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
Is the M1 MacBook Pro Wi-Fi Really Slower?
I ordered a new M1 MacBook Pro to upgrade my existing model from 2016. I’m still waiting on it to arrive by managed to catch a sensationalist headline in the process:
“New MacBook Wi-Fi Slower than Intel Model!”
The article referenced this spec sheet from Apple referencing the various cards and capabilities of the MacBook Pro line. I looked it over and found that, according to the tables, the wireless card in the M1 MacBook Pro is capable of a maximum data rate of 1200 Mbps. The wireless card in the older model Intel MacBook Pro all the way back to 2017 is capable of 1300 Mbps. Case closed! The older one is indeed faster. Except that’s not the case anywhere but on paper.
PHYs, Damned Lies, and Statistics
You’d be forgiven for jumping right to the numbers in the table and using your first grade inequality math to figure out that 1300 is bigger than 1200. I’m sure it’s what the authors of the article did. Me? I decided to dig in a little deeper to find some answers.
It only took me about 10 seconds to find the first answer as to one of the differences in Continue reading
Getting In Front of Future Regret
Yesterday I sat in on the keynote from Commvault Connections21 and participated in a live blog of it on Gestalt IT. There was a lot of interesting info around security, especially related to how backup and disaster recovery companies are trying to add value to the growing ransomware issue in global commerce. One thing that I did take away from the conversation wasn’t specifically related to security though and I wanted to dive into a bit more.
Reza Morakabati, CIO for Commvault, was asked what he thought teams needed to do to advance their data strategy. And his response was very insightful:
Ask your team to imagine waking up to hear some major incident has happened. What would their biggest regret be? Now, go to work tomorrow and fix it.
It’s a short, sweet, and powerful sentence. Technology professionals are usually focused on implementing new things to improve productivity or introduce new features to users and customers. We focus on moving fast and making people happy. Security is often seen as running counter to this ideal. Security wants to keep people safe and secure. It’s not unlike the parents that hold on to their child’s bicycle after the training wheels Continue reading
Fast Friday Thoughts From Security Field Day
It’s a busy week for me thanks to Security Field Day but I didn’t want to leave you without some thoughts that have popped up this week from the discussions we’ve been having. Security is one of those topics that creates a lot of thought-provoking ideas and makes you seriously wonder if you’re doing it right all the time.
- Never underestimate the value of having plumbing that connects all your systems. You may look at a solution and think to yourself “All this does is aggregate data from other sources”. Which raises the question: How do you do it now? Sure, antivirus fires alerts like a car alarm. But when you get breached and find out that those alerts caught it weeks ago you’re going to wish you had a better idea of what was going on. You need a way to send that data somewhere to be dealt with and cataloged properly. This is one of the biggest reasons why machine learning is being applied to the massive amount of data we gather in security. Having an algorithm working to find the important pieces means you don’t miss things that are important to you.
- Not every solution is going Continue reading
Choosing the Least Incorrect Answer
My son was complaining to me the other day that he missed on question on a multiple choice quiz in his class and he got a low B grade instead of getting a perfect score. When I asked him why he was frustrated he told me, “Because it was easy and I missed it. But I think the question was wrong.” As usual, I pressed him further to explain his reasoning and found out that the question was indeed ambiguous but the answer choices were pretty obviously wrong all over. He asked me why someone would write a test like that. Which is how he got a big lesson on writing test questions.
Spin the Wheel
When you write a multiple choice test question for any reputable exam you are supposed to pick “wrong” answers, known as distractors, that ensure that the candidate doesn’t have a better than 25% chance of guessing the correct answer. You’ve probably seen this before because you took some kind of simple quiz that had answers that were completely wrong to the point of being easy to pick out. Those quizzes are usually designed to be passed with the minimum amount of effort.
What Can You Learn From Facebook’s Meltdown?
I wanted to wait to put out a hot take on the Facebook issues from earlier this week because failures of this magnitude always have details that come out well after the actual excitement is done. A company like Facebook isn’t going to do the kind of in-depth post-mortem that we might like to see but the amount of information coming out from other areas does point to some interesting circumstances causing this situation.
Let me start off the whole thing by reiterating something important: Your network looks absolutely nothing like Facebook. The scale of what goes on there is unimaginable to the normal person. The average person has no conception of what one billion looks like. Likewise, the scale of the networking that goes on at Facebook is beyond the ken of most networking professionals. I’m not saying this to make your network feel inferior. More that I’m trying to help you understand that your network operations resemble those at Facebook in the same way that a model airplane resembles a space shuttle. They’re alike on the surface only.
Facebook has unique challenges that they have to face in their own way. Network automation there isn’t a bonus. It’s Continue reading
Chip Shortages Aren’t Sweet for Networking
Have you tried to order networking gear recently? You’re probably cursing because the lead times on most everything are getting long. It’s not uncommon to see lead times on wireless access points or switch gear reaching 180 days or more. Reports from the Internet say that some people are still waiting to get things they ordered this spring. The prospect of rapid delivery of equipment is fading like the summer sun.
Why are we here? What happened? And can we do anything about it?
Fewer Chips, More Air
The pandemic has obviously had the biggest impact for a number of reasons. When a fabrication facility shuts down it doesn’t just ramp back up. Even when all the workers are healthy and the city where it is located is open for business it takes weeks to bring everything back online to full capacity. Just like any manufacturing facility you can’t just snap your fingers and get back to churning out the widgets.
The pandemic has also strained supply chains around the world. Even if the fabs had stayed open this entire time you’d be looking at a shortage of materials to make the equipment. Global supply chains were running extremely lean Continue reading
Private 5G Needs Complexity To Thrive
I know we talk about the subject of private 5G a lot in the industry but there are more players coming out every day looking to add their voice to the growing supporters of these solutions. And despite the fact that we tend to see 5G and Wi-Fi technologies as ships in the night this discussion isn’t going to go away any time soon. In part it’s because decision makers aren’t quite savvy enough to distinguish between the bands, thinking all wireless communications are pretty much the same.
I think we’re not going to see much overlap between these two technologies. But the reasons why aren’t quite what you might think.
Walking Workforces
Working from anywhere other than the traditional office is here to stay. Every major Silicon Valley company has looked at the cost benefit analysis and decided to let workers do their thing from where they live. How can I tell it’s permanent? Because they’re reducing salaries for those that choose to stay away from the Bay Area. That carrot is pretty enticing and for the companies to say that it’s not on the table for remote work going forward means they have no incentive to make people Continue reading
APIs and Department Stores
This week I tweeted something from a discussion we had during Networking Field Day that summed up my feelings about the state of documentation of application programming interfaces (APIs):
I laughed a bit as I wrote it because I’ve worked in department stores like Walmart in the past and I know the reasons why they tend to move things around. Comparing that to the way that APIs are documented is an interesting exercise in how people think about things like new capabilities and notification of changes.
Branding Exercises
In case you weren’t aware, everything in your average department store is carefully planned out. The things placed in the main aisles are decided on weeks in advance due to high traffic. The items placed at the ends of the aisles, or endcaps, are placed there to highlight high margin items or things that are popular enough to be sought out by customers. The makeup of the rest of the store is determined by a lot of metrics.
There are a Continue reading
Fast Friday – Podcasts Galore!
It’s been a hectic week and I realized that I haven’t had a chance to share some of the latest stuff that I’ve been working on outside of Tech Field Day. I’ve been a guest on a couple of recent podcasts that I loved.
Art of Network Engineering
I was happy to be a guest on Episode 57 of the Art of Network Engineering podcast. AJ Murray invited me to take part with all the amazing co-hosts. We talked about some fun stuff including my CCIE study attempts, my journey through technology, and my role at Tech Field Day and how it came to be that I went from being a network engineer to an event lead.
The interplay between the hosts and I during the discussion was great. I felt like we probably could have gone another hour if we really wanted to. You should definitely take a listen and learn how I kept getting my butt kicked by the CCIE open-ended questions or what it’s like to be a technical person on a non-technical briefing.
IPv6, Wireless, and the Buzz
I love being able to record episodes of Tomversations on Youtube. One of my latest was all about Continue reading
Getting Blasted by Backdoors
I wanted to take minute to talk about a story I’ve been following that’s had some new developments this week. You may have seen an article talking about a backdoor in Juniper equipment that caused some issues. The issue at hand is complicated at the linked article does a good job of explaining some of the nuance. Here’s the short version:
- The NSA develops a version of Dual EC random number generation that includes a pretty substantial flaw.
- That flaw? If you know the pseudorandom value used to start the process you can figure out the values, which means you can decrypt any traffic that uses the algorithm.
- NIST proposes the use of Dual EC and makes it a requirement for vendors to be included on future work. Don’t support this one? You don’t get to even be considered.
- Vendors adopt the standard per the requirement but don’t make it the default for some pretty obvious reasons.
- Netscreen, a part of Juniper, does use Dual EC as part of their default setup.
- The Chinese APT 5 hacking group figures out the vulnerability and breaks into Juniper to add code to Netscreen’s OS.
- They Continue reading
Sharing Failure as a Learning Model
Earlier this week there was a great tweet from my friends over at Juniper Networks about mistakes we’ve made in networking:
Devices stop working. Services stop responding. Palms start sweating.
— Juniper Networks (@JuniperNetworks) August 23, 2021We've all made networking mistakes.
The first step to fixing them? Sharing them. Tell us herepic.twitter.com/Fn9gNZhxz5
We've all made networking mistakes. 
It got some interactions with the community, which is always nice, but it got me to thinking about how we solve problems and learn from our mistakes. I feel that we’ve reached a point where we’re learning from the things we’ve screwed up but we’re not passing it along like we used to.
Write It Down For the Future
Part of the reason why I started my blog was to capture ideas that had been floating in my head for a while. Troubleshooting steps or perhaps even ideas that I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget down the line. All of it was important to capture for the sake of posterity. After all, if you didn’t write it down did it even happen?
Along the way I found that the posts that got significant traction on my site were the ones that involved Continue reading
The Mystery of Known Issues
I’ve spent the better part of the last month fighting a transient issue with my home ISP. I thought I had it figure out after a hardware failure at the connection point but it crept back up after I got back from my Philmont trip. I spent a lot of energy upgrading my home equipment firmware and charting the seemingly random timing of the issue. I also called the technical support line and carefully explained what I was seeing and what had been done to work on the problem already.
The responses usually ranged from confused reactions to attempts to reset my cable modem, which never worked. It took several phone calls and lots of repeated explanations before I finally got a different answer from a technician. It turns out there was a known issue with the modem hardware! It’s something they’ve been working on for a few weeks and they’re not entirely sure what the ultimate fix is going to be. So for now I’m going to have to endure the daily resets. But at least I know I’m not going crazy!
Issues for Days
Known issues are a way of life in technology. If you’ve worked with any Continue reading
Slow and Steady and Complete
I was saddened to learn last week that one of my former coworkers passed away unexpectedly. Duane Mersman started at the same time I did at United Systems and we both spent most of our time in the engineering area working on projects. We worked together on so many things that I honestly couldn’t keep count of them if I tried. He’s going to be missed by so many people.
A Hare’s Breadth
Duane was, in many ways, my polar opposite at work. I was the hard-charging young buck that wanted to learn everything there was to know about stuff in about a week and just get my hands dirty trying to break it and learn from my mistakes. If you needed someone to install a phone system next week with zero formal training or learn how iSCSI was supposed to operate based on notes sketched on the back of a cocktail napkin I was your nerd. That meant we could often get things running quickly. It also meant I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why things weren’t working. I left quite a few forehead-shaped dents in data center walls.
Duane was not any of those Continue reading
Follow My Leader
I spent the past two weeks enjoying the scenic views at the Philmont Scout Ranch with my son and some of his fellow Scouts BSA troop mates. It was very much the kind of vacation that involved a lot of hiking, mountain climbing, and even some inclement weather. We all completely enjoyed ourselves and I learned a lot about hanging bear bags and taking care of blisters. I also learned a lot about leadership by watching the boys in the crew interact with each other.
Storm Warnings
Leadership styles are nothing new to the people that read my blog. I’ve talked about them at length in the past. One thing I noticed when I was on the trek was how different leadership styles can clash and create friction among teenagers. As adults we tend to gloss over delivery and just accept that people are the way they are. When you’re fourteen or fifteen you haven’t quite taken that lesson to heart yet. That means more pushing against styles that don’t work for you.
We have all worked for or with someone that has a very authoritarian style in the past. The kind of people that say, “Do this right now” Continue reading
Pegasus Pisses Me Off
In this week’s episode of the Gestalt IT Rundown, I jumped on my soapbox a bit regarding the latest Pegasus exploit. If you’re not familiar with Pegasus you should catch up with the latest news.
Pegasus is a toolkit designed by NSO Group from Israel. It’s designed for counterterrorism investigations. It’s essentially a piece of malware that can be dropped on a mobile phone through a series of unpatched exploits that allows you to create records of text messages, photos, and phone calls and send them to a location for analysis. On the surface it sounds like a tool that could be used to covertly gather intelligence on someone of interest and ensure that they’re known to law enforcement agencies so they can be stopped in the event of some kind of criminal activity.
Letting the Horses Out
If that’s where Pegasus stopped, I’d probably not care one way or the other. A tool used by law enforcement to figure out how to stop things that are tough to defend against. But because you’re reading this post you know that’s not where it stopped. Pegasus wasn’t merely a tool developed by intelligence agencies for targeted use. If I had to Continue reading
Should We Embrace Points of Failure?
There was a tweet making the rounds this last week that gave me pause. Max Clark said that we should embrace single points of failure in the network. His post was an impassioned plea to networking rock stars out there to drop redundancy out of their networks and instead embrace these Single Points of Failure (SPoF). The main points Mr. Clark made boil down to a couple of major statements:
- Single-device networks are less complex and easier to manage and troubleshoot. Don’t have multiple devices when an all-in-one works better.
- Consumer-grade hardware is cheaper and easier to understand, therefore it’s better. Plus, if you need a backup you can just buy a second one and keep it on the shelf.
I’m sure more networking pros out there are practically bristling at these suggestions. Others may read through the original tweet and think this was a tongue-in-cheek post. Let’s look at the argument logically and understand why this has some merit but is ultimately flawed.
Missing Minutes Matter
I’m going to tackle the second point first. The idea that you can use cheaper gear and have cold standby equipment just sitting on the shelf is one that I’ve heard of many Continue reading
VARs See You As Technical Debt
I’ve worked for a Value Added Reseller (VAR) in the past and it was a good run of my career before I started working at Tech Field Day. The market was already changing eight years ago when I got out of the game. With the advent of the pandemic that’s especially true today. Quite a few of my friends say they’re feeling the pressure from their VAR employer to stretch beyond what they’re accustomed to doing or outright being treated in such a way as to be forced out or leaving on their own. They tell me they can’t quite understand why that’s happening. After some thought on the matter I think I know. Because you represent debt they need to retire.
Skill Up
We don’t start our careers knowing everything we need to know to make it. The industry spends a lot of time talking about careers and skill paths and getting your legs under you. Networking people need to learn Cisco or Juniper or whatever configuration language makes the most sense for them. Wireless people need to learn how to do site surveys and configure access points. Server people need to learn operating systems and hypervisors. We start Continue reading
Friday Thoughts on Going Back To the Office
We’re halfway through 2021 and it’s been going better than last year. Technology seems to be rebounding and we’re seeing companies trying to find ways to get employees to come back into the office. Of course, that is being met head on by the desire to not go back at all and continue to do the job from home that has been done over the past year. Something is going to have to give and I don’t know what that might be.
- Working from home is comfortable for sure. And the lack of schedule means that people are unknowingly putting in hours beyond what they normally would at the office. At least in the office you can walk away from your desk at the end of the day.
- Unlimited PTO and flexible work schedules sound great in theory. Except not tracking your PTO hours also means you don’t accrue them. You don’t get paid for time you don’t take off. And a flexible work schedule sounds great in theory but reality says that you’re not likely to get much support if you suddenly decide you want to work noon to 10pm Hawaiian time. Flexible really means “work longer than normal”.
- Continue reading
Putting the FUN Back in Productivity
It’s not a secret that it’s hard to get stuff done. Procrastination is practically a super power for me. I’ve tried so many methods and systems to keep myself on track over the years that I should probably start a review site. Sadly, the battle of my executive function being on constant vacation and the inability to get organized saps a lot of my ability to execute. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve finally realized that I need to start tricking my brain into getting things done.
Any reputable researcher will tell you that dealing with neurodivergent behaviors like ADHD is all about understanding the reasons why you do the things you do. I know what needs to be done. I just don’t want to do it. Worse yet, anything that I can do to avoid working on something is going to capture my attention because I’d rather be doing something unproductive as opposed to something I don’t like. This can manifest itself in strange ways like preferring to do the dishes instead of writing a blog post or mowing the yard instead of practicing a presentation.
Not DisFUNctional
It’s taken me a while but I’ve finally come up Continue reading