Packet Pushers Show 149 – Discussion of Real World Problems with Entry Techs

When I refreshed my pod catcher today, I found that Packet Pushers had just released an episode that deals with career issues. This particular episode is a discussion between Greg Ferro and two less experienced technicians. Of these two gentleman, one has two years of experience and the other has only about one year of […]

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Paul Stewart

Paul is a Network and Security Engineer, Trainer and Blogger who enjoys understanding how things really work. With nearly 15 years of experience in the technology industry, Paul has helped many organizations build, maintain and secure their networks and systems. Paul also writes technical content at PacketU.

The post Packet Pushers Show 149 – Discussion of Real World Problems with Entry Techs appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Paul Stewart.

The Software Defined Datacenter Symposium 2013 – Tech Field Day

About a year and a half ago, arguably well before the biggest of all the SDN hype that we’ve come to know and love, Stephen Foskett and company organized a fantastic OpenFlow Symposium aimed at getting deep into the state of the protocol at that time and what was being done with it at some of the leading tech companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Brocade, and others. For those keeping track, Dave Meyer was on the panel at the time representing Cisco but is now CTO and Chief Scientist with Brocade and getting to do some really cool stuff with OpenDaylight.

When The World Runs As Software

I have heard so many sweeping statements in the past few weeks like “network engineers’ jobs are in danger” or “will my CCIE have any value when networking is run in the hypervisor”? Clearly the social media community is preaching “software or bust” these days, clearly leaving those that are not used to this kind of talk, or have been doing infrastructure the same way for years, quite alienated. I want to make one thing extremely clear - It’s okay to be an infrastructure person.

The Software Defined Datacenter Symposium 2013 – Tech Field Day

About a year and a half ago, arguably well before the biggest of all the SDN hype that we’ve come to know and love, Stephen Foskett and company organized a fantastic OpenFlow Symposium aimed at getting deep into the state of the protocol at that time and what was being done with it at some of the leading tech companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Brocade, and others. For those keeping track, Dave Meyer was on the panel at the time representing Cisco but is now CTO and Chief Scientist with Brocade and getting to do some really cool stuff with OpenDaylight.

When The World Runs As Software

I have heard so many sweeping statements in the past few weeks like “network engineers’ jobs are in danger” or “will my CCIE have any value when networking is run in the hypervisor”? Clearly the social media community is preaching “software or bust” these days, clearly leaving those that are not used to this kind of talk, or have been doing infrastructure the same way for years, quite alienated. I want to make one thing extremely clear - It’s okay to be an infrastructure person.

The Software Defined Datacenter Symposium 2013 – Tech Field Day

About a year and a half ago, arguably well before the biggest of all the SDN hype that we’ve come to know and love, Stephen Foskett and company organized a fantastic OpenFlow Symposium aimed at getting deep into the state of the protocol at that time and what was being done with it at some of the leading tech companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Brocade, and others. For those keeping track, Dave Meyer was on the panel at the time representing Cisco but is now CTO and Chief Scientist with Brocade and getting to do some really cool stuff with OpenDaylight.

Show 149 – Questions on the Sweet Spot for the Network Engineer Career

A common discussion in the Packet Pushers Forums and on the #packetpushers IRC channel is questions about career development, focus and doing a good job. These are always good discussions so Greg invited Giulio Chiappini - @its_gcand Jon Garrison – @jpwgarrison to bring their questions & Greg’s does his best to give a perspective, opinions and ideas on worklife as a […]

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Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus.

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The post Show 149 – Questions on the Sweet Spot for the Network Engineer Career appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

MAC address tracking with NMS

Let’s assume that I have a port open in my Cisco switch for guest users and I would like to keep track of the new mac-addresses that are added or existing mac-addresses that are removed from that port. I have a NMS (Network Management System), capable of receiving SNMP, traps that will send me an […]

Let’s 6rd!

6rd mechanism belongs to the same family as automatic 6to4, in which IPv6 traffic is encapsulated inside IPv4. The key difference is that with 6rd, Service Providers use their own 6rd prefix and control the transition of their access-aggregation IPv4-only part of their networks to native IPv6. In the same time, SPs transparently provide IPv6 availability service […]

Information Hoarders

I make no secret of my love for Seth Godin and his amazing insight into the world. Besides being a marketing genius, he’s like Ockham’s Razor in getting to the essence of a problem. Take today’s posting, which really resonated with me, because it seems to reflect my own frustration with a common problem in […]

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Mrs. Y

Snarkitecht at Island of Misfit Toys

Mrs. Y is a recovering Unix engineer working in network security. Also the host of Healthy Paranoia and official nerd hunter. She likes long walks in hubsites, traveling to security conferences and spending time in the Bat Cave. Sincerely believes that every problem can be solved with a "for" loop. When not blogging or podcasting, can be found using up her 15 minutes in the Twittersphere or Google+ as @MrsYisWhy.
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The post Information Hoarders appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Mrs. Y.

Salary Negotiation For Technical Jobs

I wanted to take just a moment and share a video that one of my twitter friends shared with me. This video is of the final stage of the interview process and outlines the negotiation required to come to a mutually agreeable compensation level. Of key importance, it highlights several items that should be understood […]

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Paul Stewart

Paul is a Network and Security Engineer, Trainer and Blogger who enjoys understanding how things really work. With nearly 15 years of experience in the technology industry, Paul has helped many organizations build, maintain and secure their networks and systems. Paul also writes technical content at PacketU.

The post Salary Negotiation For Technical Jobs appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Paul Stewart.

How to Become CCDE

Wow. I still can't believe it.

The moment I clicked Next at the end of the CCDE practical exam today in London, and it showed Congratulations word, I was literally jumping out my chair. It was a bad move, I admit, because it was really distracting and it made many other candidates in the room to look at me furiously since we still had more than an hour to complete this 352-011 exam. But I couldn't help it. I passed!

I'm a CCDE now. Part of the group consists around 100 people only, in the world. Wow. Thank God.
(I haven't received my number yet. So I hope CCDE team don't change their mind)


How did I prepare for CCDE exam?

Well, it's been a long journey. I passed my first CCDE written exam four years ago. I have taken the practical exam when it was version v1.0. And now I passed with v2.0.

Before I took the exam today I thought I would have lots of things to write about my preparation for CCDE exam. But I'm typing this while having my "CCDE dinner" at Hard Rock Cafe in London, and I can only came up with Continue reading

Scale, SDN, and Network Virtualization

[This post was put together by Teemu Koponen, Andrew Lambeth, Rajiv Ramanathan, and Martin Casado]

Scale has been an active (and often contentious) topic in the discourse around SDN (and by SDN we refer to the traditional definition) long before the term was coined. Criticism of the work that lead to SDN argued that changing the model of the control plane from anything but full distribution would lead to scalability challenges. Later arguments reasoned that SDN results in *more* scalable network designs because there is no longer the need to flood the entire network state in order to create a global view at each switch. Finally, there is the common concern that calls into question the scalability of using traditional SDN (a la OpenFlow) to control physical switches due to forwarding table limits.

However, while there has been a lot of talk, there have been relatively few real-world examples to back up the rhetoric. Most arguments appeal to reason, argue (sometimes convincingly) from first principles, or point to related but ultimately different systems.

The goal of this post is to add to the discourse by presenting some scaling data, taken over a two-year period, from a production network virtualization Continue reading

How much are you worth per hour

[This content was originally published on thenetworksherpa.com] Have you ever sat at your desk repeating the same task again and again, getting that groundhog day feeling. Arrrghhh, this is so inefficient someone should automate this. I could even do it myself with five days of focussed work. Sadly, you don’t have five days and the […]

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John Harrington

John is an experienced data center engineer with a background in mobile telecoms. He works as a network test engineer for a large cloud service provider, and is gradually accepting that he's a nerd. He blogs about network technology and careers at theNetworkSherpa.com. You can reach him on twitter at: @networksherpa

The post How much are you worth per hour appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by John Harrington.

Teamwork in a Disconnected Environment

As an introvert, I don’t like ice breakers or team building exercises at team meetings. Building the team camaraderie is done slowly over time with peers you work with. Daily interactions during work help build that as engineers learn to trust each other. What about for a team that does not interact with each other […]

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Charles Galler

Charles Galler

Charles is a network and UC engineer for an integrator. He has worked in the networking industry for about 15 years. He started as a network administrator for a small CLEC (carrier) where he did it all in internal IT and worked on the carrier network. After the CLEC, Charles went to work for a large healthcare organization in the Houston area and stayed with them for about three and a half years. Now he works for a reseller in the professional services part of the organization. He is currently studying for his CCIE in Routing and Switching and plans on passing it sometime. You can find him on the Twitter @twidfeki.
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The post Teamwork in a Disconnected Environment appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Charles Galler.

Your Company Doesn’t Care About You

  Companies are Systems for Making Money We’ve all heard corporate leadership speak about ‘human resources’ and that ‘people are our most important asset’. This is true but the words ‘resource’ and ‘asset’ were carefully chosen. A resource is something to be mined for value. Please don’t be fooled into thinking that your company cares […]

Author information

John Harrington

John is an experienced data center engineer with a background in mobile telecoms. He works as a network test engineer for a large cloud service provider, and is gradually accepting that he's a nerd. He blogs about network technology and careers at theNetworkSherpa.com. You can reach him on twitter at: @networksherpa

The post Your Company Doesn’t Care About You appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by John Harrington.

[Code] PowerTool: PowerOnUCSBlades

# ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Name: PowerOnUCSBlades.ps1 # Author: Matthew Oswalt # Created: 3/30/2012 # Revision: v0.2 - BETA # Rev. Date: 4/30/2013 # Description: A script that powers on blades in a UCS system. # Can be configured to boot all blades, or # only those associated to service profiles in a # given sub-organization. # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Import the Cisco UCS PowerTool module Import-Module CiscoUcsPs #Enable Multiple System Config Mode Set-UcsPowerToolConfiguration -SupportMultipleDefaultUcs $true ##################################################################################################################### # AUTHENTICATION # #################################### #Stored method of authentication - change the two values shown below $user = "admin" $password = "password" | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force $cred = New-Object system.

[Code] PowerTool: PowerOnUCSBlades

———————————————————————- # Name: PowerOnUCSBlades.ps1 # Author: Matthew Oswalt # Created: 3/30/2012 # Revision: v0.2 - BETA # Rev. Date: 4/30/2013 # Description: A script that powers on blades in a UCS system. # Can be configured to boot all blades, or # only those associated to service profiles in a # given sub-organization. # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Import the Cisco UCS PowerTool module Import-Module CiscoUcsPs #Enable Multiple System Config Mode Set-UcsPowerToolConfiguration -SupportMultipleDefaultUcs $true ##################################################################################################################### # AUTHENTICATION # #################################### #Stored method of authentication - change the two values shown below $user = "admin" $password = "password" | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force $cred = New-Object system.

SDN: Stop Differentiating by Names

Why does it happen with every technology cycle? First, there’s a period of great innovation, followed by the introduction of new terms and categories, which is always followed by a frenzy of differentiation-by-acronym. Everyone gets caught up in talking to each other and one-upping each other, instead of remembering why there was innovation in the first place. I call it “the yearbook effect,” and the networking industry and those who work in it, watch it and write about it are fully entrenched in it right now.

Think about it. SDN, NFV, OpenFlow, controllers, consortiums to build controllers, control plane separation, overlays, blah blah blah.

The industry has gotten so wrapped up in talking about definitions of SDN, the various technologies and how they get implemented, we actually may help delay adoption. We are supposed to be trying to help customers, but we are focusing on the wrong things and it’s confusing them.

I may get kicked out of the SDN fan club for saying this, but I’ve come to the conclusion after speaking to dozens of customers and participating in various industry discussions, any delay in widespread adoption of SDN is our own fault.

People are rarely, if ever, talking Continue reading

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