A Modest Proposal for Cisco Interface Naming

If you’re going to be configuring an interface in a switch, which one are you going to use? The interface has a name and a number based on where it is on the device. The numbering part is fairly easy to figure out. The module number comes first, followed by the slot, and finally the port. In the world of Cisco, which is the one I’m the most familiar with, that means a fixed configuration switch usually has interfaces labeled 0/24, with no module and the slot almost always being zero. With a modular switch the interface would be labeled 2/0/28 to indicate the 28th port on the second line card.

The issue arises when you factor in the first part of the interface naming convention. The nomenclature used in the Cisco world since the beginning of time has been the interface speed. If your interface is a 100Mbit Ethernet interface then the interface name is FastEthernet0/48. If you’re using a 1Gbit interface it’s GigabitEthernet0/48. If it’s a 10Gbit interface it becomes TenGigabitEthernet0/48. It’s a progression of interface speeds. Even if the port is capable of using 10/100/1000 the port is referred to at the highest speed. The 10Gbit ports Continue reading

No Is A Complete Sentence

Has someone asked you to do something recently that you know you don’t have time to do but felt like you needed to do anyway? Or has someone tried to get you to help with something and impressed upon you just how important it is? You probably told them “yes” out of guilt or obligation or some other kind of negative emotion. Sure, you could have declined but you thought about how bad you would feel if someone did the same to you.

Let me tell you clearly. “No” is a complete sentence. It requires no explanation or defense. It is the only thing you need to say when you know you won’t be able to do something no matter how much the other party tries to get you to agree.

Everything Sucking Equally

If you know anything about QoS, you know that once a given circuit reaches the limitation for bandwidth you can no long send additional information. What’s counterintuitive about this is most people would assume that if you try to squeeze one more stream or packet into the mix that only that last packet would be affected and everything else would work perfectly fine, right? Only one Continue reading

Trust Will Do You In

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If you’re a fan of the Gestalt IT Rundown that I do every week on the Gestalt IT YouTube channel, you have probably heard about the recent hacks of NVIDIA and Samsung. The original investigation into those hacks talked about using MDM platforms and other vectors to gain access to the information that was obtained by the hacking groups. An interesting tweet popped up on my feed yesterday that helped me reframe the attacks:

It would appear that the group behind these attacks are going after their targets the old fashioned way. With people. For illustration, see XKCD from 2009:

The Weakest Links

People are always the weakest link in any security situation. They choose to make something insecure through bad policy or by trying to evade the policy. Perhaps they are trying to do harm to the organization or even try to shine a light on Continue reading

AI is a Promotion

When I worked at IBM as an intern, part of my job was writing a deployment script to help make our lives easier when installing new ThinkPads. In order to change an MTU setting on the token ring PCMCIA cards (long story), I had to write a script that iterated through all the possible combinations of adapters in the registry to find the one I was looking for and change the value.

Now, I was 22 at the time and green behind the ears, especially when it came to programming. I finally figured out that the most efficient way to do this in the language that I was using was a very deep nested if statement. It wasn’t my best work but it operated properly. I mentioned this to my mentors on my team with a remark of how hard it was to understand the logic at first. My comment was “You know, if it’s hard to read for anyone else then I never have to worry about gettin fired.”

To which the response was, “Yes, but you can never be promoted either.”

That sage wisdom brings me to the modern world and how AI can fix that Continue reading

The Value of Old Ideas

I had a fun exchange on Twitter this week that bears some additional thinking. Emirage (@Emirage6) tweeted a fun meme about learning BGP:

I retweeted it and a few people jumped in the fun, including a couple that said it was better to configure BGP for reasons. This led to a blog post about routing protocols with even more great memes and a good dose of reality for anyone that isn’t a multi-CCIE.

Explain It Like I’m Five

I want you to call your mom and explain BGP to her. Go on and do that now because I’m curious to see how you’d open that conversation. Unless your mom is in networking already I’m willing to bet you’re going to have to start really, really basic. In fact, given the number of news organizations that don’t even know what the letters in the acronym stand for I’d guess you are going to have a hard time talking about the path selection process or leak maps or how sessions are established.

Now, try that same Continue reading

Technical Debt or Underperforming Investment?

In this week’s issue of the Packet Pushers Human Infrastructure newsletter, there was an excellent blog post from Kam Lasater about how talking about technical debt makes us sound silly. I recommend you read the whole thing because he brings up some very valid points about how the way the other departments of the organization perceive our issues can vary. It also breaks down debt in a very simple format that takes it away from a negative connotation and shows how debt can be a leverage instrument.

To that end, I want to make a modest proposal to help the organization understand the challenges that IT faces with older systems and integration challenges. Except we need some new branding. So, I propose we start referring to technical debt as “underperforming technical investments”.

I’d Buy That For A Dollar

Technical debt is just a clever way to refer to the series of layered challenges we face from decisions that were made to accomplish tasks. It’s a burden we carry negatively throughout the execution of our job because it adds extra time to the process. We express it as debt because it’s a price that must be paid every time we need Continue reading

Who Wants to Be Supported Forever?

I saw an interesting thread today on Reddit talking about using networking equipment past the End of Life. It’s a fun read that talks about why someone would want to do something like this and how you might find yourself in some trouble depending on your company policies and such. But I wanted to touch on something that I think we skip over when we get here. What does the life of the equipment really mean?

It’s a Kind of Magic

As someone that uses equipment of all kinds, the lifetime of that equipment means something different for me than it does for vendors. When I think of how long something lasts I think of it in terms of how long I can use it until it is unable to be repaired any further. A great example of this is a car. All of my life I have driven older used cars that I continue to fix over and over until they have a very high mileage or my needs change and I must buy something different.

My vehicles don’t have a warranty or any kind of support, necessarily. If I need something fixed I either fix it myself or Continue reading

Backing Up the Dump Truck

Hello Ellen,

 

I have received a number of these spam messages over the past few weeks and I had hoped they would eventually taper off. However, it doesn’t appear that is the case. So I’ll take the direct approach.

 

I’m a member of the CCIE Advisory Council. Which means I am obligated to report any and all attempts to infringe upon the integrity of the exam. As you have seen fit to continue to email me to link to your site to promote your test dumps I think you should be aware that I will be reporting you to the CCIE team.

 

Good luck in your future endeavors after they shut you down for violating their exam terms and conditions. And do not email me again.

That’s an actual email that I sent TODAY to someone (who probably isn’t really named Ellen) that has been spamming me to link to their CCIE dump site. The spam is all the same. They really enjoy reading a random page on my site, usually some index page picked up by a crawler. They want me to insure a link to their site which is a brain dump site for CCIE Continue reading

The Network Does Too Much

I’m at Networking Field Day this week and it’s good to be back in person around other brilliant engineers and companies. One of the other fun things that happens at Networking Field Day is that I get to chat with folks that help me think about things in new ways and come up with awesome ideas for networking blog posts.

One of the ones that was discussed quickly this week really got me thinking again about fragility and complexity. Thanks to Carl Fugate for reminding me about it. Essentially, networks are inherently unstable because they are doing far too much heavy lifting.

Swiss Army Design

Have you heard about the AxeSaw Reddit? It’s a page dedicated to finding silly tools that attempt to combine too many things together into one package that make the overall tool less useful. Like making a combination shovel and axe that isn’t easy to operate because you have to hold on to the shovel scoop as the handle for the axe and so on. It’s a goofy take on a trend of trying to make things too compact at the sake of usability.

Networking has this issue as well. I’ve talked about it before here Continue reading

The Demise of G-Suite

In case you missed it this week, Google is killing off the free edition of Google Apps/G-Suite/Workspace. The short version is that you need to convert to a paid plan by May 1, 2022. If you don’t you’re going to lose everything in July. The initial offering of the free tier was back in 2006 and the free plan hasn’t been available since 2012. I suppose a decade is a long time to enjoy custom email but I’m still a bit miffed at the decision.

Value Added, Value Lost

It’s pretty easy to see that the free version of Workspace was designed to encourage people to use it and then upgrade to a paid account to gain more features. As time wore on Google realized that people were taking advantage of having a full suite of 50 accounts and never moving, which is why 2012 was the original cutoff date. Now there has been some other change that has forced their hand into dropping the plan entirely.

I won’t speculate about what’s happening because I’m sure it’s complex and tied to ad revenue and privacy restrictions that people are implementing that is reducing the value of the data Google has Continue reading

Wi-Fi 6 Release 2, Or Why Naming Conventions Suck

I just noticed that the Wi-Fi Alliance announced a new spec for Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E. Long-time readers of this blog will know that I am a fan of referring to technology by the standard, not by a catch term that serves as a way to trademark something, like Pentium. Anyway, this updated new standard for wireless communications was announced on January 5th at CES and seems to be an entry in the long line of embarrassing companies that forget to think ahead when naming things.

Standards Bodies Suck

Let’s look at what’s included in the new release for Wi-Fi 6. The first and likely biggest thing to crow about is uplink multi-user MIMO. This technology is designed to enhance performance and reduce latency for things like video conferencing and uploading data. Essentially, it creates multi-user MIMO for data headed back the other direction. When the standard was first announced in 2018 who knew we would have spent two years using Zoom for everything? This adds functionality to help alleviate congestion for applications that upload lots of data.

The second new feature is power management. This one is aimed primarily at IoT devices. The combination of broadcast target wake Continue reading

Make Sure You Juggle The Right Way in IT

When my eldest son was just a baby, he had toys that looked like little baseballs. Long story short, I decided to teach myself to juggle with them. I’d always wanted to learn and thought to myself “How hard can it be?” Well, the answer was harder than I thought and it took me more time that I realized to finally get the hang of it.

One of the things that I needed to learn is that adding in one more ball to track while I’m trying to manage the ones that I had wasn’t as simple as it sounded. You would think that adding in a fourth ball should only be about 25% harder than the three you had been working with before. Or, you might even believe the statistical fallacy that you’re only going to fail about a quarter of the time and be successful the rest. The truth is that adding in one more object makes your entire performance subpar until you learn to adjust for it.

Clogging Up the Pipe

I mention this example because the most obvious application for the juggling metaphor is in Quality of Service (QoS). If you’ve ever read any of Continue reading

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:

• 0/8
• 127/8 except for 172.0.0/16
• 240/4

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