bloggy hiatus

I'm taking some time off from blogtastic bloggity blogging. Not sure how long. Several weeks at the least.

What I'm reading this weekend

I've been reading posts from Ethereal Mind, having started out finding a site to the "Network Zen" post on standardization.

Random network history and make-up trivia

A chicks-in-tech factoid that amuses me and that a lot of folks don't seem to know is that one of the cofounders of cisco Systems, Sandra Lerner, took the proceeds from sale of her founder's stock and created a venture capital firm that, among other things, funded the creation of Urban Decay cosmetics.

DHCP snooping

Worried about rogue DHCP servers mucking with your network? DHCP snooping can help. For cisco catalyst switches, these docs might be helpful: understanding and configuring DHCP snooping and configuring DHCP features and IP Source Guard.

The abyss gazes also

It's easy to see how your packets are leaving your network, but hard to see what happens to them after that. Differences in routing and preferential traffic shaping mean that your traffic may take a very different route coming back as going out.

One way to get more information about what's happening is with "looking glass" servers. These provide snapshots of routing at various points around on the Internet so you can see what the path to your network looks like from out there.

There are a bunch of them out there, with some lists here and here.