Cisco Tech Stories

A podcast by Cisco CX (TAC) experts in the form of a technology true crime storytelling. Learn about technologies, troubleshooting stories from various experts from Cisco.

28 - Qubit the bullet - quantum entanglement

In this episode, Tim Szigeti, Distinguished Engineer talks to us about Quantum computing, the latest progresses and what are the potential impact and opportunities it creates. We also discuss what is Cisco doing in the Quantum field.

11-01
01:05:26

27 - Crypto Key insights

In this episode, Frederic Detienne, a Distinguished Cisco CX Engineer takes us through the evolution of cryptography in IT, the latest changes and challenges as well as the quantum problem and post-quantum cryptography.

10-01
49:17

26 - Kendra's SD-WAN war stories

In this episode, Kendra Dodson, CX Technical Leader in the RTP TAC, tells us about the SD-WAN technology and her personal troubleshooting stories : counter overflow, packet over-fragmentation and sudden config loss. We also discuss the future of WAN technologies

09-01
50:06

25 - Ransom Where ? PSIRT adventures

In this episode we interview Roberto Petrillo who works for Cisco Product Security Incident Response team. He works on and assesses vulnerabilities on all Cisco products. He tells us about his career in TAC support web security and his move to PSIRT, working on vulnerability disclosures.

08-01
53:34

24 - Snoop Dogged - NexusOS Crisis

In this episode, Brandon tells us about the time a critical problem surfaced the day before the Cisco Live US event started and how the clock started ticking to find an acceptable solution for the next day. We also discuss how he prepares the event network for Cisco Live.

07-01
48:49

23 - Dead Air

In this episode, we host Dimitar Dimitrov a Collaboration expert in Webex Calling who tells us a story about dead air. All calls are working fine except sometimes, people can't hear each other at all. From a classic problem description, they end up troubleshooting the whole network hunting after the lost packets. Dimitar also works with AI and tells us about his role in shaping the future of Cisco AI Tech Support

06-01
51:23

22 - Breaking (CX) Lab

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

05-01
54:32

21 - It's a hard NOC life (Cisco Live)

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.

04-01
01:04:02

20 - Asynchronous secrets and pythonic powers

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.

03-01
55:34

19 - Richards' time machine rollercoaster

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.

02-01
01:10:06

18 - Splunk around and find out

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.

01-01
54:14

17 - Dive into threat hunting with JF

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.

12-01
45:48

16 - The return of X.25

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 ...

11-01
34:00

15 - Cruise Control

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.

10-01
57:36

14 - From spanning trees to saving trees

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.

09-01
47:32

13 - Crash course : automating problem resolution with RADKit

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

08-01
53:35

12 - Rogue (AP) One - A Cisco TAC story

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

06-30
29:13

11 - Switching Gears: The Flicker Board Fiasco and the Intricacies of SD-Access

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.

05-31
40:32

10- Firewalls play "Tag ! you're it !"

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 ?

05-01
45:50

9 - April's fool episode : 2 truths and a lie

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 ...

04-01
39:04

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