Salman Naqvi – 2xCCIE

I’ve read over 150 books in the last 4 years! How? I haven’t actually ‘read’ them, but have had them read out to me by my smartphone. I listened to these books while driving, riding the subway, exercising, and during other idle times. Many of these, I read even two or in some cases three times. This included various genres: fiction, psychological, technical, spiritual, business, etc. Here is a video showing how to set up your Android phone to read books to you:

Continue reading “Make your Android phone read books to you!” →

In one my previous blog posts, we covered “Best resources for learning Networking”. In this post, I will attempt to cover some of the best resources I’ve used to keep up with the changes in the Networking world.

This is going to be a very subjective post. Depending on your area of expertise and mix of vendors being utilized at your organization, your resources for keeping up with networking may be very different.

Continue reading “Best resources for keeping up with Networking” →

Learning is itself a skill – just like riding a bicycle or swimming is a skill. Treating it as a skill, and working to improve that skill is essential for almost all careers, but especially important for careers in Information Technology which require constant upkeep with new trends and technologies.

First of all, why should you listen to my advice? Actually you shouldn’t – as I wouldn’t be giving my own advice or “wisdom”.  I’d instead be presenting ideas from academics and scholars who have professionally studied human memory, brain development and learning. Also, these are the ideas I used to attain two CCIEs and numerous other certifications. Continue reading “Learning to learn!” →

There are many situations in which you may need to ping a large number of IP addresses. You can use the Tcl (usually pronounced “tickle”) shell built-in in both IOS and NX-OS to accomplish this task.

Simply replace the below IP addresses and VRF (where applicable) with your own, and copy/paste the script into your IOS or NX-OS based device.

IOS

tclsh
foreach address {

172.16.32.54
172.16.32.55
172.16.32.56
172.16.32.57
172.16.32.58
172.16.32.59

} {ping $address re 2
}

Continue reading “IOS and NX-OS Ping Script using TCL” →

Have you ever needed to test if a particular firewall rule is enabled and actually functioning as expected? Of course you had! A great friend and a colleague passed this gem along to me that allows you to create a simple ‘port listener’ on any Windows machine using PowerShell.

Simply click Continue reading “Port listener / firewall rule tester” →