From the yearly archives: 2009

Cisco Certified Architect Exam blueprint has been released

By On December 17, 2009 · 1 Comment

Cisco announced through their LearningNetwork webpage that the topics (blueprint) for the Cisco Certified Architect have been released. The exam is scheduled to be available February 2010 and qualified candidates will be provided the information as it becomes available.

It will be quite a challenge among these level engineers to be the first one to achieve such certification Above holding a valid CCDE certification there are a lot of other requirements just to qualify to take this exam.

If you are interested in you can [...]

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Core Knowledge Questions for All CCIE Labs

By On December 17, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Important change in all CCIE labs exams. Finally the attendees for CCIE RS Lab will now feel discriminated by the Core Knowledge Questions, as starting with next year, this will become mandatory for all CCIE Lab exams.

Interesting is that they say for all CCIE Labs exam, but below the Security and Voice exams are not specified…

See below the official announcement:

Effective January 4, 2010, the Cisco CCIE® Service Provider, Storage, and Wireless lab exams will add a new type of question format in [...]

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Cisco IP Routing overview – Part I

By On December 16, 2009 · 2 Comments

I have found this great video material from RouteHub Group regarding IP routing overview. It contains basic about IP routing, why it is needed, how to implement and so on. This material will be really apreciated by the beginners in this area as the explanation is straight forward without using fancy explanation where is not needed. For today you have part 1 from this 4 episodes series.

All this material is produced by RouteHub Group consultants, so [...]

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Ivan Pepelnjak, CCIE#1354, proposed some reduced budget training

By On December 16, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Ivan Pepelnjak, proposed on his blog, some reduced budget training. For now, the prices on his blog shows:

€30 ($45)/hour/participant (two attendees @ 2-hour presentation = € 120);

€200 ($300)/hour for a private on-line workshop (up to 10 participants).

According to his statement this training will be WebEx-delivered workshops or, depending from case to case training, can also arrange on-site events.
For more information please visit his blog, or

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Great tool for testing QoS implementation

By On December 16, 2009 · 5 Comments

After my last post, some readers were asking what tool did I used for testing the QoS and how satisfied I’m with it.

The name of the tool is Packgen. According to its developer developers, “Packgen is a simple network packet generator handling diffserv markers, useful for testing network bandwidth and QoS.” It support features like:
– Network packet flows generation with given bandwidth (packets sent at each time interval depending on the bandwidth to produce and the [...]

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Cisco Mobile for Iphone

By On December 1, 2009 · Leave a Comment

[flashvideo filename=http://www.firstdigest.com/vid/archive/2009/12/cisco-mobile-iphone.flv image=http://www.firstdigest.com/vid/archive/2009/12/cisco-mobile-iphone.jpg /]

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Cisco AutoQoS VoIP

By On November 20, 2009 · Leave a Comment

QoS – one of the most interesting and challenging part of the network engineer’s life. I think I’m not wrong when I’m saying that most engineers that hear the word QoS, react somehow like “ah, that ugly stuff…” I have to be honest and say that QoS is not one of my preferred part, but as a network engineer you have to accomplish all task, not only the one that you like. With QoS you can achieve some great results, and once you have started [...]

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Draw network diagrams with Visio under Mac or Linux

By On November 12, 2009 · 7 Comments

Maybe one of the biggest loss of mine when I switched from PC to Mac, was the Microsoft Visio is not available for any other platform than Windows OS. Now, I’m not a big fan of Microsoft products, but I have to admit that they have some good products, and one of this is Visio. Like it or not, more than 75%  of the network diagrams that I get are in  VSD format, which we all know (or we should) is a [...]

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Does the Nexus 7000 Obsolete the Catalyst 6500?

By On November 9, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Well, this is one question that rise a lot of discussion regarding the future of Cisco Catalyst 6500. With the release in 2003 of Nexus 7000, many IT professionals are awaiting for Cisco to announce the end-life of 6500 series.

John McCool ((Cisco’s SVP and GM for both product lines) give assurance that the support and development for 6500 series will continue and the Nexus 7000 was not designed to replace the Catalyst 6500 line.

Watch below Jennifer Geisler’s interview with John McCool about this [...]

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Cisco may be forced to drop the acquisition of Tandberg

By On November 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

After one month ago Cisco announced that will offer $3 billion for Tandberg, today there are rumors that this acquisition will not work as expected. It seems that after Tandberg’s board of directors recommended to accept the price offered, for 153.5 Norwegian Kroner per share, now this still requires approval by 90 percent of the company’s shareholders by 9th of November.

The problem get more complicated as shareholders, representing 24 percent of Tandberg’s shares, don’t plan to accept the deal, with arguments that Tandberg can [...]

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