Really Late Company Christmas Shopping

I’m headed out to Cisco Live Europe today, so I’m trying to get everything packed before I head to the airport. I also realize I need to go buy a few things for my suitcase. Which must be the same thing that a bunch of companies thought this week as they went on a buying spree! Seriously:

• VMware buys Nyansa for the VeloCloud unit
• Arista is going buy Big Switch Networks, as first reported by SDxCentral but pretty much what’s happening for sure.

I don’t think we’re quite done yet, either. An oblique tweet from a friend with some inside sources leads me to believe that the reason why this is happening right now is because some of the venture funds are getting antsy and are calling in their markers. Maybe they need the funds to cash out investors? Maybe they’re looking to reduce their exposure to other things? Maybe they’re ready to jump on a plane to an uncharted island somewhere?

This is one of the challenges when you’re beholden to investors. Sure, not all of us are independently wealthy and capable of bootstrapping our own startup. We need some kind of funding to make that happen. But Continue reading

Why Do You Need NAT66?

It’s hard to believe that it’s been eight years since I wrote my most controversial post ever. I get all kinds of comments on my NAT66 post even to this day. I’ve been told I’m a moron, an elitist, and someone that doesn’t understand how the Internet works. I’ve also had some good comments that highlight a specific need for tools like NAT66. I wanted to catch up with everything and ask a very important question.

WHY?

Every Tool Has A Purpose

APNIC had a great post about NAT66 back in 2018. You should totally read it. I consider it a fair review of the questions surrounding NAT’s use in 2020. Again, NAT has a purpose and when used properly and sparingly for that purpose it works well. In the case of the article, Marco Cilloni (@MCilloni) lays out the need to use NAT66 to use IPv6 at his house due to ISP insanity and the latency overhead of using tunnels with Hurricane Electric. In this specific case, NAT66 was a good tool for him to use to translate his /128 address to something useable in his network.

If you’re brave, you should delve into the comments. A Continue reading

The Art of Saying “No”

No.

It’s the shortest sentence in the English language. It requires no other parts of speech. It’s an answer, a statement, and a command all at once. It’s a phrase that some people have zero issues saying over and over again. And yet, some others have an extremely difficult time answering anything in the negative.

I had a fun discussion on twitter yesterday with some friends about the idea behind saying “no” to people. It started with this tweet:

Coincidentally, I tweeted something very similar to what Bob Plankers had tweeted just hours before:

The gist is the same though. Crazy features and other things that have been included in software and hardware because someone couldn’t tell another person “no”. Sadly, it’s something Continue reading

Time For Improvement

Welcome to 2020! First and foremost, no posts from me involving vision or eyesight or any other optometrist puns for this year. I promise 366 days free of anything having to do with eyeballs. That does mean a whole world of other puns that I’m going to be focusing on!

Now, let’s look back at 2019. The word that I could use to describe it was “hectic”. It felt like everything was in overdrive all year long. There were several times that I got to the end of the week and realized that I didn’t have any kind of post ready to go. I’m the kind of person that likes to write when the inspiration hits me. And instead I found myself scrambling to write up some thoughts. And that was something I told myself that I was going to get away from. So we’re going to call that one a miss and get back to trying to post on a day other than Friday.

That also means that, given all the other content that I’ve been working on with Gestalt IT that I’m going to have to schedule some time actually working on that content instead of hoping that Continue reading

Fast Friday- Keeping Up With The Times

We’re at the end of the 2010s. It’s almost time to start making posts about 2020 and somehow working vision or eyesight into the theme so you can look just like everyone else. But I want to look back for a moment on how much things have changed for networking in the last ten years.

It’s true that networking wasn’t too exciting for most of the 2000s. Things got faster and more complicated. Nothing really got better except the bottom lines of people pushing bigger hardware. And that’s honestly how we liked it. Because the idea that we were all special people that needed to be at the top of our game to get things done resonated with us. We weren’t just mechanics. We were the automobile designers of the future!

But if there’s something that the mobile revolution of the late 2000s taught us, it was that operators don’t need to be programmers to enjoy using technology. Likewise, enterprise users don’t need to be CCIEs or VCDXs to make things work. That’s the real secret behind all the of the advances in networking technology in the 2010s. We’re not making networking harder any more. We’re not adding complexity for Continue reading

Stop SIS – Self-Inflicted Spam

Last month I ran across a great blog post by Jed Casey (@WaxTrax) about letting go of the digital hoard that he had slowly been collecting over the years. It’s not easy to declare bankruptcy because you’ve hit your limit of things that you can learn and process. Jed’s focus in the article is that whatever he was going to try and come up with was probably out of date or past its prime. But it got me to thinking about a little project that I’ve been working on over the past few months.

Incoming!

One of the easy ways to stay on top of things in the industry is to sign up for updates. A digest email here and a notification there about new posts or conversations is a great way to stay in-the-know about information or the latest, greatest thing. But before you know it you’re going to find yourself swamped with incoming emails and notifications.

I’ve noticed it quite a bit in my inbox this year. What was once a message that I would read to catch up became a message I would scan for content. That then became a message that I skipped past Continue reading

Magical Mechanics

If you’re a fan of this blog, you’ve probably read my last post about the new SD-WAN magic quadrant that’s been making the rounds and generating discussion. Some people are smiling that this report places Cisco in an area other than leadership in the SD-WAN space. Others are decrying the report as being unfair and contradictory. I wanted to take another look at it given some new information and some additional thoughts on the results.

Fair and Square

The first thing I wanted to do is make sure that I was completely transparent with the way the Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) works. I have a very good idea thanks to a conversation with Andrew Lerner (@Fast_Lerner), who is the Research VP of Networking at Gartner. Andrew was nice enough to clarify my understanding of the MQ and accompanying documentation. I’ll quote him here to make sure I don’t get anything wrong:

In an MQ, we assess the overall vendors’ behavior and offering in the market. Product, service/support sales, marketing, innovation, etc. if a vendor has multiple products in a market and sells them regularly to the enterprise, they are part of the MQ assessment. Viable products are not Continue reading

SD-WAN Squares and Perplexing Planes

The latest arcane polygon is out in the SD-WAN space. Normally, my fortune telling skills don’t involve geometry. I like to talk to real people about their concerns and their successes. Yes, I know that the gardening people do that too. It’s just that no one really bothers to read their reports and instead makes all their decisions based on boring wall art.

Speaking of which, I’m going to summarize that particular piece of art here. Note this isn’t the same for copyright reasons but close enough for you to get the point:

So, if you can’t tell by the colors here, the big news is that Cisco has slipped out of the top Good part of the polygon and is now in the bottom Bad part (denoted by the red) and is in danger of going out of business and being the laughing stock of the networking community. Well, no, not so much that last part. But their implementation has slipped into the lower part of the quadrant where first-stage startups and cash-strapped companies live and wish they could build something.

Cisco released a report rebutting those claims and it talks about how Viptela is a huge part of Continue reading

Fast Friday- Perry Mason Moments

It’s the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in the US which means lots of people discussing things with their relatives. And, as is often the case, lots of arguments. It’s the nature of people to have a point of view and then to want to defend it. And it’s not just politics or other divisive topics. We see it all the time in networking too.

EIGRP vs OSPF. Cisco vs Juniper. ACI vs NSX. You name it and we’ve argued about it. Every viewpoint has a corresponding counterpart. Yes, there are good points for using one versus the other. But there are also times when every piece of factual information doesn’t matter because we “know” the right answer.

It’s those times when we run into what I call the “Perry Mason Problem”. It’s a reminder of the old Perry Mason TV show when the lawyer in the title would win a case with a carefully crafted statement that just ends any arguments. It’s often called a Wham Line or an Armor-Piercing Question. Basically, Mr. Mason would ask a question or make a statement that let all the air out of the argument. And often it would result in him winning the case Continue reading

Five Minutes To Magic Time

Have you ever worked with someone that has the most valuable time in the world? Someone that counts each precious minute in their presence as if you’re keeping them from something very, very important that they could use to solve world hunger or cure cancer? If you haven’t then you’re a very lucky person indeed. Sadly, almost everyone, especially those in IT, has had the misfortune to be involved with someone whose time is more precious than platinum-plated saffron.

That’s not to say that we should be wasting the time of those we work with. Simple things like being late to meetings or not having your materials prepared are easy ways to help reduce the time of meetings or to make things run smoothly. Those items are common courtesies that should be extended to all the people you meet, from the cashier that takes your order at a fast food establishment to the most powerful people on the planet. No, this is about something deeper and more insidious.

No Time For Hugs

I’ve seen the kind of behavior I’ve described very often in the higher echelons of companies. People that live at the CxO level often have very little time Continue reading

AI and Trivia

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I didn’t get a chance to attend Networking Field Day Exclusive at Juniper NXTWORK 2019 this year but I did get to catch some of the great live videos that were recorded and posted here. Mist, now a Juniper Company, did a great job of talking about how they’re going to be extending their AI-driven networking into the realm of wired networking. They’ve been using their AI virtual assistant, named “Marvis”, for quite a while now to solve basic wireless issues for admins and engineers. With the technology moving toward the copper side of the house, I wanted to talk a bit about why this is important for the sanity of people everywhere.

Finding the Answer

Network and wireless engineers are walking storehouses of useless trivia knowledge. I know this because I am one. I remember the hello and dead timers for OSPF on NBMA networks. I remember how long it takes BGP to converge or what the default spanning tree bridge priority is for a switch. Where some of my friends can remember the batting average for all first basemen in the league in 1971, I can instead tell you all about Continue reading

The Future of Hidden Features

You may have noticed last week that Ubiquiti added a new “feature” to their devices in a firmware updated. According to this YouTube video from @TomLawrenceTech, Ubiquiti built an new service that contacts a URL to “phone home” and check in with their servers. It got some heavy discussion going, especially on Reddit.

The consensus is that Ubiquiti screwed up here by not informing people they were adding the feature up front and also not allowing users to opt-out initially. The support people at Ubiquiti even posted a quick workaround of blocking the URL at a perimeter firewall to prevent the communications until they could patch in the option to opt-out. If this was an isolated incident I could see some manner of outcry about it, but the fact of the matter is that companies are adding these hidden features more and more every day.

The first issue comes from the fact that most release notes for apps any more are nothing aside from platitudes. “Hey, we fixed some bugs and stuff so turn on automatic updates so you get the best version of our stuff!” is somewhat common now when it comes to a list of Continue reading

In Defense of Support

We’re all in IT. We’ve done our time in the trenches. We’ve…seen things, as Roy Batty might say. Things you wouldn’t believe. But in the end we all know the pain of trying to get support for something that we’re working on. And we know how painful that whole process can be. Yet, how is it that support is universally “bad” in our eyes?

One Of Us

Before we launch into this discussion, I’ll give you a bit of background on me. I did inbound tech support for Gateway Computers for about six months at the start of my career. So I wasn’t supporting enterprises to start with but I’ve been about as far down in the trenches as you can go. And that taught me a lot about the landscape of support.

The first thing you have to realize is that most Tier 1 support people are, in fact, not IT nerds. They don’t have a degree in troubleshooting OSPF or are signatories to the fibre channel standards. They are generally regular people. They get a week or two of training and off they go. In general the people on the other end of the support phone number are Continue reading

The End of SD-WAN’s Party In China

As I was listening to Network Break Episode 257 from my friends at Packet Pushers, I heard Greg and Drew talking about a new development in China that could be the end of SD-WAN’s big influence there.

China has a new policy in place, according to Axios, that enforces a stricter cybersecurity stance for companies. Companies doing business in China or with offices in China must now allow Chinese officials to get into their networks to check for security issues as well as verifying the supply chain for network security.

In essence, this is saying that Chinese officials can have access to your networks at any time to check for security threats. But the subtext is a little less clear. Do they get to control the CPE as well? What about security constructs like VPNs? This article seems to indicate that as of January 1, 2020, there will be no intra-company VPNs authorized by any companies in China, whether Chinese or foreign businesses in China.

Tunnel Collapse

I talked with a company doing some SD-WAN rollouts globally in China all the way back in 2018. One of the things that was brought up in that interview was that Continue reading

Locked Up By Lock-In

When you start evaluating a solution, you are going to get a laundry list of features and functionality that you are supposed to use as criteria for selection. Some are important, like the ones that give you the feature set you need to get your job done. Others are less important for the majority of use cases. One thing tends to stand out for me though.

Since the dawn of platforms, I believe the first piece of comparison marketing has been “avoids lock-in”. You know you’ve seen it too. For those that may not be completely familiar with the term, “lock-in” describes a platform where all the components need to come from the same manufacturer or group of manufacturers in order to work properly. An example would be if a networking solution required you to purchase routers, switches, access points, and firewalls from a single vendor in order to work properly.

Chain of Fools

Lock in is the greatest asset a platform company has. The more devices they can sell you the more money they can get from you at every turn. That’s what they want. So they’re going to do everything they can to keep you in their ecosystem. Continue reading

Procrastination Party

“I’ll get to that later.”

“I’m not feeling it right now.”

“I have to find an angle.”

“It will be there tomorrow.”

Any of those sound familiar? I know they do for me. That’s because procrastination is the beast that lives inside all of us. Slumbering until a time when it awakes and persuades us to just put things off until later. Can’t hurt, right?

Brain Games

The human brain is an amazing thing. It is the single largest consumer of nutrients and oxygen in the human body. It’s the reason why human babies are born practically helpless due to the size in relation to the rest of an infant. It’s the reason why we can make tools, ponder the existence of life in the universe, and write kick-ass rock and roll music.

But the human brain is lazy. It doesn’t like thinking. It prefers simple patterns and easy work. Given a choice, the human brain would rather do some kind of mindless repetitive task ad naseum instead of creating. When you think about it that makes a lot of sense from a biological perspective. Tasks that are easy don’t engage many resources. Which means the Continue reading

Fast Friday Thoughts – Networking Field Day 21

This week has been completely full at Networking Field Day 21 with lots of great presentations. As usual, I wanted to throw out some quick thoughts that fit more with some observations and also to set up some topics for deeper discussion at a later time.

• SD-WAN isn’t just a thing for branches. It’s an application-focused solution now. We’ve moved past the technical reasons for implementation and finally moved the needle on “getting rid of MPLS” and instead realized that the quality of service and other aspects of the software allow us to do more. That’s especially true for cloud initiatives. If you can guarantee QoS through your SD-WAN setup you’re already light years ahead of where we’ve been already.
• Automation isn’t just figuring out how to make hardware and software do things really fast. It’s also about helping humans understand which things need to be done fast and automatically and which things don’t. For all the amazing stuff that you can do with scripting and orchestration there are still tasks that should be done manually. And there are plenty of people problems in the process. Really smart companies that want to solve these issues should stop focusing on using Continue reading

The Certification Ladder

Are you climbing the certification ladder? If you’re in IT the odds are good that you are. Some people are just starting out and see certifications as a way to get the knowledge they need to do their job. Others see certs as a way to get out of a job they don’t like. Still others have plenty of certifications but want to get the ones at the top of their field. This last group are the ones that I want to spend some time talking about.

Pushing The Limit

Expert-level certifications aren’t easy on purpose. They’re supposed to represent the gap between being good at something and going above and beyond. For some that involves some kind of practical test of skills like the CCIE. For others it involves a board interview process like the VCDX. Or it could even involve a combination of things like the CWNE does with board review and documentation submissions.

Expert certifications aren’t designed to be powered through in a short amount of time. That’s because it’s difficult to become an expert at something without putting in the practice time. For some tests, that means meeting some minimum requirements. You can only attempt your Continue reading

It’s A Wireless Problem, Right?

How many times have your users come to your office and told you the wireless was down? Or maybe you get a phone call or a text message sent from their phone. If there’s a way for people to figure out that the wireless isn’t working they will not hesitate to tell you about it. But is it always the wireless?

Path of Destruction

During CWNP Wi-Fi Trek 2019, Keith Parsons (@KeithRParsons) gave a great talk about Tips, Techniques, and Tools for Troubleshooting Wireless LAN. It went into a lot of detail about how many things you have to look at when you start troubleshooting wireless issues. It makes your head spin when you try and figure out exactly where the issues all lie.

However, I did have to put up a point that I didn’t necessarily agree with Keith on:

Keynote Hate – Celebrity Edition

We all know by now that I’m not a huge fan of keynotes. While I’ve pulled back in recent years from the all out snark during industry keynotes, it’s nice to see that friends like Justin Warren (@JPWarren) and Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) have stepped up their game. Instead, I try to pull nuggets of importance from a speech designed to rally investors instead of the users. However, there is one thing I really have to stand my ground against.

Celebrity Keynotes.

We’ve seen these a hundred times at dozens of events. After the cheers and adulation of the CEO giving a big speech and again after the technical stuff happens with the CTO or product teams, it’s time to talk about…nothing.

Celebrity keynotes break down into two distinct categories. The first is when your celebrity is actually well-spoken and can write a speech that enthralls the audience. This means they get the stage to talk about whatever they want, like their accomplishments in their career or the charity work their pushing this week. I don’t mind these as much because they feel like a real talk that I might want to attend. Generally the celebrity talking Continue reading