Misc on Aaron's Worthless Words

An Update for my Adoring Fans

Tue, 05 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I feel like a teenage girl with a fashion blog who hasn’t posted in 6 months and comes back with “I know I haven’t posted in a while…” Sigh. It’s been right at a year since I actually published a post, so I figured I would give everyone an update.

I’ve had some personal things going on lately, and those have taken all of my energy. We’ve made it through those rough times, so my energy is coming back. I’m feeling better every day, and I hope I can get back to producing some content. And, let me tell you…I’ve got some stuff to talk about.

FEMA and Your Business Continuity Plan

Fri, 12 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I passed the ROUTE exam a few days/weeks/months/something ago and decided to pursue certifications of another sort for a while. The wife and I are trying our best to help the community through our ham radio training, so I decided to go down that path a bit further. One thing I was interested in doing is to do EmComm during declared emergencies. That meant I had to take two FEMA courses online to be allowed in the EOC. I thought they would be terribly boring, but I found them to be quite familiar.

Goals for the New Year

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, I know I’m late. Just remember I’m lazy, and it all makes sense.

This year I’ve decided to go a little more practical with my goals. Instead of “get this cert” or “learn about that”, I’ve decided to take some steps to help myself. That is, in order to learn and advance, I need make sure I give myself the opportunities to do so. Damn, that sounded like some crap from a marketing department, so let me use my own words.

The Usual End of the Year Tripe

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The year is finally coming to an end, so it’s time yet again to look at goals and embarrass myself by publicly admitting that I didn’t meet them. Oh, well. Let’s get this done so I can go back to sleep.

I changed the layout of the blog, so the page with my goals isn’t really visible. Here’s what I claimed I would do this past year.

Select a CCIE training vendor - Yeah…this didn’t happen. This is a very high-priced item, and I simply couldn’t afford the packages I wanted. We’re talking $8k - $10k for everything. Yikes! I asked management at work to pay for it. They said they would but that I would have to agree not to leave the company for some long length of time. I didn’t want to put myself in a situation where finding a new job meant writing a check for $10k, so I decided to pass on it. Without the financial backing, this ended with me just sighing pitifully on my couch.
Take the CCIE R&S lab - Of course this didn’t happen without the first one. I guess I could have bought the materials that I could and just got on a bus to Raleigh to see what happens. This whole thing was complicated by the fact that the new job is 95% Juniper. My waking hours at work and my study time at home were spent trying to figure out how Junos works; I tried my best, but it was just too difficult for me to study both at the same time. For the trifecta of excuses, I also had an issue with my study area. I went from a 4-bedroom house to a 1-bedroom apartment when we moved for the new job. There’s no quiet space at all to study at all - a huge problem I need to fix.
Pass JNCIA-Junos exam - Wo! I actually did this one. I took this exam a few months back and passed it without any problems. Good for me! One out of three!

As for my goals, it really wasn’t a very good year. Even for me, it was bad. I’ll tell you, though, it’s very hard to study when you don’t have one subject or a place to do so. Definitely things I need to work on in 2013.

An Interesting Interview Story

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been looking for a new Network Engineer for quite a while but are having no luck at all. There is plenty of talent out there, but finding a high-end Juniper guy is almost impossible around here. We’ve loosened up our requirement for Juniper experience just to get someone in for interviews. This led us to one prospect and an interesting story.

This guy’s resume was very impressive. For the last 5 years, he’s been the Network Architect at a very large company. His experiences were off the chart. Large-scale Enterprise deployments. Monster PCI environments. Years of Juniper experience. Years of Cisco experience. I had to talk to this guy, so I got a phone interview with him.

Stubby Post - Time for a New Provider

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

After years of getting so-so service from my old hosting provider, I’ve finally migrated over to an unnamed competitor. After my thorough testing schedule, I have no doubt that everything nothing is broken. Surely I didn’t miss some diagrams or audio files or videos or anything. If you happen to find anything amiss (and you won’t), let me know.

Maybe I’ll actually have a real blog article one of these days.

Reviewing Goals from Last Year

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The year is finally over. Actually, it sort of snuck up on me. I must be getting really old or something to let that happen.

At the beginning of the year, I posted my goals for 2011. How did I do? Not too well. I batted .500, so feel free to boo me.

Hurry up and finish CCNA Voice : I finished that on 7 February. Was it worth it? Not really. I haven’t used the knowledge, and voice isn’t my thing. I got it to spice up the resume, but it didn’t really come into play at all. Oh, well. It’ll expire in about 2 years.
Pass CCIE R&S written exam : I got this one finally. I flunked out at Cisco Live this year, but I redeemed myself on 23 August with a online pokie games pass. Jody still owes me a drink since I hold the record for lowest passing score.
Select a CCIE training vendor : Yeah…I never got to that one. When I finally got through the written, my job had completely drained my motivation. I fixed that problem by getting a new job, but that didn’t help free up any time to figure out which vendor I wanted to use. #fail
Schedule CCIE R&S lab : That obviously didn’t work out, either, since it’s dependent on selecting a training vendor. #fail

What does this hold for this year? Getting some training and scheduling an exam is obviously priority. Since my new job is going all Juniper, going through those certifications would be next. Another super-busy year, I’m sure.

Bigger and Better Things

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I like to take a month or so off from blogging during the summer, but my CCIE R&S written studies pushed that back a bit. I’ve finally got my lazy self back on track, but it may just be for a few days since I’ve accepted a new job in another city and am in the process of moving.

I am really excited about the new position. Since I haven’t started yet, I’m not going to reveal who the company is, but you’ve all seen the name. They’re forming a new group to handle specialty services for customers, and I’ll be working for the manager of that team as the Senior Network Engineer. My future boss is a CCIE, so that’s a great start; we didn’t even have a CCNA at my current company until about 2007. The job is going to be great, and the wife and I are both up for new adventures.

A Little OSPF Story

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a story from last week with little of no teaching value.

I got a call from one of our business units looking for some routing help. We don’t usually care about their production networks, but they were seeing some funky traceroutes, so I agreed to try and help them out.

They sent over two fresh traceroutes from a host on a 7600. In one of them, the trace went to the 7600 and then on down the line as expected. In the other, the trace showed the 7600, another router’s far interface IP (that is, an interface not facing the 7600), then the 7600’s interface facing that router. Every few minutes, the path was switch between the two. The dude told me that they were an OSPF shop, so I asked him to send me the standard show ip route and show ip ospf database commands so I could see what’s going on. The word “unexpected” comes to mind when trying to describe what I found. So do other words that aren’t very appropriate.

The Four Stages of Expertise (In Your Mind)

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve worked in any particular area for some significant amount of time, you have probably noticed that how much you think you know about a subject has changed over time. This is nothing earth-shattering, and we’ve all had this realization over the course of our lives; it’s come up a lot lately in the course of my career, so I thought I’d share.

When you learn a new topic, your actual knowledge levels starts at a low point and gradually works its way up until you’re an expert (if you’ve lasted that long). You start with nothing and learn more and more until you get bored and stop. If you evaluate how much you know at intervals during the process, you’ll see that your self-assessment is more of wave than the straight(er) line of actual knowledge.

Stubby Post - I'm Unemployed...Until Monday

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Today was my last day at the office, and I start a new job and adventure on Monday. What does that mean for the blog?

The biggest impact is the fact that I won’t have access to a CSM or FSWM any more. These are two pretty unique devices, and I get quite a few questions on these guys. I’ll try my best to recount what I know, but I’ll have to get information from buddies at the old job if research is needed. The CSM has been a backbone of this blog for a while, so I’ll need to find another area with a similar demand for examples and configuration help. The FWSM doesn’t measure to the same scale, but the old company casino online australia is the only one I know that runs those things, so the world may be that much poorer in FWSM information.

Stubby Post - I've Taken a New Job

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

After several months of semi-serious job searching, I’ve landed a new position with a local company. I don’t know how much I should reveal about them, but I’m really excited to be joining their team. I’ll pass on more details as I get a feel for what Pokies is appropriate, but I’ll say that the position involves Nexus 7ks, ASR 1000s, and supporting private cloud technologies. It should be really fun and quite a new adventure for me.

I've Been Violated...Again

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I noticed a few weeks back that my blog article titles were showing up in my RSS feed as ads for cheap prescriptions. Not good. I changed all my passwords, made sure I was at the latest version of Wordpress (I was), and disabled all my unneeded plugins. The RSS feed cleared up, but my Google search results still showed I was a pharmacy; the big problem is that all the pages appeared normal when browsing over to them, so I never really noticed the bigger problem.

Network Protocol Overhead

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Here are some packet overhead numbers for a few popular protocols to help with doing bandwidth requirement calculations. This may be another add-as-we-go post, so please comment with additions or corrections.

Ethernet : 20 bytes
Frame Relay : 4 - 6 bytes
PPP : 6 bytes
MLPPP: 10 bytes
MPLS : 4 bytes

IP : 20 bytes

TCP : 20+ bytes
UDP : 8 bytes
GRE: 4 - 20+ bytes

The Start of Another Year

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

How did 2010 turn out? Not as well as I would have liked.

Another Blow to Dynamips/Dynagen/GNS3

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

It looks like Cisco is trying to crack down on illegal distribution of their software. I can’t really blame them since it’s their property.

Lessons Learned from a Bad Day

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I had a really, really bad day this past Tuesday. I mean, a really bad day. I guess I should have seen it coming since the last #stabbytuesday was uneventful. Here’s what said cosmos had in for me and the lessons I took away. Most of these are things we’ve all lived before, but, for various reasons, I got blindsided. I expected more from myself.

Stubby Post - A Story on VPN Hardware Acceleration

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

We use a hosted application that requires IPSec tunnels to the provider from different properties across the country. The ones in the lower 48 perform adequately, but the new one in Alaska is absolutely horrible.

Stubby Post - GNS3 Vault for the Win!

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I was thinking about firing off some GNS3 labs as exercises for everyone to use. My thought was that I could generate a few small networks with a requirements doc and have people do the leg work as practice or for a study aid. You know, configure OSPF over this frame relay network or GLBP for load-balancing gateways. I gave up on that dream (like I do a lot of them), and wound up clicking around on GNS3 Vault. Rene Molenaar has already thought ahead and developed about 60 labs exercises that can be downloaded.

A Quick Intro to Google's Capirca

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Yeled left a comment earlier this week asking if I’d seen Google’s Capirca. I’d heard of it and checked out some presentation slides on it, but I’d never actually tried it out, so, in keeping with the script, I downloaded it to see what it could do. Remember, now, that I’ve been playing with it for about 2 hours now, so I’m no expert on its use.

Capirca is a Python-based solution that Google came up with to automate ACL creation on their many thousands of routers around the world. You can’t blame them for wanting to automate it, either. How many times do you think they ran into problems with typos or keying errors from their network guys across those devices?