This past June when I was in North Carolina at Cisco's CPOC lab, I learned that there was a chance-albeit a slim one, but a chance nonetheless-that a position would be opening up on the CPOC team in the fall. By that point I had been to CPOC three times and knew many of the engineers who worked there. I spoke to them to get their feedback, met with the newly-hired manager of the team, and just generally did all the things I thought I should be doing to take advantage of my time being face to face with these folks.

I know it's cliche and I know I'm biased because I have an @cisco.com email address, but I've truthfully never seen anything like CPOC before. And the customer's I've worked with at CPOC haven't either. It's extremely gratifying to take something you built “on paper” and prove that it works; to take it to the next level and work those final kinks out that the paper design just didn't account for.

If you want more information about CPOC, get in touch with me or leave a comment below. Or ask your Cisco SE (and if they don't know, have them get in touch with me).

Anyways, on to the point of this post. When I was building the topology for the customer, I kept notes about random things I ran into that I wanted to remember later or those “oh duh!” moments that I probably should've known the answer to but had forgotten or overlooked at the time. This post is just a tidy-up of those notes, in no particular order.