“Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.” – Ogden Nash The book The Innovator’s Dilemma appears on the desk of a lot of Silicon Valley executives. Its author, Clayton Christiensen, is famous for having coined the term “disruptive innovation.” The term has always bothered me, and I keep waiting for the […]
Before the Internet: The Bulletin Board System II
In my last post, I discussed the BBS and how it worked. (It would be helpful to review, to understand the terminology.) In this post, I have resurrected, in part, the BBS I used to run from 1988-1990. It was called “The Tower”, for no particularly good reason except that it sounded cool to my […]
Vintage DDoS
With Coronavirus spreading, events shut down, the Dow crashing, and all the other bad news, how about a little distraction? Time for some NetStalgia. Back in the mid 1990’s, I worked at a computer consulting firm called Mann Consulting. Mann’s clientele consisted primarily of small ad agencies, ranging from a dozen people to a couple […]
TAC Tales #19: Butt-in-Chair
This one falls into the category of, “I probably shouldn’t post this, especially now that I’m at Cisco again,” but what the heck. I’ve often mentioned, in this series, the different practices of “backbone TAC” (or WW-TAC) and High Touch Technical Support (HTTS), the group I was a part of. WW-TAC was the larger TAC […]
Where does time go?
Two things can almost go without saying: If you start a blog, you need to commit time to writing it. When you move up in the corporate world, time becomes a precious commodity. When I started this blog several years ago, I was a network architect at Juniper with a fair amount of time on […]
Before the Internet: The Bulletin Board System
It’s inevitable as we get older that we look back on the past with a certain nostalgia. Nostalgia or not, I do think that computing in the 1980’s was more fun and interesting than it is now. Personal computers were starting to become common, but were not omnipresent as they are now. They were quite […]
TAC Tales #18: All at once
The case came into the routing protocols queue, even though it was simply a line card crash. The RP queue in HTTS was the dumping ground for anything that did not fit into one of the few other specialized queues we had. A large US service provider had a Packet over SONET (PoS) line card […]
Interviewing #2: Why do we interview?
In the last article on technical interviewing, I told the story of how I got my first networking job. The interview was chaotic and unorganized, and resulted in me getting the job and being quite successful. In this post, I’d like to start with a very basic question: Why is it that we interview job […]
TAC Tales #17: Escalations
When you open a TAC case, how exactly does the customer support engineer (CSE) figure out how to solve the case? After all, CSEs are not super-human. Just like any engineer, in TAC you have a range of brilliant to not-so-brilliant, and everything in between. Let me give an example: I worked at HTTS, or […]
CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure
There were quite a few big announcements at Cisco Live this year. One of the big ones was the overhaul of the certification program. A number of new certifications were introduced (such as the DevNet CCNA/CCNP), and the existing ones were overhauled. I wanted to do a post about this because I was involved with […]