I’ve been quiet for some time because I’ve been working on a couple of eBooks. Today, I pleased to publicly announce my first ever eBook called “The Arse First Method of Technical Blogging”.. I wrote this book to answer the question that I get asked a lot – “How do you write so many blog posts?”. So I started to write a blog post until I realised it would take too long. A year later I have taken it far enough to release an eBook.
Poster: Manager, Engineer, Architect, ITIL Consultant
12th March 2013 by 5 Comments
Because ITIL sucks the enjoyment out of working in technology by making pointless administrative work. Agile is the schizz. With apologies to Joey Roth for the inspiration.
Tired of Being Blamed, It’s Not the Network, It’s the Operating System
18th December 2012 by 15 Comments
Many people blame networking for not being able to support dynamic server movement in virtualised environment while conveniently forgetting that server operating systems haven’t changed their networking software in twenty plus years. I think that a lot of the blame should be apportioned to operating system vendors.
Software Defined Networking & OpenFlow – So Far and So Future
11th November 2012 by 9 Comments
Over the weekend I published the latest Packet Pushers show about Software Defined Networking in the Priority Queue feed which focussed on Cisco and how you can implement SDN in an EXISTING network with some of key people from Cisco.
As I was editing the show I realised that the first time we discussed OpenFlow was in May 2011 on Show 40 – Openflow – Upending the Network Industry – a show where we identified that the future of networking was going to change. I can remember clearly during the discussion with Matt Davey from Indiana University being struck by how obvious the idea was. It was obvious to me that once you grasped the technical concepts behind OpenFlow , any decent engineer can perceive the impact on networking. While OpenFlow makes sense, it took another six months before Software Defined Networking became a thing.
Strap yourself in, SDN is just starting and it’s going to be a fun ride.
Getting Less Interruptions and More Time by Not Answering the Phone
22nd October 2012 by 6 Comments
I have a problem with interruptions as distractions. I spend a lot of time concentrating on writing and researching and concentration breaks are the worst thing for me. I rarely recover when it happens.
My primary source of interruptions was phone calls. I used to have many many phone calls asking for assistance, advice and input until I realised I wasn’t doing real work. In fact, I spent most of my time doing someone elses work. Then I would spend more of my time doing my work. That’s wasn’t fair to me or my family.
My solution to this problem was simple but it took sometime to work it out. It’s really simple and anyone can do it but it takes learning a new skill.
Cisco Value in vCider Is All Programmable Networking
9th October 2012 by 7 Comments
Cisco recently bought vCider. vCider gives Cisco tools for cloud bursting and a proven network driver to deliver overlay networks. It’s a significant boost to their Programmable Networks strategy and definitely an SDN play.
The vCider technology was architecturally similar to Nicira by building tunnels overlays in a network and, in my view, many people are incorrectly misinterpreting this as the core value on the acquisition.
I would posit that there are two aspects to vCider that Cisco is likely to extract value from. 1 – Network driver in Linux. 2 – Cloud burst networking
Prepping for Network Field Day Four
24th September 2012 by 2 Comments
Pulling off the wrap of Network Field Day Four – I always look forward to attending #NFD because it’s all kinds of awesome.
Response: Distributed? Centralized? Both? – Cisco Blog on OnePK and SDN
29th July 2012 by 1 Comment
In this blog post, Frank Brockners ( part of the Get Your Build On team) gives a detailed and interesting look into Cisco’s SDN strategy and, specifically, how Cisco see OnePK as fitting into the market. At the moment, the future of SDN in the market is unclear. There are obviously point solutions in the data centre as Nicira showed recently but in terms of the overall network market outside of that market SDN is very unclear. I review this article and attempt to summarise Cisco’s SDN position.
Top 20 Practical Cabling Tips for Network Engineers – Part One
19th July 2012 by 15 Comments
Most engineers think that cable is simply plug and play. And mostly, that true. In recent years, Ethernet standards and manufacturing Here are 20 things that Network Engineers have forgotten or don’t know about network cabling in a two part series on things I have learned in twenty years of looking after networks.
The Open and Shut Failure of BYOD. As a Narrative
27th June 2012 by 12 Comments
Manager: “Hello IT Department, this is the self important manager from the Inner Tanzanian sales team”
Helldesk: ” Hello again, sir”
