IT Hero Culture

I’ve written before about rock stars and IT super heroes. We all know or have worked with someone like this in the past. Perhaps we still do have someone in the organization that fits the description. But have you ever stopped to consider how it could be our culture that breeds the very people we don’t want around?

Keeping The Lights On

When’s the last time you got recognition for the network operating smoothly? Unless it was in response to a huge traffic spike or an attack that tried to knock you offline, the answer is probably never or rarely. Despite the fact that networks are hard to build and even harder to operate, we rarely get recognized for keeping the lights on day after day.

It’s not all that uncommon. The accounting department doesn’t get recognized when the books are balanced. The janitorial staff doesn’t get an exceptional call out when the floors are mopped. And the electric company doesn’t get a gold star because they really did keep the lights on. All of these things are examples of expected operation. When we plug something into a power socket, we expect it to work. When we plug a router Continue reading

Positioning Policy Properly

Who owns the network policy for your organization? How about the security policy?Identity policy? Sound like easy questions, don’t they? The first two are pretty standard. The last generally comes down to one or two different teams depending upon how much Active Directory you have deployed. But have you ever really thought about why?

During Future:NET this week, those poll questions were asked to an audience of advanced networking community members. The answers pretty much fell in line with what I was expecting to see. But then I started to wonder about the reasons behind those decisions. And I realized that in a world full of cloud and DevOps/SecOps/OpsOps people, we need to get away from teams owning policy and have policy owned by a separate team.

Specters of the Past

Where does the networking policy live? Most people will jump right in with a list of networking gear. Port profiles live on switches. Routing tables live on routers. Networking policy is executed in hardware. Even if the policy is programmed somewhere else.

What about security policy? Firewalls are probably the first thing that come to mind. More advanced organizations have a ton of software that scans for security Continue reading

The Sky is Not Falling For Ekahau

Ekahau Hat (photo courtesy of Sam Clements)

You may have noticed quite a few high profile departures from Ekahau recently. A lot of very visible community members, concluding Joel Crane (@PotatoFi), Jerry Olla (@JOlla), and Jussi Kiviniemi (@JussiKiviniemi) have all decided to move on. This has generated quite a bit of discussion among the members of the wireless community as to what this really means for the company and the product that is so beloved by so many wireless engineers and architects.

Putting the people aside for a moment, I want to talk about the Ekahau product line specifically. There was an undercurrent of worry in the community about what would happen to Ekahau Site Survey (ESS) and other tools in the absence of the people we’ve seen working on them for so long. I think this tweet from Drew Lentz (@WirelessNerd) best exemplifies that perspective:

Fast Friday – Mobility Field Day 4

This week’s post is running behind because I’m out in San Jose enjoying great discussions from Mobility Field Day 4. This event is bringing a lot of great discussion to the community to get everyone excited for current and future wireless technologies. Some quick thoughts here with more ideas to come soon.

• Analytics is becoming a huge driver for deployments. The more data you can gather, the better everything can be. When you start to include IoT as a part of the field you can see why all those analytics matter. You need to invest in a lot of CPU horsepower to make it all work the way you want. Which is also driving lots of people to build in the cloud to have access to what they need on-demand from an infrastructure side of things.
• Spectrum is a huge problem and source of potential for wireless. You have to have access to spectrum to make everything work. 2.4 GHz is pretty crowded and getting worse with IoT. 5 GHz is getting crowded as well, especially with LAA being used. And the opening of the 6 GHz spectrum could be held up in political concerns. Are there new investigations Continue reading

Fast Friday- Black Hat USA 2019

I just got back from my first Black Hat and it was an interesting experience. It was crazy to see three completely different security-focused events going on in town all at once. There was Black Hat, B-Sides Las Vegas, and DEFCON all within the space of a day or so of each other. People were flowing back and forth between them all and it was quite amazing.

A wanted to share a few quick thoughts about the event from my perspective being a first timer.

• The show floor wasn’t as bit as VMworld or Cisco Live, but it was as big as it needed to be. Lots of companies that I’ve heard of, but several more that were new to me. That’s usually a good sign of lots of investment in the security space.
• Speaking of which, I talked to quite a few companies about a variety of analytics, telemetry, and insider threat monitoring solutions. And almost all of them had a founder from Israel or someone that was involved in the cybersecurity areas of the IDF. That’s a pretty good track record for where the investment is going.
• The Vegas booth gimmicks never change. I think I’ve spent too Continue reading

Conference Packing – The Little Things

It seems like conference season never really ends. Between RSA, Cisco Live, Black Hat, and VMworld, I’m always running around to something. I enjoy being able to meet new people and talk to companies at these events but I also find that a little bit of planning ahead helps immensely.

There’s always a lot of discussion from people about what to pack for a conference. There have been some great posts written about it, like this one from Bob McCouch in 2014. He definitely covers all the important stuff that people would want to know, such as comfortable shoes and a bag big enough to carry extra things just in case you come back with enough fidget spinners to sink an aircraft carrier.

However, I’ve found in recent years that the difference between just surviving a conference and really being prepared involves a few extra items I never thought I’d need to bring back when I first started doing this in 2006. Maybe it’s the Scoutmaster in me, but being prepared has gone from being a suggestion to a necessity. And here are a few of those little necessities that I have found I can’t live without.

First? Aid.

I’ve Continue reading

IT Burnout – The Task List

Sadly, this picture above is me. I used to think I had one of the best memories in the world. It turns out my memory is well-suited for bar trivia and routing protocol esoterics. My memory doesn’t appear so adept at remembering other little things that are of more important, such as remembering to buy a gift for a birthday or following up on an email that I sent last week.

Human brains are great at processing information. But some of the ones that are best at processing it are horrible at recalling it. I think of it not unlike a three-tiered storage array. The fast access tasks are in the fastest storage tier where they are needed. The longer term but less important info goes into the near-line tier where it can be recalled when needed. And in my case, the bandwidth to that tier is slow and unreliable.

Exciting Things!

One of my solutions to this problem is getting better with task management. As bad as my memory is, it’s also not well suited to writing things down to remember them. The irony is almost too delicious to ignore. I need to write things down so I don’t Continue reading

I Was A 10x Engineer. And I’m Sorry.

You probably saw the big discussion this past weekend on Twitter about 10x Engineers. It all started with a tweet about how to recognize a 10x Engineer, followed by tons of responses about how useless they were and how people that had encountered them were happy to be rid of them. All that discussion made me think back to my old days as a Senior Network Rock Star. As I reminisced I realized that I was, in fact, a 10x Engineer. And I was miserable.

Pour Some Work On Me

I wasn’t always the epitome of engineering hatred. I used to be a wide-eyed technician with a hunger to learn things. I worked on a variety of systems all over the place. In fact, I was rising through the ranks of my company as a Novell Engineer in an environment with plenty of coverage. I was just learning the ropes and getting ready to take my place in a group of interchangeable people.

Then I started getting into networking. I spent more time learning about routers and switches and even firewalls. That meant that my skill set was changing from servers to appliances. It also meant that I was Continue reading

The Development of DevNet’s Future

You’re probably familiar with Cisco DevNet. If not, DevNet is the place Cisco has embraced outreach to the developer community building for software-defined networking (SDN). Though initially cautious in getting into the software developer community, Cisco has embraced their new role and really opened up to help networking professionals embrace the new software normal in networking. But where is DevNet going to go from here?

Humble Beginnings

DevNet wasn’t always the darling of Cisco’s offerings. I can remember sitting in on some of the first discussions around Cisco OnePK and thinking to myself, “This is never going to work.”

My hesitation with Cisco’s first attempts to focus on software platforms came from two places. The first was what I saw as Cisco trying to figure out how to extend the platforms to include some programmability. It was more about saying they could do software and less about making that software easy to use or program against. The second place was actually the lack of a place to store all of this software knowledge. Programmers and developers are fickle lot and you have to have a repository where they can get access to the pieces they needed.

DevNet was that Continue reading

What Happens When The Internet Breaks?

It’s a crazy idea to think that a network built to be completely decentralized and resilient can be so easily knocked offline in a matter of minutes. But that basically happened twice in the past couple of weeks. CloudFlare is a service provide that offers to sit in front of your website and provide all kinds of important services. They can prevent smaller sites from being knocked offline by an influx of traffic. They can provide security and DNS services for you. They’re quickly becoming an indispensable part of the way the Internet functions. And what happens when we all start to rely on one service too much?

Bad BGP Behavior

The first outage on June 24, 2019 wasn’t the fault of CloudFlare. A small service provider in Pennsylvania decided to use a BGP Optimizer from Noction to do some route optimization inside their autonomous system (AS). That in and of itself shouldn’t have caused a problem. At least, not until someone leaked those routes to the greater internet.

It was a comedy of errors. The provider in question announced their more specific routes to an upstream customer, who in turn announced them to Verizon. After that all bets are Continue reading

Extremely Hive Minded

I must admit that I was wrong. After almost six years, I was mistake about who would end up buying Aerohive. You may recall back in 2013 I made a prediction that Aerohive would end up being bought by Dell. I recall it frequently because quite a few people still point out that post and wonder what if it’s happened yet.

Alas, June 26, 2019 is the date when I was finally proven wrong when Extreme Networks announced plans to purchase Aerohive for $4.45/share, which equates to around $272 million paid, which will be adjust for some cash on hand. Aerohive is the latest addition to the Extreme portfolio, which now includes pieces of Brocade, Avaya, Enterasys, and Motorola/Zebra.

Why did Extreme buy Aerohive? I know that several people in the industry told me they called this months ago, but that doesn’t explain the reasoning behind spending almost $300 million right before the end of the fiscal year. What was the draw that have Extreme buzzing about this particular company?

Flying Through The Clouds

The most apparent answer is HiveManager. Why? Because it’s really the only thing unique to Aerohive that Extreme really didn’t have already. Aerohive’s APs Continue reading

Cisco Live 2019 – Rededicating Community

The 2019 Cisco Live Sign Photo

Another Cisco Live is in the books for me. I was a bit shocked to realize this was my 14th event in a row. I’ve been going to Cisco Live half of the time it’s been around! This year was back in San Diego, which has good and bad points. I’d like to discuss a few of them there and get the thoughts of the community.

Good: The Social Media Hub Has Been Freed! – After last year’s issues with the Social Media Hub being locked behind the World of Solutions, someone at Cisco woke up and realized that social people don’t keep the same hours as the show floor people. So, the Hub was located in a breezeway between the Sails Pavilion and the rest of the convention center. And it was great. People congregated. Couches were used. Discussions were had. And the community was able to come together again. Not during the hours when it was convenient. But a long time. This picture of the big meeting on Thursday just solidifies in my mind why the Social Media Hub has to be in a common area:

You don’t get this kind of Continue reading

The CCIE Times Are A Changing

Today is the day that the CCIE changes. A little, at least. The news hit just a little while ago that there are some changes to the way the CCIE certification and recertification process happens. Some of these are positive. Some of these are going to cause some insightful discussion. Let’s take a quick look at what’s changing and how it affects you. Note that these changes are not taking effect until February 24, 2020, which is in about 8 months.

Starting Your Engines

The first big change comes from the test that you take to get yourself ready for the lab. Historically, this has been a CCIE written exam. It’s a test of knowledge designed to make sure you’re ready to take the big lab. It’s also the test that has been used to recertify your CCIE status.

With the new change on Feb. 24th, the old CCIE written will go away. The test that is going to be used to qualify candidates to take the CCIE lab exam is the Core Technology exam from the CCNP track. The Core Technology exam in each CCNP track serves a dual purpose in the new Cisco certification program. If you’re Continue reading

Home on the Palo Alto Networks Cyber Range

You’ve probably heard many horror stories by now about the crazy interviews that companies in Silicon Valley put you though. Sure, some of the questions are downright silly. How would I know how to weigh the moon? But the most insidious are the ones designed to look like skills tests. You may have to spend an hour optimizing a bubble sort or writing some crazy code that honestly won’t have much impact on the outcome of what you’ll be doing for the company.

Practical skills tests have always been the joy and the bane of people the world over. Many disciplines require you to have a practical examination before you can be certified. Doctors are one. The Cisco CCIE is probably the most well-known in IT. But what is the test really quizzing you on? Most people will admit that the CCIE is an imperfect representation of a network at best. It’s a test designed to get people to think about networks in different ways. But what about other disciplines? What about the ones where time is even more of the essence than it was in CCIE lab?

Red Team Go!

I was at Palo Alto Networks Ignite19 this past Continue reading

The Good, The Bad, and The Questionable: Acquisition Activities

Sometimes I read the headlines when a company gets acquired and think to myself, “Wow, that was a great move!” Other times I can’t really speak after reading because I’m shaking my head too much about what I see to really make any kind of judgement. With that being said, I think it’s time to look at three recent acquisitions through the lens of everyone’s favorite spaghetti western.

The Good – Palo Alto Buys Twistlock: This one was kind of a no-brainer to me. If you want to stay relevant in the infrastructure security space you’re going to need to have some kind of visibility into containers. If you want to stay solvent after The Cloud destroys all infrastructure spending forevermore, you’re going to need to learn how to look into containers. And when you’re ready and waiting for the collapse of the cloud, containers are probably still going to be relevant.

Joking aside, this is a great move for Palo Alto. They’re getting a lot of container talent and can start looking at all kinds of ways to integrate that into their solution sets. It lets people in the organization justify the spend they have for security Continue reading

Will Spectrum Hunger Kill Weather Forecasting?

If you are a fan of the work we do each week with our Gestalt IT Rundown on Facebook, you probably saw a story in this week’s episode about the race for 5G spectrum causing some potential problems with weather forecasting. I didn’t have the time to dig into the details behind the story on that episode, so I wanted to take a few minutes and explain why it’s such a big deal.

First, you have to know that 5G (and many other) speeds are entirely dependent upon the amount of spectrum they can use to communicate. The more spectrum available to them, the more channels they have available to communicate. Which increases the speed they can exchange information and reduces the amount of interference between devices. Sounds simple right?

Except mobile devices aren’t the only things that are using the spectrum. We have all kinds of other devices out there that use radio waves to communicate. We’ve known for several years that there are a lot of devices in the 5 GHz spectrum used by 802.11 that interfere with wireless devices. Things like ISM radios for industrial and medical applications or government radar systems. The government has instituted Continue reading

You Don’t Want To Be A Rock Star

When I say “rock star”, you probably have all kinds of images that pop up in your head. Private planes, penthouse suites, grand stages, and wheelbarrows full of money are probably on that list somewhere. Maybe you’re a purist and you think of someone dedicated to the craft of entertaining the masses and trying to claw their way to fame one note at a time. But I’m also sure in both of those cases you also think about the negative aspects of being a rock star. Like ego. And lack of humility. I want to touch on some of that as it pertains to our jobs and our involvement in the community.

Great Like Elvis. Without The Tassels.

The rock star mentality at work is easy to come by. Perhaps you’re very good at what you do. You may even be the best at your company or even at the collection of companies that are your competitors. You’re the best senior architect there is. You know the products and the protocols and you can implement a complex project with your eyes closed. That’s how people start looking at you. Larger than life. The best. One of a kind.

And that Continue reading

IT And The Exception Mentality

If you work in IT, you probably have a lot in common with other IT people. You work long hours. You have the attitude that every problem can be fixed. You understand technology well enough to know how processes and systems work. It’s fairly common in our line of work because the best IT people tend to think logically and want to solve issues. But there’s something else that I see a lot in IT people. We tend to focus on the exceptions to the rules.

Odd Thing Out

A perfectly good example of this is automation. We’ve slowly been building toward a future when software and scripting does the menial work of network administration and engineering. We’ve invested dollars and hours into making interfaces into systems that allow us to repeat tasks over and over again without intervention. We see it in other areas, like paperwork processing and auto manufacturing. There are those in IT, especially in networking, that resist that change.

If you pin them down on it, sometimes the answers are cut and dried. Loss of job, immaturity of software, and even unfamiliarity with programming are common replies. However, I’ve also heard a more common response growing Continue reading

Cisco’s Catalyst for Change

You’ve probably heard by now of the big launch of Cisco’s new 802.11ax (neé Wi-Fi 6) portfolio of devices. Cisco did a special roundtable with a group of influencers from the community called Just The Tech. Here’s a video from that event covering the APs that were released, the 9120:

Fred always does a great job of explaining the technical bits behind the APs. But one thing that caught my eye here is the name of the AP – Catalyst. Cisco has been using Aironet for their AP line since they purchased Aironet Wireless Communications back in 1999. The name was practically synonymous with wireless technologies for many people in the industry that worked exclusively with Cisco technologies.

So, is the name change something we should be concerned about?

A Rose Is a Rose Is An AP

Cisco moving toward a unified naming convention for their edge solutions makes a lot of sense. Ten years ago, wireless was still primarily 802.11g-based with 802.11n still a few months away from being proposed and ratified. Connectivity hadn’t quite yet reached the ubiquitous levels of wireless that we see today. The iPhone was only about to be on its third Continue reading

Increasing Entropy with Crypto4A

Have you ever thought about the increasing disorder in your life? Sure, it may seem like things are constantly getting crazier every time you turn around, but did you know that entropy is always increasing in the universe? It’s a Law of Thermodynamics!

The idea that organized systems want to fall into disorder isn’t too strange when you think about it. Maintaining order takes a lot of effort and disorder is pretty easy to accomplish by just giving up. Anyone with a teenager knows that the amount of disorder that can be accomplished in a bedroom is pretty impressive.

One place where we don’t actually see a lot of disorder is in the computing realm. Computers are based on the idea that there is order and rationality in everything that we do. This is so prevalent that finding a way to be random is actually pretty hard. Computer programmers have tried a number of ways to come up with random number generators that take a variety of inputs into the formula and come up with something that looks sufficiently random. For most people just wanting the system to guess a number between 1 and 100 it’s not too bad. But Continue reading