I’m fundamentally lazy. That’s why automation appeals: less work for me. Get the machine to do it instead. But automating everything isn’t always the right answer. Sometimes you need to ask yourself: Does this task need to be done at all? Or can I get someone else to do it for me?
Automating tasks carries some overhead. If you’re really unlucky, you’ll end up spending more time on the automation than doing it manually:
So if you can eliminate tasks, you’re in a much better position. Here’s a few contrived examples, based around a fictitious email provider:
15-20 years ago we had limited bandwidth, and limited storage. It seemed reasonable to limit the maximum email message size. Otherwise people would send monstrous 2MB attachments. Of course, there were always ’special’ cases that needed to be able to send enormous 5MB AVI files. So we had special groups of users defined that could send large emails.
Users could put in a request to the Help Desk to get access to send large emails. That would go via some manager, who would of course approve it. Someone would then need to manually update that Continue reading
The VMware Networking Deep Dive webinar was getting pretty old and outdated, but I always managed to get an excuse to postpone its refresh – first it was lack of new features in vSphere releases, then bad timing (doesn’t make sense to do a refresh in June with new release coming out in August), then lack of documentation (vSphere 6 was announced in August 2014; the documentation appeared in March 2015).
Read more ...How would you like to be able to look up the answers to some of the tasks in the wireless lab, and not get in trouble over it? Well, read on, and I’ll give you a fun tip that you may be able to use in the lab to solve parts of certain lab tasks. It’s not actually cheating, but it almost feels like it.
One of the realities of the lab is that there will be some pre-configurations on many of the devices. You won’t be configuring every last device from scratch. There’s not enough time, and they’d prefer to test you on more complex things than configuring every VLAN, interface, host name, etc from scratch. Just about anything has the potential to have some level of pre-configuration, and that includes the AnyConnect client. If you find that the AnyConnect client already has some WLAN profiles configured on it, say a silent “thank you” to Cisco because they just gave you a ton of great information.
Another reality of the lab is that they often don’t ask you to do things in the most straightforward and clear way possible. Often they use code words or phrases that need to Continue reading
Git is a source control manager (SCM), also known as revision control. It manages changes to documents, computer programs and large websites. Arbitrarily it can manage versioning for collections of information.
Why is it important to network engineering? Well, currently we stick the config files in a directory and forget about them. Version control can be very regimented with commit comments and other markers, which helps to identify information. More importantly, as we move towards DevOps with open arms, we have to think about managing what we do in different ways. Just because something has been done a certain way, doesn’t mean it’s good to continue with that modus operandi.
Fear not – just because something is hidden away in a repository, doesn’t mean you can’t diff files etc.
Also you don’t have to have just local git repositories, you can have them on remote servers as well as the likes of github.com.
Before we start, be warned that this is a very simple example. You can use this for managing all sorts of configurations like core routers, firewall access-list entries, hell, even change control data. Be mindful of what you push and commit!!! Ensure that Continue reading
A few weeks ago I passed my 2 year work anniversary at Cumulus Networks. In this short amount of time we’ve helped change the networking industry as a whole. This statement may seem a bit bold, but I feel it’s justified and we’ve all earned it. I’ll attempt to back this up with a few anecdotes collected along the journey — the men and women of Cumulus Networks, along with our great partners and customers, deserve the credit here.
When I was first hired, our on-boarding process was a bit … unconventional to say the least. The first week included JR (our CEO and cofounder) taking a headshot photo for the website (at that time it was just a Brady Bunch collage of pictures, not much else) and being issued a switch for “jailbreaking.” Now jailbreaking is a bit of an extreme term, but in these dark days before open networking, the software and hardware for networks were tightly coupled together. Items such as debugging headers, a soldering iron, and even a bit of swearing were all part of the installation process on a fresh hardware platform. Fast forward to today, Continue reading