Category: Word from the author

Last month I celebrated 6 years of writing my blog.

This project reached yesterday his most visited day in history with more than 1500 visitors and more than 31K all together in November. Nice to finally see someone actually reading my rumblings.

It was and still is hard work of editing old posts making them better and finding new interesting stuff to write about.

Blog is about computer network technologies, you know, the stuff that makes thing get to you and appear on your device’s screens so you can stare at it all the time 🙂

Some other interesting trivia:

• I have 221 posts published currently.
• I have also more than 300 drafts that may get published. Some things get old before I get to write them so I just skip those.
• It takes me approximately 10 to 16 hours to write a post, not counting research and draft creation before starting the final edit.
• I still use paper and coloured pencils to draw all the schemes used on the blog, same as when making first drafts of my future network designs.
• My blog is using few banners to be able to pay for itself, so it is earning more or less the money I need to run it.
• From a technical side, it is a small but optimised Linux VPS build by myself from scratch using some commercially available (and paid) solutions to run fast, load pages flash fast and never go down.

Thanks to all the readers and supporters 😉
howdoesinternetwork.com/welcome

I was planning for some time now to make a list of books I read recently, here’s the list

It should be something like a book reading suggestion list in order to maybe help you pick the right materials in your networking technology learning journey.

On the top are the books I used most while studying for my certs but also some of them are the books that I usually carry with me on my Kindle or PDF wherever I go. It is always a good idea to have those books on you so you can have a look at some details when you need them.

I’m sorry to put here something that is not really technical but for a blog with the name “howdoesinternetwork.com” it would be strange not to follow the story about the future of DNS governance given the fact that DNS is a crucial part of internet functionality.

You probably know how the internet works given the fact that you are visiting a blog like this. Regardless of that, it will not hurt to explain in few words the importance of DNS (Domain Name System) for a normal internet operation.

Let’s surf to se how this works

If you want to open this webpage or send an email to someone, you must enter a destination to your computer so it could know where to sent your stuff. As you are most surely a human, being, you would like to use a name like google.com for opening a webpage or an e-mail address in order to send a message to your colleagues (rather than some strange numbers separated by dots or colons). Almost all humans are like that and they want to use names and addresses. Computers, on the other hand, know to reach each other only by IP addresses.

You can see that we needed someone to take the role of the “address book” as soon as we got the internet.

Please note:

This has nothing to do with networking in particular! Not if you look from only one perspective. If you look from totally different perspective, with Cisco ACI and all other SDN solutions, you will probably meet with Python programming language (because you will) and then, somewhere in beginning of Python exploration this is the first question that will cross your mind. Of course, if you think like me!

Although not directly related to networking, the question bothered me for some time now and the answer is not only really logical when you read it but it is also given by a cool guy named prof.dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra

For almost every networking geek it will be enough to read through it.

Intro

After getting the CCIE I found the next thing I wanted to get my hands around. Python. As it seems, Cisco ACI fabric will be the next big thing in Cisco world. Other vendors all have something about SDN to offer these days. Most important part for us, networking engineers, is that they want us to give up the CLI and get us to use Python and REST calls to speak with our network equipment. Python was the logical next step.

I signed and passed Dr. Chuck’s Coursera Python class:

• Programming for Everybody (Python) by Charles Severance

And got some books:

• Python for Informatics by Charles Severance (Coursera Professor)
• Learning Python, Fifth Edition by Mark Lutz
• Python Pocket Reference, Fifth Edition by Mark Lutz
• Fluent Python by Luciano Ramalho

After first few great lectures on Coursera by Dr.Chuck the question was born!

The Question

So my questions arose: “Why the hell in Python slices and range exclude the last item?”, “Why?”, “It’s not logical to me!”

The Answer

This is the story on how I became CCIE# 46173

To be honest, when I look back, I do not really know the main reason behind going through all this trouble, but I can tell you the story about how I did it. It’s mostly a thriller, and some drama towards the end. I will give you an overview of the whole process including the materials used, videos watched, books read and struggles that I went through.

I think that is the right thing to do. This article is for all of you out there who are still trying to study for this exam and need some suggestions. One of the most important things for me was to gather others candidate experience and suggestions in making a good study plan and get the info about the books and stuff. This is also a perfect occasion to brag about passing the damn thing and write a bit about myself. On technology blog, this is a rare opportunity when is alright to write a self reflection.