StaticNAT - Latest Comments

Re: reliability 255/255, txload 1/255, rxload 1/255 What does it really mean?

Tlepire — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:16:45 -0000

1. Looks like every factor of 4 equals roughly 1.5%
2. So, 255=100%, 128=50%, 64=25%, 32=12%, 16=6%, 8=3%, 4=1.5%
3. If TXLOAD shows 47/255, then you're looking at 18% (values 32+8+8)
or (12.5%+3%+3%=18%)

Re: Made it to the Bigs. Network Field Day 3.

Wpwilt — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 07:46:12 -0000

Good luck there, and give me hell josh!

Re: Storage Wars the Epic Battle Rages On

John Martin — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 01:22:44 -0000

< ironic intention >

From a storage weenie's perspective, one of the things that FCoE has that's attractive is that it allows you to keep at least a small portion of the network away from the so called "Network team", none of whom actually understand the absolute requirement for a massively overengineered non-blocking interconnect with no oversubscription and completely lossless layer-2 without which the world of the storage administrator as we know it will ultimately end.

You will pry the last Fibre Channel switch away from the storage team from their cold dead hands.

< / ironic intention >

Re: Having an EPOCH time with Cisco CDR.

Robert Thomson — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 19:44:54 -0000

A more portable solution between mac's and PC's may be to use a VBA macro and take advantage of the dateadd function to create a custom epochconvert that you can use in a cell formula. Taking advantage of the inbuilt functions removes the need for magic constants and allows you to specify a UTC offset to match your timezone. I've pasted the code below but in case it gets mangled you can find it at http://networknerd.wordpress.c.... Alas, I don't have a mac but if someone could test it and post results I would be grateful

Regards
Rob

Private Const SecondsPerHour = 3600Private Const EpochStart = "1/1/1970" '1 Jan 1970 00:00:00 UTCFunction epochconvert(epochtime, Optional UTCOffset) If IsMissing(UTCOffset) Then epochconvert = DateAdd("s", epochtime, EpochStart) Else epochconvert = DateAdd("s", epochtime + SecondsPerHour * UTCOffset, EpochStart) End IfEnd Function
Function ToEpoch(dtDate, Optional UTCOffset) If IsMissing(UTCOffset) Then ToEpoch = DateDiff("s", dtDate, EpochStart) Else ToEpoch = DateDiff("s", EpochStart, dtDate) - SecondsPerHour * UTCOffset End IfEnd Function

Re: Quick and Dirty…Ooohhhh….Yeahhhh

Charles Hill — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 08:11:11 -0000

I prefer "format flash:"

Re: “the best $1.80 I ever spent”

MatthewNorwood — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 22:41:11 -0000

I agree with your reasoning. Everyone does this job for money. Those who don't are lying. If you happen to like what you do, then even better, but none of us do this for free. Anyone who has been in this line of work for more than a couple of years knows that you have to take care of yourself. No company is going to do it for you. You have to manage your own career. If you are good at what you do, there are times in which you have to leave a job because you have outgrown it. There are also times in which you have to leave a job because you are not valued according to your contribution.

There are a whole lot of people out there who are just happy to have a job and don't want to rock the boat. Staying somewhere for any number of years is comfortable for them. That's not to say that you can't stay at company XYZ for 30 or 40 years. You can. It's just that finding companies that are worth staying at for that long is a hard task. The British Special Air Service, who are undoubtedly one of the finest fighting forces the world has ever seen, have a motto that simply says: "Who Dares Wins". I'm a firm believer that when opportunity knocks, you better answer. It may not knock again. Of course, experience will tell you when to actually answer the door as not all opportunities are good ones. Sometimes answering the door is taking a risk. However, playing it safe never got anyone anywhere other than a safe place. Great careers are not found in safety.

I love the Young Guns reference by the way! Emilio Estevez rocked in that role as Billy the Kid! Enjoy your new job and ignore those who criticize you for looking out for yourself. Remember that history never remembers the critics. It only remembers those who actually accomplished something. Go out there and build something really cool and tell us all about it!

Re: Moving on up. From VAR to VP.

Wpwilt11 — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 09:24:49 -0000

Congrats buddy. You will do well. Read the first book in your list I don't always agree with Dale, but it will help you.

Bill

Re: Moving on up. From VAR to VP.

Ethan Banks — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 06:18:29 -0000

I got sick of never being able to finish up properly and/or tweak a network because I was always running off to the next project when I was consulting. Doing one network and doing it well is nice, and usually easier to troubleshoot when it blows up. It'll be awesome for you...I think you'll love it.

Re: Moving on up. From VAR to VP.

Etherealmind — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 03:08:54 -0000

Fantastic. I found the time to own and build networks at a customer site to be deeply satisfying after years of reseller life. And change is good for your spirit.

Re: reliability 255/255, txload 1/255, rxload 1/255 What does it really mean?

joshobrien77 — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 14:22:28 -0000

No Idea. I was just re-publishing data. I use this site as a scratch pad for me and others. So sorry wish I could give a better answer. You might want to post this question in the NetPro forums on Cisco.com

Re: reliability 255/255, txload 1/255, rxload 1/255 What does it really mean?

Mabhay76 — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 11:40:19 -0000

what is the exponential factoe here? is it base 2,base 3,base 8 ot else?

Re: Josh’s Rules on Selling Solutions

Bill — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 10:31:51 -0000

Your rules on Selling solutions are spot on. At the end of the day you have to do 4 things,

1: Make money for your company
2: Support your family
3: Live with yourself
4: Live with yourself (needs repeating)

At some points in my career I have fail 1&2 to Live with myself.

Bill

Re: Welcome to the HP Dream world where reality does not apply.

ucs_dave — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 08:11:43 -0000

One of the most amusing parts of the HP stance was about the "90% solution". As you point out, refreshing even 90% of a huge enterprise's compute in 2 years is a huge accomplishment.

Even funnier than that, is that I have personally installed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of IBM (AIX, OS/400) server equipment into a *brand new* HP data center to support one of their legacy business applications. Why? They couldn't migrate it to one of their platforms and had to continue running it on IBM equipment.

Guess what? No vendor has a 100% solution. There will always be niche cases where you go to a specialty provider. Sure, HP and IBM *claim* to have 100% solutions across any workload, but go into their datacenters and you'll find competitors gear all over the place. I don't see that as a problem, or a weakness, just recognition of the fact that sometimes you buy a specialty product to meet a business need - even if you compete in most spaces with that supplier. It only gets amusing when the same vendor claims 100% solutions.

Let's drop the FUD and just concentrate on the things you CAN do, alright? :)

Re: The Great Hope Re-Visited

Josh — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 12:13:51 -0000

Sam,

Thanks for the info. As of right now investment is not my focus, debt elimination is. By the end of 2011 I should be debt free minus my house. Following that I move on to Baby Step 3 and then quickly on to step 4. This is where your info comes into play. Dave recommends http://www.daveramsey.com/new/... 15% of income in IRA and pre-tax retirement accounts. This is going to be my path.

That said I also plan on moving onto step 5 (http://www.daveramsey.com/new/... in 2012 and completing step 6 (http://www.daveramsey.com/new/... by 2016. This puts me 38 with no debt 6 months of cash in reserve and a solid retirement started any pretty much both kids college covered. Then I can really dig into what long term investments I want to go with from there. As of right now I am guessing that those investments will be Growth Stock mutual funds and investment in my companies or other entrepreneurial opportunities.

At the end of the day there is one key aspect of this plan DEBT FREE and never a slave to anyone again.

Re: The Great Hope Re-Visited

yosemitesammy217 — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 23:25:00 -0000

Hi Josh,

From one network guy to another: Dave's great for getting out of debt, but I suggest you look into the investment philosophy of Jack Bogle, William Bernstein, Burton Malkiel, lots of others known as the Bogleheads (bogleheads.org). Consistency in stock picking is virtually non-existant in the real world, over the long-term, and is dangerous to your financial health... better to innoculate yourself to the financial industry sales pitch now...

Sam
a confirmed Boglehead investor

Re: Stupid Certs

santino.rizzo — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 08:27:31 -0000

In hindsight, the CCNA isn't a hard test to pass if you have real experience. There are a few curveballs, but nothing you can't figure out with time. That's the key: time management. I thought for sure I was going to run out of time, and then ending up having 15 minutes extra. It is a hard test to study for because the material is all over the place. I just used the Cisco Press books and flashcards. Took couple of weeks to go through them. Again, because you have real experience, it shouldn't be too difficult, but you will get annoyed with all you have to study. You might consider completing your CCNP tests first and then go back for the CCNA to get your cert.

Re: Sometimes we just dont need routing

cratejockey — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 22:20:38 -0000

Similar issue. We had good comms on the trunks just not for the native vlan. So managing the device remotely was a non-starter till we did no ip routing. If i hqd to guess they were habing sikilar issues but assumed it was the entire trunk and not just the native. That was our initial thought but testing isolated it then we beat our heads on it for a few days. Default routes and default gateways can make bad bedfellows.

Re: Sometimes we just dont need routing

Matthew Norwood — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 17:39:31 -0000

It appears you are not alone. I came across this today and remembered your post: http://itknowledgeexchange.tec...

Re: DHCP is Doing What?

gspray — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 18:54:04 -0000

Thanks Chris, most helpful. I expect I will be turning to these tools and your advice next time.....because we know there is always a next time.
The only other thing I should add, is that I work for the HealthCare Industry and the users at the site were constantly rebooting to "fix" their immediate issues -because they always had patients in these rooms. It was kind of hard to get tangible data.
I'm still not convinced these tools could've led me to the source virus faster, but maybe. I just wanted others to maybe think of me next time they've "got a weird one".
Thanks.

Re: DHCP is Doing What?

cgb — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 22:45:54 -0000

Yeah, I understand how it goes, especially with it affecting this subset of user's for so long, it would have been relieving for you to have found the solution and moved on to your core tasks.. :)

I havn't confirmed this, but I suspect Snooping & ARP inspection might have helped - e.g. client gets 8 hour lease, continues to use it after the lease is expired. DHCP server gives address to another PC. At this point, the switch's snoop database will have the IPMAC mapping installed for the second PC - the first PC would from this point be replying to ARP queries & the switch will drop those frames (from the switch's perspective, it looks like a poisoning attack by this infected PC).

And if this was detected by Snooping & DAI, IP Sourceguard would have further protected you by blocking IP traffic from the infected PC.

Plus I suspect if you had something like arpwatch installed & listening on the relevant VLAN, you would have detected the MAC flapping between authoritative PC (the second DHCP lease holder) and un-authoritative PC (the first that never renewed).

These technologies are great - I havn't actually deployed them too often due to customer's wanting to take this on in-house but if I was a resident network-admin, I'd be taking advantage of every one of them.

Regards,
Chris Bennett
cgb

Re: DHCP is Doing What?

gspray — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 11:22:37 -0000

Hi cgb,

Unfortunately, in this circumstance, the above mentioned would not work. We did have DHCP Snooping turned on, but the problem was that the conficker virus on the one client was affecting the service on the other clients, without infecting them. Therefore, everything we saw communicating with the server seemed fine. There were no signs of ARP poinsoning or anything like that.

The problem was that the clients weren't checking in and the server was giving out the IP address to someone else. This looked like normal behavior on the network. It wasn't until we installed the McAfee Conficker Detection Tool that we were able to gather the data on a scheduled basis to see which machines were not checking in during their leased time. All-in-all, not something a network engineer should be spinning her cycles on, but it needed done.

You are right, and given the weirdness of the whole thing, we did try those options, but they didn't help. To us, we saw machines getting their renewals just fine - but we didn't have the tangible evidence of what devices were misbehaving.

I should add, nothing else has been done of this. These are all assumptions on my part of how the virus actually worked. Once we removed the infected device and things went back to working again as expected - I never heard anything else related to this subject.

Re: DHCP is Doing What?

cgb — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 09:10:01 -0000

Hi there Josh,

I could be missing something, but wouldn't DHCP snooping & dynamic ARP inspection mitigate this entirely?

Regards,
cgb

Re: Do Not Social Engineer Yourself out of Clients or your Job!

jenniferlucille — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 08:56:42 -0000

It is for this reason that I've only linked foursquare to my twitter feed when I'm at a networking event (CiscoLive). I have also removed pictures from my twitpic feed that could be misinterpreted for some of the same reasons you've mentioned. You never know, what you think is innocent use of social media could be viewed very differently by your company's HR or management team.

Always think twice before you tweet, because the internet never forgets!

Re: Do Not Social Engineer Yourself out of Clients or your Job!

blindhog — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:38:49 -0000

Great post. Good reminder to be more "careful" with social networks.

Re: Winbook 37T1 and Sony RM-AV3000 THANK YOU GOD!

cratejockey — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:06:44 -0000

You are correct, original remote was bad out of the box. I really want a nice harmony but it is not in the debt reduction plan. Plus figured it was a waste of a good piece of tech to not use the Sony. My kids will just end up messing it up anyway.