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FIELD NOTES

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We Retired VSS. The Redundancy Model Stayed.

Retiring an end-of-life VSS core meant new hardware and a new virtual-chassis technology. The BGP redundancy model built on top of it didn't have to change.

MORE FIELD NOTES

Building network automation that outlives its author

A platform where engineers run automation as a shell command, not a git workflow, NetBox stays the single source of truth, and zero secrets touch the repo.

The migration workbook: how I make risky network changes boring

About 900 Meraki access points migrated to sixteen Catalyst 9800 controllers — now running roughly 1,000 after density-driven additions — 190 WLANs across four regional datacenters, and an AAA migration to a parallel-built ISE 3.x environment nobody noticed. The method: audit first, pre-stage everything, cut over with the radios.

How I moved 45,000 endpoints to 802.1X without anyone noticing

Founding a Cisco ISE initiative from scratch, the architecture decisions that carried it from a 4-node cluster to 14 nodes across five global datacenters, and the monitor-first rollout that grew into 60K+ endpoints behind 802.1X.