Since my last blog post, I did enjoy the holiday season but have a few items to get caught up on. In this post I discuss hardware upgrades coming up this week, some python scripting for IPAM with a link to a great Netbox resource and some compliments to the guys at https://packetpushers.net/

I also have some upgrades of some Cisco 6500 in my remote data centers. The upgrade is actually a secondary factor. I am swapping 2 x WS-X6704-10GE for WS-X6716-10G-3CXL. The primary motivation is to regain power redundancy since they are running in Combined mode since my power supplies are currently at 1153W each and my system is using 1193 currently. These cards use 300-330W each and the combined unit is rated as using 475W. If I can shave enough off to gain redundancy I will be thrilled or at least I gain some capacity on the switch.

One of my professional goals is to replace the existing IPAM system. I began by moving the Network aggregates into Netbox. The the prefixes along with the associated vlan , customer information , etc. I did write some python scripts to help massage the data for import into Netbox. I wrote a second script to pull the “free” ip subnets available to customer alot of my learning came courtesy of another blogger thank you to Przemek Rogala. My next step is to add the functionality to add new network devices and connections.

I have been consistently studying the CCIE material as well over the last few weeks. It was timely revisit since I ran into a issue with one of my customer recently in regard to a Spanning-Tree issue where I had a 1 gig link being preferred over a 10G link, which initially caught me off guard but I was able to quickly augment the port priority to shift the traffic gracefully to the higher capacity link.

The last item to talk about was the Packetpushers podcast. This week I was invited to their slack channel which is great so far. Interacting with other engineers issues/complaining in real time helps me understand this field in a more personal way. Then Greg , Drew and the guys on the Heavy Networking (Jan 10, 2020) discussed about the important of starting a blog. This gave me the courage to come back and post something today and some of the earlier posts I began with. Highly recommend the whole family of Podcasts at PacketPushers.

I hope to post more early next week perhaps about my studying and some of my other tasks I have at work.