This week I've been out in Denver attending the annual IPv6 Summit put on by the Rocky Mountain IPv6 Task Force . It was a fantastic conference and the fact that it's free is almost too good to be true. I first got interested in this particular conference because two of the speakers are old buddies of mine from my days back at INS. Scott Hogg and Jeff Doyle are two of the sharpest people I've ever met and really know their stuff when it comes to IPv6. The content at the show was great but the best part was the collaboration that took place during the breaks and lunches...

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In case you haven’t seen it yet, the SolarWinds Engineer’s Toolset version 10.1 is now available and includes some pretty cool new stuff. One of the coolest pieces of technology that 10.1 added is the new and improved traffic generator, WAN Killer . I recently had a chance to chat with the Toolset engineering team about this new application and so I thought I’d post our discussion here. Josh – So Steve, I know that we’ve been chatting about a new and improved traffic generator for a while. What can you tell me about the new version of WAN Killer? Steve...

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As a best practice, when I'm troubleshooting network issues, I typically start at layer 1 and work my way up the stack. If you've been managing networks for very long you've probably learned that the first three steps to troubleshooting a network issue are "check the cable, check the cable, check the cable..". Once you've checked the cable though, it's probably time to move up to layer 2. Using layer 2 protocols and methods to troubleshoot layer 3 problems has long been a favorite of mine. Understanding where layer 2 is working but layer 3 isn't...

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