I have to give AWS credit for posting a fairly detailed technical description of the cause of their recent outage. Many companies rely on crisis PR people to phrase vague and uninformative announcements that do little to inform customers and put their minds at ease. I must admit, having read the AWS post-mortem a couple […]
Automation gone wild
As I write this, a number of sites out on the Internet are down because of an outage at Amazon Web Services. Delta Airlines is suffering a major outage. On a personal note, my wife’s favorite radio app and my Lutron lighting system are not operating correctly. Of course, this outage is a reminder of […]
Technical Confusion
How often have you learned about a new technology, and couldn’t understand it? How many trainings and presentations have you sat through that left you in a mental fog? It amazes me how many technologies we are supposed to master in our industry, and how many we never do. Let me give an example. When […]
Remote Access
As a part of my job at Cisco I’ve been looking into Zscaler and their offerings. It started me thinking back to the early days of remote access, and I figured it would make a good topic for Netstalgia. I wrote in the past about how bulletin board systems (BBSs) work, and in another article […]
A nauseating outage
When I worked for the Gold partner I generally serviced clients in the San Francisco Bay Area, but because we were a national partner I was occasionally called to other locations around the country. Being a double CCIE who had worked in TAC, I had a unique skill set among our engineers, which was often […]
For the love of wiring
We’ve moved into a wireless world, which is too bad for me because I love, more than anything, wiring. I miss the days of good old Cat 3 cable, T1 lines, and ISDN BRIs. I miss 66 blocks, punch down tools, cross-connect wire, and tone/probe kits. And butt sets. Especially butt sets. Now I just […]
Theme changes
I mentioned several weeks ago I would be playing with the themes on this blog as my old one is broken and I don’t have time to fix it. Pardon the changes in appearance while I play around. I was getting tired of the tiles anyways, so maybe going back to a linear format will […]
Must we speak in meetings?
When I first started at Cisco (the second time), I remember being in a customer meeting where I had no idea what was going on. As is typical for vendor meetings, Cisco employees outnumbered the customer by 3 to 1. Someone from our side was presenting, though I don’t really remember about what. I didn’t […]
Painted into a corner
I’ve written before about my years at the San Francisco Chronicle, my first job which was exclusively network engineering. It was an interesting environment, as this was back in the years before the Internet totally displaced newspapers. We had printing plants to support, active newsrooms with reporters and photographers, and a massive circulation operation. When […]
Interviewing #3: Technical Assessment
We all have weaknesses, and one of mine is that I’m good at starting things and bad at finishing them. Two years ago (gasp) I had started writing a series about technical interviewing. I wrote two posts (here and here) on the subject and never finished. A recent commenter asked for me to keep writing […]