802.11ax Is NOT A Wireless Switch

802.11ax is fast approaching. Though not 100% ratified by the IEEE, the spec is at the point where most manufacturers and vendors are going to support what’s current as the “final” version for now. While the spec for what marketing people like to call Wi-Fi 6 is not likely to change, that doesn’t mean that the ramp up to get people to buy it is showing any signs of starting off slow. One of the biggest problems I see right now is the decision by some major AP manufacturers to call 802.11ax a “wireless switch”.

Complex Duplex

In case you had any doubts, 802.11ax is NOT a switch.¹ But the answer to why that is takes some explanation. It all starts with the network. More specifically, with Ethernet.

Ethernet is a broadcast medium. Packets are launched into the network and it is hoped that the packet finds the destination. All nodes on the network listen and, if the packet isn’t destined for them they discard it. This is the nature of the broadcast. If multiple stations try to talk at once, the packets collide and no one hears anything. That’s why Ethernet developed a collision detection Continue reading

OpenConfig and Wi-Fi – The Winning Combo

Wireless isn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination. Most people fixate on the spectrum analysis part of the equation when they think about how hard wireless is. But there are many other moving parts in the whole architecture that make it difficult to manage and maintain. Not the least of which is how the devices talk to each other.

This week at Aruba Atmosphere 2019, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel of wireless and security experts for Mobility Field Day Exclusive. It was a fun discussion, as you can see from the above video. As the moderator, I didn’t really get a change to explain my thoughts on OpenConfig, but I figured now would be a great time to jump in with some color on my side of the conversation.

Yin and YANG

One of the most exciting ideas behind OpenConfig for wireless people should be the common YANG data models. This means that you can use NETCONF to have a common programming language against specific YANG models. That means no more fumbling around to remember esoteric commands. You just tell the system what you want it to do and the rest is easy.

As outlined Continue reading

Fast Friday – Aruba Atmosphere 2019

A couple of quick thoughts that I’m having ahead of Aruba Atmosphere next week in Las Vegas, NV. Tech Field Day has a lot going on and you don’t want to miss a minute of the action for sure, especially on Wednesday at 3:15pm PST. In the meantime:

• IoT is really starting to more down-market. Rather than being focused on enabling large machines with front-end devices to act as gateways we’re starting to see more and more IoT devices either come with integrated connective technology or interface with systems that do. Building control systems aren’t just for large corporations any more. You can automate an office on the cheap today. Just remember that any device that can talk can also listen. Security posture is going to be huge.
• I remember some of the discussions that we had during the heady early days of SDN and how unimpressed wireless and mobility people were when they figured out how the controllers and dumb edge devices really worked. Most wireless pros have been there and done that already. However, recently there has been a lot of movement in the OpenConfig community around wireless devices. And that really has the wireless folks excited. Because Continue reading

The Blogging Mirror

Writing isn’t always the easiest thing in the world to do. Coming up with topics is hard, but so too is making those topics into a blog post. I find myself getting briefings on a variety of subjects all the time, especially when it comes to networking. But translating those briefings into blog posts isn’t always straight forward. When I find myself stuck and ready to throw in the towel I find it easy to think about things backwards.

A World Of Pure Imagination

When people plan blog posts, they often think about things in a top-down manner. They come up with a catchy title, then an amusing anecdote to open the post. Then they hit the main idea, find a couple of supporting arguments, and then finally they write a conclusion that ties it all together. Sound like a winning formula?

Except when it isn’t. How about when the title doesn’t reflect the content of the post? Or the anecdote or lead in doesn’t quite fit with the overall tone? How about when the blog starts meandering away from the main idea halfway through with a totally separate argument? Or when the conclusion is actually the place where the Continue reading

QoS Is Dead. Long Live QoS!

Ah, good old Quality of Service. How often have we spent our time as networking professionals trying to discern the archaic texts of Szigeti to learn how to make you work? QoS is something that seemed so necessary to our networks years ago that we would spend hours upon hours trying to learn the best way to implement it for voice or bulk data traffic or some other reason. That was, until a funny thing happened. Until QoS was useless to us.

Rest In Peace and Queues

QoS didn’t die overnight. It didn’t wake up one morning without a home to go to. Instead, we slowly devalued and destroyed it over a period of years. We did it be focusing on the things that QoS was made for and then marginalizing them. Remember voice traffic?

We spent years installing voice over IP (VoIP) systems in our networks. And each of those systems needed QoS to function. We took our expertise in the arcane arts of queuing and applied it to the most finicky protocols we could find. And it worked. Our mystic knowledge made voice better! Our calls wouldn’t drop. Our packets arrived when they should. And the world was Continue reading

Silo 2: On-Premise with DevOps

I had a great time stirring up the hornet’s nest with the last post about DevOps, so I figured that I’d write another one with some updated ideas and clarifications. And maybe kick the nest a little harder this time.

Grounding the Rules

First, we need to start out with a couple of clarifications. I stated that the mantra of DevOps was “Move Fast, Break Things.” As has been rightly pointed out, this was a quote from Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook. However, as has been pointed out by quite a few people, “The use of basic principles to enable business requirements to get to production deployments with appropriate coordination among all business players, including line of business, developers, classic operations, security, networking, storage and other functional groups involved in service delivery” is a bit more of definition than motto.

What exactly is DevOps then? Well, as I have been educated, it’s a principle. It’s an idea. A premise, if you will. An ideal to strive for. So, to say that someone is on a DevOps team is wrong. There is no such thing as a classic DevOps team. DevOps is instead something that many other teams do in Continue reading

DevOps is a Silo

Silos are bad. We keep hearing how IT is too tribal and broken up into teams that only care about their swim lanes. The storage team doesn’t care about the network. The server teams don’t care about the storage team. The network team is a bunch of jerks that don’t like anyone. It’s a viscous cycle of mistrust and playground cliques.

Except for DevOps. The savior has finally arrived! DevOps is the silo-busting mentality that will allow us all to get with the program and get everything done right this time. The DevOps mentality doesn’t reinforce teams or silos. It focuses on the only pure thing left in the world – committing code. The way of the CI/CD warrior. But what if I told you that DevOps was just another silo?

Team Players

Before the pitchforks and torches come out, let’s examine why IT has been so tribal for so long. The silo mentality came about when we started getting more specialized with regards to infrastructure. Think about the original compute resources – mainframes. There weren’t any silos with mainframes because everyone pretty much had to know what they were doing with every part of the system. Everything was connected Continue reading

Atmosic and the Power of RF?

I recently talked to a company doing some very interesting things in the mobility space and I thought I’d take a stab at writing about them. Most of my mobility posts are about access points or controller software or me just complaining in general about the state of Wi-Fi 6. But this idea had me a little intrigued. And confused.

Bluetooth Moon Rising

Atmosic is a company that is focusing on low-power chips, especially for IoT applications. Most of their team came from Atheros, which you may recall powers a ton of the reference architectures used in wireless APs in many, many AP manufacturers that don’t make their own chips. Their team has the chops to make good wireless stuff one would think.

Atmosic wants to make IoT devices that use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). So far, this is sounding pretty good to me. I’ve seen a lot of crazy awesome ideas for BLE, like location tracking indoors or on-demand digital signage. Sure, there are some tracking issues that go along with that but it’s mostly okay. BLE is what the industry has decided to standardize on for a ton of IoT functionality.

How does Atmosic want to change things Continue reading

Managing Automation – Fighting Fear of Job Justification

Dear Employees

 

We have decided to implement automation in our environment because robots and programs are way better than people. We will need you to justify your job in the next week or we will fire you and make you work in a really crappy job that doesn’t involve computers while we light cigars with dollar bills.

 

Sincerely, Management

The above letter is the interpretation of the professional staff of your organization when you send out the following email:

We are going to implement some automation concepts next week. What are some things you wish you could automate in your job?

Interpretations differ as to the intent of automation. Management likes the idea of their engineering staff being fully tasked and working on valuable projects. They want to know their people are doing something productive. And the people that aren’t doing productive stuff should either be finding something to do or finding a new job.

Professional staff likes being fully tasked and productive too. They want to be involved in jobs and tasks that do something cool or justify their existence to management. If their job doesn’t do that they get worried they won’t have it any longer.

Continue reading

Certifications Are About Support

You may have seen this week that VMware has announced they are removing the mandatory recertification requirement for their certification program. This is a huge step from VMware. The VCP, VCAP, and VCDX are huge certifications in the virtualization and server industry. VMware has always wanted their partners and support personnel to be up-to-date on the latest and greatest software. But, as I will explain, the move to remove the mandatory recertification requirement says more about the fact that certifications are less about selling and more about supporting.

The Paper Escalator

Recertification is a big money maker for companies. Sure, you’re spending a lot money on things like tests and books. But those aren’t usually tied to the company offering the certification. Instead, the testing fees are given to the testing center, like Pearson, and the book fees go to the publisher.

The real money maker for companies is the first-party training. If the company developing the certification is also offering the training courses you can bet they’re raking in the cash. VMware has done this for years with the classroom requirement for the VCP. Cisco has also started doing in with their first-party CCIE training. Cisco’s example also shows Continue reading

Risking It All

When’s the last time you thought about risk? It’s something we have to deal with every day but hardly ever try to quantify unless we work in finance or a high-stakes job. When it comes to IT work, we take risks all the time. Some are little, like deleting files or emails thinking we won’t need them again. Or maybe they’re bigger risks, like deploying software to production or making a change that could take a site down. But risk is a part of our lives. Even when we can’t see it.

Mitigation Revelations

Mitigating risk is the most common thing we have to do when we analyze situations where risk is involved. Think about all the times you’ve had to create a backout plan for a change that you’re checking in. Even having a maintenance window is a form of risk mitigation. I was once involved in a cutover for a metro fiber deployment that had to happen between midnight and 2 am. When I asked why, the tech said, “Well, we don’t usually have any problems, but sometimes there’s a hiccup that takes the whole network down until we fix it. This way, there isn’t as much traffic Continue reading

Wi-Fi 6 Is A Stupid Branding Idea

You’ve probably seen recently that the Wi-Fi Alliance has decided the rebrand the forthcoming 802.11ax standard as “Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 6”, henceforth referred to as “Wi-Fi 6”. This branding decision happened late in 2018 and seems to be picking up steam in 2019 as 802.11ax comes closer to ratification later this year. With manufacturers shipping 11ax access points already and the consumer market poised to explode with the adoption of a new standard, I think it’s time to point out to the Wi-Fi Alliance that this is a dumb branding idea.

My Generation

On the surface, the branding decision looks like it makes sense. The Wi-Fi alliance wants to make sure that consumers aren’t confused about which wireless standard they are using. 802.11n, 802.11ac, and 802.11ax are all usable and valid infrastructure that could be in use at any one time, as 11n is 2.4GHz, 11ac is 5GHz, and 11ax encompasses both. According to the alliance, there will be a number displayed on the badge of the connection to denote which generation of wireless the client is using.

Except, it won’t be that simple. Users don’t care about speeds. They care about having the biggest Continue reading

iPhone 11 Plus Wi-Fi 6 Equals Undefined?

I read a curious story this weekend based on a supposed leak about the next iPhone, currently dubbed the iPhone 11¹. There’s a report that the next iPhone will have support for the forthcoming 802.11ax standard. The article refers to 802.11ax as Wi-Fi 6, which is a catch branding exercise that absolutely no one in the tech community is going to adhere to.

In case you aren’t familiar with 802.11ax, it’s essentially an upgrade of the existing wireless protocols to support better client performance and management across both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Unlike 802.11ac, which was rebranded to be called Wi-Fi 5 or 802.11n, which curiously wasn’t rebranded as Wi-Fi 4, 802.11ax works in both bands. There’s a lot of great things on the drawing board for 11ax coming soon.

Why did I say soon? Because, as of this writing, 11ax isn’t a ratified standard. According to this FAQ from Aerohive, the standard isn’t set to be voted on for final ratification until Q3 of 2019. And if anyone wants to see the standard pushed along faster it would be Aerohive. They were one of, if not the, first Continue reading

What Makes IoT A Security Risk?

IoT security is a pretty hot topic in today’s world. That’s because the increasing number of smart devices is causing issues with security professionals everywhere. Consumer IoT devices are expected to top 20 billion by 2020. And each of these smart devices represents an attack surface. Or does it?

Hello, Dave

Adding intelligence to a device increases the number of ways that it can compromised. Take a simple thermostat, for example. The most basic themostat is about as dumb as you can get. It uses the expansion properties of metal to trigger switches inside of the housing. You set a dial or a switch and it takes care of the rest. Once you start adding things like programmability or cloud connection, you increase the number of ways that you can access the device. Maybe it’s a webpage or an app. Maybe you can access it via wireless or Bluetooth. No matter how you do it, it’s more available than the simple version of the thermostat.

What about industrial IoT devices? The same rule applies. In this case, we’re often adding remote access to Supervisory Control And Data Acquistion (SCADA) systems. There’s a big market from enterprise IT providers to create Continue reading

2019 Is The King of Content

2018 was a year full of excitement and fun. And for me, it was a year full of writing quite a bit. Not only did keep up my writing here for my audience but I also wrote quite a few posts for GestaltIT.com. You can find a list of all the stuff I wrote right here. I took a lot of briefings from up-and-coming companies as well as talking to some other great companies and writing a couple of series about SD-WAN.

It was also a big year for the Gestalt IT Rundown. My co-host with most Rich Stroffolino (@MrAnthropology) and I had a lot of fun looking at news from enterprise IT and some other fun chipset and cryptocurrency news. And I’ve probably burned my last few bridges with Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg to boot. I look forward to recording these episodes every Wednesday and I hope that some of you will join us on the Gestalt IT Facebook page at 12:30 EST as well.

Content Coming Your Way

So, what does that leave in store for 2019? Well, since I hate predictions on an industry scale, that means taking a look at what I Continue reading

Meeting Your Deadlines Is Never Easy

2018 has been a busy year. There’s been a lot going on in the networking world and the pace of things keeps accelerating. I’ve been inundated with things this last month, including endless requests for my 2019 predictions and where I think the market is going. Since I’m not a prediction kind of person, I wanted to take just a couple of moments to talk more about something that I did find interesting from 2018 – deadlines.

Getting It Out The Door

Long-time readers of this blog may remember that I’ve always had a goal set for myself of trying to get one post published every week. It’s a deadline I set for myself to make sure that I didn’t let my blog start decaying into something that is barely updated. I try to hold fast to my word and get something new out every week. Sometimes it’s simple, like reflections on one of the various Tech Field Day events that I’m working on that week. But there’s always something.

That is, until Cisco Live this year. I somehow got so wrapped up in things that I missed a post for the first time in eight years! Granted, this was Continue reading

Facebook’s Mattress Problem with Privacy

If you haven’t had a chance to watch the latest episode of the Gestalt IT Rundown that I do with my co-workers every Wednesday, make sure you check this one out. Because it’s the end of the year it’s customary to do all kinds of fun wrap up stories. This episode focused on what we all thought was the biggest story of the year. For me, it was the way that Facebook completely trashed our privacy. And worse yet, I don’t see a way for this to get resolved any time soon. Because of the difference between assets and liabilities.

Contact The Asset

It’s no secret that Facebook knows a ton about us. We tell it all kinds of things every day we’re logged into the platform. We fill out our user profiles with all kinds of interesting details. We click Like buttons everywhere, including the one for the Gestalt IT Rundown. Facebook then keeps all the data somewhere.

But Facebook is collecting more data than that. They track where our mouse cursors are in the desktop when we’re logged in. They track the amount of time we spend with the mobile app open. They track information in the background. Continue reading

Some Random Thoughts From Security Field Day

I’m spending the week in some great company at Security Field Day with awesome people. They’re really making me think about security in some different ways. Between our conversations going to the presentations and the discussions we’re having after hours, I’m starting to see some things that I didn’t notice before.

• Security is a hard thing to get into because it’s so different everywhere. Where everyone just sees one big security community, it is in fact a large collection of small communities. Thinking that there is just one security community would be much more like thinking enterprise networking, wireless networking, and service provider networking are the same space. They may all deal with packets flying across the wires but they are very different under the hood. Security is a lot of various communities with the name in common.
• Security isn’t about tools. It’s not about software or hardware or a product you can buy. It’s about thinking differently. It’s about looking at the world through a different lens. How to protect something. How to attack something. How to figure all of that out. That’s not something you learn from a book or a course. It’s a way of adjusting your Continue reading

It’s The Change Freeze Season

Everyone’s favorite time of the year is almost here! Is it because it’s the holiday season? Perhaps it’s the magic that happens at the end of the year? Or maybe, it’s because there’s an even better reason to get excited!

Change Freeze Season!

That’s right. Some of you reading this started jumping up and down like Buddy the Elf at the thought of having a change freeze. There’s something truly magical about laying down the law about not touching anything in the system until after the end-of-year reports are run and certified. For some, this means a total freeze of non-critical changes from the first of December all the way through the New Year until maybe even February. That’s a long time to have a frozen network? But why?

The Cold Shoulder

Change freezes are an easy thing to explain to the new admins. You simply don’t touch anything in the network during the freeze unless it’s broken. No tweaking. No experimenting. No improvements. Just critical break/fix changes only. There had better be a ticket. There should be someone yelling that something’s not right. Otherwise you’re in for it.

There are a ton of reasons for this. The first is Continue reading

The Magic of the CCIE

I stumbled across a great Reddit thread this week: Is the CCIE as impossible as it seems? There are a lot of great replies on that thread about people passing and the “good old days” of Banyan Vines, Appletalk, and more. It’s also a fascinating look into how the rest of the networking industry sees exams like the CCIE and JNCIE. Because those of us that have the numbers seem to be magicians to some.

Sleight of CLI Hand

Have you ever seen the cups and balls magic trick? Here’s an excellent example of it from the recently departed Ricky Jay:

Impressive, right? It’s amazing to behold a master craftsman at work. Every time I watch that video I’m amazed. I know he’s doing sleight of hand. But I can’t catch it. Now, watch this same video but with annotations turned on. SPOILER ALERT – The annotations will tell you EXACTLY where the tricks are done:

Is it more impressive now that you know how the tricks are done? Check out this demonstration from Penn and Teller that shows you exactly how they do the tricks as well:

Okay, so it’s a little less mystifying now that you’ve Continue reading