The Network Engineer’s Manifesto

By filipe93 on Flickr

Back in 2005, fueled by the growing trend of manufacturers to make their products cheaper, disposable and less home-repairable, Make Magazine published their “Owner’s Manifesto: A Maker’s Bill of Rights“. This document laid out the tenets of the maker/hardware hacking/upcycling movement – essentially the freedom to use your legally-owned goods in whatever way you damn well wanted!

It struck me today that we network engineers could use a similar document – something we can brandish in the faces of vendors when they start doing Stupid Things™ and acting against the interests of those who install, configure, operate, monitor and tweak their products day-in, day-out.  So, without further ado – a manifesto for those on the front-line of the networking industry!

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Home Lab: DIY 19″ Rack

This will hopefully be the first of a series of blog entries on setting up a home lab for CCNP study.  I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to cover in each post, but bear with me and we’ll see where this goes!

As part of my studying I decided it was high time I got myself some Cisco gear of my own.  While you can gain a lot of experience from the workplace there are obvious limitations – you simply can’t just start playing with things!  Also, unless you work for a consultancy or the very largest organisations it’s highly unlikely that you will use every single CCNP-level technology in your everyday job.  Companies that use OSPF might not necessarily use EIGRP, or companies will use MPLS for WAN connectivity over Frame Relay for example.  Equally not all organisations will be totally Cisco shops – Check Point or Netscreen might be used for firewalls/VPNs and F5 or Barracuda might be used for Network Load Balancing.  There’s simply too many variables to be able to cover the whole CCNP syllabus on kit in the office.

I’ll go over the kit that I bought at a later date, but tonight I wanted to pay some attention to housing all the kit that might make up a lab.  Unless you’re single or have a dedicated workroom it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get away with leaving your kit piled in a heap on the dining room table.  That might work until someone finds an DB60 DCE/DTE cable in their soup, but trust me, it’ll be downhill from there!

So the problem here is to come up with something that doesn’t look too awful and yet can hold a decent amount of kit and doesn’t cost the earth.  While there are ready-made racks on eBay and other sites, they all tend to be a little too big/imposing or expensive.  Not good.  So it was with some amusement that I came across the concept of the Rast Rack!  Put simply this is a Ikea bedside cabinet (nightstand for our .us friends) that happens to be more-or-less the right width for 19″ gear and vertical rack rails so the kit can be properly mounted.

I picked up a couple in Ikea over the weekend and together with some 6U rack rails bought from a music/stage supply store online, put together a rack in about 30 minutes or so this evening.

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On the whole I’m pretty pleased with it.  There’s only one problem I have with it – it could do with being a few mm wider as it’s a real squeeze getting kit in there with rack ears on.  However that could just be down to my dodgy aftermarket rack ears!  This does mean that taking stuff out will require slackening the bolts that hold it together, but that’s no real hardship.

Also, let’s do the math as to how much this cost: £7.99 for the Rast cabinet itself, £6.00 for the rack rails and maybe £5.00 for a lot of 50 cage nuts, washers and M6 machine screws.  I already had the screws that I used to fit the rack rails.

Grand total: £18.99.  If I make two of them that’s £32.98 (I don’t need more screws/nuts etc).  Still a good saving over £50.00 for a large metal monstrosity that’ll loom in the corner of the room…

Network cheat sheets: the motherlode!

While browsing around my Google Reader feeds earlier I came across this amazing site of Cisco/Networking cheat sheets. It covers pretty much all the CCNP-level topics and quite likely more. Most definitely worth a look!

http://packetlife.net/library/cheat-sheets/