I’ve been at Networking Field Day this week, and as always the conversations have been great and focused around a variety of networking topics. One that keeps jumping out at me is network analytics. There’s a few things that have come up that were especially interesting to me:
Don’t ask yourself if networking monitoring is not worth your time. Odds are good you’re already monitoring stuff in your network and you don’t even realize it. Many networking vendors enable basic analytics for troubleshooting purposes. You need to figure out how to build that into a bigger part of your workflows.
Remember that analytics can integrate with platforms you’re already using. If you’re using ServiceNow you can integrate everything into it. No better way to learn how analytics can help you than to setup some kind of ticket generation for down networks. And, if that automation causes you to get overloaded with link flaps you’ll have even more motivation to figure out why your provider can’t keep things running.
Don’t discount open source tools. The world has come a long way since MRTG and Cacti. In fact, a lot of the flagship analytics platforms are built with open source tools as a starting point. If you can figure out how to use the “free” versions, you can figure out how to implement the bigger stuff too. The paid versions may look nicer or have deeper integrations, but you can bet that they all work mostly the same under the hood.
Finally, remember that you can’t possible deal with all this data yourself. You can collect it but parsing it is like trying to drink from a firehose of pond water. You need to treat the data and then analyze that result. Find tools (probably open source) that help you understand what you’re seeing. If it saves you 10 minutes of looking, it’s worth it.
Tom’s Take
Be sure to say tuned to our Gestalt IT On-Premise IT Roundtable podcast in the coming weeks for more great discussion on the analytics topic. We’ve got an episode that should be out soon that will take the discussion of the “expense” of networking analytics in a new direction.
In case you haven’t noticed recently, there are a lot of people that have been going to work for vendors and manufacturers of computer equipment. Microsoft has scored more than a few of them, along with Cohesity, Rubrik, and many others. This is something that I see frequently from my position at Tech Field Day. We typically hear the rumblings of a person looking to move on to a different position early on because we talk to a great number of companies. We also hear about it because it represents a big shift for those who are potential delegates for our events. Because going to a vendor means loss of their independence. But what does that really mean?
Undeclaring Independence
When people go to work for a manufacturer of a computing product, the necessarily lose their independence. But that’s not the only case where that happens. You can also not be truly independent if you work for reseller. If your company specializes in Cisco and EMC, are you truly independent when discussion Juniper and NetApp? If you make your money by selling one group of products you’re going to be unconsciously biased toward them. If you’ve been burned or had the rug pulled out from under you by a vendor, you may be biased against them.
Likewise, if you work yourself in an independent consulting business, are you honestly and truly independent? That would mean you’re making no money from any vendor as your customer. That means no drafting of whitepapers, no testing, and no interaction with them that involves compensation. This falls into the same line of thinking as the reseller employee. Strictly speaking, you aren’t totally independent.
Independence would really mean not even being involved in the market. A public defender is truly independent of IT. A plumber is independent of IT. They don’t have biases. They don’t care either way what type of computer or network solution they use. But you don’t consider a public defender or a plumber to be an expert on IT. Because in order to know anything about IT you have to understand the companies. You have to talk to them and get what they’re doing. And that means you’re going to start forming opinions about them. But, truthfully, real independence is not what you’re looking for here.
Partial Neutrality
Instead of independence, which is a tricky subject, what you should look for is impartiality. Being impartial means treating everything fairly. You accept that you have bias and you try to overcome it. For example, judges are impartial. They have their own opinions and thoughts about subjects. They rule based on the law. They aren’t independent of the justice system. Instead, they do their best to use logic and rules to decide matters.
Likewise, people in IT should strive to be impartial. Instead of forming an opinion about something without thought we should try to look at all aspects of the ideas before we form our opinions. I used to be a huge fan of IBM Thinkpad laptops. I carried one for many years at my old job. Today, I’m a huge fan of MacBooks. I use one every day. Does that mean that I don’t like Windows laptops any more? It means that I don’t use them enough to have a solid opinion. I may compare some of the features I have on my current laptop against the ones that I see, but I also recognize that I am making that comparison and that I need to take it into account when I arrive at my decision.
Extending this further, when making decisions about how we analyze a solution from a company, we have to take into account how impartial we’re going to be in every direction. When you work for a company that makes a thing, whether it be a switch or a laptop or a car, you’re going to be partial to the thing you make. That’s just how people are. We like things we are involved in making. Does that mean we are incapable of admiring other things? No, but it does mean that we have some things to overcome to truly be impartial.
The hardest part of trying to be impartial is realizing when you aren’t. Unconscious bias creeps in all the time. Thoughts about the one time you used a bad product or ate bad food in a restaurant make you immediately start thinking about buying something else quickly. Even when it’s unfounded we still do it. And we have to recognize when we’re doing it in order to counter it.
Being impartial isn’t easy on purpose. Being able to look at all sides of an issue, both good and bad, takes a lot of extra effort. We don’t always like seeing the good in something we dislike or finding the bad parts of an opinion we agree with. But in order to be good judges of things we need to find the balance.
Tom’s Take
I try my best to be impartial. I know it’s hard to do. I have the fortune to be independent. Sure, I’m still a CCIE so I have a lot of Cisco knowledge. I also have a lot of relationships with people in the industry. A lot of those same people work at companies that are my customers. In the end, I have to realize that I need to work hard to be impartial every day. That’s the only way I can say that I’m independent and capable of evaluating things on their own merits. It’s just a matter of having the right perspective.
I recorded a fantastic episode of The Network Collective last night with some great friends from the industry. The topic was privacy. Originally I thought we were just going to discuss how NAT both was and wasn’t a form of privacy and how EUI-64 addressing wasn’t the end of days for people worried about being tracked. But as the show wore on, I realized a few things about privacy.
Booming In Peace
My mom is a Baby Boomer. We learn about them as a generation based on some of their characteristics, most notably their rejection of the values of their parents. One of things they hold most dear is their privacy. They grew up in a world where they could be private people. They weren’t living in a 1 or 2 room house with multiple siblings. They had the right of privacy. They could have a room all to themselves if they so chose.
Baby Boomers, like my mom, are intensely private adults. They marvel at the idea that targeted advertisements can work for them. When Amazon shows them an ad for something they just searched for they feel like it’s a form of dark magic. They also aren’t trusting of “new” things. I can still remember how shocked my mother was that I would actively get into someone else’s car instead of a taxi. When I explained that Uber and Lyft do a similar job of vetting their drivers it still took some convincing to make her realize that it was safe.
Likewise, the Boomer generation’s personal privacy doesn’t mesh well with today’s technology. While there are always exceptions to every rule, the number of people in their mid-50s and older that use Twitter and Snapchat are far, far less than the number that is the target demographic for each service. I used to wonder if it was because older people didn’t understand the technology. But over time I started to realize that it was more based on the fact that older people just don’t like sharing that kind of information about themselves. They’re not open books. Instead, Baby Boomers take a lot of studying to understand.
Zee Newest
On the opposite side of the spectrum is my son’s generation, Generation Z. GenZ is the opposite of the Boomer generation when it comes to privacy. They have grown up in a world that has never known anything but the ever-present connectivity of the Internet. They don’t understand that people can live a life without being watched by cameras and having everything they do uploaded to YouTube. Their idea of celebrity isn’t just TV and movie stars but also extends to video game streamers on Twitch or Instagram models.
Likewise, this generation is more open about their privacy. They understand that the world is built on data collection. They sign away their information. But they tend to be crafty about it. Rather than acting like previous generations that would fill out every detail of a form this generation only fills out the necessary pieces. And they have been known to put in totally incorrect information for no other reason than to throw people off.
GenZ realizes that the privacy genie is out of the bottle. They have to deal with the world they were born into, just like the Baby Boomers and the other generations that came before them. But the way that they choose to deal with it is not through legislation but instead through self-regulation. They choose what information they expose so as not to create a trail or a profile that big data consuming companies can use to fingerprint them. And in most cases, they don’t even realize they’re doing it! My son is twelve and he instinctively knows that you don’t share everything about yourself everywhere. He knows how to navigate his virtual neighborhood just a sure as I knew how to ride my bike around my physical one back when I was his age.
Tom’s Take
Where does that leave me and my generation? Well, we’re a weird mashup on Generation X and Generation Y/Millenials. We aren’t as private as our parents and we aren’t as open as our children. We’re cynical. We’re rebelling against what we see as our parent’s generation and their complete privacy. Likewise, just like our parents, we are almost aghast at the idea that our children could be so open. We’re coming to live in a world where Big Data is learning everything about us. And our children are growing up in that world. Their children, the generation after GenZ, will only know a world where everyone knows everything already. Will it be like Minority Report, where advertising works with retinal patterns? Or will it be a generation where we know everything but really know nothing because no one tells the whole truth about who they are?
My good friend and colleague Rich Stroffolino (@MrAnthropology) is collecting Tales from the Trenches about times when we did things that we didn’t expect to cause problems. I wanted to share one of my own here about the time I knocked a school offline with a debug command.
I Got Your Number
The setup for this is pretty simple. I was deploying a CallManager setup for a multi-site school system deployment. I was using local gateways at every site to hook up fax lines and fire alarms with FXS/FXO ports for those systems to dial out. Everything else got backhauled to a voice gateway at the high school with a PRI running MGCP.
I was trying to figure out why the station IDs that were being send by the sites weren’t going out over caller ID. Everything was showing up as the high school number. I needed to figure out what was being sent. I was at the middle school location across town and trying to debug via telnet. I logged into the router and figured I would make a change, dial my cell phone from the VoIP phone next to me, and see what happened. Simple troubleshooting, right?
I did just that. My cell phone got the wrong caller ID. And my debug command didn’t show me anything. So I figured I must be debugging the wrong thing. Not debug isdn q931 after all. Maybe it’s a problem with MGCP. I’ll check that. But I just need to make sure I’m getting everything. I’ll just debug it all.
debug mgcp packet detail
Can You Hear Me Now?
Veterans of voice are probably screaming at me right now. For those who don’t know, debug anything detail generates a ton of messages. And I’m not consoled into the router. I’m remote. And I didn’t realize how big of a problem that was until my console started scrolling at 100 miles an hour. And then froze.
Turns out, when you overwhelm a router CPU with debug messages, it shuts off the telnet window. It also shuts off the console as well, but I wouldn’t have known that because I was way far way from that port. But I did starting hearing people down the hall saying, “Hello? Hey, are you still there? Weird, it just went dead.”
Guess what else a router isn’t doing when it’s processing a tidal wave of debug messages? It’s not processing calls. At all. For five school sites. I looked down at my watch. It was 2:00pm. That’s bad. Elementary schools get a ton of phone calls within the last hour of being in session. Parents calling to tell kids to wait in a pickup line or ride a certain bus home. Parents wanting to check kids out early. All kinds of things. That need phones.
I raced out of my back room. I acknowledged the receptionists comment about the phones not working. I jumped in my car and raced across town to the high school. I managed not to break any speed limits, but I also didn’t loiter one bit. I jumped out of my car and raced into the building. The look on my face must have warded off any comments about phone system issues because no one stopped me before I got to the physical location of the voice gateway.
I knew things were bad. I didn’t have time to console in and remove the debug command. I did what ever good CCIE has been taught since the beginning of time when they need to remove a bad configuration that broke their entire lab.
I pulled the power cable and cycled the whole thing.
I was already neck deep in it. It would have taken me at least five minutes to get my laptop ready and consoled in. In hindsight, that would have been five wasted minutes since the MGCP debugger would have locked out the console anyway. As the router was coming back up, I nervously looked at the terminal screen for a login prompt. Now that the debugger wasn’t running, everything looked normal. I waiting impatiently for the MGCP process to register with CallManager once more.
I kept repeating the same status CLI command while I refreshed the gateway page in CallManager over and over. After a few more tense minutes, everything was back to normal. I picked up a phone next to the rack and dialed my cell phone. It rang. I was happy. I walked back to the main high school office and told them that everything was back to normal.
Tom’s Take
My post-mortem was simple. I did dumb things. I shouldn’t have debugged remotely. I shouldn’t have used the detail keyword for something so simple. In fact, watching my screen fill up with five sites worth of phone calls in a fraction of a second told me there was too much going on behind the scenes for me to comprehend anyway.
That was the last time I ever debugged anything in detail. I made sure from that point forward to start out small and then build from there to find my answers. I also made sure that I did all my debugging from the console and not a remote access window. And the next couple of times I did it were always outside of production hours with a hand ready to yank the power cable just in case.
I didn’t save the day. At best, all I did was cover for my mistake. If it had been a support call center or a hospital I probably would have been fired for it. I made a bad decision and managed to get back to operational without costing money or safety.
Remember when you’re doing your job that you need to keep an eye on how your job will affect everything else. We don’t troubleshoot in a vacuum after all.
The world famous Cisco Live Sign picture, 2018 edition
Another Cisco Live has come and gone. Overall it was a fun time for many. Catching up with friends. Meeting people for the first time. Enjoying the balmy Orlando weather. It was a chance to relive some great times for every one. But does Cisco Live 2018 dictate how the future of the event will go?
Packing The Schedule
Did you get a chance to attend any of the social events at Cisco Live? There were a ton. There were Tweetups and meet ups and special sessions galore. There was every opportunity to visit a lounge or area dedicated to social media presence, Boomerang videos, goofy pictures, or global outreach. Every twenty feet had something for you to do or some way for you to make an impact.
In fact, if you went to all of these things you probably didn’t have time for much else. Definitely not time for the four or five keynote addresses. Or a certification test. Or the classes and sessions. In fact, if you tried to do everything there was to do at Cisco Live, you’d probably not sleep the whole week. There’s almost as much stuff to do outside the conference sessions as there is to do in them.
But is it too much? Are the activities around the learning sessions taking away from the conference itself? Think about something like the Big Ideas theater this year. In theory, it’s a great way to get people to attend sessions that are not specifically related to tech. You can introduce new ideas, especially those that are focused more on changing the world. But you’re also competing for time away from sessions that are focused on new products or building better architectures.
Every booth in the World of Solutions is designed to draw you in and keep you there. For the sponsors of the event it’s important to have conversations about their products and solutions. For Cisco people, it’s almost like they’re competing with the sessions to give you different content or a chance to interview people. Is that how things should be? I can understand the desire of DevNet wanting to change the way people look at programmable networking, for example. But every other little booth like Cisco Advanced Services or the Emergency Response Vehicle? Those feel more like attractions designed to show off rather than educate.
Paying the Piper
And what does all this cost in the long run? Sure, I love having extra features around the conference as much as the next person. But to what end? Things don’t pay for themselves. Every conference has a budget. Every piece of entertainment and every showcase booth costs money in some way or another. And how does that all get paid for? By us, the attendees.
It’s no secret that attending conferences isn’t cheap. A full conference pass for Cisco Live is around $2,000. In the past, there were cheaper options for just attending for the people networking aspect of things. But, with the growth of DevNet and other “included” options at the conference, Cisco needed to find a way to pay for them this year.
I’m not going to spend a lot of time going into the Imagine Pass issue right now because I want to sit down and have an honest discussion with Cisco about the pros and cons of the approach. But it is very important that we examine what we’re getting for the increased cost. There has to be a significant value for people to want to be a part of the event if the costs go up. The way to do that is to create compelling reasons to want to be at Cisco Live.
The way not to do that is to lock the content behind gates. Some of the things at Cisco Live this year were placed in areas that were not easy to access. One of my personal pet peeves is the NetVet lounge. I’m going to start this off by saying that I was a NetVet for many years before I moved to Tech Field Day. I’m no longer a NetVet. However, until 2013 the NetVet lounge was one of the de facto social hangout places. Now, it’s another area where you can get coffee and snacks.
Why does the NetVet lounge bother me? Because of the placement. Front and center across the aisle from the on-site Cisco Store (which took the place of the Social Media hub from 2013). Why does the NetVet lounge get to be outside the World of Solutions? Aside from the historical reasons, I can’t think of a good reason. You need to have a full conference pass to achieve NetVet status. A full conference pass gets you into the World of Solutions. Why not have NetVets meet there?
The obvious reason is that the World of Solutions closes. Yet the NetVet lounge does too. And the hours are pretty similar. Why not move the NetVet lounge into the World of Solutions and give that space to the Social Media folks. There are no restrictions on getting into the Social Media Hub. Why not have them front and center? Again, aside from the “tradition” of having the NetVet lounge outside the World of Solutions I can’t think of a good reason.
Tom’s Take
I love Cisco Live. I realized this year that I’ve been to thirteen of them. Every year since 2006. The conference has changed and grown. The focus has shifted. But the people remain the same. With the changes in the way that the pass structure the people may not be there much longer. We, as IT professionals, need to decide what’s important and give some feedback. We need to make it constructive and honest. Point out what works and what doesn’t. Don’t whine, but offer direct criticism. We can only make the conference we want by telling the people what we need. That’s how you make Cisco Live a place to be for now and for the future.
In IT we’ve all heard of Impostor Syndrome by now. The feeling that you’re not just a lucky person that has no real skills or is skating by on the seat of their pants is a very real thing. I’ve felt it an many of my friends and fellow members of the community have felt it too. It’s easy to deal with when you have time to think or work on your own. However, when you take your show on the road it can creep up before you know it.
Conferences are a great place to meet people and learn about new ideas. It’s also a place where your ideas will be challenged and put on display. It’s not to difficult to imagine meeting a person for the first time at a place like Cisco Live or VMworld and not feeling little awe-inspired. After all, this could be a person whose works you’ve read for a long time. It could be a person you look up to or someone you would like to have mentor you.
For those in the position of being thrust into the limelight, it can be extremely difficult to push aside those feelings of Impostor Syndrome or even just a general level of anxiety. When people are coming up to you and thanking you for the content you create or even taking it to further extremes, like bowing for example, it can feel like you’re famous and admired for nothing at all.
What the members of the community have to realize is that these feelings are totally natural. You’re well within your rights to want to shy away from attention or be modest. This is doubly true for those of us that are introverts, which seems to happen in higher numbers in IT.
How can you fight these feelings?
Realize You Are Enough. I know it sounds silly to say it but you have to realize that you are enough. You are the person that does what they can every day to make the world a better place in every way you can. It might be something simple like tweeting about a problem you fixed. It may be as impressive as publishing your own network automation book. But you still have to stop and realize you are enough to accomplish your goals.
For those out there that want to tell their heroes and mentors in the community how awesome they are, remember that you’re also forcing them to look at themselves in a critical light sometimes. Some reassurances like, “I love the way you write” or “Your ability to keep the podcast going smoothly” are huge compliments that people appreciate. Because they represent skills that are honed and practiced.
Be The Best You That You Can Be. This one sounds harder than it might actually be. Now that you’ve admitted that you’re enough, you need to keep being the best person that you can be. Maybe that’s continuing to write great content. Maybe it’s something as simple as taking a hour out of your day to learn a new topic or interact with some new people on social media. It’s important that you take your skill set and use it to make things better overall for everyone.
For those out there that are amazed at the amount of content that someone can produce or the high technical quality of what they’re working on, remember that we’re all the same. We all have the same 24 hours in the day to do what we do. So the application of the time spent studying or learning about something is what separates leaders from the pack.
Build Up Others Slowly. This one is maybe the hardest of all. When you’re talking to people and building them up from nothing, you need to be sure to take your time in bringing them along. You can’t just swamp them with knowledge and minute details about their life that have gleaned from reading blogs or LinkedIn. You need, instead, to bring people along slowly and build them up from nothing into the greatest person that you know.
This works in reverse as well. Don’t walk up to someone and start listing off their requirements like a resume. Instead, give them some time to discuss it with you. Let the person you’re talking to dictate a portion of the conversation. Even though you may feel the need to overwhelm with information to justify the discussion you should let them come to their place when they are ready. That prevents the feeling of being overwhelmed and makes the conversation much, much easier.
Tom’s Take
It’s very easy to get lost in the world of feeling inadequate about what others think of you. It goes from adulation and excitement to an overwhelming sense of dread that you’re going to let people down. You have to fix that by realizing that you’re enough and doing the best you can with what you have. If you can say that emphatically about yourself then you are well on the way to ensuring that Conference Imposter Syndrome is something you won’t have to worry about.
I had a very interesting conversation today with some friends about predictive wireless surveys. The question was really more of a confirmation: Do you need to draw your walls in the survey plan when deciding where to put your access points? Now, before you all run screaming to the comments to remind me that “YES YOU DO!!!”, there were some other interesting things that were offered that I wanted to expound upon here.
Don’t Trust, Verify
One of the most important parts of the wall question is material. Rather than just assuming that every wall in the building is made from gypsum or from wood, you need to actually go to the site or have someone go and tell you what the building material is made from. Don’t guess about the construction material.
Why? Because not everyone uses the same framing for buildings. Wood beams may be popular in one type of building, but steel reinforcement is used in other kinds. And you don’t want to base your predictive survey on one only to find out it’s the other.
Likewise, you need to make sure that the wall itself is actually made of what you think it is. Find out what kind of sheetrock they used. Make sure it’s not actually something like stucco plastered over chicken wire. Chicken wire as the structure of a plaster wall is a guaranteed Faraday Cage.
Another fun thing to run across is old buildings. One site survey I did for a wireless bid involved making sure that a couple of buildings on the outer campus were covered as well. When I asked about the buildings and when they were made, I found out they had been built in the 1950s and were constructed like bomb shelters. Thick concrete walls everywhere. Reinforcement all throughout. Once I learned this, the number of APs went up and the client had to get an explanation of why all the previous efforts to cover the buildings with antennas hadn’t worked out so well.
X-Ray Vision
Speaking of which, you also need to make sure to verify the structures underneath the walls. Not just the reinforcement. But the services behind the walls. For example, water pipes go everywhere in a building. They tend to be concentrated in certain areas but they can run the entire length of a floor or across many floors in a high rise.
Why are water pipes bad for wireless? Well, it turns out that the resonant frequency of water is the same as 802.11b/g/n – 2.4GHz. It’s how microwaves operate. And water loves to absorb radiation in that spectral range. Which means water pipes love to absorb wireless signals. So you need to know where they are in the building.
Architectural diagrams are a great way to find out these little details. Don’t just assume that walking through a building and staring at a wall is going to give you every bit of info you need. You need to research plans, blueprints, and diagrams about things. You need to understand how these things are laid out in order to know where to locate access points and how to correct predictive surveys when they do something unexpected.
Lastly, don’t forget to take into account the movement and placement of things. We often wish we could get involved in a predictive survey at the beginning of the project. A greenfield building is a great time to figure out the best place to put APs so we don’t have to go crawling over bookcases. However, you shouldn’t discount the chaos that can occur when an office is furnished or when people start moving things around. Things like plants don’t matter as much as when someone moves the kitchen microwave across the room or decides to install a new microphone system in the conference room without telling anyone.
Tom’s Take
Wireless engineers usually find out when the take the job that it involves being part radio engineer, part networking engineer, part artist, and part construction general contractor. You need to know a little bit about how buildings are made in order to make the invisible network operate optimally. Sure, traditional networking guys have it easy. They can just avoid running cables by florescent lights or interference sources and be good. But wireless engineers need to know if the very material of the wall is going to cause problems for them.
Ivan Pepelnjak has an interesting post up today about MacGyver-ing in the network. He and Simon Milhomme are right that most small-to-medium sized networks are pretty much non-reference architectures and really, really difficult to manage and maintain properly on the best of days. On the worst of days, they’re a nightmare that make you want to run screaming into the night. But why?
One Size Never Fits All
Part of the issue is that reference architectures and cookie-cutter designs aren’t made for SMEs. Sure, the large enterprise and cloud providers have their own special snowflakes. But so too do small IT shops that have been handed a pile of parts and told to make it work.
People like Greg Ferro and Peyton Maynard-Koran believe this is due to vendors and VARs pushing hardware and sales cycles like crazy. I have attributed it to the lack of real training and knowledge about networking. But, it also has a lot to do with the way that people see IT as a cost center. We don’t provide value like marketing. We don’t collect checks like accounting. At best, we’re no different than the utility companies. We’re here because we have to be.
Likewise, when IT is forced into making decisions based on some kind of rebate or sale we tend to get stuck with the blame when things don’t work correctly. People that wouldn’t bat an eye at buying a new Rolex or BMW get downright frugal when they’re deciding which switches to buy to run their operation for the next 10 years. So, they compromise. Surely you all can make this switch work? It only has half the throughput as the one you originally specced but it was on sale!
So, stuck with bad decisions and no real documentation or reference points, we IT wizards do what we can with what we have. Just like Angus MacGyver. Sure, those networks are a pain to manage. They’re a huge issue when it’s time to upgrade to the next discount switch. And given the number of fires that we have to fight on a daily basis we never get a chance to go back and fix when we nailed up in the first place. Nothing is more permanent than a temporary fix. And no install lasts longer than one that was prefaced with “let me just get this working for the next week”.
Bespoke Off The Rack
So, how do we fix the MacGyver-ing? It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be painful and require us to step out of our comfort zones.
Shut Up And Do As I Say. This one is hard. Instead of having management breathing down your neck to get something installed or working on their schedule, you need to push back. You need to tell people that rushing is only going to complicate things. You need to fire back when someone hands you equipment that doesn’t meet your spec. You need to paraphrase the famous Shigeru Miyamoto – “A delayed network is eventually good, but a rushed installation is bad forever.”
Document Like It Will Be Read Aloud In Court. Documentation isn’t just a suggestion. It’s a necessity. We’ve heard about the “hit by a bus” test. It’s more than just that, though. You need to not only be able to replace yourself but also to be able to have references for why you made the decisions you did. MacGyver-ing happens when we can’t remember why we made the decisions we did. It happens when we need to come up with a last minute solution to an impossible problem created by other people (NSFW language). Better to have that solution documented in full so you know what’s going on three years from now.
Plan Like It’s Happening Tomorrow. Want to be ready for a refresh? Plan it today. Come back to your plan. Have a replacement strategy for every piece of equipment in your organization. Refresh the plan every few months. When someone comes to you with a new idea or a new thing, write up a plan. Yes, it’s going to be a lot of spinning your wheels. but it’s also going to be a better solution when someone comes to you and says that it’s time to make a project happen. Then, all you need to do is pull out your plan and make it happen. Imagine it like the opposite of a DR plan – Instead of the worst case scenario this is your chance to make it the best case.
Tom’s Take
There’s a reason the ringtone on my phone has been the theme from MacGyver for the last 15 years. I’m good at building something out of nothing. Making things work when they shouldn’t. And, as bad as it sounds, sometimes that’s what’s needed. Especially in the VAR world. But it shouldn’t be standard operating procedure. Instead, make your plan, execute it when the time comes, and make sure no one pushes you into a situation where MacGyver-ing is the last option you have.
SD-WAN is about migrating your legacy hardware away from silos like MPLS and policy-based routing and instead integrating everything under one dashboard and one central location to make changes and see the impacts that those changes have. But there’s one thing that SD-WAN can’t really do yet. And that’s prepare us the for the end of TDM voice.
Can You Hear Me Now?
Voice is a way of life for some people. Cisco spent years upon years selling CallManager into every office they could. From small two-line shops to global organizations with multiple PRIs and TEHO configured everywhere. It was a Cisco staple for years. Which also had Avaya following along quickly to get into the act too.
Today’s voice world is a little less clear. Millenials hate talking on the phone. Video is an oddity when it comes to communications. Asynchronous chat programs like WhatsApp or Slack rule the day today. People would rather communicate via text than voice. We all have mobile devices and the phone may be one of the least used apps on it.
Where does that leave traditional voice services? Not in a good place for sure. We still need phone lines for service-focused businesses or when we need to call a hotline for support. But the office phone system isn’t getting any new features anytime soon. The phone system is like the fax machine in the corner. It’s a feature complete system that is used when it has to be used by people that are forced to use it unhappily.
Voice systems are going to stay where they are by virtue of their ubiquity. They exist because TDM technology hasn’t really advanced in the past 20 years. We still have twisted pair connections to deliver FXO lines. We still have the most basic system in place to offer services to our potential customers and users. I know this personally because when I finally traded out my home phone setup for a “VoIP” offering from my cable provider, it was really just an FXS port on the back of a residential cable modem. That’s as high-tech as it gets. TDM is a solved problem.
Call If You WANt To
So, how does SD-WAN play into this? Well, as it turns out, SD-WAN is replacing the edge router very quickly. Devices that used to be Cisco ISRs are now becoming SD-WAN edge devices. They aggregate WAN connections and balance between them. They take MPLS and broadband and LTE instead of serial and other long-forgotten connection methods.
But you know what SD-WAN appliances can’t aggregate? TDM lines. They don’t have cards that can accept FXO, FXS, or even PRI lines. They don’t have a way to provide for DSP add-in cards or even come with onboard transcoding resources. There is no way for an SD-WAN edge appliance to function as anything other than a very advanced packet router.
This is a good thing for SD-WAN companies. It means that they have a focused, purpose built device that has more software features than hardware muscle. SD-WAN should be all about data packets. It’s not a multitool box. Even the SD-WAN vendors that ship their appliances with LTE cards aren’t trying to turn them into voice routers. They’re just easing the transition for people that want LTE backup for data paths.
Voice devices were moved out of the TDM station and shelf and into data routers as Cisco and other companies tried to champion voice over IP. We’re seeing the fallout from those decisions today. As the data routing devices become more specialized and focused on the software aspects of the technology, the hardware pieces that the ISR platform specialized in are now becoming a yoke holding the platform back. Now, those devices are causing those platforms to fail to evolve.
I can remember when I was first thinking about studying for my CCIE Voice lab back in 2007-2008. At the time, the voice lab still have a Catalyst 6500 switch running in it that needed to be configured. It had a single T1 interface on a line card that you had to get up and running in CallManager. The catch? That line card would only work with a certain Supervisor engine that only ran CatOS. So, you have to be intimately familiar with CatOS in order to run that lab. I decided that it wasn’t for me right then and there.
Hardware can hold the software back. ISRs can’t operate voice interfaces in SD-WAN mode. You can’t get all the advanced features of the software until you pare the hardware down to the bare minimum needed to route data packets. If you need to have the router function as a TDM aggregator or an SBC/IPIPGW you realize that the router really should be dedicated to that purpose. Because it’s functioning more as a TDM platform than a packet router at that point.
Tom’s Take
The world of voice that I lived in five or six years ago is gone. It’s been replaced with texting and Slack/Spark/WebEx Teams. Voice is dying. Cell phones connect us more than we’ve ever been before but yet we don’t want to talk to each other. That means that the rows and rows of desk phones we used to use are falling by the wayside. And so too are the routers that used to power them. Now, we’re replacing those routers with SD-WAN devices. And when the time finally comes for use to replace those TDM devices, what will we use? That future is very murky indeed.
Peyton Maynard-Koran was the keynote speaker at InteropITX this year. If you want to catch the video, check this out:
Readers of my blog my remember that Peyton and I don’t see eye-to-eye on a few things. Last year I even wrote up some thoughts about vendors and VARs that were a direct counterpoint to many of the things that have been said. It has even gone further with a post from Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind) about the intelligence level of the average enterprise IT customer. I want to take a few moments and explore one piece of this puzzle that keeps being brought up: You.
Protein Robots
You are a critical piece of the IT puzzle. Why? You’re a thinking person. You can intuit facts and extrapolate cause from nothing. You are NI – natural intelligence. There’s an entire industry of programmers chasing what you have. They are trying to build it into everything that blinks or runs code. The first time that any company has a real breakthrough in true artificial intelligence (AI) beyond complicated regression models will be a watershed day for us all.
However, you are also the problem. You have requirements. You need a salary. You need vacation time. You need benefits and work/life balance to keep your loved ones happy. You sometimes don’t pick up the phone at 3am when the data center blinks out of existence. It’s a challenge to get you what you need while still extracting the value that is needed from you.
Another awesome friend Andrew von Nagy (@RevolutionWiFi) coined the term “protein robots”. That’s basically what we are. Meatbags. Walking brains that solve problems that cause BGP to fall over when presented with the wrong routing info or cause wireless signals to dissipate into thing air. We’re a necessary part of the IT equation.
Sure, people are trying to replace us with automation and orchestration. It’s the most common complaint about SDN that I’ve heard to date: automation is going to steal my job. I’ve railed against that for years in my talks. Automation isn’t going to steal your job, but it will get you a better one. It will get you a place in the organization to direct and delegate and not debug and destroy. In the end, automation isn’t coming for your job as long as you’re trying to get a better one.
All Aboard The Train!
The unseen force that’s opposing upward mobility is training. In order to get a better job, you need to be properly trained to do it. Maybe it’s a lot of experience from running a network for years. Perhaps it’s a training class you get to go to or a presentation online you can watch. No matter what you need to have new skills to handle new job responsibilities. Even if you’re breaking new ground in something like AI development you’re still acquiring new skills along the way. Hopefully, if you’re in a new field, you’re writing them all down for people to follow in your footsteps one day.
However, training is in opposition to what your employer wants for you. It sounds silly, doesn’t it? Yet, we still hear the quote attributed to W. Edwards Deming – “What happens if we train our people and they leave? What happens if we don’t and they stay?” Remember, as we said above you are a protein robot that needs things like time off and benefits. All of those things are seen as an investment in you.
Training is another investment that companies like to tout. When I worked at a VAR, we considered ourselves some of the most highly trained people around. The owner told me when I started that he was “going to put half a million dollars into training me.” When I asked him about that number after five years he told me it felt like he put a kid through college. And that was before my CCIE. The more trained people you have, the easier your job becomes.
But an investment in training can also backfire. Professionals can take that training and put it to use elsewhere. They can go to a different job and take more money. They can refuse to do a job until they are properly trained. The investments that people make in training are often unrealized relative to the amount of money that it costs to make it happen.
It doesn’t help that training prices have skyrocketed. It used to be that I just needed to go down to the local bookstore and find a copy of a CCNA study guide to get certified. I knew I’d reached a new point in my career when I couldn’t buy my books at the bookstore. Instead, I had to seek out the knowledge that I needed elsewhere. And yes, sometimes that knowledge came in the form of bootcamps that cost thousands of dollars. Lucky for me that my employer at the time looked at that investment and said that it was something they would pick up. But I know plenty of folks that can’t get that kind of consideration. Especially when the training budget for the whole department won’t cover one VMware ICM class.
Employers don’t want employees to be too trained. Because you have legs. Because you can get fed up. Because you can leave. The nice thing about making investments in hardware and software is that it’s stuck at a location. A switch is an asset. A license for a feature can’t be transferred. Objects are tied to the company. And their investments can be realized and recovered. Through deprecation or listing as an asset with competitive advantage companies can recover the value they put into a physical thing.
Professionals, on the other hand, aren’t as easy to deal with. Sure, you can list a CCIE as an important part of your business. But what happens if they leave? What happens when they decide they need a raise? Or, worse yet, when they need to spend six months studying for a recertification? The time taken to learn things is often not factored into the equation when we discuss how much training costs. Some of my old coworkers outright refused to get certified if they had to study on their own time. They didn’t want their free non-work time taken up by reading over MCSE books or CCNA guides. Likewise, the company didn’t want to waste billable hours from someone not providing value. It was a huge catch-22.
Running In Place
Your value is in your skillset at the company you work for. They derive that value from you. So, they want you to stay where you are. They want you trained just enough to do your job. They don’t want you to have your own skillset that could be valuable before they get their value from you. And they definitely don’t want you to take your skillset to a competitor. How can you fix that?
Don’t rely on your company to pay for your training. There are a lot of great resources out there that you can use to learn without needed to drop big bucks for a bootcamp. Use bootcamps to solidify your learning after the fact. Honestly, if you’re in a bootcamp to learn something you’re in the wrong class. Read blogs. Buy books from Amazon. Get your skills the old fashioned way.
Be ready to invest time. Your company doesn’t want you using their billable time for learning. So that means you are going to make an investment instead. The best part is that even an hour of studying instead of binge watching another episode of House is time well-spent on getting another important skill. And if it happened on your own time, you’re not going to have to pay that back.
Be ready to be uncomfortable. It’s going to happen. You’re going to feel lost when you learn something new. You’re going to make mistakes while you’re practicing it. And, honestly, you’re going to feel uncomfortable going to your boss to ask for more money once you’re really good at what you’re doing. If you’re totally comfortable when learning something new, you’re doing it wrong.
Tom’s Take
Companies want protein robots. They want workers that give 125% at all times and can offer a wide variety of skills. They want compliant workers that never want to go anywhere else. Don’t be that robot. Push back. Learn what you can on your time. Be an asset but not an immobile one. You need to know more to escape the SDN Langoliers that are trying to eat your job. That means you need to be on the move to get where you need to be. And if you sit still you risk becoming a permanent asset. Just like the hardware you work on.
The Networking Nerd 