You have:

1. A Roomba vacuum. (I was working with an i-series when I wrote this. Maybe this applies to other models as well.)
2. A firewall or router between your Roomba and your mobile device. (Maybe the two are on different wifi networks as would be the case if you have a network set aside for IoT devices.)
3. An iRobot app that gets stuck at Verify password when setting up the Roomba.

I have a cron job that renews an SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt, and then restarts the smtpd daemon so that the new certificate is picked up. This all works fine--as proven by both the presence of a new, valid cert on disk, and smtpd successfully restarting--but cron never sends an email with the output of the job. What gives?

I was recently playing around with the Traffic Mirroring feature in AWS. As a network geek, this is right up my alley because as some colleagues and I used to say, "the wire never lies!". Being able to pick packets off the wire for detailed inspection has saved the day many a time. Until Traffic Mirroring came along, it wasn't possible to do that in an Amazon VPC. Below are my notes and considerations for using this feature.

I want to draw some attention to a new document I've written titled "Troubleshooting Cisco Network Elements with the USE Method". In it, I explain how I've taken a model for troubleshooting a complex system-the USE Method, by Brendan Gregg-and applied it to Cisco network devices. By applying the USE Method, a network engineer can perform methodical troubleshooting of a network element in order to determine why the NE is not performing/acting/functioning as it should.

I ran into this situation on a recent project and thought it would make an excellent question on an exam. It could be worded something like this:

What is the behavior of a router or Layer 3 switch when a dynamic route is learned that partially overlaps with a directly connected network?

1. The router reboots
2. The network reboots
3. That's um-possible
4. None of the above

The worst feeling for a geek:

This has happened to me twice now: upgrading Mac OS X from one release to another and after the dust settles, the search function in Outlook 2011 totally breaks and always returns "no results". As we all know, email sucks and being able to deftly search through that mound of crap in your mail client is the only thing that makes it somewhat bearable.

Normally I talk about overlays in the context of data center/SDN/cloud but today I'm going out into left field and am going to talk about voice! :-)

I freely admit that I'm a noob when it comes to Cisco voice so I'm not sure if the behavior I'm about to describe is obvious or not. It wasn't obvious to me and I only figured it out after running into the issue for real and troubleshooting it to resolution.

The issue stems from my misunderstanding about how dual-line ephone-dns function when used in an overlay.