net acad labs...

one of the things i liked most about doing the netacad labs for switch is that they are structured, meaning they get you into good habits... of course it's a pain in the ass, but nothing that was ever worth anything wasn't a pain in the ass...

repetition is paramount here; doing things without having to think about them...

i can set up an enterprise switch block in a half hour from scratch...  i don't even think about the vlans, the addressing, port channles or hsrp anymore, routing, it's built in...

funny, some people i know talk about hsrp like it's old... well, yeah, it is old, but it works great, and it's the father of ha and redundancy... if you know hsrp, you also know vrrp and glbp, and the idea of vitualization is planted firmly...

don't be jaded when it comes to certain older technologies; they are still taught for very good reason... without a foundation your house falls down...  don't be the guy who wants to start at chapter 48, there were 47 chapters you missed along the way...  i have no patience for people like that... you'll never be good at building a nexus system if you can't already build a basic switch...

i've been getting into nx-os lately... what you find is everything old is new again...

between junos and nx-os the idea of burying the system under a bunch of aliased commands is becoming obsolete, and the unix command line coming back into the fore of these systems is for me, welcome and refreshing...

if you can't navigate a file system you will be left behind...  dust off the old system V and berkeley books; use a linux distro instead of nasty windows as your desktop... get back to where the power is... the gui is your enemy...

when you follow my labs, don't just scrape the configs into your topologies... type em like you got a pair...