25+ years of networking equipment, from a 4 Mbps Token Ring MAU in a server room cupboard to my fascination with GPU fabrics running at 800G. Every item here was instrumental in my learning.
Multistation Access Unit. Token Ring at 16Mbps — a shared ring where one bad NIC takes down the whole network. Found in a server room cupboard. Left in a server room cupboard.
decommissionedSerial interfaces. Frame Relay DLCIs. ISDN BRI for backup. A rollover console cable that was never where you left it. The router that taught me what "interesting traffic" means at 2am.
decommissionedEthernet, Token Ring, ATM, FDDI - if you had an obscure connector, you could probably find a port here to plug it into. Before IP was the thing, this beast spoke IPX, Appletalk and a dozen other dead languages. Config changes worked best with a second coffee and a quiet prayer.
decommissionedThe supervisor engine lottery. Would it failover cleanly? The answer was always yes — eventually — after reseating the SUP card three times across a two-hour maintenance window.
decommissionedThe Swiss Army knife of campus switching. SUP2, PFC2, MSFC2, CatOS-to-IOS migration scripts written at midnight. Still in production somewhere right now. You know it's true.
survived itUnified Communications Manager. Dial plans, MGCP gateways, SIP trunks that didn't quite SIP, H.323 for undocumented legacy reasons. The most patience testing two years of my career - too much end-user exposure
survived itLWAPP before CAPWAP. H-REAP before FlexConnect. Rogue AP detection. The eternal support ticket: "the wifi is slow" — Yes. Yes, it is. Bet you wish you hadn't skipped the site survey to save money
eventually tamedThe Gigabit Switch Router. Consumed an entire rack. Required its own power circuit. Needed a forklift to install. Also delivered 10Gbps of MPLS backbone at a time when that was remarkable.
decommissionedA rack full of router. The arrival of the iPhone pushed most carriers to deploy QoS in their cores to deal with the coming load. Or better still, just keep throwing more bandwidth at the problem.
eventually tamedVirtual Switching System — two Catalyst 6500s cosplaying as one switch. The cosplay occasionally broke at 3am. Root Cause Analysis: "unexpected hardware event on VSL." Thanks, Cisco.
eventually tamed802.1X, MAB, profiling, posture, CoA, guest portals, RADIUS. It could do everything. Getting it to do the specific thing you needed in the specific topology you had was the real CCIE lab exam.
survived itvPC put spanning tree trauma to bed. FCoE was going to unify storage and networking forever. M-series line cards cost more than my car. One F-series module once caused a partial fabric meltdown. Lessons were learned.
eventually tamedFEX topology. 2148T, 2248TP, 2232PP — Fabric Extenders as far as the eye could see. I have cabled more of these than I am willing to admit in a public document.
survived itServers rethunk. Unified Computing System — blades, fabric interconnects, service profiles, and a stateless computing model that was genuinely ahead of its time. The day I realised networking and compute were the same problem wearing different clothes.
eventually tamedTenant. VRF. Bridge domain. EPG. Contract. Subject. A whole new networking model on a new OS. Beautiful in theory. Deeply humbling to operate. Still the most ambitious thing Cisco ever shipped.
eventually tamedDMVPN, PfR, and QoS bolted together and rebranded as SD-WAN. Cisco's answer to the Viptela-led revolution — application-aware routing before Cisco admitted SD-WAN was actually a thing. Powerful when it worked. A puzzle when it didn't.
eventually tamedA proper SD-WAN fabric before Cisco got there. vSmart, vBond, vEdge — a clean controller-plane separation that made iWAN look like what it was. Cisco noticed. The acquisition followed. The product survived the transition better than most.
survived itVPC, subnets, route tables, security groups, NACLs, IGW, NAT gateway, VPC peering, then Transit Gateway. The mental model shift from physical to cloud took six months and three production incidents.
survived itVNet, NSGs, UDRs, VNet peering, ExpressRoute, Virtual WAN. The same concepts as AWS in different clothes, with different edge cases — all waiting patiently to introduce themselves in production.
survived itA router in a VM. A genuine breakthrough — BGP, OSPF, VRFs, all virtualised. Also: why is BGP flapping? Answer: Insufficient resources. It is always insufficient resources.
eventually tamedMulti-cloud networking with an actual control plane. Encrypted transit, FQDN egress filtering, CoPilot visibility. The tool that made the multi-cloud architecture diagram work in production rather than just in PowerPoint.
survived itA single global VPC. No regional routing tables. Hierarchical firewall policies. VPC-native GKE. The GKE networking model alone could fill a book. This site is partly that book.
survived itRDMA over Converged Ethernet. Rail-optimised topologies. Sub-microsecond latency requirements. Do not drop a single packet. The stakes change when a GPU costs $30k and the training run is 72 hours.
fascinated by itSpine-leaf at 400G. InfiniBand versus RoCE debates that feel like the old FCoE debates but with significantly more money involved. Flow-level ECMP. Collective comms at scale. Same physics, new price tag.
fascinated by itStill learning. Still breaking things. Before they get to production. The equipment changes and the blast radius grows. The blue rollover cable has evolved. However, first principles never change.
still at it