b20c:c011:5:b109::/64

So the strangest thing happened out of the blue last week… Swisscom sent me a new xDSL router for free without any warning.  I called the service desk and they told me it was because I was being upgraded from ADSL to VDSL.  Cool, I thought, and waited.  About 3 days later, my Internet went down, so I figured it must be time for the upgrade ( for a telecom company, Swisscom is not too hot on communication ).   Sure enough, after some messing around and a call to the service desk again (both filters which were included with the router were DOA), I finally got the connection back up and was able to log into the customer center to check out my WLAN SSID/key and my admin password, etc. for the router.  Then I noticed it… at the bottom of the Router Setup Page was the option to enable IPv6 with the text:

How cool is that? So I selected the option to turn IPv6 on and within a few seconds, my Windows7 PC showed a new public IPv6 address along side my old, dare I say, legacy RFC1918 IPv4 address.    Interesingly, my Windows Vista PC also came up with both addresses and seems no worse for the ware….  Yay!

As is customary, I guess I need to introduce myself in my first post.  As I mentioned in the sidebar, I started this blog to document some of the technical topics I come across at work, at home, in books, or otherwise.

The picture at the top of the page is supposedly the original diagram of an Ethernet network.   Being an engineer who has worked almost exclusively in telecommunications and data networking, I thought this was appropriate.  I was first exposed to modern networking (Ethernet, TCP/IP, etc.) in 1991.  I configured my first AGS+ router in 1992, my first Cisco (Kalpana) switch in 1995 and my first firewall and corporate Internet access in the 1993-’94 time frame.  Since then I have implemented countless routers, switches, firewalls and other miscellaneous devices and have not looked back.  I have also been involved in evaluating and testing many of the technologies which were supposed to replace Ethernet as a better, faster, more reliable networking technology (FDDI, 100VG-AnyLAN, ATM/LANE, Infiniband, etc.).  Needless to say, none have lived up to the hype, and I can proudly say I never fell for any of them.   Although Infiniband lives on  and keeps getting new leases on life, with 10G Ethernet now supported on copper, RDMA support, 100G coming soon, it too is not long for this world.

Since my original education I have only gotten around to a single technical certification, the CISSP.  The certification compliments my networking background well and only required one test.  The reason I never got a CCIE is that it requires much more than one test and I have never really seen the practical benefit.

I have recently moved into an architecture roll and that is the reason for the EA category.  Although I am still primarily a network and network security architect, I am also interested in topics concerning general enterprise architecture, corporate governance and architectural frameworks (I am TOGAF certified as well).

If you found your way here by accident or if you are a friend who found their way here via Facebook or other social network, feel free to look around.  Although I am including information here for personal use, I hope it is understandable and maybe even helpful or interesting depending on what you are looking for.  Feel free to leave a comment, positive or negative, just remember, I am always right ;-).