Assuming the worst is not the best assumption

It was too bad to be true, but I should have known that assuming the worst was not the best assumption. I was driving the “other” car, the Saab, on the way back from the METNAV shop around eight in the morning. Since the shop was located in the middle of the three runways, this meant I had to drive across the 18 taxiway, along the white lines painted between the C-141’s, C-130’s, KC-10’s, F-4’s, and sometimes other odds and ends, and then past the Tower, off the flightline, and onto the “surface streets.” As I was coming off a call at around three in the morning, I wasn’t in uniform. For some reason, I hadn’t driven my normal car — a white Jeep — so the folks in the Tower certainly wouldn’t recognize me.

So when the SP flipped his lights on and pulled in behind me, I was worried. Just as the lights came on, I remembered something really important: I had forgotten to put my sticker on the car. You see, to drive on the flightline, you had to have a sticker on your car. There were various colors for the different areas you could gain Continue reading

Another Year of Thankfulness

By the time you read this, I’ll be down at Oak Island on the North Carolina Coast, where my wife will be getting the turkey ready, and making a white chocolate cheesecake. No, I won’t tell you the address, but I will tell you this.

I’m thankful for this year.

I’m thankful for my family. For my wife and kids who put up with me and my insane schedule.

I’m thankful for my friends (I would list them all, but I’d probably forget someone, which would hurt feelings; it just doesn’t seem right to hurt anyone’s feelings today). Across the years, I’ve been taught so much about networking and engineering in the last 20+ years, from working on RADAR systems to large scale data centers. I’ve been given so many opportunities to write and speak, and been shown how to be just a better person.

I’m thankful that God has opened a door into a top notch PhD program, the support structure every PhD student needs to succeed, and two great mentors (more than anyone could ask for).

I know it’s not Thanksgiving in every country in the world. But there’s never a bad day to give thanks for what Continue reading

Worth Reading: Vendorspeak

Network vendors’ sales teams are a special bunch, and they say some interesting things. I’ve heard some real zingers thru the years, and sat down to write the Top-10, but couldn’t stop at ten. So here are the Top 25 things that network vendor sales teams often say, and what they really mean… via gartner

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Yokohama

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QOTW: The specialist

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Reaction: Personal Integrity

There is, on a daily basis, a choice you must make as a geek, as someone who is involved in technology — particularly in the world of computer networking. The choice we always face, every one of us, is whether to champion a particular product or service, or to champion solving the problem at hand. Between doing what’s best for a vendor — or even harder, what’s best for our career — or doing what’s best for our customer (whoever that customer might be). In other words, what to do with our personal integrity.

I know it’s hard, when you’re working for a vendor, not to just throw yourself into a product to the point of seeing it as the hammer that solves every problem, whether a nail or not. I know it’s hard, when you work for a smaller company, or in what feels like a “side alley” of our little industry (what Ethan calls a “mud puddle”) not to try to throw yourself at being famous, or warping the direction of the company so you can learn something new. I once worked on an account where I’d been asking to come in and help them switch from EIGRP Continue reading

Worth Reading: God-like powers

In short, the intersection of the real world and the virtual one is constant, powerful and dangerous. Equipped with the latest in phones smarter than we are, we have all become the media. But we lack the common sense to sort through what we’ve learned. We’re going to uncover every flaw of one another – probably with accompanying video. Let’s just hope we learn to forgive … and forget. via townhall

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Worth Reading Roundup: Security and Privacy

“If I haven’t done anything wrong, then I don’t have anything to hide.” This is one of those bits of nonsense that never seems to lose it’s power regardless of how many times it’s been proven wrong in history. Privacy is one of the most important freedoms we enjoy — the privacy to try, the privacy to work things out among friends, and even the privacy to fail.

So what does the ‘net say about privacy this week?

One of the most disturbing things is the growing tendency to engineer people for greater efficiency. This trend started more than a hundred years ago — remember this?

But there is something fundamentally dehumanizing about people like machines out of whom you can squeeze infinite amounts of bandwidth — but it seems to be something we’re pushing towards almost as fast as we can, in both the corporate world and in government.

Digging into personal information in order to manipulate the environment for greater profit and productivity just seems a bit slimy. And I used the word manipulate (and slimy) on purpose. fistful of talent

Many countries are in the throes of a debate about the amount of surveillance a government Continue reading

Worth Reading: SPAM

Spam email, those unsolicited email messages we find cluttering our inboxes, are a challenge for Internet users, businesses, and policymakers alike. Estimates vary, but some suggest that more than 100 billion spam messages are sent every day, representing up to 85 percent of global daily email traffic. via the internet society

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Worth Reading: Net Neutrality

‘Neutrality’ has an evil twin, namely ‘discrimination’. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between the intentional and operational semantics of broadband. Neither concept is a term of the art of performance engineering or computer science. No packet networks have ever been ‘neutral’, and none ever will be. No scheduling algorithm is ‘(non-)discriminatory’. The assumed intentionality of random processes is false. The idea of ‘defending’ neutrality is thus a pure intellectual nonsense. via circleid

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Worth Reading: Connecting the next billion users

Internet access is still a mirage to most in the developing world, let alone broadband. A lot of statistics are thrown around on the number of users with access to Internet. For Example Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) pegs the numbers at 14 million Internet subscribers and 22 million internet users against a population of 41 million. This translates to 34% internet subscribers and 54% internet users over an African average of 19% Internet users according to ITU. via circleid

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Initial Thoughts: BroadView

On a technical level, BroadView is a collection of open-source software, plugins to multiple ecosystem projects (such as OpenDaylight and OpenStack), and documentation. It offers programmable access to the internal workings of switching architecture for enhanced network control tasks such as monitoring, congestion control and advanced troubleshooting. via broadcom

What’s interesting about this “product,” produced by Broadcom, is they are open source. We tend to think software will eat the world, but when something like this comes out in the open source space, it makes me think that if software eats the world, profit is going to take a long nosedive into nothingness. From Broadcom’s perspective this makes sense, of course; any box you buy that has a Broadcom chipset, no matter who wrapped the sheet metal around the chipset, will have some new added capability in terms of understanding the traffic flow through the network. Does this sort of thing take something essential away from the vendors who are building their products based on Broadcom, however? It seems the possibility is definitely there, but it’s going to take a lot deeper dive than what’s provided in the post above to really understand. If these interfaces are exposed simply through Continue reading

HL: On Losing

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Worth Reading: Smarter than our tech

It’s fine to be a gamer or a social media enthusiast, but if you need a smart watch to tell you when it’s time to get up and walk around so you don’t end up with a pulmonary embolism, something’s very wrong. … The smarter technology becomes, the smarter we need to become – not so much to know how and when to use it, but to know how and when not to use it. via Fox

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Reaction: Anonymity isn’t a bug

Despite the bad rap it sometimes gets, anonymity – and anonymity technology – is used all the time by everyday people. Think about it: just walking in a park without being recorded or observed or “going off the grid” are common examples of people seeking to disconnect their identity from their activities. via the center for democracy and technology

The problem with anonymity and the modern Internet is we tend to think of being anonymous as either “on” or “off” all the time. The only real reason we can think of to want to be anonymous is to do something evil, to hurt someone, to steal something, or to do something else considered anti-social or wrong.

But there’s a problem with this thinking — it’s much like pitting “the rich” against “the poor,” or any other time bound classification. There are times when I want to be anonymous, and there are times when I don’t care. It’s not a matter of doing that which is nefarious. It’s more about expressing opinions you know people won’t agree with, but which the expression of could cause you material harm, or about being able to investigate something without telling anyone about the situation. Continue reading

Worth Listening: Packet Pushers Show 263

The Packet Pushers take a break from tech to share perspectives on interviewing for a job. The job interview can be a nerve-wracking experience. They talk about how to prepare and discuss what an interviewer is really thinking. via packetpushers

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Worth Reading: The Future of Networking

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Castle versus Cannon: It’s time to rethink security

In case you’re confused about the modern state of security, let me give you a short lesson.

Your network is pictured to the left. When I first started working on networks in the USAF we were just starting to build well designed DMZs, sort of a gate system for the modern network. “Firewalls” (a term I’m coming to dislike immensely), guard routers, VPN concentrators, and other systems were designed to keep your network from being “penetrated.” Standing at the front gate you’ll find a few folks wearing armor and carrying swords, responsible for letting only the right people inside the walls — policies, and perhaps even an IDS or two.

The world lived with castles for a long time — thousands of years, to be precise. In fact, the pride of the Roman Legion really wasn’t the short sword and battle formation, it was their ability to work in concrete. Certainly they had swords, but they could also build roads and walls, as evidenced by the Roman style fortifications dotting the entire world.

But we don’t live inside concrete walls any longer. Instead, our armies today move on small and large vehicles, defending territory through measure and countermeasure. They gather Continue reading

HL: On Being Different

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QOTW: Ignorance

Contrary to folk wisdom, ignorance is usually not blissful. Generally, it produces the very opposite of bliss. Just ask the frightened hiker lost in some remote mountain blizzard who never paid attention to his Boy Scout instruction; or ask the new employee who never did her math homework, frantically trying to figure out the correct change for customers; or, worse yet, ask the frustrated and annoyed patrons waiting in the ever-increasing line as this new employee bumbles one purchase after another.
Phillip Dow, Virtuous Minds

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