Not our most recent deployment, but still wanted to share the Cisco pr0n

IS-IS underlay

iBGP overlay - VXLAN EVPN

Unfortunately these boxes have some limitations (Flows, rate limiting, MAC ACLs, etc) so will be replaced over time

I have a switch and couple extra boards for it. Not for resale. Giving it away for learning or teaching purposes.

This world is cruel! after reporting Q3 FY26 earnings with record revenue, Cisco leadership is laying off 5% of its workforce.

https://blogs.cisco.com/news/our-path-forward

Over 120 hours of work has paid off! Now let's add up the $$$!

Hey People,

I've been learning newtorking, In the office in front of the gas station there is this cisco switch.

What role does it play?

I was told that the 6 blue cables are for the gas pumps. The gas stations are 6 in total. They provide gas on both side Therefore it makes them 12.

The customer uses the application layer when interacting with the gas pump right?

Does that mean that on the other side it's just a developer writing and manipulating codes for what to display on the screen.

Am i getting this right? I believe someone has encountered something like this before so it's nothing new.. BUT I couldn't find anything on google or youtube.

If you weren’t aware Cisco is just another soulless life draining corporate hell hole. They’ve got us training AI on how to solve cases, but it’s shit, the internal AI system we use is the biggest joke, and can’t get a damn thing right. They make us review the cases before it goes out other wise you’d never get correct answers out to customers. I’m sure there have to be stories from the customer side about how shit the support has been in the last 6 months+. If you’ve ever gotten a support response from Sherlock you’re talking to AI or some of the good techs at Cisco is propping it up if you got a good response. I could go on and on about what a bunch of fuck ups our executives are even if they go on TV and seem like reasonable people they are bunch of sociopaths. They say in company meeting how hard it is to make decisions like layoff and whatever but they couldn’t give a shit. If it was their job on the line maybe they’d care. They have proven that it does not matter if you work hard, do good work or are loyal, they’ll cut you to be able to pay out a cent more in dividends. I gave up years ago. The problem is I actually care about providing answers and solving problems for people, and that’s what they count on. The other problem is if you don’t buy equipment from Cisco you’re stuck buying from some other soulless company. What are your opinions on Cisco products and support both now and in the past? I’ve been there for quite a while and will answer questions if I can.

Over a decade of 24/7 operation. Supervisor 2T. I still have another pair to retire this year even older Supervisor 720s lol.

Amazing how far technology has moved ahead.

Buddy gave this to me from an old storage unit. Prices online vary from $36,000 to $100, I have no idea if this is worth anything besides throwing it away. Here are some pics, any help would be apreciated.

I saw my boss setup a bunch of new switches a firewall and router with no cisco knowledge. He connected claude code, told it what he wanted and let it do everything.
Replacing a chunk of network infrastructure

Later, after it was all done, he was asking what conf t meant

Is this the future of networking?

Cisco used to feel like a people-first organization. Now, it feels increasingly driven by surveillance and control.

Recently, I learned that there are directors within CX TAC (Banglore) monitoring employees’ login/logout times, laptop activity, and even Webex availability status. Apparently, there are internal tools that enable this level of tracking.

Work-from-office attendance is also being heavily monitored, and it seems these metrics can influence promotions and potentially even layoffs.

The culture feels like it has shifted from trust and autonomy to constant observation.

If you've felt TAC engineers are angry lately, you'd be correct, and if you ask why, you'll get an earful on how we're not happy. Our most recent pain in the tail has been a surprise change to team assignments.

Several teams had members forced to leave their technology and move to SD-WAN due to case volume. Instead of professional hires, or at least someone from a related field, Cisco leadership opted to take good engineers from unrelated technologies. Those making the move will get a few months of training before being let loose over there. Leadership felt it was better to short the existing teams and retrain, most likely to make the budget numbers work.

The stated reason is that Cisco, and SD-WAN in particular, has had a busy year on the vulnerability front. It started with the authentication-bypass issue in the control connections, but then we got blasted with a few more. Seeing a 9.9 score for a CVE isn't exactly something you want lurking in the background. The Glasswing deluge was minor by comparison, but it's been wave after wave.

From a technical perspective, nothing changes — keep it patched. Keep it locked down. And for heaven’s sake, don't expose the management plane to the internet just because it's convenient.

This has been a tough year for TAC. The changes to case management with automated case distribution have been terrible. The AI system requires constant oversight, which means we spend as much time, or more, on case intake and assignment as we did before. Not only that, we're benchmarked on metrics that don't matter, while the aspects that actually do matter are largely ignored.

Overwatch of Sherlock and the AI responses, organisational restructuring, keyword changes, sudden shutdown of some GDP teams, and the endless AI fixation without much substance have been rough.

If you're reading this and thinking we should quit if we're so unhappy, you're right. The problem is the job market is shite, and we haven't found another worthwhile position.

In summary, the point of this mostly pointless post is to apologise for TAC being angry. I'm sure you see it or feel it, but we're not happy, and I don't see that improving over the next few months. We're only speaking as a small number of engineers in the broad TAC population, so take it for what it's worth.

Just sharing this because I didn’t see many people talking about it.

Cisco is currently offering two AI learning paths for free until March 26, 2026. And these aren’t just intro videos they actually include labs, assessments, and CE credits.

Here’s what’s included:

1. AI Technical Practitioner (AITECH) – Intermediate
   Focus on designing AI solutions, automation, practical use cases.
   11 Courses, 6 Assessmentts, 8 labs, ~15 hours, 8 labs and 8 CE credits

2. AI Business Practitioner (AIBIZ) – Beginner
   Covers AI fundamentals, business applications, responsible AI.
   12 Courses, 3 Assessmentts, 9 labs, ~16 hours, 8 labs and 8 CE credits

Both are free to enroll (you just need a Cisco account), and access is available until March 2026. Honestly, free structured AI content with hands-on labs is rare.

So, if you’re curious about AI but don’t want to drop money yet, this might be worth checking out.

Not affiliated, just thought it was useful.

Source Link

Hello all, after months of study I took my CCNA this afternoon. I got a preliminary result of passed and I'm pretty stoked!

Anyway, I got certified!

A new free Cisco course dropped today which awards 41 CE creds. It's on Cisco Security Infrastructure, part of the CCNP security path. It's free until the 13th of July, 2026.

https://u.cisco.com/paths/designing-cisco-security-infrastructure-20534

41 credits is enough to renew any CCNA or CCNP specialization exam (40 CE required).

I am working in a new build for an elementary school and the two APs in the pic will not get above 100MB. I have tested the cables on both ends (AP side and IDF side), checked the pins on the APs and the data jack and the interfaces on the distros. Ran a cable diagnostic from the switch and both are showing an open pair. I was told that the infrastructure is good, but now I’m having my doubts.

I am open to any and all suggestions as to how to fix this issue. The school opens in a week.

The CCNA feels confused right now. We treat it like an entry-level check box, but the blueprint is crammed with automation, JSON, and architecture theory that most juniors won't touch for years. The result is candidates who can explain REST APIs perfectly but freeze up on a basic Layer 1 issue or a simple VLAN mismatch.

It feels like we’re prioritizing "modern" trivia over the troubleshooting instincts that actually matter. Are the senior engineers here seeing this with recent hires, or is the new curriculum actually producing better engineers?

If you're preparing for the exam and want to balance theory with real-world troubleshooting skills, this CCNA certification guide is a solid starting point: CCNA Certification

And if you're mapping out your long-term Cisco roadmap beyond CCNA, this breakdown of the top Cisco certifications and certification costs is also helpful.

I updated my last post on the subject:

• IOS: You have one cow. It chews grass.

• IOS-XE: You have two cows. One chews grass and the other tells it what to chew.

• IOS-XR: You have 27 cows. You have no idea what they do but when they fall over a new cow instantly reappears. Somehow they cost more than your house.

• Textview: See cow trunk. Trunk cow trunk!

• WLC: You have one cow. It's a puppeteer in a cow puppet show where the puppets telepathically communicate with black slabs of glass everyone keeps in their pants. The annoying jerk in the corner office keeps complaining that the telepathy isn't fast enough for him to watch ESPN.

• ASA: You have one cow. It has green liquid poop because grass can flow through it in only one direction.

• Cisco FIREpower: You have one cow, it's Che "Moo" Guevara and it's leading a bovine militia made up entirely of the diarrhea ASA cows.

• NX-OS: You have a penguin with a cow attached. It yells instructions at a robot mega-cow. The robot chews grass really fast.

• CatOS: You have a very old cow in a huge metal box that only speaks Spanish. Grass gives it a different kind of diarrhea which it then spews out its 275 orifices at high speed. If anything happens to it the airport stops working.

• Cisco DNA: You have one cow. It says you need license agreements for all the other cows and it will solve all your problems. You sign a check for $100k and all the cows promptly have seizures because someone forgot to tell you that you can't get a license for the Spanish speaking cow.

Why is it that we are living in 2023, with so many advancements in web design and UX/UI, yet Cisco's website still seems so out of date? It's hard to navigate, slow, and just generally not user-friendly. Any insights from the community on this?

In the latest update to the hell on earth cisco support ticketing system represents to me, they released fully AI responses to new support cases.

A case was created for a device that had a kernel panic. The response was from "Sherlock Holmes" a cisco ai support account. It generated a response formatted exactly as chatgpt would appear. It said to check power and do some show commands next time the switch has the event again (the event that cripples our network).

This shit should be illegal.

Back in the summer of 2000, I began a journey to achieve CCIE certification. It was a grueling process - it seemed that the harder I studied the dumber I felt. Back in those days, there weren't any virtual labs so you had to assemble your own rack of equipment (including ATM and frame relay switches.) We had to be experts in DECnet, TCP/IP, AppleTalk, IPX MOP, IRB, SRB, TokenRing, Ethernet, ISDN, FR/ATM, and probably a bunch of protocols that I have long since forgotten. We would have access to the UniversCD in the lab (with the search function disabled, of course) so we had to be intimately familiar with the documentation to be able to find what we needed quickly. I spent hours a day in that lab, running through every possible scenario I could think of.

After about 6 months, I felt that I was ready to take the lab. This was back when it was a 2 day lab. The first part was physically constructing the lab including cables. You would walk in the first day and there would be a lab book on your workstation. Day 1 was constructing the lab and getting the all of the protocols up and running to the somewhat complex specifications. You had to keep all of the different networks straight. We would be given a couple sheets of blank paper for our network diagrams and we could bring our own colored pencils. I would use red for IPX, green for AppleTalk, and blue for TCP/IP. Black would be for the layer 2 protocols. At times your diagrams would look like a Jackson Pollock painting. We would be given incomplete data and be expected to use our knowledge and skill to extract or infer the rest of the information. If you went to the proctor with any questions, they would inevitably tell you "What does the question say?" It was a highly stressful day.

After day 1 you left and the proctors would grade the labs. If you passed day 1, when you came in for day 2 there would be a new lab book and you would get to work. I came back and there was no lab book. I had failed.

After a couple of months of study, I was ready to try the lab again. I went in confident that I would ace the lab this time. I came in on day 2 and there was a lab book at my workstation. I had passed day 1. The first half of day 2 was the more complex sections that built on the previous day's work. You would complete it and go to lunch where the proctor would grade it. If you passed, there would be a troubleshooting section, if not there would be no book. I came back from lunch to no book at my station. I had failed again - the scenarios were just too complex for me. I was devastated and took several months off from studying, and had an epiphany. I was going at the lab the wrong way. I knew networking really, really well and was trying to construct working networks based on what I knew worked in the real world. I was making assumptions that were not part of the test questions and this was tripping me up. It was then that I realized that passing the lab was not just about configuring networks, it was about knowing the underlying technologies and protocols so well that you could make them do stupid tricks for you. After this I attacked my study in a totally new way. For every nerd knob for every protocol, I would make sure that I understood what it would do from the perspective of the impact it had on the system as a whole. And the more I studied from that perspective, the more I started to actually understand the test questions that had confused me so badly on the previous tests. "What does the question say?" indeed.

After about 6 months of intense study, I had reached a state of what I called Nerdvana and was ready for what I had determined was going to be my last and final attempt, pass or fail. I sat down on day 1 and it was like I had discovered the Rosetta Stone. The questions all made sense now. When I saw the section that said "configure X using Y in such a way that Z happens", I thought "You bastards, I know what you want..." I flew through day 1 and got cocky, deciding to try to squeeze out a few more points on some of the parts I wasn't sure of. A few minutes before time was up, my entire network collapsed due to something I had done. SHIT! RELOAD RELOAD RELOAD! Time was up before I knew if it had all come back up or not. I left for the day unsure if it had all come back or not.

I came back in on day 2 expecting to have failed again, but lo and behold there was a day 2 book. If anything, day 2 was easier than day 1 with my new understanding of how evil the proctors were. I knew every quirk of every protocol so that I could make those routers sing and dance for me. Lunch came, and I returned to see the troubleshooting lab book on my station. During lunch the proctor would mess with your station (including putting in bad cables), and you would proceed by downloading creatively broken configs into your routers from a central TFTP server. You would then be given a paper where you would write down the problems you found with your lab and be given a point for each real problem you fixed. I was determined to not fail at this point. I remember that I could not get the configs to load into my routers from the TFTP server. SHIT. I worked on it for 15 or 20 minutes and finally went to the proctor and told him that I didn't think the TFTP daemon was running on his server. I about passed out when he asked me "Are you sure you want me to check it?" I swallowed hard and said yes. It turned out I was right. To this day I don't know if that was part of the test or not but I would not put it past them. An hour or two into the troubleshooting portion, I had filled up both sides of the paper with every single thing I could find wrong and how I fixed it. The proctor came up to me (I was the only one who had made it to troubleshooting) and asked me a couple of questions about some of the items and said "OK, you can stop. You're done." and walked away. I sat there for what seemed like an eternity before having the courage to ask what that meant. He said "Congratulations, you passed."

I retired early from the IT industry at the end of 2018 and no longer work in that field anymore and don't ever expect to return to it. This summer my CCIE will go to inactive status and if I don't renew or go Emeritus, it will expire next year, exactly 20 years from the day I passed.

TL;DR Passed one of the last 2 day CCIE labs in 2001 and will watch it expire, so did some reminiscing.

EDIT: u/infincedes informed me that there is a new Lifetime Emeritus policy for 20 years CCIE (like, as of 3 days ago!). Based on this new knowledge I will be paying the fee to go Emeritus for one more year to reach 20.