Still migrating

Well I'm still in the process of migrating this blog off to a "self"-hosted site, with services provided by Amazon EC2/S3 (western region thank you very much!).  Its been slower than I thought as I have had some personal issues come up as well as work related matters.  Hard to focus on other things.

That said, I'm having the talented folks over at Studio Stayne design a new site / brand logo for me.  They are responsible for the very well done logo for a well followed network blog (Network Janitor).

My original blog name was going to be along the lines of www.qopinc.org with the name of Quam Oculus Pravus, which goes back to my days playing EVE-Online.  It is roughly translated as "The Evil Eye" which is an ancient symbol that is used in trinkets to ward off evil.  It makes ABSOLUTELY no sense for a blog about networking/storage/datacenter technology.

After discussing some ideas back and forth with Stijn, I've decided to change it up a bit.  I'm going to keep a play on "Into the Void" however since that is currently taken, I am going to go with www.network-void.com.  Look for it soon.  I'm working through the process of setting up WordPress and getting my SSL certificates all legitimized and installed before I roll things out.

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Migrating

Moving this blog from Google to a self managed WordPress instance from Amazon Web Services.  I'm not liking the templates and customization options here anymore. 

Its nice for a little personal journal type blog but I need something more.

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Blog Style Changes

Working on my blog today, please be aware.  Looks like hell right now, but I'm working on the templates, stylesheets, and logos.  Stay tuned!

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Daily Life of a Consultant Systems Engineer

Lets take a small journey in the life of a Consultant Systems Engineer.

Today was particularly rough.

Woke up at 5AM to be at work by 6AM.  The past two days I've been "dual fisting" training courses, one for Netapp and one for Dell Sonicwall (shudder).  The Dell is only a two day course and was just terrible.  It started at 8AM Eastern Time, today was the last day so I guessed that I should be punctual since I was two hours late yesterday due to the time zone difference and some scheduling confusion (I'm in Mountain Time).

I have to install a number of these "firewalls" next week for a customer in Central Washington so I figured I should at least get a rough idea of what i'm doing beforehand, though I've had the customer gear for a week or to and basically figured it all out already without the "training."  Dell is talking up this product line pretty heavy, until you ask what happens when you actually turn on some of the advanced UTM/CFS features of the boxes and enable SSL VPN and DPI.  I'm sure you can guess what I'm about to say.  Yep, the box falls over and begins to catch fire in a spectacular display of virtual death.

On TOP of that, I'm doing a Cluster Advanced Administration 5 day course for Netapp.  This one I actually care about.  I have a very large deployment of a mufti cluster setup next month, and I'm responsible for both the VMware portion of it and the Netapp portion of it. Need to pay attention here.

By necessity and desire, I'm primarily a mufti faceted systems engineer.  I focus generally on 3 tiers:  Storage, Networking, and Virtualization.  Put them together, and I call them "Infrastructure."  I'm also required to be a full pre-sales technical engineer, who's job it is to actually sell the product/services we are pitching to our customers after the sales rep has buttered them up with warm fuzzy bullshit about the fantastic toast whatever pizza box piece of gear we are proposing to them makes.

Since my training courses are "virtual," it means I'm in the office.  We all know what happens here.  Inevitably, you end up getting maybe 15 minutes of uninterrupted attention on the training, and the rest of the day you are writing SoW's (Scope of Work), talking to customers during emergencies and generally being bothered by nuisance sales reps on shit that really can (and should) wait.  Oh well.

By the time I left work at 6PM I'd done 3 SoW's for 3 different potential and current clients for work ranging from a simple network assessment check to a 9 month network security staff augmentation, two training courses (at the same time), remotely configured 3 Juniper SRX's for new VPN sites for a client, and taken care of some personal financial business.  When looked at it through the lenses of "man hours,"  I think i pulled a 28 hour day in the span of 12 hours.

I'm actually not complaining.  I love my job, sometimes not my company, but I love my job.  New projects all the time, training whenever I want it usually, and generally pretty good perks (we have a keg in the break room).  Time to go at it all over again tomorrow.

/Signing off.

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Working Hard...

Lately, I've been really working hard to improve my professional "social" presence.  I've started working on this blog in earnest, and have several technical writeups pending peer edits/reviews prior to posting.

This IS a blog about networking, virtualization, storage, basically anything to do with high end systems engineering.  I've applied to become a delegate to the Tech Field Day, and have been working hard to follow the right people on Twitter/LinkedIn, in order to increase my profile presence and get to know other top people in the industry.

Some of the people on twitter that I follow (they're all awesome):
@Storagezilla, @SFoskett, @IPv6Freely, @aconaway, @fryguy_pa, @networkjanitor, @TwistedBitLogic, @abothman, @BobMcCouch, @cloudtoad, @douglashanksjr, @packetpushers

Look for me to restyle my blog soon (off of blogspot probably, in order to get more "freedom").

That is all for now.

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A new stage (JNCIP) in the begins...

I've finished "The Phoenix Project" (check my previous post for a quick initial review), so its back to the non-fiction books and readings.  Since routing is not generally a strength of mine, and I have a fairly large scale security project coming up, I have decided to put my Juniper JNCIE-ENT journey on hold for the time being, and focus more on the security track with JUNOS.  I will be quickly pursuing the JNCIP-SEC.  I got my JNCIS-SEC two weeks ago, so I feel its time to keep the momentum going and get it done.

I'll be posting my progress here as well as little tidbits through my twitter page, so feel free to follow along.  I've been reading up on the exam study guides, and luckily the JNCIP-SEC doesn't focus too much on UTM features, which I particularly didn't do so well on the last exam, so that is a relief to me.  I will have to focus more on a different styles of VPN technology within the higher end SRX lines,  as well continue to strengthen my skills with NAT, and begin learning about IPv6 security.  I've also read that there is a fair amount of IDP questions, so look for some posts related to that as well.

Now the struggle will be to source a few bits of lab kit.  I can get an SRX240H for a bit, but in order for this to REALLY work, I need an SRX100 as well to borrow/buy for a month or two.  If you have one lying around and you are willing to be kindly and help a financially strapped network engineer out, I would appreciate it and find someway to return the favor and/or pay it forward as it were.

Hopefully I'll see this in my near future:

Signing out for the evening.

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Of Life...Finances, and Frustrations

Late on a Saturday night, kids are in bed, and I'm here posting to my blog.  I was going to write something about IS-IS, but then something of a revelation struck me.  I'll get back to IS-IS in a later post :-)

I am an extremely well paid (for my area) systems engineering consultant, focused on networking, storage, and virtualization technology projects.  I love my job, love meeting new people and having the opportunity to travel and work on interesting projects.  My days are always different, and I hardly ever have to worry about coming to work and being bored, vs spending my time as a silo'ed IT tech for a large company, stuck somewhere in a environment staring at ticket queues and always being worried about being outsourced or reduced by a bean counter that doesn't know jack shit about how important our work is.

Now that I've said all that, I'm feeling overly conflicted about my career future.  I struggle with systemic lupus (SLE) along with a myriad of related issues.  I live in a world of near constant daily aches and pains, which I can only explain to someone without it as telling them to imagine waking up to a feeling like they are getting the achiness of the flu EVERY single morning of your life.  There is no cure, there is only a weak treatment regimen of immuno-suppressants corticosteroids.  This brings me to my main point.

Health insurance is bar none the MOST important factor I look at when evaluating a potential career employment change or offer.  If you don't offer health insurance benefits, or what you do offer is very weak, then expect me to need a higher pay so I can find my own.  I simply can't afford to go with the "catastrophic plans" that a number of my age group peers have.  I can find myself frequently hospitalized if I overwork and get dehydrated and without good healthcare insurance, I would be bankrupt near immediately.

As I've previously mentioned, I love my job, and generally like working for the company I work for.  I've managed to make some good friends and colleagues in the short time I've been here and I hope to foster those relationships for a long time.  I must however, be pragmatic and practical about my financial situation.  Its becoming a large burden just to stay afloat from month to month.  We pay nearly $1100.00 / month in premiums for health insurance for myself and my family of four.  Coupled with the out of pocket expenses, plus expenses of owning a rapidly falling apart house with no way out of it, and we find ourselves on the verge.  Expenses pile up and our credit cards are nearly maxed out.

Even if we were to find a way to reduce that amount by 300 to 400 dollars / month, we would be in much better shape in a short time.  I've heard rumors that our premiums are going to rise again.  Immediately after receiving a recent small raise for meeting a personal professional goal, the payroll tax holiday expired, wiping out that increase and putting us back in the red.  I'm hoping that the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) might offer some relief as we can then shop around for more affordable alternatives.  Unfortunately we are a ways off from implementation of the state or federal based health exchanges.  If things don't change soon, we might be forced to make a more drastic move, though what that is, I'm not yet sure.  There are no real attractive options and no real winners in this.

/End Personal Rant

Okay back to JNCIP-SEC and ENT study time.  Got another exam coming up in a little less than a month.

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Recent Readings

Since picking up my Juniper Networks JNCIS-SEC, I've decided to take a small break from at home IT studying, and do a bit of R&R reading.  I saw a book review from an excellent blog I follow, from a previous employer.

The book is "The Phoenix Project" by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford.  It is a modern day version/successor to "The Goal." Its about IT, DevOps, and managing yourself and your IT team in a way to succeed in the face of overwhelming odds amid a myriad of other issues in the business.

The synopsis:

Bill is an IT manager at Parts Unlimited. It’s Tuesday morning and on his drive into the office, Bill gets a call from the CEO.

The company’s new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but the project is massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him and fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill’s entire department will be outsourced.

With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited.


I can hear the groans now. I'm sure a number of you are now wondering how in the hell this can be considered "R&R." Why would anyone want to read a book for pleasure about something they routinely deal with on a day to day basis. Let me explain.


I'm not looking for a purely pleasure book. My mind doesn't work that way. To be honest, I'm always working. I really don't ever shut off. When I saw the fairly glowing review, I decided to take the plunge and see what its all about. The book is actually fairly riveting. Its written in a fairly accessible way, with a first person perspective. While obviously fictional, the lessons therein are laid out right in the open, some by name, others simply implied. There are a few issues in the prose so far, with somewhat of a overuse of the "office politics" card. I've been in some intense meetings in my time, but some of the back and forth between main characters here appear to be forced in a way I can't yet put my finger on. I'm nearly about halfway through, since Friday evening, so I'll update this post with my final thoughts when I'm done.


I encourage anyone to check it out, if they are interested in IT management, DevOps, or just for some simple laughs knowing a lot of whats in this novel is what we go through every damn day.

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Changes abound

Making some changes to my blog so I can actually promote it and begin to use it a bit more.

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The (fast) certification train rolls on...

I'm feeling a bit proud this week.  With very little time to study, I sat and passed the JNCIS-SEC test.  This is Juniper's second level security products exam, focused mainly on the SRX security products.  I used my knowledge gained from working in the field and the "fast track" study guides on the Juniper website here.  They were very thorough.  I borrowed a study guide from a friend who had taken the Juniper security course and compared the content. 

While I'm sure the course (if taught by a knowledgeable instructor) provided better context and labs access, the "fast track" content was very comparable and is highly recommended for those who (like me) are already familiar with the concepts from years of experience with Juniper or other vendors' security products. 

If you absolutely MUST have lab kit to work with, a few base model SRX100s will give you nearly all the necessary capability.  You won't be able to test some of the more advanced UTM features with this model, as it isn't capable, so if you are the hands on type, this might be a problem.  Higher end models are harder to come by for home lab gear, and even those will require licensing to use UTM so you'll probably just have to spend extra time in this section of the study materials.  You've been warned.  I'll admit I didn't do too well here.

There is a fair amount of questions which surrounds UTM, HA, and IpSec so focus a lot of mental energy in these sections.  As for the NAT sections, a good portion of these come from looking at operational mode "show" commands and determining which type of NAT you are looking at (source, destination, static) and whether or not PAT is involved.

Overall, like most Juniper tests, its a healthy mixed balance between concepts, and real world operation, so approach it as such, and you'll do fine.  Good luck!

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