I’m sharing some articles I wrote on the Solarwinds Geek Speak blog. I recommend you start with the 80/20 rule below post below before reading through the rest. The 80-20 Rule of Analysis and Optimisation Start with Continuous Improvement, then do DevOps The pain of network variation – part 1 The pain of network variation – part 2 A disclaimer: Solarwinds didn’t ask me to promote these posts – I’m sharing them because they’re posts I would have otherwise published…
I’ve added a new question to my own network integration checklist, specifically when integrating chassis-based or integrated solutions: Does the system use any reserved internal address ranges?
I’ve got a problem with sagging cables, and I’ve got a simple solution. Examine the side-by-side images below which show the same fiber connection between a switch and a firewall. The image on the left shows a sagging cable which crosses in front of the switch in the rack unit just below it. As you may know, this cabling install is a violation of the 167th rule of networking: Thou shalt contain your cables to your own rack unit and shalt not, under any circumstances,…
I recently gave a 13-minute talk to the Irish Network Operators Group (INOG). In this talk I argue that you can become more effective, and a happier engineer by standing back and reflecting. The talk discusses how you work – with reference to some great truths, principles and fallacies. I introduce The twelve networking truths and the 8 Fallacies of Distributed Computing. I then describe a handful of my own learnings and fancy terms like Chesterton’s Fence and the Gordian Knot. Check out the video folks, I’d…
I had to buy some switches recently and needed to gather a second quote from another vendor. I went to the Dell website and was pleasantly surprised to quickly find a clear price and a buy-now button for each device on their website. Normally you’d need an account of the vendors portal to get this information, so it is refreshing to have straightforward access to clear hardware pricing. However it was the list of professional services options shown in the attached image that caught my eye.
I recently stumbled upon an interesting speech from 1984 by Charlie Munger of Bershire Hathaway fame. Charlie is Warren Buffet’s right-hand-man, and a straight talking genius in his own right. It’s a fairly long speech and Charlie has a few very interesting things to say, but one particular section on ‘explaining the why’ really struck home. Here’s a brief quote: ….if you always tell people why, they’ll understand it better, they’ll consider it more important, and they’ll be more likely…
A friend of mine has just ordered a shiny new packet generator for his network lab. I’ve spent some time working as a QA engineer in a network lab and wanted to share some advice. You can purchase stateful and stateless packet generators from major vendors like Spirent, IXIA or Agilent. If you just need to test throughput, latency or loss, a stateless packet generator will do the trick. The test hardware will use an ASIC to produce line-rate 10G traffic…
I’ve had an interesting few months doing WAN circuit turn-ups for a new Data Centre. I dealt with three major carriers, and each experience was worse than the next. I’m not sure why I held such high expectations but I was surprised by their hopeless inefficiency in delivering what should have been a standard product. In this post I’ll examine the problems I saw and their root causes. In all three situations, 1Gbps Layer-2 ethernet circuit was ordered with a copper ethernet handoff…
East/west segmentation is required in the data center to protect backend networks from each other. Segmentation is often implemented using ACLs between VLANS on your core switch. The ACLS are maintained by network or security engineers but define the flows permitted between hosts or host classes.
Scenario: You are an engineer who runs a managed network on behalf of a customer. Your manager has asked you to create a change control process. Your customer and your manager will measure you only by the uptime or outages they experience, and don’t care what your process looks like. I’ve discussed why we need change control in a previous post. Knowing this, what sort of process would you create? I this post I provide a high-level template and some tips.