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Cisco Live!
07.03.13
17:27:01


So just another quick update from my adventures in rebooting my site. I've checked a couple things off my list. First I added titles to my blog entries. I also updated the RSS feed to reflect appropriate information. I did some updating on the back end to help with that too. Across the top I updated the links to social sites. I was hoping to get a little farther tonight but I unfortunately / amazingly ran into a backup of an old PHP / curl monitoring tool I wrote for work and decided if I could get it back up and working. You can check it out here:

http://4d4m.net/curlmon/

I'm sure if it gets out there too much people will troll add websites to it but whatever I'll fix it if that happens. The neat part about this is the site allows you to add a site you want to monitor. Once added it uses a cron job that runs a PHP script that runs a Linux application called curl. Curl basically parses apart all the timing it takes in requesting a website. Things like how long does it take to lookup the DNS, request the site, get a response, and most importantly to me was the time to first byte (or TTFB).

This was an unfortunate find because it sucked up all sorts of time I should have been getting familiar with my site again and making updates. Especially since I really don't have a need for this tool anymore. However I'm still stoked about it because this was the first (and really only) time I was able to create graphs with PHP. If you go there and click on a site it will take you to a report that gives you some information and displays a bar graph to compare easily where the most amount of time is being taken during the request. Finally the saddest part about this find is it's still not the final product I had for the project at work. In the final project I had added several types of graphs and time frame stuff. But it's close enough that I could reboot the project and if I ever need this information I have a working copy that does the bulk of the work I've been working for my current company for 8 years as of today. During that carrier I went from just sorting out cables in drawers, plugging into keyboards and installing printers to being the go to guy in the infrastructure group. My main role now is network engineer and I definitely am doing what I love. Nothing makes me geek out more than working on the network. The network is the back bone of any company and its challenging and fun to be involved in literally everything my department does. Hopefully I'll be able to write up some post on some of the major projects we've taken on the last year and going to be doing this year. Like our complete network redesign from a collapsed network using cross campus layer two to a full core / distribution /access network all routed over layer three. Also we're implementing BGP using our ARIN /24 at the data center we turned up last year. But that's for later.

The reason I'm writing this up is because I've been networking here for over four years now. A little over half my carrier here and that entire time I've been asking to go to Cisco Live and every year I get denied. I'm not sure why because others went to things like the Avaya and EMC conferences. However this year is the year they finally said yes. As of this week I have registered for Cisco Live and my travel arrangements are being finalized.

So I'm super excited for being able to go to Orlando and really be able to take in the Cisco Live experience. My two main goals are:

1) First and foremost the ticket comes with a free Cisco cert test. Which unintentionally let my CCNA lapse last year in July so I'm hoping to retest that for free down there and then start working on my CCNA ' Security.
2) I really want to get my hands on some BOYD technology. Mostly I've been looking at moving from CICSO ACS to ISE so that we can start preparing for BOYD. Note: ISE doesn't support TACACS yet so that's a bummer.

Be sides that I really have the generic want to get away and just have fun. This is my first major convention so I'm really looking forward to the experience and seeing all the super geeky things that will be there. Also really looking forward to be there and physically being able to get hands on some new tech that might actually apply to me.

Finally the big news' Journey is playing at the customer appreciation event' Yeah that's right.


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