networkingnerd

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Double the Fun in 2022

It’s January 1 again. The last 365 days have been fascinating for sure. The road to recovery doesn’t always take the straightest path. 2021 brought some of the the normal things back to us but we’re still not quite there yet. With that in mind, I wanted to look back at some of the things I proposed last year and see how they worked out for me:

  • Bullet Journaling: This one worked really well. When I remembered to do it. Being able to chart out what I was working on and what I needed to be doing helped keep me on track. The hardest part was remembering to do it. As I’ve said before, I always think I have a great memory and then remember that I forgot I don’t. Bullet journaling helped me get a lot of my tasks prioritized and made sure that the ones that didn’t get done got carried over to be finished later. I kind of stopped completely at the end of the year when things got hectic and I think that is what led me to feeling like everything was chaotic. I’m going to start again for 2022 and make sure to add Continue reading

Holiday Networking Thoughts from 2021

It’s the Christmas break for 2021, which means lots of time spent doing very little work-related stuff. I’m currently putting together a Lego set, playing Metroid Dread and working on beating Ocarina of Time again.

As I waited for updates to download on Christmas morning I remembered how many packets must be flying across the wire to update software and operating systems for consoles. Even having done a few of the updates the night before I could see the traffic to those servers started to get a bit congested. It’s like Black Friday but for the latest patches to keep your games running. Add in the content that needs to be installed now in order to make that game disc work, or the download-only consoles for sale, and you can see that network engineers aren’t going to be a dying profession any time soon.

I’m a bit jaded because I come from a time when you didn’t need to be constantly connected to use software or need to download an update every few days. Heck, some of the bugs in Ocarina of Time have been there for over twenty years because those cartridges are not designed to be patched, Continue reading

A Recipe for Presentation Success

When I was a kid, I loved to help my mother bake. My absolute favorite thing to make was a pecan pie. I made sure I was always the one that got to do the work to fix it during the holidays. When I was first starting out I made sure I followed the recipe to the letter. I mixed everything in the order that it was listed. One of the first times I made the pie I melted the butter and poured it into the mixture which also had an egg. To my horror I saw the egg starting to cook and scramble in the bowl due to the hot butter. When I asked my mom she chuckled and said, “Now you get to learn about why the recipe isn’t always right.”

Throughout my career in IT and in presentations, I’ve also had to learn about why even if the recipe for success is written down properly there are other things you need to take into account before you put everything together. Just like tempering a mixture or properly creaming butter and sugar together, you may find that you need to do some things in a different order Continue reading

Is Disaggregation Going to Be Cord Cutting for the Enterprise?

There’s a lot of talk in the networking industry around disaggregation. The basic premise is that by decoupling the operating system from the hardware you can gain the freedom to run the devices you want from any vendor with the software that does what you want it to do. You can standardize or mix-and-match as you see fit. You gain the ability to direct the way your network works and you control how things will be going forward.

To me it sounds an awful lot like the trend of “cutting the cord” or unsubscribing from cable TV service and picking and choosing how you want to consume your content. Ten years ago the idea of getting rid of your cable TV provider was somewhat crazy. In 2021 it seems almost a given that you no long need to rely on your cable provider for entertainment. However, just like with the landscape of the post-cable cutting world, I think disaggregation is going to lead to a vastly different outcome than expected.

TNSTAAFL

Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: This idea of “freedom” when it comes to disaggregation and cord cutting is almost always about money. Yes, you Continue reading

You Down with IoT? You Better Be!

Did you see the big announcement from AWS re:Invent that Amazon has a preview of a Private 5G service? It probably got buried under the 200 other announcements that came out on so many other things so I’ll forgive you for missing it. Especially if you also managed to miss a few of the “hot takes” that mentioned how Amazon was trying to become a cellular provider. If I rolled my eyes any harder I might have caused permanent damage. Leave it to the professionals to screw up what seems to be the most cut-and-dried case of not reading the room.

Amazon doesn’t care about providing mobile service. How in the hell did we already forget about the Amazon (dumpster) Fire Phone? Amazon isn’t trying to supplant AT&T or Verizon. They are trying to provide additional connectivity for their IoT devices. It’s about as clear as it can get.

Remember all the flap about Amazon Sidewalk? How IoT devices were going to use 900 MHz to connect to each other if they had no other connectivity? Well, now it doesn’t matter because as long as one speaker or doorbell has a SIM slot for a private 5G or CBRS node Continue reading

A Gift Guide for Sanity In Your Home IT Life

If you’re reading my blog you’re probably the designated IT person for your family or immediate friend group. Just like doctors that get called for every little scrape or plumbers that get the nod when something isn’t draining over the holidays, you are the one that gets an email or a text message when something pops up that isn’t “right” or has a weird error message. These kinds of engagements are hard because you can’t just walk away from them and you’re likely not getting paid. So how can you be the Designated Computer Friend and still keep your sanity this holiday season?

The answer, dear reader, is gifts. If you’re struggling to find something to give your friends that says “I like you but I also want to reduce the number of times that you call me about your computer problems” then you should definitely read on for more info! Note that I’m not going to fill this post will affiliate links or plug products that have sponsored anything. Instead, I’m going to just share the classes or types of devices that I think are the best way to get control of things.

Step 1: Infrastructure Upgrades

When you Continue reading

IP Class is Now in Session

You may have seen something making the rounds on Twitter this week about a couple of proposed drafts designed to alleviate the problems with IPv4 exhaustion by repurposing some old IP spaces that aren’t available for use right now. Specifically:

Ultimately, this is probably going to fail for a variety of reasons and looks like it’s more of a suggestion than anything else but I wanted to take a moment to talk about why this isn’t an effective way of fixing address issues.

Error Bearers

The first reason that the Schoen drafts are going to fail is because most of the operating systems in the world won’t allow you to use reserved spaces for a system address. Because we knew years ago that certain spaces were marked as non-usable the logic was configured into the system to disallow the use of those spaces. And even if the system isn’t configured to disallow that space there’s no guarantee the traffic is going to be transmitted.

Let’s take 127/8 as a good example. Was it a smart idea to mark 16 million addresses as loopback host-only space? Nope. But that ship has sailed and Continue reading

The Process Will Save You

I had the opportunity to chat with my friend Chris Marget (@ChrisMarget) this week for the first time in a long while. It was good to catch up with all the things that have been going on and reminisce about the good old days. One of the topics that came up during our conversation was around working inside big organizations and the way that change processes are built.

I worked at IBM as an intern 20 years ago and the process to change things even back then was arduous. My experience with it was the deployment procedures to set up a new laptop. When I arrived the task took an hour and required something like five reboots. By the time I left we had changed that process and gotten it down to half an hour and only two reboots. However, before we could get the new directions approved as the procedure I had to test it and make sure that it was faster and produced the same result. I was frustrated but ultimately learned a lot about the glacial pace of improvements in big organizations.

Slow and Steady Finishes the Race

Change processes work to slow down the Continue reading

Is the M1 MacBook Pro Wi-Fi Really Slower?

I ordered a new M1 MacBook Pro to upgrade my existing model from 2016. I’m still waiting on it to arrive by managed to catch a sensationalist headline in the process:

“New MacBook Wi-Fi Slower than Intel Model!”

The article referenced this spec sheet from Apple referencing the various cards and capabilities of the MacBook Pro line. I looked it over and found that, according to the tables, the wireless card in the M1 MacBook Pro is capable of a maximum data rate of 1200 Mbps. The wireless card in the older model Intel MacBook Pro all the way back to 2017 is capable of 1300 Mbps. Case closed! The older one is indeed faster. Except that’s not the case anywhere but on paper.

PHYs, Damned Lies, and Statistics

You’d be forgiven for jumping right to the numbers in the table and using your first grade inequality math to figure out that 1300 is bigger than 1200. I’m sure it’s what the authors of the article did. Me? I decided to dig in a little deeper to find some answers.

It only took me about 10 seconds to find the first answer as to one of the differences in Continue reading

Getting In Front of Future Regret

Yesterday I sat in on the keynote from Commvault Connections21 and participated in a live blog of it on Gestalt IT. There was a lot of interesting info around security, especially related to how backup and disaster recovery companies are trying to add value to the growing ransomware issue in global commerce. One thing that I did take away from the conversation wasn’t specifically related to security though and I wanted to dive into a bit more.

Reza Morakabati, CIO for Commvault, was asked what he thought teams needed to do to advance their data strategy. And his response was very insightful:

Ask your team to imagine waking up to hear some major incident has happened. What would their biggest regret be? Now, go to work tomorrow and fix it.

It’s a short, sweet, and powerful sentence. Technology professionals are usually focused on implementing new things to improve productivity or introduce new features to users and customers. We focus on moving fast and making people happy. Security is often seen as running counter to this ideal. Security wants to keep people safe and secure. It’s not unlike the parents that hold on to their child’s bicycle after the training wheels Continue reading

Fast Friday Thoughts From Security Field Day

It’s a busy week for me thanks to Security Field Day but I didn’t want to leave you without some thoughts that have popped up this week from the discussions we’ve been having. Security is one of those topics that creates a lot of thought-provoking ideas and makes you seriously wonder if you’re doing it right all the time.

  • Never underestimate the value of having plumbing that connects all your systems. You may look at a solution and think to yourself “All this does is aggregate data from other sources”. Which raises the question: How do you do it now? Sure, antivirus fires alerts like a car alarm. But when you get breached and find out that those alerts caught it weeks ago you’re going to wish you had a better idea of what was going on. You need a way to send that data somewhere to be dealt with and cataloged properly. This is one of the biggest reasons why machine learning is being applied to the massive amount of data we gather in security. Having an algorithm working to find the important pieces means you don’t miss things that are important to you.
  • Not every solution is going Continue reading

Choosing the Least Incorrect Answer

My son was complaining to me the other day that he missed on question on a multiple choice quiz in his class and he got a low B grade instead of getting a perfect score. When I asked him why he was frustrated he told me, “Because it was easy and I missed it. But I think the question was wrong.” As usual, I pressed him further to explain his reasoning and found out that the question was indeed ambiguous but the answer choices were pretty obviously wrong all over. He asked me why someone would write a test like that. Which is how he got a big lesson on writing test questions.

Spin the Wheel

When you write a multiple choice test question for any reputable exam you are supposed to pick “wrong” answers, known as distractors, that ensure that the candidate doesn’t have a better than 25% chance of guessing the correct answer. You’ve probably seen this before because you took some kind of simple quiz that had answers that were completely wrong to the point of being easy to pick out. Those quizzes are usually designed to be passed with the minimum amount of effort.

Continue reading

What Can You Learn From Facebook’s Meltdown?

I wanted to wait to put out a hot take on the Facebook issues from earlier this week because failures of this magnitude always have details that come out well after the actual excitement is done. A company like Facebook isn’t going to do the kind of in-depth post-mortem that we might like to see but the amount of information coming out from other areas does point to some interesting circumstances causing this situation.

Let me start off the whole thing by reiterating something important: Your network looks absolutely nothing like Facebook. The scale of what goes on there is unimaginable to the normal person. The average person has no conception of what one billion looks like. Likewise, the scale of the networking that goes on at Facebook is beyond the ken of most networking professionals. I’m not saying this to make your network feel inferior. More that I’m trying to help you understand that your network operations resemble those at Facebook in the same way that a model airplane resembles a space shuttle. They’re alike on the surface only.

Facebook has unique challenges that they have to face in their own way. Network automation there isn’t a bonus. It’s Continue reading

Chip Shortages Aren’t Sweet for Networking

Have you tried to order networking gear recently? You’re probably cursing because the lead times on most everything are getting long. It’s not uncommon to see lead times on wireless access points or switch gear reaching 180 days or more. Reports from the Internet say that some people are still waiting to get things they ordered this spring. The prospect of rapid delivery of equipment is fading like the summer sun.

Why are we here? What happened? And can we do anything about it?

Fewer Chips, More Air

The pandemic has obviously had the biggest impact for a number of reasons. When a fabrication facility shuts down it doesn’t just ramp back up. Even when all the workers are healthy and the city where it is located is open for business it takes weeks to bring everything back online to full capacity. Just like any manufacturing facility you can’t just snap your fingers and get back to churning out the widgets.

The pandemic has also strained supply chains around the world. Even if the fabs had stayed open this entire time you’d be looking at a shortage of materials to make the equipment. Global supply chains were running extremely lean Continue reading

Private 5G Needs Complexity To Thrive

I know we talk about the subject of private 5G a lot in the industry but there are more players coming out every day looking to add their voice to the growing supporters of these solutions. And despite the fact that we tend to see 5G and Wi-Fi technologies as ships in the night this discussion isn’t going to go away any time soon. In part it’s because decision makers aren’t quite savvy enough to distinguish between the bands, thinking all wireless communications are pretty much the same.

I think we’re not going to see much overlap between these two technologies. But the reasons why aren’t quite what you might think.

Walking Workforces

Working from anywhere other than the traditional office is here to stay. Every major Silicon Valley company has looked at the cost benefit analysis and decided to let workers do their thing from where they live. How can I tell it’s permanent? Because they’re reducing salaries for those that choose to stay away from the Bay Area. That carrot is pretty enticing and for the companies to say that it’s not on the table for remote work going forward means they have no incentive to make people Continue reading

APIs and Department Stores

This week I tweeted something from a discussion we had during Networking Field Day that summed up my feelings about the state of documentation of application programming interfaces (APIs):

I laughed a bit as I wrote it because I’ve worked in department stores like Walmart in the past and I know the reasons why they tend to move things around. Comparing that to the way that APIs are documented is an interesting exercise in how people think about things like new capabilities and notification of changes.

Branding Exercises

In case you weren’t aware, everything in your average department store is carefully planned out. The things placed in the main aisles are decided on weeks in advance due to high traffic. The items placed at the ends of the aisles, or endcaps, are placed there to highlight high margin items or things that are popular enough to be sought out by customers. The makeup of the rest of the store is determined by a lot of metrics.

There are a Continue reading

Fast Friday – Podcasts Galore!

It’s been a hectic week and I realized that I haven’t had a chance to share some of the latest stuff that I’ve been working on outside of Tech Field Day. I’ve been a guest on a couple of recent podcasts that I loved.

Art of Network Engineering

I was happy to be a guest on Episode 57 of the Art of Network Engineering podcast. AJ Murray invited me to take part with all the amazing co-hosts. We talked about some fun stuff including my CCIE study attempts, my journey through technology, and my role at Tech Field Day and how it came to be that I went from being a network engineer to an event lead.

The interplay between the hosts and I during the discussion was great. I felt like we probably could have gone another hour if we really wanted to. You should definitely take a listen and learn how I kept getting my butt kicked by the CCIE open-ended questions or what it’s like to be a technical person on a non-technical briefing.

IPv6, Wireless, and the Buzz

I love being able to record episodes of Tomversations on Youtube. One of my latest was all about Continue reading

Getting Blasted by Backdoors

Open Door from http://viktoria-lyn.deviantart.com/

I wanted to take minute to talk about a story I’ve been following that’s had some new developments this week. You may have seen an article talking about a backdoor in Juniper equipment that caused some issues. The issue at hand is complicated at the linked article does a good job of explaining some of the nuance. Here’s the short version:

  • The NSA develops a version of Dual EC random number generation that includes a pretty substantial flaw.
  • That flaw? If you know the pseudorandom value used to start the process you can figure out the values, which means you can decrypt any traffic that uses the algorithm.
  • NIST proposes the use of Dual EC and makes it a requirement for vendors to be included on future work. Don’t support this one? You don’t get to even be considered.
  • Vendors adopt the standard per the requirement but don’t make it the default for some pretty obvious reasons.
  • Netscreen, a part of Juniper, does use Dual EC as part of their default setup.
  • The Chinese APT 5 hacking group figures out the vulnerability and breaks into Juniper to add code to Netscreen’s OS.
  • They Continue reading

Sharing Failure as a Learning Model

Earlier this week there was a great tweet from my friends over at Juniper Networks about mistakes we’ve made in networking:

It got some interactions with the community, which is always nice, but it got me to thinking about how we solve problems and learn from our mistakes. I feel that we’ve reached a point where we’re learning from the things we’ve screwed up but we’re not passing it along like we used to.

Write It Down For the Future

Part of the reason why I started my blog was to capture ideas that had been floating in my head for a while. Troubleshooting steps or perhaps even ideas that I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget down the line. All of it was important to capture for the sake of posterity. After all, if you didn’t write it down did it even happen?

Along the way I found that the posts that got significant traction on my site were the ones that involved Continue reading

The Mystery of Known Issues

I’ve spent the better part of the last month fighting a transient issue with my home ISP. I thought I had it figure out after a hardware failure at the connection point but it crept back up after I got back from my Philmont trip. I spent a lot of energy upgrading my home equipment firmware and charting the seemingly random timing of the issue. I also called the technical support line and carefully explained what I was seeing and what had been done to work on the problem already.

The responses usually ranged from confused reactions to attempts to reset my cable modem, which never worked. It took several phone calls and lots of repeated explanations before I finally got a different answer from a technician. It turns out there was a known issue with the modem hardware! It’s something they’ve been working on for a few weeks and they’re not entirely sure what the ultimate fix is going to be. So for now I’m going to have to endure the daily resets. But at least I know I’m not going crazy!

Issues for Days

Known issues are a way of life in technology. If you’ve worked with any Continue reading

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