Cisco Tech Stories

In this episode, we receive Regis Baudin, Technical Leader for the CXLabs department in Europe. He is responsible for the operations of the biggest lab of the continent (Cisco has bigger labs in the US and Bangalore) and explains to us what are the challenges of hosting a gigantic lab where hundreds or thousands of engineers come to reproduce customer issues

A special Cisco Live EMEA Amsterdam episode where Nico interviews NOC team members on how they manage to deploy an entire network in a matter of days.

In this episode, we interview Jonathan Slenders, lead python developer at Cisco who takes us on adventure along his automation tools developped before and during his Cisco tenure. We discuss how terrible networking engineers are at coding and how we can reconcile both worlds.

Richard Yates, Service provider Technical Leader, tells us about his career story. Starting from the air force and analog phone switchboards through all the wireless technologies like CDMA, 3G, WiMAX to 5G. This long episode covers life lessons, technology anecdotes, insane stories and much much more.

We interview Devon Herron, a Splunk support engineer based in the UK. Devon only handles network down P1 situations and he has seen a few doozies during his career. He takes us through storage troubleshooting, hypervisor shenanigans and of course automation going bananas. Follow us on this journey to discover Splunk and how it can change your life as a network engineer.

In this episode, we interview Jean Francois Dive : threat hunting for Cisco internal Security. He takes us through the stakes of a few very recent and famous hacks.

In this episode, we interview Alain Lanssiers, Service Provider Technical Leader at Cisco CX who knows more protocols than anyone around here. One day he casually decides to code a new feature for a protocol that was already old back then ...

Special episode where we interview 3 engineers : Tristan, Jaroslav and Maren who troubleshooted network issues on boats and cruise ships. Some even had to go on site on the cruise ... there could be worse interventions probably.

In this episode, Esther Roure Villa remembers her days of troubleshooting Service Providers and spanning-tree loops. Esther is now a Sustainability Lead at Cisco and explains to us why it's way more technical than just a few buzzwords for good measure.

In this episode, we host our first non-Cisco guest Richard Atkin from ITGL. He tells us how he combines network engineering and programming in his job role with the help of Cisco RADKit, a free tool provided by Frederic Detienne whom we also invited on this episode ! When you have random access points crashing in your network, how can you automate the troubleshooting and more importantly expedite a solution ? Find out more at radkit.cisco.com

In this episode, Tiago Antunes takes remote troubleshooting to the next level where guiding someone collecting a wireless packet capture on site allows to figure out who is messing up with the warehouse Wi-Fi network. 00:00-Introduction 1:12-Tiago Antunes 1:50-Warehouse Wi-Fi shenanigans 18:40-Talking Web Summit

00:00 Introduction 02:30 Nathan flies to Malaysia 13:00 Discussing SD-access and switching In this episode, Nathan Pan, Switching and SD-access Technical Leader, tells us about his trip onsite to Malaysia. We engage on a long discussion about Cisco SD-access as well as the evolution of switching technologies.

00:00 Intro 02:06 Justin Roberts In this episode, we interview Justin Roberts, Technical Leader in Next-Gen Firewalls in the US. He takes us, in a very technical episode, through the artchitecture of Cisco Firewalls, how they work and how performance and security are two concepts that are very related. In this story, a customer is seeing applications performance issues after the start of Covid as employees all work from home. However, load is not the problem and their beefy security appliances should handle it without any problem. Where could the problem be ?

00:00 Intro 00:59 Welcome 01:57 Jaro's story 16:20 Ivan's story 31:56 Rik's story Today, we interview Jaroslaw Gawron, Ivan Shirshin and Rik Boven. They tell us their stories but one of them is made up. Will you be able to guess which one ? Between database drops, a crystal farm and a blackhole generator, hard to know ...

In this episode, Steven Janssens takes us through his most memorable Collaboration mysteries.In one story, Steven is faced with random Webex endpoints disconnecting with no other logs than "user disconnected session" but the user swears they didn't disconnect. Is there a ghost involved ?The other story involves latency troubleshooting in peak hours and load measuring. The server should have plenty enough power but somehow is still not able to cope with the load ?

Today, we host Philip Smeuninx, Principal Engineer in Collaboration technologies in CX. He tells us stories about missed upgrades during christmas, missing ski vacations with the family as well as hunting for a lost call manager chassis in the logistics chain.

We receive our audio editor but first of all DataCenter guru Kris Vandecruys. He tells us about SAN and the storage technologies, FiberChannel, the difference between NAS and SAN as well as the time where an SNMP monitoring script killed the whole datacenter.

In this episode, Ricardo Galvan tells us about the time he had to hack into a UCS to troubleshoot it when he went onsite to a customer who had random server crashes over the period of many many months. We also discuss the future of UCS servers and Compute in general.

We interview Ramses Smeyers, Distinguished Engineer for CX Datacenter. He tells us a story of non-stop RMAs and another story where he prevents ACI to be released to customer due to a last minute problem. We also get his opinion on the cloudization of networks.

In this episode, Jens Depuydt is taking us on a project where buses receive an IoT router that allows telemetry from the buses to be centralized as well as services and informations provided to the people inside the bus. While early tests showed great results, on the big day, buses start to go missing throughout the city !

In the first peak in the Covid outbreak, a hospital uses wireless handheld phones to communicate between nurses and doctors but suddenly calls drop and have terrible quality. The issue is reported by nurses and doctors but the partner engineers cannot reproduce and with the pandemic, they cannot go onsite anymore. Now, Cisco's A-team has to resolve the problem remotely and without talking to the end users !

In this episode, Tristan tells us a story about a Cable service provider facing random outages, with a cause well beyond what we could think of. Every month, Nico and Tristan present us interesting and unusual tech stories from Cisco CX centers. Subscribe to Cisco Podcast Network to be sure not to miss the next one. Follow us on X (Twitter) @CiscoTechStorie and send us your comments, we value your feedback!

CX SVP Buffy Ransom helps us introduce the podcast concept and shares her insights about the future of CX and technology. She also shares her own troubleshooting story.