Have a backup plan before power off your routers, especially for old ones

Entrance of the Taoyuangu Trail (DSCN0349),
originally uploaded by Li-Ji.

Even Cisco routers are reliable enough to run non-stop for several years, it does not guarantee it to power on normally after simply one power off.

Soft phones can never replace all hardware IP phones

Intersection (DSCN0462),
originally uploaded by Li-Ji.

I was in a voice conference inside company Intranet using a soft phone in my Intel Core i5, 2G DRAM notebook. Unfortunately, I encountered voice loss several times during the conference. I noticed it might not be the problem of network QoS, because when voice loss happened again, my notebook was also busy accessing the hard drive, which is also 7200 rpm model.

Long scheduled down time again! People are watching!

Screen capture upon Facebook down incident
(Sep. 24, 2010).

I received this notification from Cisco Network Academy mailing list. WOW! It's going down for 72 hours! That is 3 whole days!

Subject: Reminder: Scheduled Academy Connection Downtime begins January 8 (1 AM GMT)
...
Cisco Networking Academy is upgrading its data center infrastructure. This change will help Cisco in continuing to give you excellent services and support.

During the upgrade, Academy Connection and all Academy Connection services will be unavailable for 72 hours. The outage will start Friday Jan 7th at 5 pm and finish on Monday Jan 10th at 5 pm (San Francisco (-8 GMT)).
...

Fw: Cisco Positioned as a Leader in the 2010 Magic Quadrant for SSL VPNs

The Magic Quadrant.
Captured from original Gartner's Report

I am refreshed by a blog post on Cisco's "The Platform" blog, that Cisco is now "positioned as leader in SSL VPNs".

Cisco Blog, The Platform, Cisco Positioned as a Leader in the 2010 Magic Quadrant for SSL VPNs

(Yes, Cisco used to call SSL VPN as WebVPN.)