Podcast Guest: Can You Have A Successful IT Career Without A Degree?

I was a guest on the February 22, 2022 episode of the So You Wanna Be In IT podcast.

Certifications

I chatted with hosts Pat & Dean about how my career got started. I’ve been around IT since the 90s, so my start was with Novell certification that became Microsoft certification that became Cisco certification. We talk about certs and the job opportunities I took advantage of driven by those certs.

Can You Have A Successful IT Career Without A Degree?

Along the way, we discussed whether or not someone can have a successful IT career without a college degree. Put another way, are IT certifications good enough? I think that yes, you can have a successful IT career without a degree, but that the question, “College degree. Yes or no?” deserves more analysis than a simple yes or no answer offers. Like anything, choosing not to attend university has tradeoffs. We discuss this at some length in the podcast.

What IT Roles Are In Demand In 2022?

The degree vs. certifications part of the discussion transitioned into my takes on IT careers in 2022–especially related to infrastructure. 2022 is an interesting time to be in IT. There are Continue reading

How To Pass Environment Variables To A Remote SSH Deployment With PyCharm

I pass access tokens, authentication keys, and other secrets to Python scripts via environment variables rather than encode these values into the scripts themselves. If I was a real boy, I’d use a solution like Hashicorp Vault or other secrets management tool (there’s a bunch of them), but I haven’t yet found the motivation to learn such a tool.

I’m not sure I’d want to build and maintain such a tool if I did find the motivation. I’m sort of lazy sometimes is what I’m saying. So for now, environment variables it is.

PyCharm allows for the passing of environment variables from the IDE to a script, whether that script is running locally or in a remote SSH deployment you’ve configured for your project.

To set the environment variables, select Edit Configurations from the Run menu.

Or in the project bar above the code window, click the dropdown with your script name, and select Edit Configurations.

Either way brings up the following configuration window for the scripts in your project. In the Environment variables: field, click the icon.

That will bring up the following window you can use to configure the environment variables.

Fantastic. But how do we assign the Continue reading

How To Pass API Query Parameters In A Curl Request

If you’re using CLI tool curl to retrieve data from a remote API, you might send forth a command like so.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer access_token_goes_here" \
  https://api.provider.com/thing/you_want/index.json

That results in a lovely JSON payload that makes you happy.

Let’s say that according to the API documentation, /thing/you_want/ accepts query parameters so that you can scope what you want to know about. Excellent! Instinctively, you try the following…

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer access_token_goes_here" \
  https://api.provider.com/thing/you_want/index.json?scope=1

Rather than a scoped JSON payload that also makes you happy, you get back a message indicating that the API endpoint is displeased. Your sacrifice was deemed unworthy. Nay, YOU are unworthy. You are decidedly not happy.

What has gone wrong to anger the API gods so? You asked the wrong question of the API. More accurately, curl hasn’t formatted the request in quite the way you intuited it would.

To appease the API deities, the appropriate sacrifice comes in the form of a tweaked curl command. For example…

curl -G -H "Authorization: Bearer access_token_goes_here" \
  https://api.provider.com/thing/you_want/index.json \
  -d "query=scope=1"

We added a “-G” flag to make sure curl is sending a GET and not Continue reading

They’ll Remember The Rage Monster

I was tired. Very tired. Tired in my brain. Tired in my body. I needed to eat, puke, and scream…all of those things as soon as possible. Big cutovers are like that. You know the kind of change I’m talking about. The kind where you only get a maintenance window twice a year, so you plan to throw in the new core switch pair because that’s easy, re-tool the BGP peering that twelve other changes are waiting for, and bring up the new firewall all in one night.

Stupid! Unthinkable! Small changes only!! I mean…obviously. Of course. But sometimes, that’s just not the way it works out. And so it was that after several hours of executing a meticulously planned change that would create the network foundation for the company’s big plans, I needed to eat, puke, and scream.

You see, the change hadn’t got entirely well. It had only gone mostly well. The core switch upgrade really was easy. The BGP peering work went well enough. The new firewall was a fight, though.

At first, the firewall pair wouldn’t pass traffic. At all. Despite a lovely routing table and so on. After sitting in the freezing data center for Continue reading

The Best Technologists First Try To Solve Their Own Problems

Every once in a while, I get questions from random internet folks who want me to do their homework for them. They want me to provide them with detailed technical information, solve their complex design problem, or curate content on a difficult topic so that they don’t have to do the sifting.

While I like to help folks out as much as anyone (and often do), I usually ignore these sorts of questions. Why? Partly, I don’t have enough time to fix the internet. Partly, I like to get paid for consulting. But more importantly, the best technologists first try to solve their own problems.

A Manager’s Perspective

When interviewing candidates for technical positions, one of my questions is, “If you run into a problem you’ve never faced before, how do you solve it?” There are two typical answers.

1. “I’ll ask someone else for help. Probably you.”
2. “I’ll search the internet, company wiki, and product documentation. I’ll set up a lab. If I’m still stuck, I’ll ask for help.”

I prefer to hire a person who first tries to figure things out. While I want neither a cowboy nor science experiments making their way into production, I Continue reading

How IT Pros Learn Online In 2021

I surveyed 53 IT professionals about online IT training in August 2021. Most of the folks I interact with are networking & cloud infrastructure professionals, and the answers reflect that. 53 responses isn’t enough to draw hard and fast conclusions from, but I still believe there are interesting trends & individual comments worth thinking about.

By the way, if you’d like to submit your own responses, I left the survey open. I told Google Forms to not collect email addresses, so your responses are anonymous.

1. Which online learning sites do you have a subscription to or have bought an IT course from?

1. Udemy – 32
2. Pluralsight – 24
3. INE – 19
4. A Cloud Guru – 16
5. CBT Nuggets – 12
6. Coursera – 9
7. O’Reilly / Safari – 7
8. ITProTV – 4
9. LinkedIn Learning / Lynda – 3
10. Juniper Learning Portal – 2
11. Pearson – 2
12. Skillshare – 2
13. Adrian Cantrill – 1
14. Cisco Learning Network – 1
15. Global Knowledge – 1
16. Ivan Pepelnjak – 1
17. KBITS – 1
18. Kirk Byers – 1
19. Routehub – 1
20. Skillsoft – 1
21. TalkPython – 1
22. Teachable – 1
23. YouTube – 1

I believe Udemy is so popular because it’s a great platform to Continue reading

What Makes A Senior IT Engineer “Senior”?

Ravi asks the following…

I’m trying to figure out what makes a network engineer truly a “senior” engineer. What skills, mostly non-technical, do they possess in order to bring value to the work place?

I’ll share my opinions based on my experience having held junior and senior IT engineering roles, as well as multiple managerial stints with engineers as direct reports. I’m mostly going to address IT engineering broadly rather than networking specifically, as my opinion is the same no matter which tech silo an engineer might hail from.

Technical Skills

As Ravi asked about “mostly non-technical” skills, I’ll be brief here. From a technical perspective, I believe a senior IT engineer is primarily differentiated from a junior in one word–experience. The senior engineer has installed more systems, planned more changes, fixed more problems, and survived more outages than a junior engineer in the same organization.

Ideally, that experience has led to wisdom about how technology can best serve the business needs of an organization. This wisdom will tend to eschew needlessly complex designs, nerd knobs, and “science experiments” conducted in production. This wisdom will also result in difficult problems being resolved more quickly. Experienced folks know somewhat instinctively Continue reading

How Upgrading PHP On WordPress Became *It Was DNS*-An IT Operations Tale

The server needed a PHP update. WordPress told me so with a severe-sounding notification adorned with red coloration, a security warning, boldface type, and a link explaining how to change the PHP version. I sighed. Security issues never end, and I have a recurring reminder in my todo list to patch the Virtual Private Server (VPS) boxes I shepherd.

But this PHP issue…hmm. This felt like a bigger deal, and many sites I support lean heavily into WordPress. Rather than wait for the next regular patching session, I decided to get on it. I did a process test on one server, a lower profile machine that wouldn’t hurt too much if things went awry. The goal was to move from PHP 7.2.insecure to PHP 7.4.secure. How hard could it be?

Most of the search engine hits for “upgrade PHP on WordPress” told me to go into CPanel or a similar tool my hosting provider might offer to abstract what’s going on with the server itself. That’s not what I was looking for, because I manage my own hosts. I needed to know how to reconfigure the host itself. The OS packages to install. The conf files Continue reading

Born In The Cloud Enterprise Case Study With Tekion – Packet Pushers LiveStream With Alkira (Video 2)

Tekion builds cloud-based applications for the automotive retail industry. The company uses Alkira’s cloud networking product to connect a network of automobile dealerships to an array of cloud-hosted services. In this video, the Packet Pushers’ Ethan Banks talks to Tekion’s Jamie Fox. They discuss how the Alkira platform enables Tekion to leverage multiple clouds with […]

The post Born In The Cloud Enterprise Case Study With Tekion – Packet Pushers LiveStream With Alkira (Video 2) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Is Sticking With A Networking Vendor As Risky As Changing?

The networking industry has had a bumper crop of startup companies including a few unicorns, new and novel solutions, and fresh standards-driven tech in the last decade. There’s been enough churn that you’d think the landscape would be unrecognizable from what it was ten years back. And yet, a dominant vendor supplying networks to enterprises remains Cisco.

Data networking folks sometimes wonder why Cisco remains such a dominant force after all these years. With all the churn in the industry, with all the fancy new products, companies and approaches, with the cloud changing how computing is done, and with software eating the world, there are many more options than Cisco to meet networking needs. Of course, Cisco has always had competition. Cisco’s never gotten 100% of the pie, but, depending on market segment, there’s rarely been a second juggernaut in the enterprise networking space. The choice has typically been between Cisco and everyone else.

But in 2021, the networking market is increasingly fragmented with more startups than I’ve even heard of chasing after slivers of the diverse networking pie. Sure, that impacts Cisco. Still, Cisco tends to dominate, even if their share isn’t quite what it was depending on which Continue reading

Learning In Public Helps Everyone

I’m happy to coach through write about network architecture too. Learning in public helps everyone https://t.co/ckMdHUnwt4

— Matt Broberg (@mbbroberg) April 23, 2021

The tradition of technology blogging is built on the idea of learning in public, something Matt’s encouraging with Red Hat’s Enable Architect blog linked in his tweet above. We encourage it at Packet Pushers, too. We think everyone has at least one blog post in them worth sharing with the community. Let us know, and we’ll set you up with an author account.

Starting a blog, especially for the technically savvy, is not overly difficult, though. Maybe Matt and I are hoping to make it even easier to share by offering our platforms, but I don’t think the time it takes to stand up a blog is necessarily the barrier.

I think the biggest barrier is the “in public” part. Architects and engineers tend to be introverts who are at times unsure of themselves. We don’t want to be learning in public. We want to be left alone to figure it out. When we’ve figured it out, maybe then will we share, once we’re supremely confident that we’ve got it 110% right. We just don’t Continue reading

If You Haven’t Checked Your Backups, They Probably Aren’t Working

This is a pleasant reminder to check your backups. I don’t mean, “Hey, did the backup run last night? Yes? Then all is well.” That’s slightly better than nothing, but not really what you’re checking for. Instead, you’re determining your ability to return a system to a known state by verifying your backups regularly.

Backups are a key part of disaster recovery, where modern disasters include ransomware, catastrophic public cloud failures, and asset exposure by accidental secrets posting.

For folks in IT operations such as network engineers, systems to be concerned about include network devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, and VPN concentrators. Public cloud network artifacts also matter. Automation systems matter, too. And don’t forget about special systems like policy engines, SDN controllers, wifi controllers, network monitoring, AAA, and…you get the idea.

Don’t confuse resiliency for backup.

When I talk about backups, I’m talking about having known good copies of crucial data that exist independently of the systems they normally live on.

• Distributed storage is not backup.
• A cluster is not backup.
• An active/active application delivery system spread over geographically diverse data centers is not backup.

The points above are examples of distributed computing. Distributed computing Continue reading

A Networking Perspective On Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA)

Why Being A Late Technology Adopter Pays Off

When Stretching Layer Two, Separate Your Fate

On the Packet Pushers YouTube channel, Jorge asks in response to Using VXLAN To Span One Data Center Across Two Locations…

if stretching the layer 2 is not recommended, then what is the recommendation if you need to fault over to a different physical location and still got to keep the same IP addresses for mission critical applications?

TL;DR

That video is a couple of years old at this point, and I don’t recall the entire discussion. Here’s my answer at this moment in time. If DCI is required (and I argue that it shouldn’t be in most cases), look at VXLAN/EVPN. EVPN is supported by several vendors. If you are a multi-vendor shop, watch for EVPN inter-vendor compatibility problems. Also look for vendor EVPN guides discussing the use case of data center interconnect (DCI).

Also be aware (and beware) of vendor-proprietary DCI technologies like Cisco’s OTV. I recommend against investing in OTV and similar tech unless you already have hardware that can do it and can turn the feature on for free. Otherwise, my opinion, for what it’s worth, is to stick with an EVPN solution. EVPN is a standard that’s been running in production environments for Continue reading

It’s Not What You Say. It’s How You’re Heard.

In written communication, technical people can sometimes come across as impolite. I see this on Slack (talking down), Twitter (the angry tweeter), in emails (blunt and terse), in blog comments (bitter sarcasm or pedantry), Hacker News discussions (aggressive confrontation), and other places IT builders gather online.

Perhaps you, as just such a technical person, don’t mean to be impolite. Maybe your focus is on efficiency. Get to the point. Say what needs saying, however it comes out. Click send. Job done. Go back to facepalming at the Swagger docs explaining this ill-considered API you need to use.

Here’s the problem with your communications approach. To the person receiving your missive, you might sound like you’re upset. Or tone-deaf. Or maybe just a jerk. You’re presumably none of those things, at least not intentionally. We’re all nice folks who want to get along with our fellow humans, right?

It’s not what you say. It’s how you’re heard.

You need to communicate in such a way that you’re heard as you mean to be heard. If you’re not good at this and want to be, you can improve your messaging.

Before hitting send, engage in role reversal. If you received a Continue reading

Free Networking ArubaOS-CX Lab Image From Aruba Networks

This is a continuation of my post documenting hassle-free, virtualized network operating system images you can download for labbing and learning.

Aruba Networks (HPE) ArubaOS-CX

What is it?

While you probably think of wireless networking first when Aruba Networks comes up, ArubaOS-CX is a ground-up network operating system for switches built by the former HPE ProCurve team, if memory serves me correctly. Aruba has been a part of HPE for some time, and the networking folks within HPE fall under the Aruba hierarchy as I understand it.

I wrote an overview of ArubaOS-CX as part of a series on the Aruba 8400 switch launch back in October 2017.

Aruba offers a virtual version of ArubaOS-CX delivered as an OVA. You can use the OVA as-is, or extract the OVA tarball to get to the vmdk and convert the vmdk to a qcow2 image, all depending on what your hypervisor needs.

How do I obtain the image?

1. Create an Aruba Support Portal account & log in via https://asp.arubanetworks.com/.
2. Head to Software and Documents, currently https://asp.arubanetworks.com/downloads.
3. In the left pane, filter on…
   1. File type: Software
   2. Product: Aruba Switches
   3. File Category: OVA
4. Sort by: Version New To Old
5. That Continue reading

Free Networking Lab Images From Arista, Cisco, nVidia (Cumulus)

Here’s my current list of no cost, minimal headache, easily obtainable networking images that work in a virtual lab environment such as EVE-NG or GNS3. My goal is to clearly document what these images are and how to obtain them, as this data is less obvious than I’d like.

I missed some. Probably a bunch. Let me know on the Packet Pushers Slack channel or Twitter DM, and I’ll do additional posts or update this list over time. Make sure your recommendations are for images which are freely available from the vendor for lab use with no licensing requirements or other strings attached. Use those same channels if you just want to tell me I’m wrong about whatever you come across in this post that’s…you know…wrong. I’m all about fixing the wrong stuff.

The list is vendor-neutral, sorted alphabetically. I have no personal allegiance to any of these operating systems. I’ve worked with both EOS and NX-OS in production environments. JUNOS, too, although I don’t have a Juniper virtual device on this list currently. I haven’t worked with Cumulus in production, although it’s been a passive interest for a while now.

Remember–configuration is the boring part. Select a NOS Continue reading

Don’t Be Complex When Simple Will Do

Let’s say you’re a consultant working on a couple of internet edge design projects.

In the first scenario, you are designing an internet connection for a factory.

1. There are a few hundred workers who access AWS using the internet-as-WAN for critical apps related to factory operations.
2. The factory is automated, and metrics related to production line health and performance are analyzed in AWS.
3. There is an IoT network used for physical security that relies on an internet-based SaaS product to run reports and distribute alerts.
4. A group of executives have offices at one end of the factory. Because of the pandemic, they don’t use them right now, but they do remotely access workstations with highly sensitive data that reside in those offices.

In the second scenario, you are designing an internet connection for an executive’s home.

1. The executive has been working from home since the pandemic started, and finds the internet connection is unreliable for video calls. The video lags and gets pixelated. There are audio dropouts and audible jitter.
2. The executive’s family members are also demanding internet users. The kids are in Zoom school. The spouse has a digital editing business and shares large files with clients.

Continue reading

You Can’t Think If You’re Always Thinking

On the March 25, 2021 edition of his Daily Check-In podcast, Ned Bellavance talks about feeling like he’s putting too many inputs into his brain, and not leaving enough time to hear his own thoughts. I have had similar concerns for myself.

I tend to have something going most of the time. Podcasts in the morning before settling into my office. Music during the day, typically something familiar or non-intrusive so that it’s not too distracting while I write and research. YouTube or a Boston Celtics basketball game in the evenings while I eat dinner and unwind from Zoomday. (Zoomday is everyday! ) Before I go to bed, I read mentally engaging things. Books, a mix of fiction and non-fiction, currently Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Blogs like Astral Codex Ten plus a myriad of tech writers. When the sleepies finally hit, I turn off the glowing doom rectangle and hope my dreams aren’t unfathomable. Like the one two days ago where I was inside a commercial jet taxing rapidly through a city, the jet being chased by emergency vehicles that kept inexplicably bursting into flames. My dreams are fun. But I digress.

Like Ned outlined in his podcast, Continue reading