Ethan Banks

Author Archives: Ethan Banks

New Tech Skills In Two Hours

How long does it take to learn a new skill? It’s like…a really long time, right? You never have that much time to learn whatever it is. Most people who learn new skills are dedicated super humans who put in 25 hour days doing labs and reading books and taking courses and sniffing markers. Those folks sacrifice everything to stay ahead and command the respect of their peers. Right? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?

Don’t overthink it.

New skills come from one thing. Focus. That’s it. That’s the secret. Focus to learn a skill comes in blocks of a few undistracted hours at a time. Not dramatic sacrifice. Not bragging to social media about how you’re crushing it on your studies because you’ve given up your personal life.

Let the public drama queen masochists do what they feel they must to impress…whomever. They are not your role model. You don’t need to be them. You just need to find a few consecutive hours on your calendar. Block them off. Use them to focus on a single thing you want to learn. During the blocked off time, learn the thing. Do not do any of the other things that Continue reading

Buying Used Cisco Gear From eBay For Your Lab

While most of the lab work I do is with virtualized networking gear, once in a while, I need actual hardware. For instance, to fully explore QoS, hardware is key. Many QoS commands won’t be available to you in a virtual network device.

eBay offers lots of older networking gear for pennies or even fractions of a penny of what the gear was worth new. Why so cheap? Mostly, older networking gear is too slow for modern LANs and WANs. That’s a win for learners who don’t care about the speed as long as they can still use the old box to learn the fundamentals of routing and switching.

There are caveats to eBay networking gear, though, not unlike buying a used car. Know what you’re getting into.

You’re buying someone else’s junk.

Why is it junk? It could be the gear aged out, but still works fine. It could be that the gear broke, but you’ll be able to fix it. It could be that the gear broke, and you won’t be able to fix it. Sometimes, folks who move out of a data center sell pallets of retired gear by weight to whoever will take it just because Continue reading

Tech Bytes: Monitoring Remote Access VPN Performance With ThousandEyes (Sponsored)

On today's Tech Bytes podcast, we talk with sponsor ThousandEyes about monitoring remote access VPNs to get a clearer picture of connectivity and performance issues and to speed troubleshooting. Our guest is Alex Cruz Farmer, Principal Product Manager at ThousandEyes.

The post Tech Bytes: Monitoring Remote Access VPN Performance With ThousandEyes (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Heavy Networking 563: Automating Documentation With Ansible, Genie, And Jinja2

On today’s Heavy Networking, we explore how to get network data you reference all the time and store it in a CSV using Ansible, the Genie parser, and Jinja2. Our guide for how to assemble these gears and get them cranking is John Capobianco, automation maven and Sr. IT Planner and Integrator for the House of Commons in the Canadian Parliament.

The post Heavy Networking 563: Automating Documentation With Ansible, Genie, And Jinja2 appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Preempting Gray Failures With AI/ML

The network was definitely up, and had been up. There was nothing in the logs indicating link flaps, spanning-tree convergence events, or routing process adjacency changes. The packets had been, were presently, and presumably would forever be flowing. Flowing like a river. I was pondering this inaccurate version of reality because of an annoying ticket that wouldn’t go away...

The post Preempting Gray Failures With AI/ML appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Day Two Cloud 085: Hosting Your Infrastructure Code In The Cloud

Let’s say I host my Infrastructure as Code provisioning stuff locally. It works. It’s nearby. I feel in control. Are there good reasons I should move that stuff to the cloud? Here to help us sort the pros and cons of that question is Calvin Hendryx-Parker. Calvin is the co-founder and CTO of Six Feet Up, a Python web application development company.

The post Day Two Cloud 085: Hosting Your Infrastructure Code In The Cloud appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Jassy’s Replacement At AWS Matters

As Andy Jassy takes over the CEO role at Amazon, the question is asked, “Does it matter who takes over at AWS, the position Jassy is vacating?” The idea is that AWS is such a dominant force in public cloud, an untrained monkey could sit at the helm and AWS would continue printing billions of dollars. So who cares who replaces Jassy? Whoever the new human is, they can’t get it wrong.

That might be exactly right, but for the thought exercise, I decided to go a different direction. For purposes of this opinion article, I choose to entertain the idea that Jassy’s replacement does matter, and matters a lot.

Growing A Gargantuan Gorilla

We can all agree that AWS is the 800 pound gorilla of public cloud. However, I believe AWS will see increasing pressure from all quarters. By way of comparison, let’s consider Cisco Systems of the last ten years.

Cisco has dominated the networking space in a variety of categories for a very long time. The last decade has seen them as the target all of their competitors aim at. In that context, did it matter who replaced John Chambers when he moved on? You Continue reading

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