It’s the first working day of 2020 - a new year, a new decade. Just before Christmas I got a gentle reminder from Cisco that my CCNP needs to be recertified. Hence I am starting to get back into the groove of studying - it’s been a while.

Rather than simply try one of the ROUTE, SWITCH or TSHOOT exams again, I thought I would advance my learning by taking on the ARCH 300-320

This evening was “INOG” evening in Dublin, an evening I always look forward to, not least the quite brilliant event venues the meetings seem very often to be held in. INOG:12 was no different as we assembled in the really cool “Dogpatch Labs” located in the “CHQ Building”.

George Ryan - A New Tech Apprenticeship for Ireland - FIT

Following the customary introductions and “Code Of Conduct” was read out by [“Donal (@irldexter)”] (https://twitter.com/irldexter) the first talk this evening was from George Ryan. George is COO of “FIT”. This lightning talk had the sole purpose to make us all aware of the organisation and indeed the fact that they are operating a pay and learn Technical Apprenticeship programme and skills partnership.

This week I spent a tone of time working on my HOMELAN with a couple of goals in mind.

• I needed to road-test my employer’s “Agile Connect” SD-WAN product which is based on Nokia Nuage Network’s VNS SD-WAN offering and had to carve off a new VLAN to plug the NSG-E into.

and

• I wanted to ensure my HOMELAN was completely v6-ified once again following several months using Google Wifi without my hosts having native v6.

Connecting my NSG

There are a couple of us in BT Ireland that have been given the task of road-testing the NSGs and indeed our service wrap for this technology which has a product name of “Agile Connect”. The intention is that we have active familiarity with the technology when we are doing customer engagement and can demonstrate our orchestration and reporting portal with ease and comfort.

This week just gone saw #RIPE77 take place in the home of RIPE and the RIPE NCC - Amsterdam. Even since I attended my first RIPE in Dublin which was RIPE66, I have loved the event. For this reason I really dislike missing it.

With my change of role since 2016, attending the meetings are sadly not a core responsibility of mine for $day_job but that said, who in their right mind that has any involvement in the networking community ignores the meetings (amirite)? At any chance I get during the week, I either remotely participate in the live meeting or failing that, check back on the presentation archives after the fact. A couple of key and to me seminal presentations were;

After the last number of weeks I have been working away with some projects / repositories on GitHub. As I’m currently the only contributor to my repos my usage of the full capabilities of git isn’t necessitated and to be frank most of my work with git has simply involved;

vim some-super-interesting-file.md
:wq
git add some-super-interesting-file.md
git commit -m "some commit message"
git push origin whatever-branch

It’s pretty simple and straightforward and outside of needing to do the odd git pull in my project directory from time to time because I’ve done some updates either directly on github.com or on another machine, it’s been pretty flawless.

I’ve been an active member of the INEX community as a result of my employer BT’s membership of INEX for many years now. Even though it’s no longer a direct responsibility of mine to attend on behalf of our Network Engineering team any longer, I feel it’s an extremely good way of keeping in touch with the networking community in Ireland.

So any time the meetings are held and I can work it into my working schedule without having a clash with other customer meetings etc I make it my business to attend. It’s also a really good way to stay embedded with what’s relevant in terms of technologies in use by Service Providers / Peers in the industry.