Finally I found out today what the magnifier app  is that most of the presenters have been using all week to highlight and magnify parts of the PC screen being presented. The tool is called Dragnifier and can be obtained totally free from this location                  

Screen Magnifier

The app may be of use only to instructors or presenters, but it has been used to great effect in many presentations this week at Cisco Live. It has made clear the GUI screenshots that are very difficult  to see normally. I will definetly be be installing this app on my laptop.

The highlight of the week, for me had to be the presentation on IPS that I attended first thing this morning. This was this least attended session of the week that I had seen, a disappointment maybe for the presenter.  The homemade video at the begining of the presenters session of his daughter crafting a PDF document to lure an unsuspecting 6 year old boy into relinqushing control of his machine was just brilliant.

I have been teaching IPS for a number of years but learnt so  much from just this one session. The real world examples given and talk throughs will be used in the classroom in the future. The golden nugget for me today was I finally found out what the buffer size is for normalising inspections..... a whooping 4 gig I will rest easy now.

The bad news is that the rest of the day went down hill slightly after the IPS session. The troublshooting of Voice over Wireless session was OK, but was very much focused at basic access point placement at  layer 1 and 2 and was for me not focused enough on particular Voice issues over wireless. Some great troubleshooting tools were displayed not necesarrily supported by Cisco. I was hoping maybe that there would be a bit more information on QOS issues.

The only session I did not fully complete this week was "Hybrid Cloud Compting" a bad choice by me. It was specific to a solution in Orange. The detailed MPLS tagging slides half through the session was too much for many in the audience, who started to leave in droves. I went back to update this website over a non-existent wireless network, the tea and chunky biscuits took away the disappointment of no wireless access.

A session that I have looking forward to all week  was the last event of the day  "Which Routing Protocol?" from an IPV4 IPV6 perspective. The content  disappointingly was mainly at CCNA level, a large chunk of material relating to IGP operations, mostly IPV4 focused. The one thing I did learn is OSPFV3 will be a challenge to configure in an IPV6 environment. There are lots of additions to OSPFV3 especially with regard to LSA types that make it a challenge to configure and understand in both an IPV4 and IPV6 environment. ISIS, RIP and EIGRP by comparision are a breeze to configure in IPV6 and took no more than 10 minutes to cover.

I did not stay for the closing event but I am sure it was as slick as the rest event. The catering throughout the event has been first class. The duck dish today served with a  mushy mash and bean mash was a treat.

If you want to go straight to my session reviews follow the links below. I have also uploaded a few additional photos and videos.

BRKSEC-3030  Advanced - From Alerts to Tuning with Cisco IPS
BRKEWN-3012  Advanced - Troubleshooting Voice over Wireless LAN deployments
ITMCCS-2580  Hybrid Cloud Networking
BRKIPM-3010  Which Routing Protocol? - IPv4 and IPv6 Perspective

Newly updated Photos  and Videos. 



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A slightly different atmosphere today than yesterday, a more down to business atmopshere pervaid. No catering facilities open in the morning  therefore I was left to my own devices for breakfast which included a cup of coffee and a Danish Twirl.

The first session was just first class presented by Steinthor Bjarnason from Iceland. The no PPT slide approach was just a breath of fresh air. I picked up some really useful information about exploits to DNS that are still out there anf potrntially very dangerous.  It really put into perspective the role the ASA could play in protecting against DNS attacks. I picked up some useful information to feed back into the courses. We were informed that DNSSEC is the future and Cisco dont even use it, along with many others.

The live demo of an DNS attack was brilliant and brave, most demosI have seen  have been recorded videos.

I missed the keynote speech, updating this blog, read further on about WIFI access or lack of :-).   A colleague informed me that I missed a brilliant keynote speech, which included intelligent contact lens displays. I was also intrigued how I can build a kidney in 3D and print it, I can even print my own food. I dread to  think what ink costs are going to be for this technology. Take a look at the photos section to see the machine that can do this.

WIFI access, I thought it was just me but for the life of me I could not get internet access. I resorted in the end to pre paid 3G access. All was revealed in the Web security session. Dodgy mobile devices posing as hotspots had caused a few problems with the wifi access at the event. This was a really interesting turn of events after yesterdays sessions on mobility access and support for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), how easily such an approach had brought, in effect the whole network down.

If you want to view the sessions I attended today then follow the main site or the following links :-

BRKSEC-2071   Securing DNS
BRKSEC-2101  Deploying Web Security
BRKSEC-2022  Demystifying TrustSec, Identity, NAC and ISE
               




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I arrived early at the Excel centre for Cisco Live, took a cup of coffee then headed to the Keynote speech in  the ICC Auditorium. It was entertaining with many references to the excitement in London over the 2012 Olympics and the role Cisco were playing with providing the infrastructure to the atheletes during thier stay. 

One of the themes of the Keynote speech was that in todays world a  "good enough" appraoch was not acceptable. A demonstration was carried out using a "good enough" approach solution from a competitor and the Cisco approach. The blocky video from the competitor in comparision with the silky smooth Video Cisco solution was proof enough.

Highly available and resislant networks were also aired, and the pulling, simultanuously of power on switches from non-Cisco and Cisco together and timing the recovery, Cisco 105 Video frames lost, Non-Cisco in 1 minute never recovered, proved to be a graphic demonstration.

I attended all but one of the scheduled sessions I booked for today.

You can gain access to my overview's of each session from the main site or click on the following links :-

BRKEWN-2018 Secure Mobility in the Cisco Unified WLAN Networks
BRKGS-2017 Virtualisation changes the provisioning paradigm
ITMCOC-2574 Inside Cisco IT: Coping with the Explosion of Mobile Devices in the Enterprise
BRKUCC-2006 SIP Trunk design and deployment in Enterprise UC networks



It was not all hard work so take a look at the Photos and Videos

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First Post! 01/23/2012
 
The first post on a newly formed blog in preparation for Cisco Live. 
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