Troubleshooting Webinar this Friday

I’m teaching my troubleshooting webinar this Friday. I’ve revamped the slides entirely, so this will likely be a big change for anyone who’s attended previous versions of this. Three hours, 109 slides, and interaction through the chat window … all to develop some really good skills in how to troubleshoot. For those who are curious, I was taught formal troubleshooting skills in my early life in electronics, learning my lessons on ILS, RADAR, and radio systems of various kinds. This webinar is my adaptation of those skills for network engineers.

You can register here.

What’s your Digital Dilemma?

There are many ways to describe the need for IT organizations to do things better. There are multiple opportunities to get it wrong. Certainly, compromising today in the name of tomorrow is what many IT leaders now call the digital dilemma. Derek Britton of Micro Focus offers the vendor perspective.

Back-to-Office Canceled: The New Phase of IT Spending

As we hit IT budget season for 2022, many organizations are delaying their back-to-the-office plans. Here's what that will mean for CIO IT spending priorities next year.

Blessay: Enterprise DevOps is about Hiring More People

The hidden secret of DevOps is headcount justification

Response: Survey Reveals Talent Shortages as Biggest Barrier to Emerging Technologies Adoption

Lack of training not lack of talent

Managing and monitoring swap space on Linux

Most of us don't often think about swap space unless we run into a problem on our systems that suggests we don't have enough. Even so, viewing and gauging the adequacy of swap space on a system is not overly complicated, and knowing what's normal for your system can help you spot when something is wrong. So let's check out some commands that can help you look into your swap space. But first, let's review some fundamentals.What swap space is and how it's used Swap space is disk space that acts something like an extension of memory. It gets used when the system's physical memory (RAM) is full and the system needs more memory resources. It's called "swap" because the system will move some inactive pages in memory into the swap space so that it can accommodate more data in RAM. In other words, it provides a way to free up RAM on a busy system.To read this article in full, please click here

Managing and monitoring swap space on Linux

Stateful Switchover (SSO) 101

Stateful Switchover (SSO) is another seemingly awesome technology that can help you implement high availability when facing a ~~broken~~ non-redundant network design. Here’s how it’s supposed to work:

A network device runs two copies of the control plane (primary and backup);
Primary control plane continuously synchronizes its state with the backup control plane;
When the primary control plane crashes, the backup control plane already has all the required state and is ready to take over in moments.

Delighted? You might be disappointed once you start digging into the details.

Stateful Switchover (SSO) 101

A network device runs two copies of the control plane (primary and backup);
Primary control plane continuously synchronizes its state with the backup control plane;
When the primary control plane crashes, the backup control plane already has all the required state and is ready to take over in moments.

Delighted? You might be disappointed once you start digging into the details.

Lucky Webapp Add Select2 dropdowns

In this post I will cover the process of adding searchable dropdown boxes to your Lucky webapp with the Select2 Javascript library and styling them with Bootstrap 5. Software The following software versions were used in this post. Lucky - 0.28.0 Select2 - 4.1.0-rc.0 Bootstrap -...continue reading

Gartner: IT skills shortage hobbles cloud, edge, automation growth

Gartner says the current paucity of skilled IT workers is foiling the adoption of cloud, edge computing, and automation technologies.In its "2021-2023 Emerging Technology Roadmap" based on surveying 437 global firms, Gartner found that IT executives see the talent shortage as the most significant barrier to deploying emerging technologies, including compute infrastructure and platform services, network security, digital workplace, IT automation, and storage.To read this article in full, please click here

Gartner: IT skills shortage hobbles cloud, edge, automation growth

Network Break 350: Intel Pledges Billions For European Chip Factories; Facebook Reveals New Data Center Design

This week's Network Break podcast wonders what Intel wants in return for a multi-year, multi-billion pledge to build European chip factories, marvels at Facebook's newly revealed data center designs, analyzes Comcast's Masergy acquisition, and more.

Network Break 350: Intel Pledges Billions For European Chip Factories; Facebook Reveals New Data Center Design

The post Network Break 350: Intel Pledges Billions For European Chip Factories; Facebook Reveals New Data Center Design appeared first on Packet Pushers.

What’s new: Automating ServiceNow with Ansible Automation Platform

It has been almost half a year since the XLAB Steampunk and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform teams developed the first version of the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM). You may also want to read our ServiceNow introduction if you are not familiar with this already. So, let’s take a look at what is new since the last release.

We will skip most of the technical details in this post because, let us face it, talking about interactions between API pagination and filtering is not something many people enjoy. Instead, we will focus on the new things users can do using the current 1.2.0 version of this collection.

Attachment management

ServiceNow records (incidents, problems, change requests, etc.) may contain attachments, but the first version of the ServiceNow Collection did not expose this capability to Ansible Automation Platform users. We changed this in version 1.2.0 when we added the attachments parameter to all non-info modules.

Ansible users can now upload error logs and other artifacts when creating new incidents and other ServiceNow records. They can also add them later to existing ServiceNow records. For example, users might Continue reading

Lenovo and VMware partner for resilient edge servers

VMware and Lenovo have collaborated on edge computing systems, with the goal of making them more robust and resilient. Tech Spotlight: Edge Computing 4 essential edge computing use cases (Network World) Edge computing's epic turf war (CIO) Securing the edge: 5 best practices (CSO) Edge computing and 5G give business apps a boost (Computerworld) Amazon, Google, and Microsoft take their clouds to the edge (InfoWorld) As part of the deal, Lenovo's Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) will pre-load VMware's edge software on its ThinkSystem SE350 Edge servers, a pair of ruggedized servers designed specifically for edge deployments. This includes vSphere, vSan, and Tanzu.To read this article in full, please click here

VMware CEO looks to accelerate enterprise multicloud expansion

Since he helped build the highly successful ship that is VMware, it is widely expected the company’s CEO Raghu Raghuram, appointed in June, won’t rock that boat too much, at least in the near term. VMware Raghuram is credited with helping build and grow the company’s core virtualization and multicloud business as well as its software-defined data center strategy. VMware also credits Raghuram with driving partnerships with Dell Technologies and hyper-scaler customers.To read this article in full, please click here

Lenovo and VMware partner for resilient edge servers

11 Tips on Gaining Experience in Network Design

For people that want to pursue a career in network design, it can be tough getting the experience needed for such a role. How do you get design experience if your current role does not involve design? There are still many things you can do and I will give you tips on gaining that experience.

Network fundamentals – I always bring this up because it’s easy to overlook the need for network fundamentals. Being an Architect you still need to have technical chops and hopefully some operational experience as well. How can you design for something you are not familiar with? You can’t! You need to know OSPF, ISIS, BGP, etc. to understand when you should use each protocol. Spend a lot of time building these fundamentals before you move into design. How do you do that? Ivan Pepelnjak has training in this area. There is also the Computer Networking Problems and Solutions book by Russ White and Ethan Banks.

Books – There are several excellent books on network design. Some of them are geared towards network design certifications but they are great reads even if you are not pursuing any certification. One of my favourite books is The Art Continue reading

Configuring NSX-T Firewall with a CI/CD Pipeline

Initial implementation of Noël Boulene’s automated provisioning of NSX-T distributed firewall rules changed NSX-T firewall configuration based on Terraform configuration files. To make the deployment fully automated he went a step further and added a full-blown CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions and Terraform Cloud.

Not everyone is as lucky as Noël – developers in his organization already use GitHub and Terraform Cloud, making his choices totally frictionless.