vRAM – Reversal of (costing us a) Fortune

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A bombshell news item came across my feed in the last couple of days.  According to a source that gave information to CRN, VMware will being doing away with the vRAM entitlement licensing structure.  To say that the outcry of support for this rumored licensing change was uproarious would be the understatement of the year.  Ever since the changes in vSphere 5.0 last year, virtualization admins the world over have chafed at the prospect of having the amount of RAM installed in their systems artificially limited via a licensing structure.

On the surface, this made lots of sense.  VMware has always been licensed on a per-socket processor license.  Back in the old days, this made a lot of sense.  If you needed a larger, more powerful system you naturally bought more processors.  With a lot more processors, VMware made a lot more money.  Then, Intel went and started cramming more and more cores onto a processor die.  This was a great boon for the end user.  Now you could have two, four, or even eight processors in one socket.  Who cares if I have more than two sockets?  Once the floodgates opened on the multi-core race, it became a huge competition to increase core density to keep up with Moore’s Law.  For companies like VMware, the multi-core arms race was a disaster.  If the most you are ever going to make from a server is two processor licenses no matter how many virtual machines get crammed into it then you are royally screwed.  I’m sure the scurrying around VMware to find a new revenue source kicked into high gear once companies like Cisco started producing servers with lots of processor cores and more than enough horsepower to run a whole VM cluster.  That’s when VMware hit on a winner.  If processor cores are the big engine that drives the virtualization monster truck, then RAM is the gas in the gas tank.  Cisco and others loaded down those monster two-socket boxes with enough RAM to sink an aircraft carrier.  They had to in order to keep those processors humming along.  VMware stepped in and said, “We missed the boat on processor cores.  Let’s limit the amount of RAM to specific licenses.”  Their first attempt at vRAM was a huge headache.  The RAM entitlements were half of what they are now.  Only after much name calling and pleading on the part of the customer base did VMware double it all to the levels that we see today.

According to VMware, the vRAM entitlements didn’t affect the majority of their customers.  The ones that needed the additional RAM were already running the Enterprise or Enterprise Plus licenses.  However, what it did limit is growth.  Now, if customer has been running an Enterprise Plus license for their two-socket machine and the time for an upgrade comes along, they won’t get to order all that extra RAM like Cisco or HP would want them to do.  Why bother ordering more than 192GB of RAM if I have to buy extra licenses just to use it?  The idea that I can just have those processor licenses floating around for use with other machines is just as silly in my mind.  If I bought one server with 256GB of RAM and needed 3 licenses to use it all, I’m likely going to buy the same server again.  Then I have 6 license for 4 processors.  Sure, I could buy another server if I wanted, but I’d have to load it with something like 80GB of RAM, unless I wanted to buy yet another license.  I’m left with lots of leftover licenses that I’m not going to utilize.  That makes the accounting department unhappy.  Telling the bean counters that you bought something but you can’t utilize it all because of an aritificial limitation makes them angry.  Overall, you have a decision that makes engineering and management unhappy.

If the rumor from CRN is true, this is a great thing for us all.  It means we can concentrate more on solutions and less on ensuring we have counted the number of processors, real or imagined.  In addition, the idea that VMware might being bundling other software, such as vCloud Director is equally appealing.  Trying to convince my bean counters that I want to try this extra cool thing that doesn’t have any immediate impact but might save money down the road is a bit of a stretch.  Telling them it’s a part of the bundle we have to buy is easy.  Cisco has done this to great effect with Unified Workspace Licensing and Jabber for Everyone.  If it’s already a part of the bundle, I can use it and not have to worry about justifying it.  If VMware does the same thing for vCloud Director and other software, it should open doors to a lot more penetration of interesting software.  Given that VMware hasn’t outright said that this isn’t true, I’m willing to be that the announcement will be met with even more fanfare from the regular trade press.  Besides, after the uproar of support for this decision, it’s going to be hard for VMware to back out now.  These kinds of things aren’t really “leaked” anymore.  I’d wager that this was done with the express permission of the VMware PR department as a way to get a reaction before VMworld.  If the community wasn’t so hot about it, the announcement would have been buried at the end of the show.  As it is, they could announce only this change at the keynote and the audience would give a standing ovation.

Tom’s Take

I hate vRAM.  I think it’s a very backwards idea designed to try and put the genie back in the bottle after VMware missed the boat on licensing processor cores instead of sockets.  After spending more than a year listening to the constant complaining about this licensing structure, VMware is doing the right thing by reversing course and giving us back our RAM.  Solution bundles are the way to go with a platform like the one that VMware is building.  By giving us access to software we won’t otherwise get to run, we can now build bigger and better virtualized clusters.  When we’re dependent on all this technology working in concert, that’s when VMware wins.  When we have support contracts and recurring revenue pouring into their coffers because we can’t live without vCloud Director of vFabric Manager.  Making us pay a tax on hardware is a screwball idea.  But giving us a bit of advanced software for nothing with a bundle we’re going to buy anyway so we are forced to start relying on it?  That’s a pretty brilliant move.

Cloud and the Death of E-Rate

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Seems today you can’t throw a rock with hitting someone talking about the cloud.  There’s cloud in everything from the data center to my phone to my TV.  With all this cloud talk, you’d be pretty safe to say that cloud has its detractors.  There’s worry about data storage and password security.  There are fears that cloud will cause massive layoffs in IT.  However, I’m here to take a slightly different road with cloud.  I want to talk about how cloud is poised to harm your children’s education and bankrupt one the most important technology advantage programs ever.

Go find your most recent phone bill.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s a landline phone or a cell phone bill.  Now, flip to the last page.  You should see a minor line item labeled “Federal Universal Service Fee”.  Just like all other miscellaneous fees, this one goes mostly unnoticed, especially since it’s required on all phone numbers.  All that money that you pay into the Universal Service Fund is administered by the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC), a division of the FCC.  USF has four divisions, one of which is the Schools and Libraries Division (SLD).  This portion of the program has a more commonly used name – E-Rate.  E-Rate helps schools and libraries all over the country obtain telecommunications and Internet access.  It accomplishes this by providing a fund that qualifying schools can draw from to help pay for a portion of their services.  Schools can be classified in a range of discount percentages, ranging from as low as 20% all the way up to 90% discount rates.  Those schools only have to pay $.10 on the dollar for their telecommunications services.  Those schools also happen to be the ones most in need of assistance, usually because of things such as rural location or other funding challenges.

E-Rate is divided into two separate pieces – Priority One and Priority Two.  Priority One is for telecommunications service and Internet access.  Priority One pays for phone service for the school and the pipeline to get them on the Internet.  The general rule for Priority One is that it is service-based only.  There usually isn’t any equipment provided by Priority One – at least not equipment owned by the customer.  Back in 1997, the first year of E-Rate, a T1 was considered a very fast Internet Circuit.  Today, most schools are moving past 10Mbit Ethernet circuits and looking to 100Mbit and beyond to satisfy voracious Internet users.  All Priority One requests must be fulfilled before Priority Two requests will begin to be funded.  One USAC starts funding Priority Two, they start at the 90% discount percentage and begin funding requests until the $2.25 billion allocated each year to the program is exhausted.  Priority Two covers Internal Connections and basic maintenance on those connections.  This is where the equipment comes in.  You can request routers, switches, wireless APs, Ethernet cabling, and even servers (provided they meet the requirements of providing some form of Internet access, like e-mail or web servers).  You can’t request PCs or phone handsets.  You can only ask for approved infrastructure pieces.  The idea is that Priority Two facilitates connectivity to Priority One services.  Priority Two allocations vary every year.  Some years they never fund past the 90% mark.  Two years ago, they funded all applicants.  It all depends on how much money is left over after all Priority One requests are satisfied.  There are rules in place to prevent schools from asking for new equipment every year to keep things fair.  Schools can only ask for internal connections two out of any five given years (the 2-of-5 rule).  In the other three years, they must ask for maintenance of that equipment.

There has always been a tug-of-war between what things should be covered under Priority One and Priority Two.  As I said, the general rule is that Priority One is for services only – no equipment.  One of the first things that was discussed was web hosting.  Web servers are covered under Priority Two.  A few years ago, some web hosting providers were able to get their services listed under Priority One.  That meant that schools didn’t have to apply to have their web servers installed under Priority Two.  They could just pay someone to host their website under Priority One and be done with it.  No extra money needed.  This was a real boon for those schools with lower discount percentages.  They didn’t have to hope that USAC would fund down into the 70s or the 60s.  Instead, they could have their website hosted under Priority One with no questions asked.  Remember, Priority One is always funded before Priority Two is even considered.  This fact has lead to many people attempting to get qualifying services setup under Priority One.  E-mail hosting and voice over IP (VoIP) are two that immediately spring to mind.  E-mail hosting goes without saying.  Priority One VoIP is new to the current E-Rate year (Year 15) as an eligible service.  The general idea is that a school can use a VoIP system hosted at a central location from a provider and have it covered as a Priority One service.  This still doesn’t cover handsets for the users, as those are never eligible.  It also doesn’t cover a local voice gateway, something that is very crucial for schools that want to maintain a backup just in case their VoIP connectivity goes down.  However, it does allow the school to have a VoIP phone system funded every year as opposed to hoping that E-Rate will fund low enough to cover it this year.

While I agree that access to more services is a good thing overall, I think we’re starting to see a slippery slope that will lead to trouble very soon.  ISPs and providers are scrambling to get anything and everything they can listed as a Priority One service.  Why stop at phones?  Why not have eligible servers hosted on a cloud platform?  Outsource all the applications you can to a data center far, far away.  If you can get your web, e-mail, and phone systems hosted in the cloud, what’s left to place on site in your school? Basic connectivity to those services, perhaps.  We still need switches and routers and access points to enable our connectivity to those far away services.  Except…the money.  Since Priority One always gets funded, everything that gets shoveled into Priority One takes money that could be used in Priority Two for infrastructure.  Schools that may never get funded at 25% will have their e-mail hosting paid for, while a 90% school that could really use APs to connect a mobile lab may get left out even though they have a critical need.  Making things Priority One just for the sake of getting them funded doesn’t really help when the budget for the program is capped from the beginning.  It’s already happening this year.  E-Rate Year 15 will only fund down to 90% for Priority Two.  That’s only because there was a carry over from last year.  Otherwise, USAC was seriously considering not funding Priority Two at all this year.  No internal connections.  No basic maintenance.  Find your own way schools.  Priority One is eating up the fund with all the new cloud services being considered, let alone with the huge increase in faster Internet circuits needed to access all these cloud services.  Network World recently had a report saying that schools need 100Mbps circuits.  Guess where the money to pay for those upgrades is going to come from?  Yep, E-Rate Priority One.  At least, until the money runs out because server hosting is a qualifying service this year.

Most of the schools that get E-Rate funding for Priority Two wouldn’t be able to pay for infrastructure services otherwise.  Unlike large school districts, these in-need schools may be forced to choose between adding a switch to connect a lab and adding another AP to cover a classroom.  Every penny counts, even when you consider they may only be paying 10-12% of the price in the first place.  If Priority One services eat up all the funding before we get to Priority Two, it may not matter a whole lot to those 90% schools.  They may not have the infrastructure in place to access the cloud.  Instead, they’ll limp along with a T1 or a 10Mbps circuit, hoping that one day Priority Two might get funded again.

How do we fix this before cloud becomes the death mask for E-Rate?  We have to ensure that USAC knows that hosting services need to be considered separately from Priority One.  I’m not quite sure how that needs to happen, whether it needs to be a section under Priority Two or if it needs to be something more like Priority One And A Half.  But lumping hosted VoIP in with Internet access simply because there is no on-site equipment isn’t the right solution.  Since a large majority of the schools that qualify for E-Rate are lower elementary schools, it makes sense that they have the best access to the Internet possible, along with good intra-site connectivity.  A gigabit Internet circuit doesn’t amount to much if you are still running on 10Mbps hubs (don’t laugh, it’s happened).  If USAC can’t be convinced that hosted services need to be separated from other Priority One access, maybe it’s time to look at raising the E-Rate cap.  Every year, the amount of requests for E-Rate is more than triple the funding commitment.  That’s a lot of paperwork.  The $2.25 billion allocation set forth in 1997 may have been a lot back then, but looking at the number of schools applying today, it’s just a drop in the bucket.  E-Rate isn’t the only component of USF, and any kind of increase in funding will likely come from an increase in the USF fees that everyone pays.  That’s akin to raising taxes, which is always a hot button issue.  The program itself has even come under fire both in the past and in recent years due to mismanagement and fraud.  I don’t have any concrete answers on how to fix this problem, but I sincerely hope that bringing it to light helps shed some light on the way that schools get their technology needs addressed.  I also hope that it makes people take a hard look at the cloud services being proposed for inclusion in E-Rate and think twice about taking an extra bucket of water from the well.  After all, the well will run dry sooner or later.  Then everyone goes thirsty.

Disclaimer

I am employed by a VAR that focuses on providing Priority Two E-Rate services for schools.  The analysis and opinions expressed in this article do not represent the position of my employer and are my thoughts and conclusions alone.

Mental Case – In a Flash(card)

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You’ve probably noticed that I spend a lot of my time studying for things.  Seems like I’ve always been reading things or memorizing arcane formulae for one reason or another.  In the past, I have relied upon a large number of methods for this purpose.  However, I keep coming back to the tried-and-true flash card.  To me, it’s the most basic form of learning.  A question on the front and an answer on the back is all you need to drill a fact into your head.  As I started studying for my CCIE lab exam, this was the route that I chose to go down when I wanted to learn some of the more difficult features, like BGP supress maps or NTP peer configurations.  It was a pain to hand write all that info out on my cards.  Sometimes it didn’t all fit.  Other times, I couldn’t read my own writing.  I wondered if there was a better solution.

Cue my friend Greg Ferro and his post about a program called Mental Case.  Mental Case, from Mental Faculty, is a program designed to let you create your own flashcards.  The main program runs on a Mac computer and allows you to create libraries of flash cards.  There are a lot of good example sets when you first launch the app for things like languages.  But, as you go through some of the other examples, you can see the power that Mental Case can give you above and beyond a simple 3″x5″ flash card.  For one thing, you can use pictures in your flash cards.  This is handy if you are trying to learn about art or landmarks, for instance.  You could also use it as a quick quiz about Cisco Visio shapes or wireless antenna types.  This is a great way to study things more advanced than just simple text.

Once you dig into Mental Case, though, you can see some of the things that separate it from traditional pen-and-paper.  While it might be handy to have a few flash cards in your pocket to take out and study when you’re in line at the DMV, more often than not you tend to forget about them.  Mental Case can setup a schedule for you to study.  It will pop up and tell you that it’s time to do some work.  That’s great as a constant reminder of what you need to learn.  Another nice feature is the learning feature.  If you have ever used flash cards, you probably know that after a while, you tend to know about 80% of them cold with little effort.  However, there are about 20% that kind of float in the middle of the pack and just get skipped past without much reinforcement.  They kind of get lost in the shuffle, so to speak.  With Mental Case, those questions which you get wrong more often get shuffled to the front, where your attention span is more focused.  Mental Case learns the best ways to make you learn best.  You can also set Mental Case to shuffle or even reverse the card deck to keep you on your toes.

When you couple all of these features with the fact that there is a Mental Case IOS client as well as a desktop version, your study efficiency goes through the roof.  Now, rather than only being able to study your flash cards when you are at your desk, you can take them with you everywhere.  When you consider that most people today spend an awful lot of time staring at their iPhones and iPads, it’s nice to know that you can pull up a set of flash cards from your mobile device and go to town at a moment’s notice, like in the line at the DMV.  In fact, that’s how I got started with Mental Case.  I downloaded the IOS app and started firing out the flash cards for things like changing RIP timers and configuring SSM.  However, the main Mental Case app only runs on Mac.  At the time, I didn’t have a Mac?  How did I do it?  Well, Mental Case seems to have thought of everything.  While the IOS app works best in concert with the Mac app, you can also create flash cards on other sites, like FlashcardExchange and Quizzlet.  You can create decks and make them publicly available for everyone, or just share them among your friends.  You do have to make the deck public long enough to download to Mental Case IOS, but it can be protected again afterwards if you are studying information that shouldn’t be shared with the rest of the world.  Note, though, that the IOS version of the software is a little more basic than the one on the Mac.  It doesn’t support wacky text formatting or the ability to do multiple choice quizzes.  Also, cards that are created with more than two “sides” (Mental Case calls them facets) will only display properly in slideshow mode.  But, if you think of the IOS client as a replacement for the stack of 10,000 flash cards you might already be carrying in your backpack or pocket the limitations aren’t that severe after all.

The latest version of Mental Case now has the option to share content between Macs via iCloud.  This will allow you to keep your deck synced between your different computers.  You still have to sync the cards between your Mac and your IOS device via Wi-Fi.  You can share at shorter ranges over Bluetooth.  You can also create collection of cards known as a Study Archive and place them in a central location, like Dropbox for instance. This wasn’t a feature when I was using Mental Case full time, but I like the idea of being able to keep my cards in one place all the time.

Mental Case is running a special on their software for the next few days.  Normally, the Mac version costs $29.99.  That’s worth every penny if you spend time studying.  However, for the next few days, it’s only $9.99.  This is a steal for such a powerful study program.  The IOS app is also on sale.  Normally $4.99, it’s just $2.99.  Alone the IOS app is a great resource.  Paired with its bigger brother, this is a no-brainer.  Run out and grab these two programs and spend more time studying your facts and figures efficiently and less time creating them.  If you’d like to learn more about Mental Case from Mental Faculty, you can check out their webiste at http://www.mentalcaseapp.com.

Disclaimer

I am a Mental Case IOS user.  I have used the demo version of the Mental Case Mac app.  Mental Case has not contacted me about this review, and no promotional consideration was given.  I’m just a really big fan of the app and wanted to tell people about it.

Networking Is Not Trivia(l)

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Fun fact: my friends and family have banned me from playing Trivial Pursuit.  I played the Genus 4 edition in college so much that I practically memorized the card deck.  I can’t play the Star Wars version or any other licensed set.  I chalk a lot of this up to the fact that my mind seems to be wired for trivia.  For whatever reason, pointless facts stick in my head like glue.  I knew what an aglet was before Phinneas & Ferb.  My head is filled with random statistics and anecdotes about subjects no one cares about.  I’ve been accused in the past of reading encyclopedias in my spare time.  Amusingly enough, I do tend to consume articles on Wikipedia quite often.  All of this lead me to picking a career in computers.

Information Technology is filled with all kinds of interesting trivia.  Whether it’s knowing that Admiral Grace Hopper coined the term “bug” or remembering that the default OSPF reference bandwidth is 100 Mb, there are thousands of informational nuggets laying around, waiting to be discovered and cataloged away for a rainy day.  With my love of learning mindless minutia, it comes as no surprise that I tend to devour all kinds of information related to computing.  After a while I started to realize that simply amassing all of this information doesn’t do any good for anyone.  Simply remembering that EIGRP bandwidth values are multiplied by 256 doesn’t do any good without a bigger picture of realizing it’s for backwards compatibility with IGRP.  The individual facts themselves are useless without context and application.

I tried to learn how to play the guitar many years ago.  I went out and got a starter acoustic guitar and a book of chords and spent many diligent hours practicing the proper fingering to make something other than noise.  I was getting fairly good at producing chords without a second thought.  It kind of started falling apart when I tried to play my first song, though.  While I was good at making the individual notes, when it came time to string them together into something that sounded like a song I wasn’t quite up to snuff.  In much the same way, being an effective IT professional is more than just knowing a whole bunch of stuff.  It’s finding a way to take all that knowledge and apply it somehow.  You need to find a way to take all those little random bits of trivia and learn to apply them to problems to fix things efficiently.  People that depend on IT don’t really care what the multicast address for RIPv2 updates is.  What they want is a stable routing table when they have some sort of access list blocking traffic.  It’s up to us to make a song out of all the network chords we’ve learned.

It’s important to know all of those bits of trivia in the long run.  They come in handy for things like tests or cocktail party anecdotes.  However, you need to be sure to treat them like building blocks.  Take what you need to form a bigger picture.  You won’t become bogged down in the details of deciding what parts to implement based on sheer knowledge alone.  Instead, you can build a successful strategy.  Think of the idea of the gestalt – things are often greater than the sum of their parts.  That’s how you should look at IT-related facts.

Tom’s Take

I’m never going to stop learning trivia.  It’s as ingrained into my personality as snark and sarcasm.  However, if I’m going to find a way to make money off of all that trivia, I need to be sure to remember that factoids are useless without application.  I must always keep in mind that solutions are key to decision makers.  After all, the snark and sarcasm aren’t likely to amount to much of career.  At least not in networking.

Cisco Telepresence – The White Glove Treatment

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I’ve spent the last week or so working on and training people to use a new Cisco Telepresence Profile 55″.  I like the fact that the whole unit is bundled together and only needs to have a couple of cables routed around and plugged in along with 4-6 screws to join everything together.  One thing that did bother me was that the system shipped with two desk microphones and no microphone cables.  I’m still trying to sort out that mess, but upon further investigation, I uncovered something else entirely strange to me.

The box contains all the accessories that were included in the bundle.  There’s the usual microphones (sans cables) and power cables and even a microfiber cleaning cloth.  But what are those white things in the plastic bags?  I wondered that myself.  At first, I thought they may have been bags to keep the microphones in.  After opening one, I found that I was totally wrong…

Uh, Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.  Those are indeed white cotton gloves.  The kind the a butler might wear when checking the mansion to ensure that everything is nice and tidy. They aren’t OEMed from anyone either, as you can tell by the Cisco logo on the tag.  Why on earth are these in the package?  I had to do a little searching to find the answer.

I can’t really tell if these are a holdover from the old Tandberg systems, but I have found references to them in the MX200 and MX300 installation posters.  According to the prose, it looks like you’re supposed to put them on when you begin installing the TV portion of the unit onto the base to ensure that you don’t transfer any oils or other strange things to the unit.  That’s a good idea in theory, but as well all know there is a world of difference between theory and practice.  If you’ve never picked up the monitor portion of a Profile 55″, it’s a 55″ TV surrounded by a metal cage and mounting bracket. It weighs between 80-100 pounds.  It’s not a flimsy thing.  Plus, with all that metal, it’s a very slippery surface bare handed, let alone if your hands are encased in soft, smooth cotton.  I could barely hold the cardboard box the gloves came in when I had one on.  I can just imagine the whole TV slipping out of my hands when I’m trying to secure it to the base.  Also suspect is the fact that the LCD screen comes out of the shipping container with a big plastic cover taped to the front.  There’s almost no chance of transferring anything onto the screen itself until the cover is peeled away.  Even if you do manage to smudge the metal case, there’s a microfiber cloth in the box too.  Why go to all the trouble of the white butler gloves?  I think more than anything else, this is mostly for appearances.  These things can’t serve any real purpose, and if the people responsible for wasting space in the accessories box feel differently, I invite them to come with me and do a couple of these assemblies and installations.  I can promise you that the gloves will get stripped off and thrown in the same pile as all those little static wrist straps.

WordAds – My Time in Advertising

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A few of you probably notice that I started running ads on this blog a while back, say around February.  I also recently turned them off two weeks ago.  I wanted to give you all a little background into what went on with the WordPress WordAds program that I ran for a bit.

This blog is hosted by WordPress.com.  That means that they control all the admin stuff like code updates and server locations.  All I do is log in and write.  This is great for people that don’t really care about the dirty stuff under the hood and would rather spend their constructive time writing.  That’s what I wanted to do for the most part.  Sure, I miss out on all the cooler things, like using Disqus for my comments or hosting other plugins, but all in all I am very happy with the service provided by WordPress.  The major thing that people will tell you that you’re missing out on with a hosted solution is advertising.  WordPress reserves the right to run some advertisements on your blog when you hit a certain traffic level.  Beyond that, there won’t be any ads on the site if you are hosted by WordPress.  That is, until the advent of the WordAds program.

WordAds is a program designed to allow WordPress-hosted blogs that meet certain criteria to run some limited advertisements.  There aren’t many requirements, other than you must be a publicly visible blog with a custom domain name, such as networkingnerd.net as opposed to networkingnerd.wordpress.com.  Since I met the criteria, I jumped in and got setup for WordAds.  This was mostly as a trial run, as I knew that I wasn’t going to make enough money out of my little experiment to quit my day job and become a globe-trotting playboy.  I hoped to collect a bit of money and use it to do something like pay for additional WordPress upgrades or maybe even move to a self-hosted solution at some point down the road.

The setup for WordAds is fairly easy.  Once you’ve indicated your interest in the program and you’ve been vetted by WordPress, all you need to do is log into your control panel and check a box to display your ads.  You can choose to display ads to all your visitors or just the ones that aren’t logged into WordPress.  I set mine up to display to all users.  Once I had selected my ad impression categories, which were a meager list of technology and geeky-type stuff, I turned everything on and began my grand experiment.  The first thing that I noticed is that you aren’t going to get immediate feedback.  It took a month before WordPress reported my earnings, and they only really updated the data once a week or so.  I knew that my coffers weren’t going to be filling up like Scrooge McDuck’s money bin, but a little more real-time feedback or the option to pull that information from a mouse click might have been nice.  The other thing that irked me is that I didn’t have a lot of control over the ads that played.  I tried to keep it to something my audience wouldn’t mind seeing, but it seems that the advertising network had other ideas.  The primary reason that I pulled the whole thing down was that there was an annoying ad for a vehicle that keep auto-playing on rollover and blasting my readers with annoying sound.  Since my readers are my greatest asset, and since I don’t want any of you showing up on my doorstep to punch me for annoying the daylights out of you, I decided to pull down the ads.

The payout structure for WordAds involves PayPal, which isn’t a huge deal since almost everyone that has ever bought anything online probably has a PayPal account at this point.  The kicker is that the payout threshhold is $100 US.  They won’t cut you a check for your earnings until you’ve hit the magic tipping point.  Right now, after about five months of running ads on my blog, I haven’t even hit $50 yet.  My first month, I made a whole $2.  All that’s good for is getting the paperboy off your back.  I know that based on the amount of traffic that I get living off my advertising wasn’t a realistic goal.  I also know how often I tend to click on banner ads, so again since most of my readers are smarter than I am I knew they weren’t likely to click on the banners either.  Instead, I figured I’d just let the ads sit there until I could pull the money out and use it for upgrades.  At this rate, I’ll probably run out of boring things to say before I get to that point.  Instead, I’ve decided to turn off the ads and go back to what I do best – writing boring pieces about CallManager or taunting the NAT folks.  I’m not worried about making any money off of this whole thing.  The little bit that I do have can go back to WordPress for them to buy a round of coffee for the operations team that keeps my blog from crashing every now and then.  If I’m really that concerned about sponsors, I suppose I can start wearing a jumpsuit to work festooned with patches like racing drivers.  Now I just need to work out my rates for that.

Why Won’t AirPlay Work On My Macbook?

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One of the major reasons why I decided to upgrade to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion was for AirPlay mirroring.  AirPlay has been a nice function to have for people with an AirPlay receiver (basically an AppleTV) and an AirPlay source, like an iDevice.  I know of many people that like to watch a movie from iTunes on their iPad to start, then switch over to the big TV in the living room via AirPlay to the AppleTV.  That’s all well and good for those that want to stream movies or music.  However, my streaming needs are a little more advanced.  I’d rather be able to mirror my desktop to the AirPlay receiver instead, for things like presentations or demonstrations.  That functionality has only be available with software applications like AirParrot up until the release of Mountain Lion, which now has support for AirPlay mirroring on Macs.  Once the GM release of Mountain Lion came out, people started noticing that AirPlay was only supported on relatively new Apple hardware.  Even in cases where the CPU was almost identical to a later hardware release.  It seems a bit mind-boggling that Apple has a very limited specification list for AirPlay Mirroring.  The official site doesn’t even list it, as a matter of fact.  Essentially, any Mac made in 2011 or newer should be capable of supporting AirPlay.  So why did the 2010 Macs get left out?  They’re almost as good as their one-year-newer cousins.

The real answer comes down to the chipset.  Apple started shipping Macs with Intel’s Sandy Bridge chipset in 2011.  This enabled all kinds of interesting things, like Thunderbolt for instance.  There was one little feature down at the bottom of the list of Sandy Bridge spec sheets that didn’t mean much at the time – Intel QuickSync.  QuickSync is an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that has been placed in the Sandy Bridge line of processors to allow high-speed video encoding and decoding.  This allows the Sandy Bridge i-series processors to offload video encoding to the ASIC to reduce the amount of CPU power consumed by performing video tasks.  Rather than tying up the CPU or the GPU of a machine, Sandy Bridge can use this ASIC to do very high speed encoding.  Why would this be a boon?  Well, for most people the idea was that QuickSync could reduce the amount of time that it took to do video production work on mid-range machines.  The problem was that QuickSync turned out lower quality video in favor of optimization for speed?  Where would you find an application that prioritized speed over quality?  If you guessed video streaming, you’d be spot on.  QuickSync supports high-speed encoding of H.264 video streams, which is the preferred format for Apple.  Mountain Lion can now access the QuickSync ASIC to mirror your desktop over to an AppleTV with almost no video lag.  The quality may not be the same as a Pixar rendering farm, but for 1080p video on a TV it’s close enough.

Any Mac made before the introduction of Sandy Bridge isn’t capable of running AirPlay mirroring, at least according to Apple.  Since they are missing the QuickSync ASIC, they aren’t capable of video encoding at the rate that Apple wants to in order to preserve the AirPlay experience.  While on the surface it looks like the same i-series processors are present in 2010 and 2011 machines, the older Macs are using the Clarksdale chipset, which does have a high-speed video decoder, but not an encoder.  Since the Mac is doing all the heavy lifting for the AppleTV in an AirPlay mirroring setup, having the onboard encoding ASIC is critical.  This isn’t the first time that Apple has locked out use of AirPlay.  If you want to AirPlay mirror from your favorite iDevice, you have to ensure that you’re running an iPhone 4S or an iPad 2 or iPad 3.  What’s different about them?  They’re all running the A5 dual-core chip.  Supposedly, the A5 helps with video-intensive tasks.  That says to me that Apple is big on using hardware to help accelerate video mirroring.  That’s not to say that you can’t do AirPlay mirroring with a pre-2011 Mac.  You’re just going to have to rely on a third party program to do it, like the aforementioned AirParrot.  Take note, though, that AirParrot is going to use your CPU to do all the encoding work for AirPlay.  While that isn’t going to be a big issue for simple presentations or showing your desktop, you should take care if you’re going to do any kind of processor-intensive activity, like firing up a bunch of virtual machines or compiling code.

Tom’s Take

Yes, it’s very irritating that Apple drew the line for AirPlay mirroring support at Sandy Bridge.  As it is with all technology refreshes, being on the opposite side of that line sucks big time.  You’ve got a machine that’s more than capable, yet some design guy said that you can’t hack it any more.  Sadly, these are the kinds of decisions that aren’t made lightly by vendors.  Rather than risk offering incomplete support of producing the kind of dodgy results that make for bad Youtube comparison videos, Apple took a hard line and leaned heavily on QuickSync for AirPlay mirroring support.  In another year it won’t matter much as people will have either upgraded their machines to support it if it’s a crucial need for them, or they’ll let it lie fallow and unused like FaceTime.  If you find yourself asking whether or not your machine can support AirPlay mirroring, just look for a Thunderbolt port.  If you’ve got one, you’re good to go.  Otherwise, you should look into a software solution.  There are lots of good ones out there that will help you out.  Based on Apple’s track record with the iDevices, I wouldn’t hold out hope that they’re going to enable AirPlay mirroring on pre-2011 Macs any time soon.  So, if AirPlay mirroring is something important to you, you’re either going to need to spring for a new Mac or get to work installing some software.

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.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion – Review

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Today appears to be the day that the world at large gets their hands on OS X 10.8, otherwise known as Mountain Lion. The latest major update in the OS X cat family, Mountain Lion isn’t so much a revolutionary upgrade (like moving from Snow Leopard to Lion) as opposed to an evolutionary one (like moving from Leopard to Snow Leopard). I’ve had a chance to use Mountain Lion since early July when the golden master (GM) build was released to the developer community. What follows are my impressions about the OS from a relatively new Mac user.

When you start your Mountain Lion machine for the first time, you won’t notice a lot that’s different from Lion. That’s one of the nicer things about OS X. I don’t have to worry that Apple is going to come out with some strange AOL-esque GUI update just around the corner. Instead, the same principles that I learned in Lion continue here as well. In lieu of a total window manager overhaul, a heavy coat of polish has been applied everywhere. Most of the features that are listed on the Mountain Lion website are included and likely not to be used by me that much. Instead, there are a few little quality of life (QoL) things that I’ve noticed. Firstly, Lion originally came with the dock indicator for open programs disabled. Instead of a little light telling you that Safari and Mail were open, you saw nothing. This spoke more to the capability introduced that reopened the windows that were open when you closed the program. Apple would rather you think less about a program being open or closed and instead on what programs you wanted to use to accomplish things. In Mountain Lion, the little light that indicates an open program has shrunk to a small lighted notch on the very bottom of the dock below an open program. It’s now rather difficult to determine which programs are open with a quick glance. Being one of those people that is meticulous about which programs I have open at any one time, this is a bit of step in the wrong direction. I don’t mind that Apple has changed the default indicator. Just give me an option to put the old one back.

My Mountain Lion Dock with the new open program indicators

Safari

Safari also got an overhaul. One of the things I like the most about Chrome is the Omnibox. The ability to type my searches directly into the address bar saves me a step, and since my job sometimes feels like the Chief Google Search Engineer, saving an extra step can be a big help. Another feature is the iCloud button. iCloud can now sync open tabs on your iPhone/iPad/iPod/Mountain Lion system. This could be handy for someone that opens a website on their mobile device but would like to look at it on a full-sized screen when they get to the office. Not a groundbreaking feature, but a very nice one to have. The Reading List feature is still there as well from the last update, but being a huge fan of Instapaper, I haven’t really tested it yet.

Dictation

Another new feature is dictation. Mountain lion has included a Siri like dictation feature in the operating system that allows you to say what you want rather than typing it out. Make no mistake though. This isn’t Siri. This is more like the dictation feature from the new iPad. Right now, it won’t do much more than regurgitate what you say. I’m not sure how much I’ll use this feature going forward, as I prefer to write with the keyboard as opposed to thinking out loud. Using the dictation feature does make it much more accurate, as the system learns your accent and idiosyncrasies to become much more adapt over time. If you’d like to get a feel for how well the dictation feature works, (the paragraph)

You’ve been reading was done completely by the dictation feature. I’ve left any spelling and grammar mistakes intact to give you a realistic picture. Seriously though, the word paragraph seems to make the dictation feature make a new paragraph.

Gatekeeper

I did have my first run-in with Gatekeeper about a week after I upgraded, but not for the reasons that I thought I would.  Apple’s new program security mechanism is designed to prevent drive-by downloads and program installations like the ones that embarrassed Apple as of late.  Gatekeeper can be set to allow only signed applications from the App Store to be installed or run on the system.  This gives Apple the ability to not only protect the non-IT savvy populace at large from malicious programs, but also gives Apple the ability to program a remote kill switch in the event that something nasty slips past the reviewers and starts wreaking havoc.  Yes, there have been more nefarious and sinister prognostications that Apple will begin to limit apps to only being able to be installed through the App Store or that Apple might flip the kill switch on software they deem “unworthy”, but I’m not going to talk about that here.  Instead, I wanted to point out the issue that I had with Gatekeeper.  I use a networking monitoring system called N-Able at work that gives me the ability to remote into systems on my customer’s networks.  N-Able uses a Java client to establish this remote connection, whether it be telnet, SSH, or RDP.  However, after my upgrade to Mountain Lion, my first attempt to log into a remote machine was met with a Java failure.  I couldn’t bypass the security warning and launch the app from a web browser to bring up my RDP client.  I checked all the Java security settings that got mucked with after the Flashback fiasco, but they all looked clean.  After a Google Glance, I found the culprit was Gatekeeper.  The default permission model allows Mac App Store apps to run as well as those from registered developers.  However, the server that I have running N-Able uses a self-signed certificate.  That evidently violates the Gatekeeper rules for program execution.  I changed Gatekeeper’s permission model to allow all apps to run, regardless of where the app was downloaded from.  This was probably something that would have needed to be done anyway at some point, but the lack of specific error messages pointing me toward Gatekeeper worried me.  I can foresee a lot of support calls in the future from unsuspecting users not understanding that their real problem isn’t with the program they are trying to open, but with the underlying security subsystem of their Mac instead.

Twitter Integration

Mountain Lion has also followed the same path as it’s mobile counterpart and allowed Twitter integration into the OS itself. This, to me, is a mixed bag. I’m a huge fan of Twitter clients on the desktop. Since Tapbots released the Tweetbot Alpha the same day that I upgraded to Mountain Lion, I’ve been using it as my primary communication method with Twitter. The OS still pops up an update when I have a new Twitter notification or DM, so I see that window before I check my client. The sharing ability in the OS to tweet links and pictures is a nice time saver, but it merely saves me a step of copying and pasting. I doubt I’m any more likely to share things with the new shortcuts as I was before. The forthcoming Facebook integration may be more to my liking. Not because I use Facebook more than I use Twitter. Instead, by having access to Facebook without having to open their website in a browser, I might be more motivated to update every once in a while.

AirPlay

I had a limited opportunity to play with AirPlay in Mountain Lion.  AirPlay, for those not familiar, is the ability to wirelessly stream video or audio from some device to receiver.  As of right now, the only out-of-the box receiver is the Apple TV.  The iPad 2 and 3 as well as the iPhone 4S have the capability to stream audio and video to this device.  Older Macs and mobile devices can only stream audio files, ala iTunes.  In Mountain Lion, however, any newer Mac running an i-Series processor can mirror their screen to an Apple TV (or other AirPlay receiver, provided you have the right software installed).  I tested it, and everything worked flawlessly.  Mountain Lion uses Bonjour to detect that a suitable AirPlay receiver is on the network, and the AirPlay icon appears in the notification area to let you know you can mirror your desktop over there.  The software takes care of sizing your desktop to an HD-friendly resolution and away you go.  There was a bit of video lag on the receiver, but not on the Mountain Lion system itself, so you could probably play games if you wanted, provided your weren’t relying on the AirPlay receiver as your primary screen.  For regular things, like presentations, everything went smooth.  The only part of this system that I didn’t care much for is the mirroring setup.  While I understand the idea behind AirPlay is to allow things like movies to be streamed over to an Apple TV, I would have liked the ability to attach an Apple TV as a second monitor input.  That would let me do all kinds of interesting things.  First and foremost, I could use the multi-screen features in Powerpoint and Keynote as they were intended to be used.  Or I could use AirPlay with a second HDMI-capable monitor to finally have a dual monitor setup for my MacBook Air.  But, as a first generation desktop product, AirPlay on Mountain Lion does some good things.  While I had to borrow the Apple TV that I used to test this feature, I’m likely to go pick one up just to throw in my bag for things like presentations.

Tom’s Take

Is Mountain Lion worth the $20 upgrade price? I would say “yes” with some reservations. Having a newer kernel and device drivers is never a bad thing. Software will soon require Mountain Lion to function, as in the case of the OS X version of Tweetbot when it’s finally released. The feature set is tempting for those that spend time sharing on Twitter or want to use iCloud to sync things back and forth. Notification Center is a plus for those that don’t want popup windows cluttering everything. If you are a heavy user of presentation software and own an AppleTV, the Airplay mirroring may be the tipping point for you. Overall, compared to those that paid much more for more minor upgrades, or paid for upgrades that broke their system beyond belief (I’m looking at you, Windows ME), upgrading to Mountain Lion is painless and offers some distinct advantages. For the price of a nice steak, you can keep the same performance you’ve had with your system running Lion and get some new features to boot. Maybe this old cougar can keep running a little while longer.

Study Advice – Listen To That Little Voice

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During Show 109 of the Packet Pushers podcast, I had the unique honor to be involved in an episode that included the uber geek Scott Morris, distinguished Cisco Press author Wendell Odom, and the very first CCDE, Russ White.  Along with Natalie Timms, the CCIE Security program manager and Amy Arnold, we discussed a lot of various topics around the subject of certification.  One of the topics that came up about 37 minutes in was about being persistent in your studies.  Amy brought up a good point that you need to find a study habit that works for you.  I followed up with a comment that I still have a voice in the back of my head that tells me I need to study.  I promised a blog post about that, so here it is only a month late.

I took three years to get my CCIE.  Only the last year really involved intense study on a regular basis.  The previous 24 months, I spent a great deal of time and effort with my regular job.  I picked up a book from time to time and refresh my memory, but I wasn’t doing the kind of heavy duty labbing necessary to hone my CCIE skills.  After I had some conversations with my mentors about what the CCIE really meant to me, I jumped in and started doing as much studying as I could every night.  Almost all of my study time came after my kids went to bed.  Basically, from 8 p.m. until about 1 a.m. I fired up my GNS3 lab and tested various scenarios and brain teasers.  I took me a bit of time before I really settled into a routine, though.  There were lots of things that kept tugging at my attention.  The devilsh Internet, the seductive allure of my television, and the siren call of video games all competed to see which one could lure me away from the warm glow of my console screen.  I had to spend a great deal of time focusing on making a conscious decision to drop what I was doing and start working on my lab.  It’s a lot like running, in a way.  Most runners will tell you that if you can get outside and start running, the rest is easy.  It’s overcoming all the obstacles in your way that are trying to keep you from running.  You have to push past the distractions and keep moving no matter what.  Don’t let an email or a text message keep you from starting R1.  Don’t let a late-night snack run distract you from loading a troubleshooting configuration.  The real key is to get started.  Crack open those lab manuals and fire up your routers, whether they be real or virtual.  After that, the rest just falls into place.

There is a downside to all that training, though.  It’s now been 13 months since I passed my CCIE lab.  To this day, I stil have a little voice in the back of my head telling me that I need to be studying.  Every time I flip on the TV or sit down on the couch, I feel like I should have a book in my lap or have a lab diagram staring me in the face.  I’ve taken some certification tests since the lab, but I haven’t really taken a great deal of time to study something that isn’t familiar to me.  I talked about what I wanted to do at the beginning of the year, and I firmly believe now that I’m halfway through that I’ve missed some opportunities to get back on the horse, as it were.  I know that the only way to satisfy that voice that keeps telling me that I should be doing something is to feed it with chapters of study guides and time in front of the lab console again.  I don’t think it will take the same kind of time investment that the CCIE did, but who knows what it might build into in the end?  I certainly never thought I’d be taking the granddaddy of all certification tests when I first started learning about networking all those many years ago.

For those out there just starting to study for your certifications, I would echo Ethan’s advice during the podcast.  You need to make a habit out of studying.  Many people that I talk to want to study for tests, but they want to do it on someone else’s time.  They want their employer to mark off time for study or provide resources for learning.  While I’m all for this kind of idea and would love to see more employers doing things like this, there is a limit that you will eventually reach.  Your employer expects you to spend your time providing a service for them.  If you truly want to have as much study time as you want, you will have to do it outside working hours.  Your boss doesn’t care what you do from 5 p.m. on.  In the case of the CCIE, it was a whole lot easier for me to try and do mock labs on Saturday than it was to try and do them on Tuesday.  The work week doesn’t afford many uninterrupted opportunities for study.  Nights and weekends do.

Make sure you take your study habits as seriously as you do your job.  It might be easy to kid yourself into thinking that you can just pick up the book for five minutes before the next TV show comes one, but we both know that won’t work.  Unless you immerse yourself in studying, all that knowledge that you gained in those scant minutes of furious reading will evaporate when the theme song to that hit sitcom starts.  You don’t have to have total silence, though.  I find that I do some of my best studying when I have some noise in the background that forces me to pay attention to what I’m doing.  However, if you don’t apply some serious consideration to your studies, you’ll probably end up much like I did in the first couple of years of my studies – adrift and listless.  If you can knuckle down and treat it just like you would a troubleshooting task or an installation project, then you’ll do just fine.