Cisco Tech Stories

This is an introductory episode to the Tech stories podcast. We explain the podcast concept with our guest Buffy Ransom, SVP of Cisco CX. Buffy tells us about the CX organisation, which will be our pool for inviting guests on the show and also tells us about stories of her own.
This show is hosted by Tristan Van Egroo and Nicolas Darchis.

Tech Stories - ep00 - Introduction with Buffy Ransom

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!

Tech Stories - ep01 - The power of that thing in your pocket

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 !

Tech Stories - ep 02 - Healthcare drama during Covid

Jens Depuydt takes us with him on a journey where a large city has a great IoT project connecting all their buses to a central server to provide for connected services onboard. The testing went great, but when the project goes live, buses start to go missing from the central app and it's not really possible to call the buses back for troubleshooting as they are live.

Tech Stories - ep 03 - IoT City buses gone wild !

We interview Distringuished Engineer Ramses Smeyers from CX Datacenter who tells us two stories. In one, dozens of RMAs are done for a UCS server and each one makes the problem a little worse. In the other, Ramses prevents ACI to be released on time because it doesn't work in his lab. We also get his feelings about the Cloudization of this world.

Tech Stories - ep 04 - 99 problems and an RMA is one

In this episode, Ricardo Galvan tells us about the time a customer reported random UCS crashing for many months. He had to go on site and start hacking the server in order to debug it.

Tech Stories - ep 05 - Hacking UCS like an old gaming console

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.

Cisco Tech Stories 2023

Tech Stories - ep 06 -Automation Pandemonium : The day SNMP broke the Datacenter

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.

Tech Stories - ep 07 - The missing chassis and Christmas Ski Chaos

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 ?

Tech Stories - ep 08 - Spotless but spot on

In this episode, Jaroslav Gawron, Ivan Shirshin and Rik Boven tell us 3 crazy stories. However, only 2 are true. Will you be able to find out which one is the fake one ?

Tech Stories - ep 09 - April's fool - 2 truths and a lie

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 ?

Tech Stories - ep 10 - Firewalls play "Tag ! you're it !"

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.

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

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

Tech Stories - ep 12 - Rogue One - A Cisco TAC Story

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

Tech Stories - ep 13 - Crash course : The RADKit special

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.

Tech Stories - ep 14 - From Spanning Trees to saving trees

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.

Tech Stories - ep 15 - Cruise Control

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 ...

Tech Stories - ep 16 - The Return of X25

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.

Tech Stories - ep 17 - Dive into threat hunting with JF

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.

Tech Stories - ep 18 - Splunk around and find out

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.

Tech stories - ep 19 - Richard's time machine rollercoaster

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