed to take the CCDE lab – if I can get a seat.  It was a good test, some things took more thought then I expected, but it is a fair test.  If you are wondering what I used to study, there are many books listed on the CCDE Cisco site, the list there is good.
My first class of the day was BRKARC-3470 Cisco Nexus 7000 Switch Architecture given by Tim Stevenson.  This class was a great overview of how the Cisco 7010/7018 chassis interworkings work.  From port-level asic connectivity, to backplane connectivity, and even the differences with the M and F cards.  It was a great overview of the hardware.
Lunch on Monday was hectic – there are about 14,000 attendees here (last count I heard), so you can image the logistics of getting that many people fed and seated.  The food was good but the seating was a bit tough.  It is sometimes like that on the first day though, it is the day that any issues are quickly exposed and fixed.

A few weeks ago a few of us on Twitter where having some fun with technology and talking about the closing keynote speaker, William Shatner, and his history and his fame with Star Trek.  What came out of all of that tweeting was a shirt design that reflected memorable Star Trek terms with the Nexus 7000.  Since it was proving difficult to get the shirt printed through on-line means,  I decided to make one myself – and add in a few other geeky items.
So, without further ado, here is the shirt and all the fun stuff that is on it!
Front of shirt playing off the movie phrase “Scotty, we need more power” by Capt. Kirk

And then on the back we have

Well, Day two of Cisco Live 2011 for me (for some this is your first day as you are still arriving).

For me, I am taking an 8 hour Techtorial on Next Generation Data Center Infrastructure TECDCT-8001.  This is a paid seminar that has covered some great material – and probably help to generate some future blog posts as well!

Mike Herbert took the first part of the class and did a great review of some of the changes that have happened in the data center over the past few years. From the evolving 3-tier architecture with Spanning Tree and such all the way to Fabric Path and TRILL.  Nothing was really in depth but was a great setting of the stage for the day.  Some of the things that I liked was the discussion on the Data Center Standards and where different things are in the flow.  Another nice discussion was data center cabling and the potential future of cabling.  From the traditional home-run cabling that many of us use today to the discussion of top of rack (TOR) and end of row (EOR) drivers with regards to 10g and beyond cabling.  Problems discussed where primarily the cost of running those lengths of cables to the cross-talk potentials due to the power required to drive the data.  Oh yeah, Mike gets some bonus points for mentioning LISP during the presentation as well.

Well the day has finally come, it is time for Cisco Live 2011 in Las Vegas, NV.  Everything here is looking great, things are still getting setup but the Wireless is up and working, registration opened early, and I am set to go.
So, the big question every year is what does the bag look like?  Well, here is your answer – looks great! Tom ( @NetworkingNerd) mentioned to me that these are the TSA Friendly backpack bags, AWESOME!  What is a TSA Friendly bag? Well, you can check the TSA website for exact details – link – but in short they are bags where the laptop storage section open like a butterfly to go through x-ray without having to remove the laptop from the bag.
 
So, here are pics of the bag.  It is black, orange, and gray – not a bad color combination at all!

 
 

 
Well the time is just about here, the time for Cisco Live 2011 in Las Vegas, NV.
I will post updates as the days progress, just like I did last year.  Hoping to recap the experiences, mention the bad, highlight the good, and recognize the great.
The posts should be fast and furious – my twitter feed should be streaming!
To all those who will be there with me, safe travels, good times and see you soon!
 
 

I was working on some stuff the other day in the lab and needed to demonstrate how to tell why a router reloaded.  Did it reload by the reload command?  SNMP string? or some random Error (not withstanding Solar Flares).  Well, the first two are easy to demonstrate, but the third one is a little difficult. Or is it…
As we all know there are some hidden commands out there – a popular one is CSIM (Call Simulator).  It is used to generate a call from a Cisco router to test a dial-peer and trunk configuration.  If you are on Cisco router, you can type
(quick housekeeping)
Router/Switch Output
Commands
Notes
PSTNGateway.PA# csim start 6105551212
csim: called number = 6105551212, loop count = 1 ping count = 0
csim err csimDisconnected recvd DISC cid(1170604)
csim: loop = 1, failed = 1
csim: call attempted = 1, setup failed = 1, tone failed = 0
PSTNGateway.PA#
That command, CSIM, will tell the router to dial 6105551212 and place a call.  They usually returned with a failed state, but I can assure you my phone rang (I changed the number in the post)
OK, I digress a bit there but I wanted to provide a hidden command that would not be destructive that you can look at.
So, how does one show a fellow engineer what a crash looks like, well TEST CRASH is the command.  And yes, it is a hidden command that will crash the router.