November 18, 2008 by ted.

The Embedded Event Manager (EEM) is nothing new to the IOS. It has been around for a long time but is very underutilized (mostly because people don’t know about it).

EEM is great way for those who love scripting and automation to make your networking devices do some interesting things. How about having a script that automatically assigns VLAN and QoS configuration to an access port when detecting an IP phone connected (via CDP)? You can do all sorts of cool things. You can have a script that disables ports at certain times of the day to save power. It doesn’t sound like much, but on a large scale it could be significant (great for companies trying to work on their “green” initiatives). Cisco is doing some cool things in the future regarding power savings.

On the voice side, I always hated having to track intermittent drop call issues. You can look at a trace and see the “disconnect” from your voice gateway, so you will want to look at Q931 debugs. Looking through a syslog server full of Q931 logs isn’t going to be fun. (try a call center where hundreds of calls can come in on 5 different gateways with 5-6 PRIs each). What you can do is enable the 931 debug, use EEM to parse through the syslogs and when it finds a certain cause code or calling/called number, you can have it create a file on the flash with just the info you care about. You could also have it send a trap alerting you if you felt so inclined. Much easier than waiting on the customer to “alert” you when they have another dropped call, only to find out the traces are overwritten…

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November 18, 2008 by ted.

Call home is a really cool feature that allows you to be a little more proactive on your network. Instead of relying on your SNMP poller (HP openview, CUOM) to provide you with your network health, the devices are becoming more intelligent.

Imagine a module failing in your switch over the weekend and it being smart enough to perform diagnostics (GOLD), open a TAC SR, and have the module there waiting for you on Monday (if needed right?). You could even integrate it into your current network operations and have it alert you and provide more intelligent alerts. I think it will probably help things get fixed faster and hopefully provide more meaningful alerts.

It’s not currently available on every platform since it’s still kind of new. You will find it on the following ::
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November 18, 2008 by ted.

I’ve been busy these last couple of weeks while starting this new job at Applied Materials. Many would question why to leave a great company like Cisco. Well, here in Austin, I’m very limited to what I could have done locally unless I wanted to relocate. Originally, I was open to the idea of relocating when it was time to move to another department. At this time in my life, I’m not able to move and I’m really not open to working from home (a lot of things change in a year I guess).

Applied is a great opportunity for me in Austin. Their main data center is here in Austin and really puts me in the right place in the company to grow and stay local. I have the opportunity to work on many different areas of technology including :: wireless, voice, data center, storage and security. I’m currently focusing on a lot of the new data center technologies which is quite a bit of fun. I’m mainly project-based which allows me to focus more on design and implementation, not to mention the great hands-on experience.

Last week I racked 2 brand new Nexus 7000 switches to be used for our future distribution upgrade. I also got to install 2 of the brand new ASR 1000 routers as well as 2 6509E chassis with the new Virtual Switching supervisor. I can’t wait to start implementing them into our existing network. It’s nice to be hands-on again. Not to forget all the new toys to play with!

Ted

P.S. I am still working on my second CCIE in Voice as that’s still very important to me.

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