It struck me this morning that one of the few constants in life is the importance of fundamentals. I can well remember my junior high and high school basketball coach drilling the importance of fundamental basketball into our young heads - dribbling, proper shooting technique, passing - he was all about mastering the basics and we practiced them for hours at a time, 6 days per week. It was much the same when my mom dragged me to church on Sundays - learn the fundamentals and they will stay with you throughout your life they told us. So, we focused on memorizing the Ten Commandments...

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A few weeks ago I wrote blog post about some cool technologies including NetFlow and Cisco's IP SLA and provided some information on what IP SLA can be used for and how it works. Since then I've become even more convinced that IP SLA is a must-use technology. I guess you could say I've gone from being just a fan to being somewhat of a fanatic. Sort of like the way I feel about Mountain Dew, spinnerbaits, and bird dogs - I just plain love 'em. Over the last few weeks I've really been able to get my hands dirty with this technology. I hosted a webcast -Deep Dive...

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This Thursday, March 26th, at 10:00 a.m. CDT, we're hosting a new webcast on "Network Troubleshooting - the Top 5 Technologies to Leverage". This webcast is going to be a little different than some of the others as we're going to dive a little deeper into how each technology works vs. focusing on applications the leverage the technology. We'll also cover some of the common concerns that people raise with enabling these technologies on your corporate network. During the webcast we'll take an in-depth look at: Trace route SNMP NetFlow (J-Flow, sFlow, etc)...

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This morning I had the opportunity to participate in a podcast with my buddies and the co-hosts of Cisco's TechWiseTV Jimmy Ray Pursor and Robb Boyd . The subject was the Conficker threat and I must say that I learned a few things as Jimmy Ray really knows his bots. We also talked about the best ways to avoid bots, the difference between bots and viruses, and some recommendations for protection software. It was a heckuva lot of fun and definitely provided some good informaiton. You can use these links listen to or download the podcast. Flame on... Josh Follow me on Twitter

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Recently I've had a several people ask me for advice on getting started with managing their networks and so I thought I'd take a few minutes tonight to shed some light on the subject... Now, this might seem like an odd topic as many of us have been neck deep in network management since we were knee-high to a grasshopper, but when you think about it we may have actually only been through the process of "getting started" a few times, once, or never at all. Often times we're brought in as part of an existing team where there's an ongoing network management...

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