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....

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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 mor...

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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 tun...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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 mo...

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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. ...

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Router Simulation

I'm about to get started setting up my route/switch simulators for the JNCIx and CCxx certifications. I'll try to post updates about my status on this page. What I've found so far is that simulating Cisco routers is ridiculously easy, Juniper routers...not so much. Pretty much the only thing that seems to work is packet-based routers (M/T Series).  The problem is that almost all of my future use cases will be flow-based (SRX/J/MX).  Its very frustrating so far. GNS3 has a QEMU setting for JUNOS, but there is nearly no documentation for how to utilize it. More to come. GNS3 Options for Qemu/Juno...

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