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Planning For The Worst Case You Can’t Think Of

Remember that Slack outage earlier this month? The one that happened when we all got back from vacation and tried to jump on to share cat memes and emojis? We all chalked it up to gremlins and went on going through our pile of email until it came back up. The post-mortem came out yesterday and there were two things that were interesting to me. Both of them have implications on reliability planning and how we handle the worst-case scenarios we come up with.

It’s Out of Our Hands

The first thing that came up in the report was that the specific cause for the outage came from an AWS Transit Gateway not being able to scale fast enough to handle the demand spike that came when we all went back to work on the morning of January 4th. What, the cloud can’t scale?

The cloud is practically limitless when it comes to resources. We can create instances with massive CPU resources or storage allocations or even networking pipelines. However, we can’t create them instantly. No matter how much we need it takes time to do the basic provisioning to get it up and running. It’s the old story of Continue reading

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Managing Leaders, Or Why Pat Gelsinger Is Awesome

In case you missed it, Intel CEO Bob Swan is stepping down from his role effective February 15 and will be replaced by current VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. Gelsinger was the former CTO at Intel for a number of years before leaving to run EMC and VMware. His return is a bright spot in an otherwise dismal past few months for the chip giant.

Why is Gelsinger’s return such a cause for celebration? The analysts that have been interviewed say that Intel has been in need of a technical leader for a while now. Swan came from the office of the CFO to run Intel on an interim basis after the resignation of Brian Krzanich. The past year has been a rough one for Intel, with delays in their new smaller chip manufacturing process and competition heating up from long-time rival AMD but also from new threats like ARM being potentially sold to NVIDIA. It’s a challenging course for any company captain to sail. However, I think one key thing makes is nigh impossible for Swan.

Management Mentality

Swan is a manager. That’s not meant as a slight inasmuch as an accurate label. Managers are people that have things and Continue reading

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Building Backdoors and Fixing Malfeasance

You might have seen the recent news this week that there is an exploitable backdoor in Zyxel hardware that has been discovered and is being exploited. The backdoor admin account with the clever name ‘zyfwp’ is not something that has been present in the devices forever. The account was put in during firmware version 4.60, which was released in Q4 2020.

Zyxel is rushing to patch the devices and remove the backdoor account. Users are being advised to disable remote administration until the accounts can be deactivated and proven to be removed. However, the bigger question in my mind relates to the addition of the user account in the first place. Why would you knowingly install a backdoor?

Hello, Joshua

Backdoors are nothing new in the computer world. I’d argue the most famous backdoor account in the history of computer hacking belongs to Joshua, the dormant login for the War Operations Programmed Response (WOPR) computer system in the 1983 movie Wargames. Joshua was an old login for the creator to access the system outside of the military chain of command. When the developer was removed from the project the account was forgotten about until a kid discovered it and Continue reading

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Winning in 2021

I’d jump in here and say something about 2020 being a crazy year but we all know it’s nothing we haven’t heard before. I’d also say that we’re going to look back at my big plans for the year however we also know that those got scrapped right after the end of February. I like looking back at a couple of things and then looking forward to what the next year will accomplish. Why? Because retrospectives are boring and putting your planning out there for the world to see is a much more interesting use of your time. The journey you’re taking changes greatly when you change your thinking about the destination.

2020 Good or Bad

2020 wasn’t all bad. I finally justified getting a new office chair! All kidding aside, 2020 was a year that challenged everyone greatly when it came to mental health, professional output, and even personal capability. My biggest focus for 2020 was to start putting blog posts out earlier in the week and focus on continuous improvement. I’d say the first was another miss due to the hectic workload, as a lot of my posts still came out on Fridays.

The second point was a Continue reading

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Making Time For Yourself

I was a recent pop-in guest on the Network Collective Holiday Show with my friends Jordan Martin and Tony Efantis. One of the questions they had been asking their guests was about the big lessons we’ve learned this year. As I thought back on the roller coaster ride that was 2020, I realized that one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned is that I need to make time for the important things for myself.

Mark It Down

I know it sounds like a given, but we all need to make time for ourselves. I realized that when my usual schedule of running myself in overdrive and jumping from one event or travel opportunity to the next evaporated back in March. I found myself sitting at home and working toward some uncertain future. I never thought that there were going to be huge problems but I also didn’t know how things would end up turning out.

As the days grew into weeks and eventually into months, I quickly figured out that the normal I once knew was going to stay gone for quite a while. In place of that was a situation that I needed to adjust to. And that Continue reading

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Setting Boundaries Before You’re Swamped

We’re at the tail end of 2020 and things are hopeful for 2021. People are looking at the way IT has pulled together to enable working from anywhere and moving resources to the cloud and enabling users to get their jobs done. It’s a testament to the resilience of a group of sanitation workers behind the scenes whose job it is to clean up after management and sales and do the jobs no one else wants to do.

The cynic in me is worried about what the future is going to hold now that we’ve managed to transform the way we work. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I was checking out this Reddit thread from last week. The top rant had an interesting perspective on the way that 2021 is going to go for workers and I couldn’t agree more. My dread has a name, and it’s Overwork.

Harder, Not Smarter

If anything, 2020 proved that we can do amazing things with the right motivation. The superhero mentality of IT paid off handsomely as we stood up remote access servers and found ways to get access to resources for people that couldn’t come into the office Continue reading

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How Long Should You Practice

A reporter once asked boxing legend Muhammad Ali how many sit-ups he did each day. I’m sure the reporter wasn’t expecting Ali’s answer. Ali replied with:

I don’t know. I don’t start counting them until it hurts. Those are the only ones that count. That’s what makes you a champion.”

Ali knew that counting things is just a numbers game. Five hundred poor sit-ups don’t count as much a fifty done the right way. With any practice that you do the only things that count are the things that teach your something or that push you to be better.

Don’t Practice Until It’s Right

People used to ask me how long I would spend at night studying for the CCIE lab. I told them I usually spent between five and seven hours depending on what I was studying. Sometimes those people would say things like “I’m not talking about setup time. I’m talking about actual lab work.” I always countered by making them explain why the setup isn’t part of the “real” work. That’s usually when they went quiet.

It’s far too easy to fall into the trap of overlooking things that you think are unimportant. A task Continue reading

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Seeking Knowledge and Willful Ignorance

I had a great time recording a fun episode of Seeking Truth in Networking, an awesome podcast with my friends Derick Winkworth and Brandon Heller. We talked a lot about a variety of different topics, but the one I want to spend a few more minutes on here came in the first five minutes. Brandon asked me what question I liked to be asked and I mentioned that love to be asked about learning. My explanation included the following line:

I feel like the gap between people that don’t understand something and the willfully ignorant is that ability to take a step out and say “I don’t know the answer to this but I’m going to find out.”

I’ve always said that true learners are the ones that don’t accept the unknown. They want to find the answer. They want to be able to understand something as completely as they can. Those that I consider to be willfully ignorant choose not to do that.

Note that there is a difference between incidentally ignorant and willfully ignorant. People who are incidentally ignorant are unaware they don’t know something. They haven’t had the opportunity to learn or change their thought Continue reading

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What’s Your Work From Home DR Plan?

It’s almost December and the signs are pointing to a continuation of the current state of working from home for a lot of people out there. Whether it’s a surge in cases that is causing businesses to close again or a change in the way your company looks at offices and remote work, you’re likely going to ring in the new year at your home keyboard in your pajamas with a cup of something steaming next to your desk.

We have all spent a lot of time and money investing in better conditions for ourselves at home. Perhaps it was a fancy new mesh chair or a more ergonomic keyboard. It could have been a bigger monitor with a resolution increase or a better webcam for the dozen or so Zoom meetings that have replaced the water cooler. There may even be more equipment in store, such as a better home wireless setup or even a corporate SD-WAN solution to help with network latency. However, have you considered what might happen if it all goes wrong and you need to be online?

In and Outage

Outages happen more often than we realize. That’s never been more evident than the situation Continue reading

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A Different Viewpoint of Lock-In

First things first: Go watch this great video on lock-in from Ethan Banks (@ECBanks). We’ll reference it.

Welcome back. Still carrying that pitchfork around screaming about how you want to avoid vendor lock-in? Ready to build the most perfect automation system in history that does multi-cloud, multi-vendor, multi-protocol networking in a seamless manner with full documentation? Nice. How hard was is to build that unicorn farm?

I get it. No one wants to be beholden to a specific vendor. No one likes being forced into buying things. Everyone hates the life of the engineer forced to work on something they don’t like or had to use because someone needed a new boat. Or do they?

Ford and Chevys and Dodge, Oh My!

What kind of car do you drive? Odds are good you’re either ready to get a new one or you’re proud of what you’re driving. I find that the more flashy a car is the more likely people are to talk about how amazing it is. And when there are two dominant manufacturers in a market for cars, you tend to see people dividing into camps to sing the praises of their favorite brands. Ford people love their Continue reading

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Looking For a Mentor? Don’t Forget This Important Step!

With the insanity of the pandemic and the knowledge drain that we’re seeing across IT in general, there’s never been a more important time than right now to help out those that are getting started on this rise. The calls for mentors across the community is heartwarming. I’ve been excited personally to see many recognizable names and faces in the Security, Networking, and Wireless communities reaching out to let people know they are available to mentor others or connect them with potential mentors. It’s a way to give back and provide servant leadership to those that need it.

If you’re someone that’s reading this blog right now and looking for a mentor you’re in luck. There are dozens of people out there that are willing to help you out. The kindness of the community is without bounds and there are those that know what it was like to wander through the wilderness for a while before getting on the right track. They are the ones that will be of the most help to you. However, before you slide into someone’s DMs looking for help, you need to keep a few things in mind.

Make Me One With Everything

The single Continue reading

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Securing Your Work From Home

Wanna make your security team’s blood run cold? Remind them that all that time and effort they put in to securing the enterprise from attackers and data exfiltration is currently sitting unused while we all work from home. You might have even heard them screaming at the sky just now.

Enterprise security isn’t easy, nor should it be. We constantly have to be on the offensive to find new attack vectors and hunt down threats and exploits. We have spent years and careers building defense-in-depth to an artform not unlike making buttery croissants. It’s all great when that apparatus is protecting our enterprise data center and cloud presence like a Scottish castle repelling invaders. Right now we’re in the wilderness with nothing but a tired sentry to protect us from the marauders.

During Security Field Day 4, I led a discussion panel with the delegates about the challenges of working from home securely. Here’s a link to our discussion that I wanted to spend some time elaborating on:

Home Is Where the Exploits Are

BYOD was a huge watershed moment for the enterprise because we realized for the first time that we had to learn to secure other people’s Continue reading

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Learning To Listen For Learning

Can you hear me? Are you listening to me? Those two statements are used frequently to see if someone is paying attention to what you’re saying. Their connotation is very different though. One asks a question about whether you can tell if there are words coming out of someone’s mouth. Is the language something you can process? The other question is all about understanding.

Taking Turns Speaking

“Seek first to understand,then to be understood.” – Stephen Covey

Listening is hard. Like super hard. How often do you find yourself on a conference call with your mind wandering to other things you need to take care of? How many times have we seen someone shopping online for shoes or camping gear instead of taking notes on the call they should be paying attention to? They answer is more often than we should.

Attention spans are hard for everyone, whether you’re affected by attention disorders or have normal brain chemistry. Our minds hate being bored. They’re always looking for a way to escape to something more exciting and stimulating. You know you can feel it when there’s a topic that seriously interests you and pulls you in versus the same old Continue reading

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Do You Do What You’ve Always Done?

When I was an intern at IBM twenty something years ago, my job was deploying new laptops to people. The job was easy enough. Transfer their few hundred megabytes of data to the new machine and ensure their email was all setup correctly. There was a checklist that needed to be followed in order to ensure that it was done correctly.

When I arrived for my internship, one of my friends was there finishing his. He was supposed to train me in how to do the job before he went back to school. He helped me through the first day of deploying laptops following the procedure. The next day he handed me a different sheet with some of the same information but in a different order. He said, “I realized we had too many reboots in the process and this way cuts about twenty minutes off the deployment time.” I’m all about saving time so I jumped at the chance.

Everything went smashingly for the next month or so. My friend was back at school and I used his modified procedure to be as productive as possible. One day, my mentor wanted to shadow my deployment day to see Continue reading

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Imposters Among Us

Have you been playing Among Us? If you haven’t, your kids definitely have. I found out about it a few weeks ago because my children suddenly became Batman-level detectives and knew how to ask the kinds of interview questions that would make the FBI proud. In short, the game is all about finding the imposters in your midst based on their behavior and voting them out of the group to win. Sometimes you get it right. Other times you get it wrong and vote out someone who was doing legitimate tasks. It’s all a matter of perception.

Now, let’s look at another situation where we see this kind of behavior in a different light. You probably guessed where this is going already. We’re going to talk about Imposter Syndrome in our non-gaming lives and how it affects us. We may even make reference to pop culture along the way.

Where You Need To Be

I was thinking about this because something I said a few years ago at Security Field Day 1 popped back up in my feed. I was giving a speech at the beginning of the first day to the delegates and I wanted them to know that Continue reading

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When Will You Need Wi-Fi 6E at Home?

The pandemic has really done a number on most of our office environments. For some, we went from being in a corporate enterprise with desks and coffee makers to being at home with a slightly different desk and perhaps a slightly better coffee maker. However, one thing that didn’t improve was our home network.

For the most part, the home network has been operating on a scale radically different from those of the average corporate environment. Taking away the discrepancies in Internet speed for a moment you would have a hard time arguing that most home wireless gear is as good or better than the equivalent enterprise solution. Most of us end up buying our equipment from the local big box store and are likely shopping as much on price as we are on features. As long as it supports our phones, gaming consoles, and the streaming box we picked up we’re happy. We don’t need QoS or rogue detection.

However, we now live in a world where the enterprise is our home. We live at work as much as we work where we live. Extended hours means we typically work past 5:00 pm or start earlier than 8:00 or Continue reading

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Thoughts From Networking Field Day 23

I know I’m a little late getting this post out but Networking Field Day 23 was a jam-packed event with lots of things to digest. I wanted to share some quick thoughts about it here that should create some discussion amongst the community, hopefully.

• If you don’t believe that wireless is the new access edge, go look at Juniper. Their campus networking division is basically EX switching and Mist. That’s it. Remember how HPE called Aruba a “reverse acquisition” years ago? And how Aruba essentially took over the networking portion of HPE? Don’t be surprised to see Juniper getting more misty sooner rather than later. And that’s a good thing for everything that isn’t a carrier or service provider router.
• Network monitoring became telemetry and is now transforming into digital experience. What is the difference to me? Monitoring devices tells you point-in-time information. Telemetry gives you the story of those point-in-time measurements over the course of days or weeks and can help you find issues. Experience is all about how that looks to your users. Problems don’t always affect them the same way it might appear on a dashboard. Likewise, things you don’t always see in your alerts can affect Continue reading

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A Decade of Blogging

Today is a milestone for me. Ten years ago I picked up a virtual notepad for the first time and committed my first blog post to the ether. It’s been a wild ride ever since. It also marks the milestone of being the job that I’ve held the longest so far in my career.

Blogging has been a huge boon for me. I’ve become a better writer in the last decade. I’ve learned how to ask the right questions and get good material for a story instead of just putting out what someone wants me to say. I’ve learned that being a pseudo-journalist is a thing you can do and have fun with.

I’ve written a ton over the years. 751 posts, as a matter of fact (counting this one). I’ve always tried to hold myself to a standard of getting something out once a week. Aside from the few times when I’ve tried to push that to twice a week I’ve held up pretty well. Yeah, I’ve slipped and the day job has gotten in the way more than once. However, keeping myself to a strict schedule has ensured that my attention stays focused on this blog and that Continue reading

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Solve the Simple Problems

One thing I’ve found out over the past decade of writing is that some problems are easy enough to solve that we sometimes forget about them. Maybe it’s something you encounter once in a great while. Perhaps it’s something that needed a little extra thought or a novel reconfiguration of an existing solution. Something so minor that you didn’t even think to write it down. Until you run into the problem again.

The truth behind most of these simple problems is that the solutions aren’t always apparent. Sure, you might be a genius when it comes to fixing the network or the storage array. Maybe you figured out how to install some new software to do a thing in a way that wasn’t intended. But did you write any of it down for later use? Did you make sure to record what you’ve done so someone else can use it for reference?

Part of the reason why I started blogging was to have those written solutions to problems I couldn’t find a quick answer to. What it became was way more than I had originally intended. But the posts that I write that still get the most attention aren’t my Continue reading

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A Place for Things and Things in Their Place

This morning I was going to go for a run and I needed to find a rain jacket to keep from getting completely soaked. I knew I had one in my hiking backpack but couldn’t locate it. I searched for at least ten minutes in every spot I could think of and couldn’t find it. That is, until I looked under the brain of the pack and found it right next to the pack’s rain cover. Then I remembered that my past self had put the jacket there for safe keeping because I knew that if I ever needed to use the pack rain cover I would likely need to have my rain jacket as well. Present me wasn’t as happy to find out past me was so accommodating.

I realized after this little situation that I’ve grown accustomed to keeping my bags organized in a certain way both for ease of use and ease of inspection. Whether it’s a hiking backpack or an IT sling bag full of gadgets I’ve always tried to set things up in simple, sane manner to figure out how to find the tools I need quickly and also discover if any of them are Continue reading