My bikes

There are things that we just can’t forget: like riding a bicycle or even driving a car. I was accompanying one of our sales engineers the other day at a customer sites and felt the urge to configure a layer 4-7 switch. If my memory serves me right, the last time that I was doing something similar was in 2000. Yet, one stare at the Access User Verification prompt and my memory was loaded.

I’m sure that somewhere, someone is studying why there are things that we can not forget. I am more interested in the opposite question. Why did I remember how to configure this switch? No, it was not a Cisco switch. However since Cisco’s IOS, style has been widely copied by other networking products (including the one I was configuring), it was very similar.  ? show run conf t ena always work somehow in a networking environment. Like seeing a friendly face in a “networking” cocktail party before the conference is a bout to begin…

Thinking about my own experience, the networking instinct is smiler to the the bicycle instinct: Both were developed over time after many trails (including errors. Some were painful). The basic instinct to keep up balance is similar to the IT instinct to keep systems up and running. Bicycle manufacturers, like networking switch vendors are using a very similar “CLI” to operate the device. the only differentiators exist with the value added features (security, voip, routing, layer 4-7 filtering etc).

Is there a conclusion? Sure. If you want a networking device, make sure that it’ll use the common CLI verbage.