Tag Archives: @Opengear

Redundancy Is Not Resiliency

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Most people carry a spare tire in their car. It’s there in case you get a flat and need to change the tire before you can be on your way again. In my old VAR job I drove a lot away from home and to the middle of nowhere so I didn’t want to rely on roadside assistance. Instead I just grabbed the extra tire out of the back if I needed it and went on my way. However, the process wasn’t entirely hitless. Even the pit crew for a racing team needs time to change tires. I could probably get it done in 20 minutes with appropriate cursing but those were 20 minutes that I wasn’t doing anything else beyond fixing a tire.

Spare tires are redundant. You have an extra thing to replace something that isn’t working. IT operations teams are familiar with redundant systems. Maybe you have a cold spare on the shelf for a switch that might go down. You might have a cold or warm data center location for a disaster. You could even have redundant devices in your enterprise to help you get back in to your equipment if something causes it to go offline. Well, I say that you do. If you’re Meta/Facebook you didn’t have them this time last year.

Don’t mistake redundancy for resilience though. Like the tire analogy above you’re not going to be able to fix a flat while you’re driving. Yes, I’ve seen the crazy video online of people doing that but aside from stunt driving you’re going to have to take some downtime from your travel to fix the tire. Likewise, a redundant setup that includes cold spares or out-of-band devices that are connected directly to your network could incur downtime if they go offline and lock you out of your management system. Facebook probably thought their out-of-band control system worked just fine. Until it didn’t.

The Right Gear for Resilience

At Networking Field Day 29 last week we were fortunate to see Opengear present again for the second time. I’m familiar with them from all the way back at Networking Field Day 2 in 2011 so their journey through the changes of networking over the past decade has been great to see. They make out-of-band devices and they make them well. They’re one of the companies that immediately spring to mind when you think about solutions for getting access to devices outside the normal network access method.

As a VAR there were times that I needed to make calls to locations in order to reboot devices or get console access to fix an issue. Whether it was driving 3 hours to press F1 to clear a failed power supply message or racing across town to restore phone service after locking myself out of an SSH session there are numerous reasons why having actual physical access to the console is important. Until we perfect quantum teleportation we’re going to have to solve that problem with technology. Here’s a video from the Networking Field Day session that highlights some of the challenges and solutions that Opengear has available:

Ryan Hogg brings up a great argument here for redundancy versus resiliency. Are you managing your devices in-band? Or do you have a dedicated management network? And what’s your backup for that dedicated network if something goes offline? VLAN separation isn’t good enough. In the event of a failure mode, such as a bridging loop or another attack that takes a switch offline you won’t be able to access the management network if you can’t sent packets through it. If the tire goes flat you’re stopped until it’s fixed.

Opengear solves this problem in a number of ways. The first is of course providing a secondary access method to your network. Opengear console devices have a cellular backup function that can allow you to access them in the event of an outage, either from the internal network or from the Internet going down. I can think of a couple of times in my career where I would have loved to have been able to connect to a cellular interface to undo a change that just happened that had unintended consequences. Sometimes reload in 5 doesn’t quite do the job. Having a reliable way to connect to your core equipment makes life easy for network operating systems that don’t keep from making mistakes.

However, as mentioned, redundancy is not resiliency. It’s not enough for us to have access to fix the problem while everything is down and the world is on fire. We may be able to get back in and fix the issue without needing to drive to the site but the users in that location are still down while we’re working. SD-WAN devices have offered us diverse connectivity options for a number of years now. If the main broadband line goes down just fail back to the cellular connection for critical traffic until it comes back up. Easy to do now that we have the proper equipment to create circuit diversity.

As outlined in the video above, Opengear has the same capability as well. If you don’t have a fancy SD-WAN edge device you can still configure Opengear console devices to act as a secondary egress point. It’s as simple as configuring the network with an IP SLA to track the state of the WAN link and installing the cellular route in the routing table if that link goes down. Once configured your users can get out on the backup link while you’re coming in to fix whatever caused the issue. If it’s the ISP having the issue you can log a ticket and confirm things are working on-site without having to jump in a car to see what your users see.

Resilience Really Matters

One of the things that Opengear has always impressed me with is their litany of use cases for their devices. I can already think of a ton of ways that I could implement something like this for customers that need monitoring and resilient connectivity options. Remote offices are an obvious choice but so too are locations with terrible connectivity options.

If you are working in a location with spotty connectivity you can easily deploy an Opengear device to keep an eye on the network and/or servers as well as providing an extra way for the site to get back online in the event of an issue. If the WAN circuit goes down you can just hop over to the cellular link until you get it fixed. Opengear will tell you something happened and you can log into the Lighthouse central management system to go there and collect data. If configured correctly your users may not even realize they’re offline! We’re almost at the point of changing the tire while we’re driving.

Tom’s Take

I am often asked if I miss working on networking equipment since I rarely touch it these days. As soon as I’m compelled to answer that question I remember all the times I had to drive somewhere to fix an issue. Wasted time can never be recovered. Resources cost money whether it’s money for a device or time spent going to fix one. I look at the capabilities that a company like Opengear has today and I wish I had those fifteen years ago and could deploy them to places I know needed them. In my former line of work redundant things were hard to come by. Resilient options were much more appealing because they offered more than just a back plan in case of failure. You need to pick resiliency every time because otherwise you’re going to be losing time replacing that tire when you could be rolling along fixing it instead.

Disclaimer

Opengear was a presenter at Networking Field Day 29 on September 7, 2022. I am an employee of Tech Field Day, which is the company that managed the event. This blog post represents my own personal thoughts about the presentation and is not the opinion of Tech Field Day. Opengear did not provide compensation for this post or ask for editorial approval. This post is my perspective alone.

Opening Up Remote Access with Opengear

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Opengear OM2200

The Opengear OM2200

If you had told me last year at this time that remote management of devices would be a huge thing in 2020 I might have agreed but laughed quietly. We were traveling down the path of simultaneously removing hardware from our organizations and deploying IoT devices that could be managed easily from the cloud. We didn’t need to access stuff like we did in the past. Even if we did, it was easy to just SSH or console into the system from a jump box inside the corporate firewall. After all, who wants to work on something when you’re not in the office?

Um, yeah. Surprise, surprise.

Turns out 2020 is the Year of Having Our Hair Lit On Fire. Which is a catchy song someone should record. But it’s also the year where we have learned how to stand up 100% Work From Home VPN setups within a week, deploy architecture to the cloud and refactor on the fly to help employees stay productive, and institute massive change freezes in the corporate data center because no one can drive in to do a reboot if someone forgets to do commit confirmed or reload in 5.

Remote management has always been something that was nice to have. Now it’s something that you can’t live without. If you didn’t have a strategy for doing it before or you’re still working with technology that requires octal cables to work, it’s time you jumped into the 21st Century.

High Gear

Opengear is a company that has presented a lot at Tech Field Day. I remember seeing them for the first time when I was a delegate many, many years ago. As I have grown with Tech Field Day, so too have they. I’ve seen them embrace new technologies like cloud management and 4G/LTE connectivity. I’ve heard the crazy stories about fish farms and Australian emergency call boxes and even some stuff that’s too crazy to repeat. But the theme remains the same throughout it all. Opengear is trying to help admins keep their boxes running even if they can’t be there to touch them.

Flash forward to the Hair On Fire year, and Opengear is still coming right along. During the recent Tech Field Day Virtual Cisco Live Experience in June, they showed off their latest offerings for sweet, sweet hardware. Rob Waldie did a great job talking about their new line of NetOps Console servers here in this video:

Now, I know what you’re thinking. NetOps? Really? Trying to cash in on the marketing hype? I would have gone down that road if they hadn’t show off some of the cool things these new devices can do.

How about support for Docker containerized apps? Pretty sure that qualifies at NetOps, doesn’t it? Now, your remote console appliance is capable of doing things like running automation scripts and triggering complex logic when something happens. And, because containers are the way the cloud runs now, you can deploy any number of applications to the console server with ease. It’s about as close at an App Store model as you’re going to find, with some nerd knobs for good measure.

That’s not all though. The new line of console appliances also comes with an embedded trusted platform module (TPM) chip. You’ve probably seen these on laptops or other mobile devices. They do a great job of securing the integrity of the device. It’s super important to have if you’re going to deploy console servers into insecure locations. That way, no one can grab your device and do things they shouldn’t like tapping traffic or trying to do other nefarious things to compromise security.

Last but not least, there’s an option for 64GB of flash storage on the device. I like this because it means I can do creative things like back up configurations to the storage device on a regular basis just in case of an outage. If and when something happens I can just remote to the Opengear server, console to the device, and put the config back where it needs to be. Pretty handy if you have a device with a dying flash card or something that is subject to power issues on a regular basis. And with a LTE-A global cellular modem, you don’t have to worry about shipping the box to a country where it won’t work.

Tom’s Take

I realize that we’re not going to be quarantined forever. But this is a chance for us to see how much we can get done without being in the office. Remember all those budgets for fancy office chairs and the coffee service? They could go to buying Opengear console servers so we can manage devices without truck rolls. Money well spent on reducing the need for human intervention also means a healthier workforce. I trust my family to stay safe with our interactions. But if I have to show up at a customer site to reboot a box? Taking chances even under the best of circumstances. And the fewer chances we take in the short term, the healthier the long-term outlook becomes.

We may never get back to the world we had before. And we may never even find ourselves in a 100% Remote Work environment. But Opengear gives us options that we need in order to find a compromise somewhere in the middle.

If you’d like more information about Opengear’s remote access solutions, make sure you check out their website at http://Opengear.com

Disclaimer: As a staff member of Tech Field Day, I was present during Opengear’s virtual presentation. This post represents my own thoughts and opinions of their presentation. Opengear did not provide any compensation for this post, nor did they request any special consideration when writing it. The conclusions contained herein are mine alone and do not represent the views of my employer.