Category Archives: Musing

Lightening The Linksys Load

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If you’re in the mood to pick up an interesting present for someone this holiday season, you may be in luck. Rumor has it that Cisco is looking to offload Linksys. Again. According to the rumors, Cisco is shopping Linksys to manufacturers of TVs for a lot less than the $500 million they paid for it a decade ago. This isn’t the first time that there have been rumors about the demise of Linksys. A year and a half ago, I even had something to say about it. My opinion of the situation hasn’t really changed from that previous blog post. What has changed is the way that Linksys has been marketed.

Cisco has known for a while that it’s fighting a losing battle in the consumer market. Cheaper vendors have been attacking them on price. Premium vendors have been offering significantly more advanced devices. It also doesn’t help that the Linksys brand itself has been murky for the past several months. Cisco has attached the Linksys name not only to the shrink wrapped boxes you find in your favorite dying big box retailer but also to many of their small business products as well. You can now buy a Linksys phone system, switches, wireless APs, and routers. Many of these products used to carry a Cisco SMB brand but were rebranded in order to give Linksys a bit more robust feel. This was probably a bad decision on Cisco’s part. No matter which piece of equipment you choose to carry the Linksys logo, most of your SMB customer base is going to have visions of trying to buy a wireless router at Best Buy. I had a very similar conversation a few years ago with D-Link. One of their reps came in to try and sell me on their enterprise line of switches. At this point I said to myself, “D-Link makes enterprise gear?!?” I was informed they were a large vendor of this type of gear. They were rather popular in Europe, according to the rep. My response? “So is David Hasselhoff.” No matter what you build with that brand, you’re still going to conjure images of your consumer brand. Linksys shares that same fate.

Cisco has made no secret that they want to start moving toward software as the core of their network offerings. When John Chambers finally retires in a couple of years, he wants to be sure that he hit his last market transition. In order to make the voyage to the Land of Software he’s going to have to shed some weight. I think Linksys is the biggest piece of that weight. After the Flip and ümi closures last year, Chambers needed some breathing room before turning the lights out in other areas. Linksys still holds enough value to fetch a fair price on the open market. Seeing as it’s being shopped to TV manufacturers this would be an excellent opportunity for a mid-market player to catch up to Samsung or Vizio in terms of network offerings. All these devices are going to need to be networked. Most of them come with wireless cards today. With 802.11ad still too far off to be of useful impact today for short-range high speed networking, manufacturers are going to need a stop-gap solution today. Likewise, Cisco has to make the decision whether or not to invest the R&D in the brand to get to those new protocols and devices. Most consumers today own an 802.11n wireless router of some kind. Those people are unlikely to buy a new device until there’s a protocol change or some kind of massive increase in throughput. And even when it does come time to make that upgrade, users are unlikely to spend the kind of money that it would take to recover the cost of development. If Cisco really wants to concentrate on software in the future, doubling down on unprofitable hardware today makes little sense.

Tom’s Take

My Cisco Valet Plus, which is really just a rebranded Linksys WRT310N, now sits on my bookshelf unused. I finally decided to move on to something that fits my usage profile better. I settled on an Apple Airport Extreme. I now have dual band radios, guest access, and a USB port for my Time Machine backups. I might have been able to get a lot of this in a Linksys device, but I grew tired of trying to figure out which one I needed. There was also a lot of feature similarity between the hardware that only seemed to be limited by firmware instead of hardware. For better or worse, I didn’t buy Linksys. Cisco is hoping that someone will buy it from them now. That buyer is going to get an entrenched consumer networking product that has some life left in it. As for Cisco, they get to rid themselves of a peculiar albatross that has weighed heavily on them as of late. Lets hope the Linksys Diet pays off.

Presentation BINGO

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At some point or another, we’ve all sat down and heard a presentation from a relatively new company.  Whether it be a startup, a stealth mode developer, or just someone trying to find their marketing legs not everyone can afford to have a PR budget like Microsoft.  At some point, all of this started sounding the same to me.  With the help of my friend Joshua Williams (@JSW_EdTech), we’ve managed to figure out why this all seems to sound like we’ve heard the same story over and over.  It’s not quite like the presentation bingo game that you may be used to.  Instead of trying to cover the card, you just need to wait for the five magic phrases or indicators.

B – Business Founders – Odds are good one of the first things a really hot startup will tell you about is how awesome the founders are.  The most impressive companies you have never heard of seem to be run by really famous people that got really bored with what they were doing for their old job and ran out and started a new company.  These folks likely used to work for Cisco or Juniper or Microsoft or even EMC.  But now they’ve got something really awesome that they want to sell you or tell you.  You will probably see this by the second slide in the Company Overview.  And the odds are really good that if the founder is one of those Cult of Personality types, you’re going to hear their name brought up a few more times in the presentation.  Usually by first name, because that shows the close-knit group dynamic that they’ve got going on.

I – I’m Unique Because… – Let’s face it.  Do we really need another storage array or switch or single pane of glass management program?  Probably not.  However, that’s what’s been built to target a segment of the market that’s really untapped at this point.  The key isn’t making the product totally awesome in every way possible.  The real key is to tell you how it’s radically different than anything you’ve seen before.  Maybe it automatically configures switch ports when load characteristics increase exponentially around holiday shopping traffic.  Maybe it can do hitless snapshots while the array is online and rebuilding.  Maybe the interface has unicorns all over the login page.  The presenter is going to hit you over the head with the fact that they are different than everyone else.  That’s why they’re going to be successful.  Never mind that the login process takes five minutes and the documentation looks like it was written by a classroom full of first graders. When a big publication does a story on us, we have something different to draw everyone in.

N – Neato Tagline – Everyone has to have a tagline.  It’s the stinger that you take away and put in the back of your mind until you’ve completely forgotten about the presentation.  Then, one morning when you’re having breakfast, the tagline comes back to you out of nowhere and you suddenly realize that this is the thing you need to fix the thing that doesn’t work!  Never mind that you can’t remember what they did or how much it costs.  That tagline was awesome!  It probably rhymes or is a pun on the state of the industry.  Maybe the it’s something the founders are fond of saying at the end of every meeting to remind people what their goals are.  Chances are it’s so cool that it will generate a few hundred thousand sales.  Then the company will hire a professional marketing firm and they’ll do market research to find a tagline that resonantes with a key demographic and everything will change and there’ll be glossy marketing slicks to go with everything.  And when that fails eventually, they’ll go back to using a modified version of the old tagline to remind everyone how they’re getting back to the core of what makes them great.

G – Gartner – You knew this one was coming.  I’m picking on Gartner here because the name fits my theme, but you know that IDC and Forrester and Tolly and others are going to come up at some point.  Despite the fact that you’ve likely never heard of them, you’re going to see that the analysts know all about this company and will have already pigeonholed them into some polygon or ranked them among the best in some esoteric category that doesn’t matter to 90% of the buying population.  It’s like being in a bank.  Everyone’s a vice president…of something.  A friend of mine was VP of communications for a bank.  His department had no employees besides himself.  What’s the point of being number one if there’s no number two or three or four?  I’m pretty sure you know how I feel about analyst firms in general by now.  Just know that the presenters are all hot to tell you about how other people tell the world that they’re awesome.  And be sure to take that information with the prescribed grain of salt.

O – Our Customers Include…(NASCAR Slide) – One of my personal favorites.  Never mind that the presenter is telling you how awesome their company/widget/idea is.  Take it from the list of companies that I’m about to show you on one (or many more) slides.  But I’m going to be clever and just show you logos, since you obviously might get FedEx confused with FedEx Cleaners in Cleveland or something.  These slides are usually a jumble of graphics that look like someone has vomited a stream of GIFs and JPEGs onto a slide.  In many ways it resembles the side of a NASCAR vehicle or jumpsuit.  In fact, all it really boils down to is an attempt to sway your opinion by saying, “Hey!  These successful people use our stuff!  You should too!”  It’s as ridiculous as McDonalds putting the logo of every company in the world on their marketing material because the employees of the company eat there on occasion.  Rather than filling your presentation with slide after slide of blather and graphic, include a testimonial from a specific company.  Or better yet, have a representative of that company come tell me how awesome your stuff is.

After you get all five of these in your presentation, you can proudly jump up and shout “BINGO!!!” and then leave.  You don’t need to know any more about the company from this point forward.  Who cares what they make?  Do you really want to know how they handle upgrades or licensing or costs?  Probably not.  You’ve already seen the important stuff.  They have awesome founders that are doing something totally unique that no one else has thought of.  They spent all their time coming up with a catchy phrase to stick in your brain and did just enough to get noticed by a few companies looking for something different to try this time around.  That, in turn, got them noticed by professionals whose job it is to tell you who you should be using and reassuring you that the products you are using are pretty cool.  After all that, you just need to write the check for whatever it is that the company is trying to sell you.  I mean, with an amazing presentation like that you shouldn’t need any more details.

When Demos Attack

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The demo. The holy grail of live, interactive presentation. The point where the rubber meets the road. The seductive allure of a live demonstration drives most technical presentations. Slide after slide gets boring, even with cutesy animations. Audiences can quickly get lost with the droning monotony of slide recitation. However, a demo give them something to focus on. A live system generates real data and shows what you can do. Questions come up and the answers are right there at the tips of your fingers. However, the demo’s siren song can lead to doom if you don’t navigate the waters carefully. Even the most polished demos can fail. Steve Jobs learned this during the launch of the iPhone 4. Tech presenters learn it every day when Mr. Murphy comes calling.

Demos are not inherently bad. In fact, the upside is astounding. The problem comes in the execution. Having been a veteran of many demo presentations, both good and bad as well as a presenter and demonstrator myself, I thought I’d share a couple of ideas I have about demos and how to keep yours from heading south.

1. Make Sure Your Demo Is Interesting – I can’t stress enough how important this bullet point is. Not all things make for good demos. Even things that you think may be the most awesome stuff on the planet can be boring or distracting for your audience. Watching someone type command after command into a CLI window is boring. However, watching a short command instantiate a software load balancer and kick back a list of the configuration is exciting. Watching someone pull up a screen on a phone and poke around is passe. Watching that same phone pull up live info from the Internet and book a reservation at a restaurant for you is much better. The key is to keep the audience on the edge of their seats. You must make the demo compelling and make them want to see where you’re going. The NFD4 Juniper Mykonos demo was exciting because you could see the build out of attack from inception to execution to response. Watching them put up a Google map projection of the attacker’s area with links to local legal council was a hilarious moment, but it illustrates the engagement aspect. On the other hand, the Aerohive BR100 iPad provisioning demo from WFD2 missed the mark a bit. Why? Because watching someone configure an AP is a pretty pedestrian to the audience. Screens full of config values make the eyes go blurry. I understand the power and awesomeness underneath the ability to provision 15 branch offices from a tablet. I just don’t want to see how the sausage is made in this case. Maybe instead having a script run automatically or making it flashier would keep attention focused on the “why” and not the “how”. And if your demo involves a task that needs some time to run to completion, please make sure to fill that time appropriately. Watching a status bar fill up on screen is like nails on a chalkboard to a presentation audience. Avoid long pauses if you can, but if you must you should kick off the first part of the demo and move on with your presentation while the magic is happening in the background. Infineta figured this out at NFD3. Since their long-distance vMotion demo was going to take twenty minutes no matter what, they let it run while they whiteboarded algorithms  Don’t make your audience stare at boredom.

2. Test Your Demo Under Real World Conditions – This was Steve’s mistake during the iPhone 4 demo. People practice their demos and presentations religiously (or at least they should). They keep staring at screen after screen to ensure everything is automatic. But sometimes they forget that all those practice runs don’t represent reality. Yes, an iPhone will access the web just fine in an empty auditorium at Moscone. It’s a different story when the audience full of phones and tablets and laptops all melt the wireless with a tidal wave of packets. Steve forgot to make sure that his practice runs looked like the audience makeup that he’d see that day. Just as important, make sure that your demo environment doesn’t do wacky things. Hiccups in dry runs should give you a hint that you need everything to be ironed out before you do it for real. Make your demo setup simple because you also have to remember that you’re under the gun and nervous as hell up there. Derick Winkworth’s SIP demo failed not because of technology, but because he was typing the wrong password into the software. Derick knew the password. But he got flustered because we gave him a hard time about his password earlier in the demo. Doing a live demo is like a trapeze act without a safety net. Be sure you’ve tested your act enough under the big top so you won’t fall.

3. Have A Backup Plan – Just like the most recent SpaceX Falcon9 rocket launch, you can’t assume that everything is going to work right. You need a backup plan. That includes everything in your presentation. Backup slide decks in case your USB drive dies or the drivers aren’t installed. Backup video adapters in case you thought there was HDMI but there is really on VGA. However, if your presentation has a demo, you have *better* have a backup plan. As above, wireless networks can be unreliable in conference centers. VPN connections can fail at a moment’s notice. Files can get moved. Systems can be shut off. Be ready to roll when it looks like your demo is going south. Instead of tap dancing, move over to a local version. Spin up and backup VM on your laptop and show your demo from there. If your files are gone or your machine is down, have a simple animation showing what was going on. Or go for broke on the whiteboard. Diagram everything and make the audience help you out. Don’t let the hiccups derail you. Be ready to go. And in the event that even your backup plan fails, don’t tap dance around it. Apologize and move on. We’ve all seen demos that fail and we know that not everything goes right.

Tom’s Take

I love great demos. I love being engaged and seeing live systems work. But every time someone pulls out a demo at a presentation, I feel a bit hesitant. I’ve been fortunate enough to be on this side of some great demos. However, I’ve also seen and had some fail spectacularly. If you take into account the things I outlined above, you can minimize the chance that your demo will fail. That way the conversation will center around something awesome and not around shaking head and embarrassed smiles.

Shadow IT – What Evil Lurks In The Heart Of An Admin?

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I’ve been hearing the term Shadow IT quite a bit recently.  According to the Fount of All Knowledge, Shadow IT refers to networks and systems built inside organizations without official approval.  I found it curious that people started referring to this almost five years ago, yet a cursory search for “shadow IT” turns up a *ton* of articles written in the last six months.  At first, I wondered if the trend of BYOD had finally petered out a bit.  After all, once you’ve assaulted the populace with a headline every day for at least two months, they kind of grow accustomed to it and get bored seeing it all the time.  Then I wondered why a five-year-old concept should be hot now.  Then it hit me.

I’ve never heard of Shadow IT because it was never a “thing” for me.  The idea that a lab computer or a non-production testing system might be moved into production work wasn’t an obstacle to the way that I’d done things in the past.  As a matter of fact, it’s the way I’ve done things for the most part my entire career.  In order to replace our aging 3Com NBX phone system, I installed Cisco CallManager in a lab and let the sales folks use it to make conference calls one week.  They were so impressed with the quality of the call they made me rip out the old and put in the new the following month.  The whole virtualization strategy around here grew out of one box running ESX standard for a VM migration test.  After people discovered how flexible things were inside of a virtualized environment, naturally our server strategy going forward was focused around our brand new ESX cluster.  Even our network was a series of cobbled-together parts scavenged from the four corners of the globe at a time when the engineering staff needed gigabit connectivity and we had no budget to accomplish it.  Slowly, one piece at a time, we assembled our entire setup without direct authorization and formal approval.  While it was nice to called to a meeting about a new feature and be told, “Yeah, we’ve been running that for the last three months” there were huge weaknesses in the plan.

With a hodge-podge network assembled over the course of months or years to address tactical problems, you have huge support headaches in the event of failures.  Untangling the knots of interconnected systems becomes a lot harder when you keep uncovering devices you knew nothing about.  That new awesome voicemail server?  It’s running on ESXi on a new server that was originally provisioned for lab use.  All well and good until I’m out of the office and someone needs to restart it after a power failure.  Worse still when they have to remember to connect via VMware Client to restart the VM itself.  Extra pain and effort introduced because of the need to move quickly to implement something.  That’s just the side of things from the lab.  Let’s not talk about things like Dropbox or GMail.  Even though I know it’s not technically the right way to do things, my job is quickly reaching the point where I’m dependent on Dropbox.  I keep notes and firmware images in mine that sync between all my systems.  My presentations go in there.  So do PDFs and software images.  If someone decided to block Dropbox tomorrow, I’d be screwed.  I avoid keeping sensitive data in there as a matter of habit, but just about every other important thing is either in a Dropbox or has been copied there at some point.  GMail is another method used frequently to avoid large attachment size limitations or mailbox quotas.  That’s under the best of circumstances.  I’ve used GMail to test incoming and outgoing mail and a number of sites.  I use it to test mail routing and NAT translations of mail servers.  That’s just the legitimate uses.  Think about the number of IT people that use GMail as a way to skirt eDiscovery rules and Freedom of Information actions.  I’ve seen that several times.

BYOD has caused people in management to start looking at their networks and systems a bit closer than they have in the past.  What used to be the big, dark hole where data entered and information came out is now being scrutinized with great fervor because of the possibility of exposure.  Now, instead of turning a blind eye towards the IT department with a mantra of “just make it work,” management must now take into account that running insecure devices or non-tested configurations can lead to trouble down the road.  Trouble that someone occasionally has to answer for, either in the press or in a court of law.  That makes management skittish.  That explains why this is now an important point of contention in IT.  Rather than taking the easy road of results, we now instead must focus on  the whole process.  Ample documentation must exist at every step of the way not as a record of implementation, but instead as a way to show liability and protect people.  In essence, that’s really what Shadow IT is about.  Never mind the challenges of creating systems from untested technology.  It all comes down to who gets the blame when things go wrong and how that can be proved when the yelling starts.

I’ve already made a commitment to do my best to avoid the kinds of last-minute solutions that are implicated in the Shadow IT movement.  I’m not going to do away with my lab or with piloting solutions before implementing them.  What I will do is make sure there is a clearly defined plan in place in the event that the lab solution needs to be moved into production.  I’ll also be sure that all the involved parties agree on the best course of action before the solution is put in place so there can be no arguing or finger pointing after the fact.  The easiest way to get rid of Shadow IT is to shine the Light of Documentation on it.  Then those of us in IT aren’t looked upon as the crazy vigilantes of networking and systems and instead we can get back to being the harmless recluses that our secret identities portray.

Velcro for VAR Engineers

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When I was younger, I must have watched The Delta Force about a hundred times. One of the things I loved in that movie was the uniforms the Delta guys wore. Jet black, covered in cargo pockets, and very useful. The most compelling feature, however, was the velcro on the shoulders and chest. The Delta troopers could remove the patches on their uniforms whenever they needed to be anonymous, then put them back on at will. I loved this idea. As time has gone on, I’ve notice the same kind of capability on the new military BDUs. Rank insignia, unit affiliation, and even the name tag are all velcro patches that can be removed, reapplied, and changed as needed.

This idea of configurable uniforms finally hit home for me the other day when I was going through my closet looking for a vendor-specific shirt. Yes, I know that Greg has decried the plumage of the vendor in a previous blog post, but as a VAR I’m a bit hamstrung. Sometimes, I need to put on my Aruba shirt or my Cisco jacket or my Aerohive tuxedo. Customers feel a bit reassured when you’re wearing a shirt from a company that you’re pitching. However, I’ve noticed that all these shirts seem to start looking alike after a while. I have the same Dri-Fit Nike polo shirt with four different vendor logos. I have the same dark blue polo with three other different vendor logos. I think I have a Cisco shirt in every color of the rainbow. I even have shirts that don’t fit anymore with fun old logos, like my Master CNE. Why do I need to have that many logo shirts in my closet? Why can’t I have a little more control over my VAR uniform?

That’s when it hit me. Let’s do the velcro configurability on vendor polo shirts. A velcro patch over the left breast and maybe another couple on the sleeves. Think of the possibilities. Now, instead of worrying about what vendor shirt I’m going to wear in the morning, I can just pick out the black one or the red one. Then, when I’m ready to brand myself, I just need to pick out the appropriate patch and slap it on the velcro. No fuss, no muss. If I wear the wrong vendor shirt today, it can cause some embarrasing issues. With the patch system, I just remove the errant patch and replace it in seconds. Much easier than trying to keep track of which shirt I shouldn’t be wearing to a particular site. You could even make a big show of it. When it’s time to get work done, make a big production of taking your patch out and slapping it on. When you need to be “off the record” about something, make a theatrical gesture of ripping the identification patch off your shirt as if to say, “I’m not with this company right now. Here’s what I think.” It would be practical as well as awesome.

Sure, there are details to work out. Even getting the vendors to start offering velcro patches would be a huge step in the right direction. I’m all for this, as it means I can finally take a little more control over my wardrobe. Now where did I put that sewing machine?

Reality As A Service

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If you are a fan of Tech Field Day or a frequent viewer of my blog posts, you know that I’m somewhat skeptical of the majority of analyst firms out there.  At best, many of them function solely as a mouthpiece regurgitating old information to remind CxOs that the decisions they made 2-3 years ago were the right ones.  At worst, they are the paid shills for companies looking for market share and attention.  Thanks to a convenient vendor event, I got to spend some time picking the brains of many of my colleagues about topics like this, and I find I’m not alone.  Independence and objectivity are always important, and as I’ve said in the past when talking about an independent testing company idea, it can be hard to maintain in an environment where you are so reliant on the vendors to provide support and funding for the things you want to do.  After all, not everyone can be as rich as  Richard Branson.  I think, however, that I might have finally hit on an idea that could work for me.

The movie Patton holds a clue to my devious intentions.  Within, the general describes a scene from ancient Rome.  Conquering generals were awarded a triumph, a giant parade through the heart of Rome where the population would shower the hero with adulation and praise.  For those very successful generals, this could soon become a source of feelings of superiority.  After all, here are all these people telling you how great you are.  Sooner or later, you’re going to start believing your own press.  According to Patton, however, it was common practice for a slave to stand behind the general and whisper in his ear every so often, “Remember, fame is fleeting…”  This is the “what have you done for me lately” mentality so prevalent today.  People quick to forget your successes but take a very long time to forgive your failures.  No where is this more apparent to me that in the audition process for the TV show American Idol.  For the five of you that might not be familiar with this particular program, it’s essentially a serialized talent competition/reality show.  The real interesting part for most people isn’t the competition itself.  It’s the auditions for the first two to three weeks of each season.  This is where you get to see the people that turn up and try out.  Many of these people have absolutely no business singing.  At all.  For whatever reason, whether it be believing their own press or the false praise of others, these people truly think they have amazing talent where none actually exists.  These “trainwrecks” drive a lot of the views for the first few episodes because people take some kind of perverse delight in watching failure.  Once the trainwrecks are finished, the real competition can start.

I’ve always said to myself that what these trainwrecks need is a harsh dose of reality.  I’ve been gifted in my life that I’ve been able to have people tell me that maybe I wasn’t best suited to be a singer or a baseball player.  They encouraged me to work toward realistic goals, like being a snarky network rock star.  However, some of these American Idol contestants don’t have that.  They go right on believing they can sing like a real rock star until they get in front of the cameras and Simon Cowell hammers them with reality in front of the whole nation.  What I had originally proposed was a service that did much the same thing, only not so public.  For those people that care enough to tell these contestants that maybe singing isn’t what they were cut out for but can’t bring themselves to do it for whatever reason, I would gladly offer my services in their stead.  I can call people up and let them know that the prevailing opinion is that while they might sound good in the shower, they really shouldn’t try to make a living singing old show tunes in front of a harsh judging panel.

My conversations as of late have finally made the lightbulb go off and join these two disparate ideas together.  That’s what bothers me to a degree about the analyst firms.  They never really have anything bad to say.  The praise is heaped on by the ladle full in many cases.  Everyone has a positive place in the mystical polygon.  There is no “suck” quadrant.  Yet, when we expose these technologies to real deployments and real workloads, they start breaking and causing all manner of problems.  What we really need is a Reality As A Service offering.  Myself, along with a group of talented individuals, will pour over your product offering and tear it to shreds.  These reports are going to be decidedly negative.  We’re going to tell you all the things that are wrong with your widget.  Just like the slave in the chariot in Rome, we’re going to remind the vendors that all the praise being offered by the crowd is fleeting.  Instead, in three months time the only thing people will care about is how broken your product is.  By contracting with Reality As A Service, we will tell you up front all the things you don’t want to hear and the regular analysts don’t want to tell you.  You may not want to hear it.  You may not like us very much after we’re finished.  But, you won’t be able to tell us we’re absolutely wrong.  And you will then have a list of things to work on to make your product better.

It’s not unlike submitting an article or a book to an editor for proofreading.  It think I have a fairly decent grasp of the English language.  However, watching a professional editor slice-and-dice my work reminds me how far I still have to go.  I don’t hate the editor for pointing out my mistakes.  I make myself better by recognizing those problems and correcting them.  That’s what Reality As A Service can help fix.  Bad GUI interfaces, horrible design decisions, and academic delusion with the way things operate outside of an incubation vacuum.  Does your interface still rely on Java or Flash?  We’ll tell you.  How about requiring a $50,000 license for a feature that should really be free at this point?  We’re going to bring that up too.  And why on earth doesn’t this use the same standard protocol that the rest of the world has used for the last five years?!? That’ll be in the report as well.  In the end, rather than hear how great you are, you’ll be reminded of all the things you should be concentrating on.  Reality As A Service won’t let you lose sight of all the important things because others are too busy telling you how great the unimportant things are.

Does this idea have a future?  Not likely.  People that create things don’t take kindly to being told their widgets aren’t up to snuff.  Just like the American Idol contestants that come out of the audition after being smacked in the face with reality and say, “I don’t know what the professional talent judge was thinking.  My mom tells me that I’m the best singer she’s heard in the general store in the last fifty years!”  They can’t accept criticism when they are absolutely convinced they are right.  But for a small portion of the people, the ones that can accept constructive feedback and use it as a tool to better themselves and the products they make, there might just be some hope.

The Knights Who Say “Um…”

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The other day, Ethan Banks (@ecbanks) tweeted a rather amusing thought while editing an episode of the Packet Pushers:

https://twitter.com/ecbanks/status/229235835449516032

It’s rather easy to sympathize with Ethan on this.  I find myself very conscious of saying “um” when I’m speaking.  We’re all guilty of it.  “Um” is a buffering word, a form of speech disfluency.  People use it as a filler while buying time to think of a more complete thought.  Most modern languages have some form of it, whether it be “err” or “ehhh”.  Most public speakers have gone to great lengths to analyze their speaking methods to eliminate these pause words.  The results, however, seem to point to substitution instead of reconfiguration.

Listen to any presentation involving technical content and you are likely to hear the word “so” more frequently than you’d like.  I’m as bad as anyone.  Since that presentation, I’ve gone to great lengths to eliminate “so” from my speaking vocabulary as a pause word.  Sometimes, I do a pretty good job.  Other times, I don’t do as great of a job.  There are a few people that work in my office that are constantly looking for my uses of “so” and pointing them out when they happen.  It seems that no matter how hard I try, rather than eliminating pause words, I just replace them.  Even in my second presentation, I used “hallmark” a lot more than I should.  Even with a lot of rehearsal, going off the cuff on some things tends to introduce the moments of indecision and thought processes that end in “um”s and “err”s.

I would much prefer that non-verbal cues be given instead of these pause words.  Rather than filling the conversation with unnecessary words, you should use silence as a time to reflect and collect your thoughts.  Provided you aren’t speaking over the phone or via a VoIP conversation, silence shouldn’t be regarded as a negative thing.  By taking a little extra time to analyze your thoughts before you start speaking, you negate the need to fill dead speaking space with unneeded syllables.  An old saying goes, “A pipe gives the wise man time to reflect and the unwise man something to put in his mouth.”  You should treat silence just like the pipe.  Rather than spending time filling the conversation, really think about what you want to say before you say it.  There’s no shame in taking an extra second or two before saying something really insightful or interesting.

I like to record my presentations because it gives me a chance to analyze them at length afterward to see what I was doing wrong.  I don’t listen for content the second or third or fourth time.  Instead, I try to pick out all the verbal garbage and make mental notes to myself to remove it for the next time.  After my IPv6 presentation, I did my best to eliminate “so” from my presenting vocabulary.  Now that I’m conscious of saying it, I can concentrate more on avoiding it.  The same goes for other pause words and comfort sayings, like “basically” or “interestingly”.  Only by repeated viewings of my prior work can I see what needs to be improved.  I would encourage those out there reading this to do the same.  Have a friend record your presentation or do it yourself with a simple tripod setup.  When you’re finished, take the time to analyze yourself.  Be honest.  Don’t give yourself any quarter when it comes to your speaking strategy.  It may be hard to watch yourself on film the first few time you do it, but after a while you begin to realize all the good that it can do for you.  You also learn to start tuning out the sound of your own voice, but that’s a different matter entirely.

Tom’s Take

There’s nothing wrong with speech disfluency.  In moderation, that is.  Words like “um” and “err” should be treated like salt – some is good, but too much ruins the dish.  Instead, focus on being conscious of the pause words and eliminating them from your speaking habits.  Instead, use silence as the best way to fill the void.  You’ll look smarter spending your time thinking about questions and not worrying about what words to fill into the conversation.

Call To Independence

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Paul Revere’s ride – Courtesy of Wikipedia

The life of an independent blogger is never boring.  With all the news coming out about acquisitions and speculations about lines of business converging and moving, we have a lot to write about.  When you factor in the realization that practically no one is secure anymore and the next major data breech is just around the corner, you can see how one might stay busy with all the things coming out that need to be written about.  However, I wanted to take a moment to talk about something that I’ve been hearing recently with regards to the independent blogging community that has me a bit distressed.

In the last couple of months, we’ve seen several of the voices in the blogging community moving on to working with vendors.  It started with Andrew von Nagy (@revolutionwifi) heading to Aerohive.  Since then, we’ve seen Marcus Burton (@marcusburton) jumping to Ruckus Wireless, Hans de Leenheer (@hansdeleenheer) moving to Veeam, and most recently, Derick Winkworth (@cloudtoad) landing at Juniper.  I’ve met each and every one of these people and I greatly admire their work and their voice in the community.  I’m very happy for them that they’ve found gainful employment with a vendor and the fact that they will be bringing their talents and opinions to those that want to hear them is a boon to everyone.  However, I had a chance to talk with Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) the other day on the phone.  We were talking about some Tech Field Day related material when the subject of independent bloggers came up.  Stephen told me that he’d heard from some people out there that we’d lost people like Andrew and Marcus to vendors.  We both agreed that kind of terminology wasn’t the best phrasing for what had occurred.

Yes, it’s true that the bloggers above are no longer independent in the strictest sense of the word.  They now have a vendor patron that will shape their views and give them information and insights that they might not otherwise get elsewhere.  They also still possess the sense of independence and critical thinking that have always made them such great resources for us all.  They are going to keep creating amazing content and helping out the community in every way they can.  They just wear a different shirt to work everyday.  They aren’t dead to us.  We don’t have to recoil in horror every time we speak to them.  Some of the best and brightest people I know work for vendors.  Especially as of late, vendors have shown that they are willing to go out and get the best and brightest of the industry.  Independent bloggers are no different.  Every word that is written or every tweet that is tweeted gives a better picture of the talent of the independent blogging community.  We all listen, and so do the vendors.

Don’t look at a vendor hiring an independent and think to yourself, “Oh boy.  What are we going to do now?”  Instead, look at this as an opportunity.  There are hundreds of people out there that have stories to tell and information to share.  The independent community is overflowing with opportunity to step up and tell the world what you want them to hear.  When you listen to the opening comment videos that I’ve done recently for Tech Field Day events, I always close with the same line – Make sure that your voice is heard.  I chose that line very carefully.  A lot of people will say that an independent blogger needs to “find their voice.”  That statement makes no sense to me.  Those of you out there with more than 30 seconds of experience with something already have a voice.  You have a thinking strategy and an opinion and a way to form words out of those, whether they be out loud or on a printed page.  You don’t need to find your voice.  You need to project it.  Blogging is all about writing down your thoughts.  I initially started this place to codify those thoughts in my head that were 141+ characters and wouldn’t fit on my Twitter stream.  Instead, it’s evolved into a place where I can prognosticate about industry news or give my opinions about things.  The key is that I put all those thoughts down here and get them out there.  People read them.  People comment on them.  People discuss them.  Sometimes people even yell at me about them.  What’s important is that people are talking.  That’s the key to becoming an independent blogger.  Every time I get a new follower on Twitter or a new LinkedIn request, I always go out to see if that person has a blog.  I like to read the things they have to talk about.  I like to see what kind of discussions they are having with people. I like to know more about what makes them tick.  That’s the kind of information that can’t be conveyed in a profile or a 140-character stream.

Those of you out there in the community that are on the fence about making your voice heard need to stop what you are doing right now and go do it.  It doesn’t matter if you think it will amount to anything in the long run.  I sure didn’t think I’d be making 250 posts when I started.  When I was talking to Greg Ferro (@etherealmind) and Ethan Banks (@ecbanks) about their plans for the opening Packet Pushers up to independent bloggers, I told them that I thought it was a great idea because “Everyone has a blog post in them somewhere.”  If I had it to do over again today, I’d probably be a Packet Pushers blogger.  I don’t like the hassle of dealing with site administration stuff.  I don’t like picking themes or deciding what widgets to put in the sidebar.  I care more about the message and the information.  Packet Pushers is great for the blogger that wants to get their feet wet and put out a few posts to gauge interest.  People like Derick and Mrs. Y (@mrsyiswhy) blog almost exclusively on Packet Pushers.  It’s a great platform for the community.  For those of you that want to make a go of it yourself there are also great options available.  WordPress and Blogger offer great free platforms.  Just pick a theme and start writing.  My blog is still hosted by WordPress and likely will be for the foreseeable future.  I’m not in this to make money or rule the world.  I want to share my thoughts and opinions with the world.  I want to generate good technical posts to help people out of tight spots.  I want to make bad NAT videos.  Wordpress helps me do that, and they can help you too.  Even if you start out writing a post a month, the key is to start.  Once you’ve gotten a post or two under your belt, you may find you like it and you want to keep doing it.  I constantly push myself to keep writing because I know that if I stop, I’m not going to keep up with it like I should.  I’m not saying you have to make a post a day, but you need to start before it can become a habit.

In the end, the independent blogging community exists because people write.  People share ideas and start conversations.  The more people that are out there doing those things, the bigger and better the blogger community becomes.  That’s the reason why Google Plus has had such a hard time competing with Facebook.  Facebook is where the people are.  In the blogging community, we already have a large number of people out there reading posts.  In order for us to truly prosper, we need to grow.  When independent bloggers get the chance to go to a vendor, that means that there is all that much more opportunity for someone new to step up.  Participation guarantees citizenship in the independent blogger community.  If you have ever wanted to share with the rest of the world, now is the time to do it.  Sit down and think about that one blog post that everyone has in them.  Write it down tonight.  Don’t worry about grammar or spelling.  Just put the thoughts on paper.  Editing can happen later.  Once you have that good blog post down and committed to paper (or text file), then decide how you want to tell the world about it.  Whether it be Packet Pushers or your own blog, just get everything together and out there so people can start reading it.  Tell the community where to find your blog.  Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and many others are good sounding boards.  Heck, you could rent an airplane to tow a banner around downtown New York City if you wanted.  They important thing is to make sure you are heard so we know where to go to read what you have to say.

If even one person reading this decides to start a blog or share their thoughts about the industry, then I will have succeeded in my call to arms.  I don’t want to hear people telling me that the independent blogging community is being diminished because vendors are hiring the best and brightest.  Instead, I want the vendors to be telling me that there are so many great independent bloggers out there that they couldn’t possibly hire them all even though they want to.  That’s the way to keep a community strong.  And I challenge each and every one of you to make us all great.

Device Naming Conventions

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At some point or another, we’ve all been faced with the ominous screen asking us to name a device.  Whether it be a NetBIOS name or a DNS hostname, in those critical minutes we’ve been under as much pressure as any other time in our careers.  What should we call this thing?  Should I name it something memorable?  Should it be useful?  What about some kind of descriptive codename?  I wanted to share a few things with you that I’ve found over the years that might get a chuckle or two.  Hopefully, they’ll also serve as a yardstick for naming things in the future.

More often than not, desktops that are deployed straight out of the box keep the name that they were programmed with at the factory.  This can be some strange combination of manufacturer or serial number or phases of the moon.  Unless you’re on top of things or you have a VAR doing the installation for you (yay me!), you’ve left the name alone because it’s something that you don’t necessarily care about.  Infrastructure devices, on the other hand, are devices that have to be named to function.  These are the ones that engender the most thought into what they should be called.  My first run-in with an odd naming convention came back in high school.  When I was but a wee lad trying out this scary Internet thing for the first time (through Compuserve, no less), I started emailing a friend that went to more tech-savvy school.  Her email address was hosted by the local university on a mail server they built.  It seems that the seven mail servers that hosted the university and its users were named after Disney’s seven dwarfs.  In particular, this server was named Bashful.  I always thought that was interesting, since my friend was anything but bashful.  As time went on, I realized that people started naming their computers funny things because they wanted to remember what it did or make it have some kind of special significance to them.  When it came time to name a whole set of networked computers, that’s when you usually delved into the depths of literature or popular culture to come up with naming sets.  Groups of collected individuals of diverse skill sets that help you remember what it is that your devices do.  It also affords you the chance to show how clever you think you might be.

Far and away, the most popular naming set for servers/routers/stuff is Greek Mythology.  I’ve worked on more Apollos and Zeus’s and Athenas that I have any other device in history.  Usually, you can figure out what a server is doing based on which deity it’s named after.  Zeus is the domain controller/master server.  Athena is the ticketing database or Sharepoint server.  Hermes is the VoIP server.  Funny thing though.  You hardly ever see Hades doing something.  Usually, it’s a server on the fifth or sixth reload that they don’t really care about.  Also, don’t ask what Tartarus is doing.  It’s never anything good, I assure you.  While the Greeks are popular when it comes to server naming, I’m seeing a huge uptick in Lord of the Rings characters.  This is a bit more problematic for me, since I’m not usually inclined to figure out why someone named a server Merry or Pippin.  Depending on how much server sprawl you have, you may even need to reach down to find characters that weren’t in the movies, like Tom Bombadil.  Of course, every time I see a LotR naming setup, I very much want to change the name of the primary domain controller to Mordor and then disable all user accounts on it.  Why?  Because no one simply logs into Mordor.

On the flip side, I’ve seen users that understand that naming things after Greek gods and Ian McKellen characters can be a bit confusing at times.  So they’ve swung to the complete opposite side of the spectrum and come up with their own naming convention for things.  Normally, I applaud this kind of forward-thinking approach.  However, if your code names only make sense to you, it’s not much better than naming your servers after Best Support Actor Academy Award winners.  For instance, does the server name SW2K332DC050 jump right out and tell you anything meaningful?  It took me many tries to finally figure out that this particular server is running Windows Server 2003 32-bit and is serving as a domain controller.  Of course, that was when the server was first installed.  Now, it’s a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine that’s not a domain controller and is instead running some web-based application.  Faced with a whole page full of names like that is like trying to read the phone book.  Someone coming into this environment would need a cheat sheet or at least access to the server admin team to figure out what server you were working on.

I’m a huge fan of naming conventions that convey the device’s type and purpose on one short line.  Being a VAR, it’s usually critical to me to be able to scan an environment quickly and determine what exactly I’m working with.  Calling a switch 7K-Core-1 allows me to know almost instantly that I’m working on a Nexus 7000 in the core and that there should be at least one other switch (Core-2) somewhere close by.  Naming a switch 2960S-IDC1-1 is almost as effective but can lead to issues when I don’t know where IDC1 is located.  Since I work mostly with K-12 education institutions, I usually fall back on familar location info, such as 3560-Lib-1 or 4500-Caf-2 to help me figure out where I need to start my search for these devices.  I’ve always told people that my documentation habits arise from the need for me to remember exactly what was going on when I did something six months ago.  This goes for naming conventions as well.  I may be looking at this device from a stuffy hotel room three time zones away and not have access to all of the pertinent information before a critical change must be made.  The more descriptive I can make a device name, the better the chances that I won’t accidentally remove EIGRP from the core router.

What types of naming conventions do you use?  Are you a dwarf/deity/fictional character type of person?  How about washing the hostname through an MD5 hash tool before applying it?  Maybe you just name it the first thing you see on your desk when you power it up.  I’d be curious to see what your ideas are.

Why I Dislike Keynotes

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I’d like to take a moment to talk about keynote presentations.  Anyone that has been to a major event in the last hundred years has had the privilege of hearing a keynote address.  Keynote comes from literature, where it describes something that sets an underlying theme.  Keynotes set the tone for everything that follows and serve as a framing mechanism.  At a conference or other gathering, a keynote is usually delivered by an important figure, either a high executive from the conference sponsor or a celebrity of some kind.  The celebrity can be used as a way to generate excitement or publicity about the conference, as people not otherwise interested might sign up just to see the keynote speaker.  Except, there’s just one issue…

I don’t like keynote addresses.

Nope.  None of them.  I’m not singling anyone out here.  I don’t like the idea of a keynote, period.  At most of the conferences and Tech Field Day events that I attend, we have a small mix of people listening to presentations and giving honest and real-time feedback about what they are hearing.  It’s not all that dissimilar from an honors class in college.  Smaller groups that debate topics and ask deeper, probing questions that might not be as welcome in a larger class.  I can specifically remember in my microeconomics class back in college spending two weeks building a utility-based theory of demand.  Once we thought we had our theory nailed down, the professor asked a couple of deceptively simple questions that pulled the rug out from under us and forced us to examine all the hard work that we had been doing for the last two weeks.  He gave us the rest of the day off to think about why we were wrong and when we came to class the next week, we started forming a proper demand theory that addressed all the shortcomings that had been brought up.  It was a fascinating exercise and we all learned a lot from it because we were allowed to take our own path and ask our own questions.  My friend in the larger non-honors section of the same class with the same teacher was simply told how the theory needed to be constructed on the first day of class.  No investigation, no construction.  This is how things are and how you will see them.

Keynote addresses, to me, are much the same as the large class sections.  We have a speaker who holds some importance, whether they be a CEO, CIO, or other famous celebrity.  They get to stand up and spend 45-60 minutes talking.  Their presentation is carefully constructed to display a certain message.  It feels like being in a car wash.  Things are happening around you, but you are locked in for the ride, unable to interact with anything going on.  Questions aren’t invited during a keynote.  You aren’t supposed to provide feedback to this important CxO/celebrity.  Your job as the audience is to sit there and accept what is being spoonfed to you.  That’s what I dislike the most.  I’m a vocal guy, especially when I disagree with something that’s being said.  At smaller gatherings, I can express my dissatisfaction.  Many times, we can have an interesting discussion about things, and often times I can either change my mind or at least see where the speaker is coming from.  In a keynote, I don’t get that opportunity.  I can lean over to the person sitting next to me and say something.  I can take to social media outlets and express my opinion, even if it is limited in character space.  Yet none of that will likely ever reach the person giving the speech.  If I disagree with their assessment or opinion of things, it’s a good chance that others do as well.  If we aren’t allowed to make our feelings on the matter known, then the speaker will likely never understand the dissension to their ideas.

Think about the definition of keynote for a moment.  It is something that is supposed to frame the discussion.  It’s a leading talk at the beginning to direct people to a goal.  What is the purpose of a closing keynote then?  These are usually the celebrity talks.  They involve an interviewer asking leading questions of someone not usually associated with the field in a way to make their opinions and observations relate to a topic at hand.  Almost as if to say “See?  Musicians and movie stars know about information technology too!”  Ask yourself this question: When’s the last time your heard someone exclaim, “I can’t wait to hear <celebrity>’s closing keynote!  I’m interested in their take on data center fabrics.”  Usually, the closing keynote will just serve as a way to generate interest and keep the attendees all the way to the end of the conference.  People want to see the movie star or the famous director talk.  They could care less if that person read numbers out of a phone book for a hour.

Tom’s Take

I can’t really stop keynotes.  I’m going to have to live with them at every conference I attend, with some notable exceptions.  What I can do is tell people how much I’d rather have a frank and open discussion about things.  It’s very easy for a CxO to stand in front of a captive audience and dictate policy and vision.  It’s an entirely different atmosphere when said CxO instead spends that time fielding questions and having frank discussions with people.  Would you rather hear about sweeping changes and visionary statements?  Or would you rather ask questions and get the chance to hear honest feedback?  I know which I’d rather have.  So while you might see me sitting in a keynote address from time to time, know that I’ve got something else on my mind entirely.