Protocol-level technical content for working network engineers. Routing, switching, security, cloud networking, automation, and certification guidance drawn from 35 combined years of enterprise deployment experience.
Two interior gateway protocols, one decision that shapes every redesign, merger, and multi-vendor negotiation that follows. Pick the wrong IGP for a greenfield network and you don’t find out for eighteen months — right around the time you’re acquiring a company that runs the other one, or onboarding a non-Cisco vendor into what was supposed
Where it earns its place in production, where it bites, and how to run your first change safely. netdaemons.com · Network Engineering Deep Dives · Article #31 · 25 September 2026 Two access switches that should be identical never stay that way. One misses an NTP line during a late-night change, the other picks up
Wider channels, one radio pretending to be several, and a spectrum decision India only finalised this year — what actually changed, and what’s realistic to buy right now. netdaemons.com · Article#27 · Network Engineering Deep Dives · 11 September 2026 A site team gets a Wi-Fi 7 access point rollout approved on paper with 320
An engineer’s honest comparison of structure, lab depth, and what actually gets you ready for the 8-hour lab exam. netdaemons.com · Network Engineering Deep Dives · Article #23 · 28 August 2026 Disclaimer General: The NetDaemons team researched this comparison at time of writing (August 2026) by reviewing vendor pricing pages, aggregated user-review platforms, and
Why “trust but verify” was always the wrong model for network access — and what actually replacing it requires from your network and identity stack. netdaemons.com · Network Engineering Deep Dives · Article #19 · 14 August 2026 A flat VPN concentrator with a single group policy applied to every remote user is still the
An Engineer’s Honest Assessment — Network Engineering Deep Dives — Updated July 2026 When MPLS breaks in a service provider or enterprise WAN, it breaks quietly. A BGP session stays up. OSPF adjacencies remain established. Ping works. But user traffic stops flowing across the backbone, VPN routes disappear from the routing table, and a 15-branch
An Engineer’s Honest Assessment · Network Engineering Deep Dives · Updated July 2026 Three engineers. Three different networks. The same 2am incident — BGP advertising a prefix nobody intended to advertise. One was a missing next-hop-self that silently blackholed traffic for six hours before anyone correlated the maintenance window. One was a route reflector pair
Which entry-level cert actually opens doors in your market — and which one sets you up for the career you actually want. netdaemons.com · Network Engineering Deep Dives · Article #6 · 30 June 2026 Six months of studying. One wrong choice. And you’re holding a certification that the hiring managers in your city have
