Wassim

This is the first time I see black-colored Catalyst switches from Cisco. Yes, these are Catalyst 3650 switches, which look elegant and remind me of the old Juniper EX4200 switches. They have 48 PoE Ethernet Gigabit interfaces and four 1G SFP ports for copper/fiber uplinks. A Cisco Catalyst 3650 switch contains two Cisco stacking ports that sit on the rear panel. When put in a stack and entered the stack master election, the switch that becomes the stack master will have a constant green ACTV LED. However, the switch that is put in Standby role will have a blinking green ACTV LED. Sample IOS command on a Catalyst 3650 Let us suppose we want to check whether there still is enough amount of PoE energy, on a Catalyst 3650 switch. We need to issue the following command first: show power inline then check the Remaining Watt value: Catalyst 3650 switch stacking benefits and commands When put in a stack, Cisco Catalyst 3650 switches form a single switch. And the stack cabling form what is c...

The service compress-config is a nice feature from Cisco that mimics the Microsoft NTFS compression. It allows to reduce the size of the startup-file, in some cases to one quarter of the original size. Configuring the service compress-config command Configuring the compression feature is easy. Position yourself at the global configuration level and issue the command service compress-config on the Cisco switch: When you do a write mem , usually the IOS will display a simple message saying that configuration has been saved. However, with service compress-config, this same message becomes the following: Compressed configuration from … bytes to … bytes[OK] Here is an example: One immediate drawback of this command is that write mem and show run take a little much longer to execute than usual. Don’t tell me it’s due to a high resource usage. I tried them on a fresh Catalyst 3650 and they do take a bit of time. Disabling service compress-config To disable the compression of the startup-fil...

Network engineers and administrators who spend considerable time on network devices need a reliable Telnet/SSH/Serial client. The best free option they have is Putty, sure. But when you have hundreds of devices and different credentials to store, then a more advanced tool is needed. This is where SercureCRT comes in place. It has beautiful features that make network administration easy and “colorful”. It is a software made by VanDyke and has nice features. Features SecureCRT provides the following features: Creating and storing sessions: you can create hundreds of sessions and save them for future use. SecureCRT includes a powerful feature that allows to store usernames and passwords along with the sessions. Customizing the GUI: if you don’t like the default font, or the background or even want to have a transparent background, then SecureCRT allows you to customize all that.  You can check my console colors on this post . Tab support: in a single instance of this soft...

Route patterns are the fundamental part of the CUCM route plan. They are used to route internal digit patterns inside a CUCM cluster, or external digit patterns to the PSTN. Their equivalent in the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express world is dial peers. The dummest explanation of route pattern is the following: to allow CUCM to route calls based on the matched patterns it finds among the route patterns. Think of it like someone talking to you and as soon as you find the right pattern you take action: Cartoon (C) Julie R. Neidlinger | AngrymanCartoon.com A Route Pattern can route or block a pattern. In the case of blocked pattern, we need to specify the cause code. The cause cause can be one of the following values: Out of bandwidth, User busy Unallocated number. Even if you don’t choose a cause code by yourself, a default one is assigned. Route patterns point to: a Route List a Route Group a device: a gateway or a trunk Cisco recommends pointing route patterns to route l...

Here are the steps to share a file on Google Drive. First, select a file to share and right-click on it. Click on Share… The following menu appears. This is where all sharing options are set:   Click on the grey rectangle that is below the “Link sharing on” text. You will be presented with the possible Google Drive file sharing permissions. For the purpose of this example, we select “Anyone with the link can view “. This mean that your file will be shared in a read-only mode. But it won’t appear for anyone, unless he has the sharing link.  You can also specify a list of people who have permissions on the file. Enter their email addresses or their names and select the permission type: At this point, you have the possibility to save your settings by clicking on Done , on to go advanced. In the advanced mode, you can share the link on major social networks: Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter. To do that, click on Advanced You can see there are four ...

Anyone who knows the power of the Internet will likely store his files somewhere on a public storage server. I used to burn CDs and DVDs to keep my data. Nowadays, I use a powerful online storage application: Google Drive. Google Drive storage Once you subscribe to the Google Drive service, you get 15GB of online storage… for free! This nice step from Google made me wonder why I should still backup my data on my computer, while I can have an online storage device. So I decided not to buy an external hard drive and send my critical data to Google Drive. Google Drive pricing If you have many large files such as video clips, movies and ISO files, you may need more than the free quota. For this, Google set up a pricing plan as follows: [table] Storage capacity,monthly fee 15 GB,free 100GB,1.99$ 1TB,9.99$ 10TB,99.99$ 20TB,199.99$ 30TB,299.99$ [/table] Google Drive vs Dropbox The most obvious criteria of comparison is the storage capacity. But there are other features worth mentioning. ...

When you choose to pursue the CCNA Voice track, and it’s the first time you will be dealing with VoIP, you need a reliable source of knowledge. In this post, we will discuss about the Ciscopress book: CCNA Voice Official Cert Guide. What is “CCNA Voice 640-461 Official Cert Guide”? This is a book developed for the purpose of teaching you the core topics of the Cisco ICOMM exam. It covers the following areas: Pieces of the Cisco Unified Communications plateform, IP phone registration, Call Manager Express CME features, administration and dial plan, Communications Manager CUCM features, administration and dial plan, Adding end users on CME and CUCM, Understanding voicemail and presence in the Unified Communications world, Basic troubleshooting techniques. The book comes with a CD that contains Pearson Education practice test engine. You need the following minimum hardware capabilities to run it: Pentium-class 1Ghz processor, 512MB of RAM, Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7, ...