I am having a bit of a nightmare with a Service Provider, which, for its own protection, shall remain nameless, over a so-called QoS-enabled MPLS WAN. A fairly sizeable UK public sector organisation has been having problems with an IPT...

Do you ever feel that, despite your best efforts, things just conspire against you? You really make the effort to design and build your network for resilience, you dual-home all your switches, provide two WAN links into all your remote...

I used to be not that fond of BGP as a routing protocol—it just struck me as too complicated and scary. Then I had to spend a lot of time with it and it became a firm favourite. In fact...

I have been doing some work on a WAN design for a large private sector communications organisation. As usual, the difficult bit has been pinning them down as to what they really need (not want - need) to support their...

Something I’ve often had to remind people—especially when they’re starting out in networking—is that it’s very much a two-way street. Traffic has to get from one end of your network to the other—but it has to be able to get...

I own a chainsaw—well, I live in the country, and for a bit of light relief from networking, I chop logs and cut (small) trees down for our stove. I have never yet cut a branch off a tree while...

With a lot of the projects I work on, I have to do the overall design, detailed configs and the bill of materials. It’s always a fine line between trying to spec out the best network I can, and not...

Sometimes it’s the most basic things that catch you out. We were recently doing some Proof of Concept testing for a large (non-UK) bank that wanted to model part of its international MPLS WAN with a view to providing Layer...

In the olden days of serial and coax connections, it was dead simple for network kit to figure out if a connection went down. Everything was direct point to point, and if a cable broke or an interface failed, you...

I’m doing some work for a customer who is moving people from one building to another, and using the opportunity to move them to some newer technology. Virtual desktops, a new printing methodology, and more emphasis on collaboration tools. The...