Colin McNamara - CCIE 18233 , VCP, RHCE, GCIH, GEEK » blog

Cisco releases Nexus 1000V virtual switch for VMware

colinmcnamara — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:30:21 +0000

This afternoon Cisco released a new member of the Nexus family of switches, the Nexus 1000V. This is the first switch to take advantage of VMware opening up their ESX and ESXi platforms to for third party network device manufacturers. This switch directly address some pretty big pain points surrounding current virtualization implementations.

The boundary between server team and network team responsibilities has become “fuzzy”

Cisco address’s this issue by putting a switch that can be managed via the same methods common to other network devices inside the ESX cluster. This switch runs the same code that has become standard on Cisco’s Nexus series of Data Center switches – NX-OS.

Prior to adoption of virtualization, when there was a connectivity problem with a host it was quite common for the network team to verify functionality down to the switch port. The server team would do the same. This allowed for each team to focus on areas that met their core competancy. Once we moved from a real switch port, to a dumb bridge inside ESX, lots of finger pointing resulted.

Now, with a Nexus 1000V sitting virtually inside the ESX clusters, the boundary between network and systems teams has been re-estabilished. Now when there is a problem with a host inside an ESX cluster, the network team can use the same day to day troubleshooting tools available to them in other portions of the network to resolve issues faster, and with less finger pointing.

Security controls have been moved further away from the hosts then we would like

A best practice for applying security policy is to apply controls as close to the source as possible. Think of this analogy – Your kids are blasting Radio Disney from their computer. Which of the following do you do?

A. Turn down the speakers at the source

B. Distribute earplugs to all members or the household

Of course, the obvious action is to go to the source, and apply a control (turn down the volume, and tell the kids to clean their rooms). The same principle is valid on the networking side. The best practice is to apply security policies such as VLAN ACL’s and TrustSec policies directly to the switchports that host your switches. Before the Nexus 1000V this was impossible to do in ESX, and forced many environments to move security controls further up into the distribution layer. The side effect of this was that now the security stance from host to host inside ESX clusters was diminished.

The Nexus 1000V brings something called port policies to the table to address this. What these are is pre-configured application security descriptions that are available to you systems administrators to apply in a point and click fashion. Once these policies are applied to the virtualized host, they follow the host where ever it is moved in your virtual cluster.

Provisioning and integrating the networks of VMware ESX clusters with classic networks for most is challenging at best

I wrote an article in march about this specific issue in my post – Challenges integrating VMware into Cisco networks . The core of this issue is that in general that the network integration portions of VMware ESX clusters is not really designed to address server teams , or network teams. In fact, you need to be pretty savy with both portions to successfully integrate VMware clusters into your network. In the real world, you generally find people that are good at one or the other, not both.

By putting a Nexus 1000V in your VMware clusters, you know give the networking teams something they can understand without having to learn Linux, and how it handles bridges (key to understanding ESX networking). With a Cisco switch running virtually inside your clusters, network teams can follow standard core / distribution / access models with the access layer now residing inside the ESX clusters. The network teams can also leverage their existing LAN switching skills for integrating the virtual switches in the clusters with the existing Data Center switching fabrics.

With these roadblocks addressed, Cisco is moving to further the DC 3.0 vision

To realize the DC 3.0 vision, the network inside of VMware clusters had to be under control, and follow the same architectural guidelines that the rest of our network is subject to. With the Nexus 1000V this is now a reality. The next steps withing the DC 3.0 vision to are to extend virtualization and mobility throughout our storage fabrics, and to continue to extend virtualization to the network as a whole, as well as focusing on application virtualization and acceleration to truly realize the vision of cloud computing in the data center.

On the storage virtualization side, Cisco will be using a technology called FlexAttach to enable virtual and physical hosts to change locations in the datacenter without storage team intervention (more on this in a near future post). And on the application virtulization and acceleration side, expect Cisco to continue to enhance it’s existing Application Control Engine (ACE) and Wide Area Application Services (WAAS), and further integrate these into their virtualization offerings.

Want to learn more ?

Introduction to VN-Link network services – Cisco.com

Nexus 1000V overview – Cisco.com

VMware distributed vNetwork switch demo – VMware.com

Challenges integrating VMware into Cisco networks – colinmcnamara.com

Douglas Gourley speaking about how Cisco and VMware will drive Cloud Computing in the Data CenterSimilar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Cisco releases Nexus 1000V virtual switch for VMware

Measuring and mitigating risk involved with sharing virtual infrastructure between DMZ and Internal environments

colinmcnamara — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:36:57 +0000

Ivan Pepelnjak over at IOS Hints and Tricks wrote a post about DMZ VLAN leaking that got me thinking.

He writes about “the VLAN leaking myth” and how it encourages clients to utilize physically separate network infrastructure in the DMZ’s. Now first things first, I wouldn’t call VLAN leaking a myth. At one time it was a very real and serious vulnerability that was exploited by overflowing the capacity of the switch you were attacking, and causing it to “downgrade” from switch to a hub. Once this happened you now had access to previously protected devices, as well as having the ability to sniff data as it passed through the shared hub backplane.

As he mentions though, this is 8 years ago. Most switches have evolved to the point where backplanes far exceed the traffic that could ever be injected into their switchports. Even beyond backplane enhancements there are many ways to further firm up your security stance – Virtual Device Contexts, not using Layer 3 SVI’s on a DMZ VLAN, utilizing PVLANs, using port security, virtual routing instances, and many more. Of course, there are still many other attack vectors that still remain, but can be mitigated by utilizing features built into the majority of enterprise switches available today.

I think the real question is not “are VLANs safe in a DMZ”. The important question is have you mitigated the probability of compromise (the actual threat) to levels that are acceptable to your business. This question remains whether you have a standalone switch or not. So many times we hear about risk risk and more risk. But risk alone is meaningless in a business context. What is important is combining risk with likelihood. For that I like to use a simple table to come up with the true threat.

For example, as I drive to Fry’s there is the risk of me dying due to a car crash. The impact of me dying is very high (risk) however the likelihood of an accident is low, and furthermore I reduce (mitigate) the latent risk (threat) by wearing my seat belt. So all in all the threat of me dying on my way to Fry’s is pretty darn low.

In a business context this may be that I have public facing web servers and network devices in my DMZ. The impact of them being compromised is that my public image may be tarnished for a short time, and my end users may lose productivity if they are not able to VPN into work, or access the Internet while on premise. I mitigate this risk by using firewalls and both host and network based Intrusion Prevention Systems as well as implementing best security practices on my network and systems devices. The latent risk (threat) remaining is at a level that is acceptable to the business leaders, so the system is allowed.

One question that I have seen coming up more often as we move towards fully virtualized data centers is centered around commingling of virtual infrastructure. There are some hard questions which challenge some practices that we have held true over the years.

Should you allow sharing of physical memory on a host virtual machine between an internal and DMZ server?
Should you allow virtual infrastructure from multiple security zones to share a storage array or cluster of arrays?
Should you allow multiple virtual switches in different security zones commingling on the same ESX or Hyper-V cluster?
Should you allow virtual firewall and load balancing instances protecting internal and external zones to reside on the same hardware?
Should you allow virtual routing instances from multiple zones to share a physical infrastructure?

In the past world of standalone systems, the additional cost of providing a wholly separate infrastructure for DMZ environments was relatively low. Each system generally had internal disk, or at most direct attached storage. Network devices themselves were scaled down to support one chassis one function. This fit quite neatly into the Enterprise Composite Network model that was quite common from 1999-2003.

Now, many data centers have moved to the Service Oriented Network Architecture (SONA). In this model the cost of a virtualized data center is primarily focused on foundation elements such as the virtual storage and virtual fabrics, virtualized network, and virtual systems elements. The cost of providing additional virtualized services off these elements is low, however the cost of duplicating the physical infrastructure is quite high on both the capital and operational levels. This is forcing the technical and executive leadership at many companies to take a long hard look at the true threats they are facing in previously physically separate security zones such as DMZ’s, Financial and other secure zones. In the end, they are having to decide whether the threat remaining after their security controls is worth duplicating hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of infrastructure or not.

These are hard questions, with really no single good answer. My gut feel is that over the next few years we will continue the move towards the fully virtualized data center where components such as memory, PCI-X buses, storage and network devices are even further decentralized. This will make the cost of duplicating the infrastructure more and more significant, causing consolidated data center (or compute) fabrics to be the norm. At this point the discussion will move away from securing zones by creating separate infrastructure, to providing end to end security, starting integrated application level security, maybe with TrustSec or a dirivative, all the way down to securing the data at rest on disk. For the time being however, the best we can do is sit down and do an honest appraisel of our security stances, mitigate what we can, and do our best to design data center architectures that provide the flexibility of implementing whatever choice the technical and business leaders agree on.Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Measuring and mitigating risk involved with sharing virtual infrastructure between DMZ and Internal environments

Protecting the integrity of the CCIE lab – Verbal Interviews being tested

colinmcnamara — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:22:36 +0000

Brian Dennis over at Internetwork Experts blog caught wind of an interesting email from Cisco -

Dear Candidate:

On August 27, Cisco will introduce a pilot for the CCIE Routing and
Switching lab exam in Beijing, China. The pilot will add a 10-minute
interview that will assess the candidate's ability to apply expert-level
networking skills and knowledge to networking problems that are encountered
on the job. After the lab orientation, a panel of three experts will conduct
a verbal interview with each candidate, asking a series of expert-level
networking questions (questions and answers will be in English). The ability
to correctly answer these questions will affect the exam score. After
completing the interview, the candidate will have the entire 8 hours to
complete the lab portion of the exam.  These scores will then be
calculated and then combined for a total score which will decide a pass
or a fail.

Our goal with this email is to let you know that your day will extend beyond
the normal testing day by approximately one hour.  The additional hour will
be at the end of the day. We hope you find this interview process
enlightening and helpful as we continue to strive for the standard the world
has come to expect from CCIE.

In my opinion this change is both needed and appropriate. In the past couple years, the two main barriers to entry with the CCIE (access to gear, and knowledge) have been lowered with the abundance of training programs as well as dynamips and it’s derivatives for gear emulation. Where in the past you were looking at a minimum of $8,000 dollars for a full lab, now you can run it on your PC at home.

From what I see, this is encouraging engineers to get their CCIE’s earlier in their career. This in itself is not a bad thing. If an engineer has dedicated themselfs to learning all the in’s and out’s of networking technology, then they really have earned the title. The problem comes when people want to take short cuts. They buy a lab of someone in China, or use other methods to get copies of the lab. To them, passing the lab and getting their number is all that is important, not truly becoming an expert in the technology.

While in the short term this may seem like the quick path to a good salary, in the long term everybody loses. Those who have cheated their way to their CCIE (while few and far between) end up devaluing the cert for the rest of us. And at the end of the day, they are just cheating themselves, and will lose their jobs when their true skills are tested.

It looks like Cisco is seeing the same thing that I have just talked about. This pilot program should go a long way into protecting the integrity of the CCIE for years to come.Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Protecting the integrity of the CCIE lab – Verbal Interviews being tested

Certguards inflamitory post about Ethan Banks removed from Network World Magazine

colinmcnamara — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:12:34 +0000

Credit to cciepursuit for breaking the news first , it looks like the editors at Network World magazine have removed Robert Williams attack on Ethan Banks from their site.

From the network world editors -

Network World and the authors have decided to remove this blog post and the discussion that followed. While the original post was intended to highlight how the issue of braindumps is a pervasive one, we regret having singled out anyone in particular and apologize for any accusations of cheating.

I hope that Ethan is watching the outflow of support for him, and puts his site back up soon.Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Certguards inflamitory post about Ethan Banks removed from Network World Magazine

Passed CCDE written and Recertified my CCIE – Killed two birds with one stone

colinmcnamara — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 05:47:30 +0000

Today was a good day, I knocked two major items of my todo list. The first, was passing the CCDE written.

This is the first step towards sitting for a practical examination that will hopefully be released this October. And, in response to Micheal Morris’s blog post – Yes Mike, I can pass the CCDE written.

The second big item on my todo list was to recertify my CCIE. Thankfully, Cisco counts the CCDE written towards my recertification requirements. I am waiting for the system to update, but I think this will set me up to be certified till June of 2011.

There is one interesting side effect of passing my CCDE written the week before networkers. I had originally planned on using the free exam at networkers as a “safety” exam in case I struck out on this attempt. Now of course, that is not necessary. Since I am already a CCIE, there isn’t much incentive to take a professional level exam.

So, after weighing my options, I have decided to take the CCIE Service Provider written. It covers much of the MPLS / IP Next Generation Networks material that I have been studying. I only have 7 days to prepare, so the odds are against me. However, with the heavy service provider focus in the CCDE blueprint, I have a feeling after I battle the CCDE practical I will be set to roll right into the CCIE Service Provider lab.Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Passed CCDE written and Recertified my CCIE – Killed two birds with one stone

Certguard, Ethan Banks, Network World and Common Sense

colinmcnamara — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 02:22:19 +0000

Robert William of Certguard managed to create quite a stir in the networking corner of the blogosphere last week. Robert runs a company called Certguard, that builds databases of braindumps across the internet, and sells a “Trusted Seal of Approval” for training vendors that pass Certguards standards. Robert posted an article that demonized Ethan Banks (of ethanbanks.net) and effectively accused Ethan of using and promoting braindumps to gain CCIE status.

From Roberts article on networkworld

Ok, so Ethan doesn’t believe in violating the NDA that he had to sign umpteen times to get where he is now, but he’s promoting the use of Testking (a well known cheating tool) to “study” for his CCIE.

As a CCIE, I am obviously supportive of Cisco’s efforts to maintain the integrity of their (and my) certifications. And yes, Ethan was not exercising the best judgment by posting about Testking in a comment on his blog. Is that a reason to start a fire, and try to get his CCIE revoked? As a CCIE, my vote is a resounding no. While Ethan definately made a bonehead move, it does not change a couple things.

The CCIE written is just a gating exam, meant to limit the CCIE lab to individuals that have a chance (a notably slim chance) of passing the actual lab.
The CCIE exam, and its proctors are amazingly effective at weeding out cheaters. Yes, every once and a while a cheater manages to get through. But trust me, these guys get eaten alive when they look for employment.
Cisco has its own enforcement team and methods for finding cheaters, they have managed to keep Cisco certifications from devolving into the land of the MCSE. I think we should trust them to do their jobs, and more importantly trust their discretion.
Ethans site documented a very thorough preparation process as he walked the long road towards his CCIE. Sadly his site has been taken down, but in my opinion this shows that he put significant preparation in, and earned his number.

My take on things is that Ethan the target of a marketing scheme. From what I can see, Roberts efforts here are not focused on supporting Cisco’s certifications. It looks to me that he is trying to drum up traffic to his business. If you look at his products, there are $995 – $4,999 fee’s to become a “VIP site”. For your payment, you receive a seal of approval and a listing in the “VIP” area of his site.

Sadly, I have seen this scheme before in the photography world. Certain photographers have been known to set up review sites of other photographers. They build Google Page Rank (PR) on their site so they show up in searches relevant to their competition. Once they start showing up in those targeted searches they sell “VIP” listing or reviews. The photographers that pay up to become “VIP” members ensure that no bad reviews of their buisiness are put up on these sites.

Robert is running the same quasi extortion scheme, but for training vendors. I think this demonstrates a lack of integrity on Roberts part. There is no excuse for attempting to destroy Ethans name in order to make a few bucks. I refuse to condone his behavior and would hope that the editors at Network World feel the same and remove his blog from their site.

Ethan – If you read this, I hope you realize that me and others like me are on your side. You have obviously put stellar effort into both studying, and documenting your efforts. It is obvious to any reasonable person that you have earned the title of CCIE.Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Certguard, Ethan Banks, Network World and Common Sense

Twitter Updates for 2008-06-05

colinmcnamara — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 07:59:59 +0000

Nexus 5020 – Consolidated 10 Gig Ethernet and 4 Gig Fibre Channel: Cisco released an addition to th.. http://tinyurl.com/5ujn7c #

UPDATE – Sorry for the RSS spam, I have been playing with twitter (and frankly am failing to see its draw) and setup twitter tools to integrate my blog with my twitter microblog. I apparently left the create daily twitter summaries on. My appologies for the RSS spam.

–ColinSimilar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Twitter Updates for 2008-06-05

Challenges integrating VMware into Cisco networks

colinmcnamara — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 01:29:50 +0000

UPDATE – for those looking for the Nexus 1000v release, check out this post

In the past couple years, VMware has changed from a product hidden in development and testing environments to a full fledged enterprise computing platform. It brings many benefits to the companies that implement it, however with those benefits come changes to the access layer of your data center. Your access layer is no longer a top of rack Cisco switch, or end of row aggregation chassis. It is now a virtual bridge that exists logically within your VMware ESX server.

This causes an interesting question to come up in many customers – Who is responsible for the configuration and maintenance of this Vswitch? At first glance most groups reference the port on the last Cisco switch as the division of responsibility between network operations and systems operations. This has worked well in the past for a three main reasons.

First, it divided responsibilities based on technical skillset. For example a network engineer understands spanning tree, trunking, routing protocols, firewalling. While a systems engineer understands file systems, databases and Linux and Windows operating systems.

Second, it provided for a interconnection point where standardized configurations could be applied by an operational group, versus complicated configurations that could impact overall network designs and require an architectural board review.

Third it provided for a clean hand off for troubleshooting. Both network and systems operations could agree on layer 2-4 functionality in an area that provided for detailed debugging on both sides.

Lack of a defined access layer

VMware ESX throws a wrench in this model. We no longer have this well defined edge at the access layer. The access layer now exists virtually inside a server. More specifically, it is a logical devices running in a Linux server. This presents a challenge because it requires cross over knowledge. Whoever is responsible for this integration has to be fluent in Linux systems administration , and also fluent in network design and operations. Frankly this is a rare skill set to come across, as it requires and engineer who has attained high proficiency in both systems and network engineering.

I see this fuzzy line of demarcation often as a failing point for many VMware integrations. Many times I see network operations teams not involved in ESX cluster design because its a “server” , and systems operations teams generally don’t have the networking skills necessary to design and implement an fully functional system.. The solution to this problem is education and collaboration.

The need for collaborative design sessions

The single most powerful element in a successful VMware integration is the creation of strong design documents. These are created by holding planning sessions where both your systems and networking leads hash out a strong design that takes both short and long term virtualization and network goals into account. Also, many times when people hear the word design, they think it is a high level Visio and a bill of materials. That is a just a fraction of the effort required. A proper design should cover everything from a 10,000 foot overview Visio down to protocol flow diagrams and configuration examples. By created a detailed design like this it is likely to bring up common issues such as 10 gig aggregation, trunking, VMotion security, layer two adjacency and layer 7 network service delivery on a white board instead of a production environment.

To create this detailed design, both your Network and Systems leads have to understand this product. VMware recognizes this is critical to successful implementation (and to further sales of their product) an offers the VMware Certified Professional certification. If you have the resources, I would recommend sending both your network and systems leads to this training at the same time. Having them attend training together allows them to leverage each others strengths and bring up questions specific to their network and their goals.

A real world example of this is the company I work for, Eplus. Last April forty of us, all senior engineers attended VMware Certified Professional training at the same time. The class was mixed up so there was an even distribution of CCIE’s, Systems Experts, and Storage Experts. Needless to say this presented our instructors with some extremely challenging questions, but more importantly it set the stage and created a venue for collaboration between these different practices within our own company.

Real world benefits

A great example of this model’s success this occurred last month. Rick and I were sitting in the engineering side of our Sunnyvale office, catching up on email after giving presentations at Cisco that morning and afternoon. In the bullpen behind us, one of the Microsoft architects was engrossed in a troubleshooting call with a large customer on the other line. It turns out a large systems vendor (who shall remain nameless) had been trying for a week to integrate the first ESX cluster into this network and just could not get the networking portion to work correctly. Our account manager received the call from a the customer, and asked the technical teams to step in to see if we could help out in any way.

The systems engineers were able to isolate the problem down to the network interconnections, but needed to bring in networking resources to resolve the problem. Rick and I were waved over and were given an overview of the problem and introduced us to the customer the far side of the call. We asked a few questions about the physical and logical architecture of their network and created a diagram of their network on the whiteboard. With this we were able to ask them to execute commands continuously isolating the problem domain until we found and resolved the issue.

Seven minutes had passed from the point Rick and I were waved over to the point the customer had a working installation. This allowed the customer to focus on moving their business forward instead of fixing a failed implementation. Three of us on the call had attended VMware Certified Professional training together. We had spent at a minimum 50 hours each creating a baseline of understanding in class, as well as many discussions in engineering meetings. The solution came in seven minutes not because of any one teams individual strengths, but because of collaboration. The systems engineers were able to isolate the problem domain very specifically. And as network engineers trained on VMware were able to quickly understand and digest the issues, and tie it together with our larger understanding of networks as a whole. Only at that point, when the team was able to leverage each others strengths were we able to address the problem so quickly.

There will come a point in the next few years where this fuzzy boundary between the “network” and the “server” is established again. My call is that this will coincide with Cisco finishing development of their Vswitch that will reside inside the ESX server. This switch will require both Cisco and VMware improve their design and integration guides for ESX which are both frankly lacking substance. Until those detailed architecture, integration and troubleshooting guides exist the key to successful ESX cluster implementation will be a strong cross trained systems and network teams that are collaborating on the next level of virtual network design in your enterprise.

Want to learn more?

Cisco – Integrating Virtual Machines Into Cisco Data Center Architecture

This is Cisco’s main design guide regarding the integration of virtual machines. You can use it as a decent high level overview if you are a network engineer who is curious how VMware ESX, or Xen servers for that matter will fit into your network.

VMware – Virtual networking Concepts

This VMware document goes between high level overviews and detailed descriptions. It is a decent resource for a network engineer, and provides an overview of ESX network features, however it misses the target for providing configuration examples.

Blog of Scott Lowe – Technical Lead for Virtualization at Eplus Technology

Scott is an engineer that works with me at Eplus Technology. He is based out of the east coast and covers servers, storage and virtualization. His blog is chock full of good of information. A recent post of interest was how to enable Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) on VMware ESX server network interface cards.Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Challenges integrating VMware into Cisco networks

Reader question – Why are corporations looking for BGP experience?

colinmcnamara — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 05:40:19 +0000

Mike, a reader of my blog, sent me an email last week with decent question for someone early in their career. Mike is currently looking for a new job. He was curious why so many corporate IT jobs were requiring BGP knowledge and experience.

Mike Writes -

“Hi Colin,
I’m an avid reader of your blog and had a question that I figured you could answer. I don’t have CCIE knowledge like I’m sure a lot of your readers do. I have worked for the same company for 6 years and during that time had been promoted into the Network Group where I was sent through class and earned my CCNA. The company I worked for decided to relocate across the country and so I have been looking for a new job. Finding a new job doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal but I noticed a lot of job descriptions are asking for BGP experience. We didn’t use BGP at my last job and I thought BGP is used primarily by ISPs for routing between Autonomous systems? If that is the case why do so many non-ISP companys list BGP experience in Networking job descriptions? What are they doing with it? Shouldn’t the ISP be doing the BGP routing for them?
Thanks!
-Mike”

Well Mike there are 3 primary reasons why a company would require (or want) BGP knowledge from its candidates.

Scenario 1. The company has an redundant Internet edge.

In this case lets call our company sample_company. Sample_company has its website hosted in a publicly facing DMZ and wants to make sure that its web servers are available in the case of an ISP failure. Normally in this case the company would request and Autonomous Systems Number (ASN) from ARIN and would get assigned a block of publicly routeable IP address’s (normally /24) that they can advertise. Sample_company would then peer with multiple ISP’s for example one connection to AT&T and the other to Sprint. Sample_company would advertise their ASN through both these ISP’s, and in the case of a failure of one of their ISP’s, the rest of the Internet would be able to calculate a path to sample_company’s web servers via the backup ISP.

Scenario 2. The company is utilizing MPLS for its WAN connectivity.

From a customer perspective MPLS is a private BGP based WAN where all edge devices connected to the MPLS provider utilize BGP to inject and learn routes. One note, some providers do support advertisement of routes via OSPF and even EIGRP now, but the most common scenario is to use BGP as your internal WAN protocol while running MPLS. One trend I am starting to notice, is that since companies are already using BGP on the MPLS WAN, they have started utilizing BGP as their primary routing protocol for their sites to avoid running multiple routing protocols and having to redistribute into BGP to cross the WAN.

Scenario 3. The company is using MPLS inside their data centers for segregation of business units.

In essence they are using the same tools and technologies that MPLS service providers are, however applying it inside of their data center and campus networks. In this case, BGP is the routing protocol necessary to carry the routes between the seperate MPLS VPN’s that are running inside the corporate data center. While this sounds pretty complicated, it actually simplifies many of the designs that you would normally implement to attain the same goals.

Learn more about BGP - Of course, there are many other reasons why you may see BGP on a job listing, but I think the previous covers the most common. If you are curious, and want to learn more about BGP I recommend buying Routing TCP/IP volume 2 by Jeff Doyle. This covers many great scenarios and configuration examples in EGP protocols. It is also written in plain English which can be a challenge with many technical books.

Learn more about MPLS in the enterprise - If you are feeling like learning about how you can implement MPLS inside of your own enterprise network then I would recommend buying Network Virtualization by Kumar Reddy and Victor Moreno. I was lucky enough to have Rick Davis translate the whole idea of utilizing MPLS in a campus environment into plain English for me a couple years back. From that point I was able to really expand my knowledge base and start asking the right questions from a firm foundational understanding of the technology. Kumar and Victors book took my understanding to the next level, showing how to incorporate many very cool features to make a MPLS network stand on its head if you want to. I can say (and actually have said to Kumar Reddy) that this book redefined my data center designs for large corporate and enterprise customers. I really recommend that you add this to your collection.Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Reader question – Why are corporations looking for BGP experience?

Usability features in Cisco’s Nexus 7000

colinmcnamara — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 07:57:31 +0000

Douglas Gourlay, Sr Director, Marketing and Product Management for Cisco’s Data Center Business Unit and writer of Cisco’s Data Center Blog commented on my celebrity sighting post (me and the nexus 7000). He asked two questions regarding my post about the Nexus 7000, and I feel that it best serves everyone to answer them here.

What useability enhancements do you feel are the most beneficial?

A separate, IP enabled, Management Interface. This has been a long time coming. The out of band management interface is very similar to a Ilo card in the HP world. it is effectively a supercharged console server that happens to site on the backplane of the sup engine. I am sure whoever pushed this feature through is going to get flowers one day from a Tech who DIDN’T lock himself out because the management interface was effectively a separate system.
Finally, a functionally USB Interface that I can transfer IOS (well, now NX-OS) images through. Everyone has a USB key nowadays, even my Grandmother has one, it will make life so much easier when I can have a 4 gig key with me that has most IOS / NX-OS versions and my common configs and just pop them right in.
The integrated Cabling system is CLEAN. I love that it forces you to reserve the appropriate space for cabling, and that there finally is the possibility to avoid the flying spaghetti train wreck we see so often in Data Centers.
Front to back Cooling. The cooling design is well thought out. I liked the fact that it draws from directly above the front floor and exits rear top.. This should help out in raised floor data centers that have a large temperature gradient as you move to the top of the rack. It also negates problem of having multiple 6500 chassis side to side and having warm air blowing from the exhaust of one 6500 to the intake of another 6500.
Fan Slots are now placed where it is IMPOSSIBLE to cover with cables. I would say 7 out of 10 times when I walk into a new customers Data Center I find that there are cables run directly over the fan tray with no slack. That is not a failure in design per say, but it could have been avoided. With the Nexus 7000 fan trays in the back the problem is solved before it is created.
Power supplies are in the back . FAR away from the data cabling. It never fails that 20 amp circuits get uncomfortably close to copper cabling. By moving the power supplies to the back side of the chassis, this becomes a mute point and we remove any shadow of a doubt about EM interference causing craziness in our cabling.
This one sounds really mundane, but a quick heads up grouping of status lights. In the past these were normally in a position where you had to squat down to see them, or they are obscured by cables. Buy putting them on the front of the cable tray assembly it ensures these will always be visible.

What can we focus on now to make it a better platform?

One thing that worried me a little was the placement of the compact flash cards in the supervisory module. For those how haven’t it up close look at this picture of the chassis and look for the Grey cover midway up the sup modules in the center slots. Behind them are two flash cards, one for system partition extension, and one to dump log files into. Having these cards available are great features however I could see an operational process of security rotating out the log partitions, or more likely and engineer pulling the flash card after dumping some data for analysis to it, and then pulling the wrong card by accident. Having a simple strap (like the screw downs for power supply plugs) or something similar would go along way towards mitigating that risk.
Continue with the spirit of innovation that has defined Cisco over the years. Cisco has consistently came out with or acquired and integrated many great products that directly address the needs of the market place into the product line (MARS, ASA, AireSpace, TelePresence, MDS, ACE, Etc) but frankly the last GAME CHANGING product that set the industry on its heals and forced everyone to rethink how we utilize technology to accelerate business as a whole was the acquisition of Selsius and the introduction of VOIP as an enterprise class product to the world. I remember having the hair stand up on my arms from the excitement of going up against Avaya and Nortel back then and fighting that uphill battle, educating customers and peers about this “new thing called VOIP and how CallManager (now Unified Communications Manager) is your ticket towards productivity.
When we talk about the Virtual DataCenter, I/O Virtualization (FCOE) and VFrame Automation it is not just another incremental improvement of existing technology. It is a paradigm shift, a leap ahead, a GAME CHANGER. I get the same chills that I did when VOIP was new because I know that those are technologies that will force us to rethink how we approach computing and data systems. These technologies are to the Data Center what IP telephony was to the PBX, and Cisco is the only company with technologies and engineering know how in all the verticals necessary to pull this off.

What being married to a geek who does search engine optimization gets you

colinmcnamara — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 03:35:00 +0000

I have been learning all the right ways to build a website that Google can understand. Along the way I set a couple of goals.

The first and foremost goal is to only use “white hat” or legal ways of increasing her visibility
Get Ashley on page 1 for four target keywords
Get An indented listing

Well, it looks like I met my initial goals. Now to move to some more generic keywords and see what goes from there.
Copyright ©2008 | Colin McNamara | CCIE 18233 | All Rights Reserved”

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

What being married to a geek who does search engine optimization gets you

Tour of Ashley’s new site !

colinmcnamara — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 01:35:00 +0000

Ashley got a new site from blu-domain a couple weeks ago and it is finally live.
let me take you on a tour -

Here is the flash version of her site

Here is the HTML beginning of her site

Direct to the HTML version

Her about page titled your San Diego Photographer

Her maternity portfolio, featuring some great shots of San Diego moms

Her baby portfolio feature babies in San Diego

Her children portfolio

Her frequently asked questions

Her price sheet

Ashley’s Charity Work

Her client proofing, where her clients can preview all their images

One that I really like is a place where you can check her schedule

And last but not least, a place where you can contact her

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Tour of Ashley’s new site !

Fibre Channel over Ethernet is taking off

colinmcnamara — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 05:51:00 +0000

Intel released open source drivers based on their current ISCSI driver implementation for Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCOE) today. For those that aren’t up to speed on FCOE, it is effectively ISCSI lite. When I say lite, I mean ISCSI without the layer 3 overhead. This will allow FCOE to leverage lower cost Ethernet transport (though most likely will be implemented using 1 and 10 gig interfaces.

This tactic address one key failing of ISCSI. Specifically an ISCSI interface running at 400 megabit will take 16% of a 3 ghz 64 bit cpu while using a software initiator or target. This can create some interesting issues where you don’t want to have them. By removing the layer3 information, and transposing fibre channel commands over the Ethernet transport a major cpu hit is avoided.

My gut feel is that this technology will follow a similar track as ISCSI did. ISCSI had a very low adoption in the first 3 years. Storage guys are naturally timid, as there are stiff consequences for failure, but eventually engineers warmed up to ISCSI and started deploying it where it was most appropriate, in lower bandwidth utilization hosts. FCOE will follow this same path, however this time we won’t have to fight the FUD of storage of a network transport. What is in FCOE’s favor is that as a protocol it is optimized for the general ISCSI setup of flat layer two transport between target and initiator.

That all being said, we are going to have to see some product releases from Cisco and Intel for FCOE to really take off. If we don’t, then FCOE will fall down the same hole that ATA over Ethernet disappeared down.

Colin McNamara
CCIE #18233 (Storage Networking)
2 Cups Solutions
“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer”

References -

Intel Project Page

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Fibre Channel over Ethernet is taking off

San Diego Maternity Photographer

colinmcnamara — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 03:30:00 +0000

Great gallery of newborn and maternity pictures shot in san diego and laguna beach

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

San Diego Maternity Photographer

Updated CCIE numbers

colinmcnamara — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 19:56:00 +0000

CCIEs Worldwide

Though CCIEs are members of an exclusive group, they can be found in countries on every continent. Use the map and tables below to discover your peers around the world.

Americas
EMEA
Pacific Rim
Africa
Asia
Cana
Europe
Middle East
Pacific Islands
South America
United States

Total of Worldwide CCIEs:		15658 (last updated 11.14.2007)
Total of Routing and Switching CCIEs:		14329
Total of Security CCIEs:		1207
Total of Service Provider CCIEs:		650
Total of Storage Networking CCIEs:		99
Total of Voice CCIEs:		601

Multiple Certifications:

Many CCIEs have gone on to pass the certification exams in additional tracks, becoming a “multiple CCIE.” Below are selected statistics on CCIEs who are certified in more than one track.

Total with multiple certifications worldwide:		1344
Total of Routing and Switching and Security CCIEs:		517
Total of Routing and Switching and Service Provider CCIEs:		300
Total of Routing and Switching and Storage Networking CCIEs:		23
Total of Routing and Switching and Voice CCIEs:		182
Total with 3 or more certifications		210

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Updated CCIE numbers

Routers can email you when they go down

colinmcnamara — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 05:12:00 +0000

Cisco IOS tips and tricks had a great post on how to use EEM to send emails when interfaces go down.

”

By Ivan Pepelnjak

John S. Pumphrey recently asked an interesting question: “Can the router send an e-mail when an interface goes down?” The enterprisey solution is obvious: deploy a high-end EMS to collect SNMP traps and use its API to write a custom module that would use a MQ interface to alert the operator. Fortunately, Event Manager applets in Cisco IOS provide action mail command (available in 12.3(14)T and 12.4) that can send an e-mail to a SMTP server straight from the router.

There are two ways you can detect that an interface went down with EEM: either you track the interface status with a track object and start an EEM applet when the track object changes state or you catch the syslog messages reporting that the interface line protocol changed state to down. The second approach is obviously more generic, as a single applet can act on multiple interfaces.

event manager applet MailOnIfDown event syslog occurs 1 →    pattern "LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN.*to down" →    period 1

Notes:

If you want to limit the applet to serial interfaces only, you could change the pattern to LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN.*Serial.*to down.
The → continuation character is used to indicate that a single configuration line has been split to increase readability.

The action mail command specifies the mail server’s address (use a hostname and DNS lookup or ip host configuration command to make the EEM applet more generic), from and to address, message subject and body. In each of these fields, you can use EEM environment variables that you can define with the event manager environment configuration command. Each EEM event also defines a few environment variables that you can use (see the table of EEM system-defined variables on CCO). For example, you can define the e-mail recipient in the router’s configuration and use the _syslog_msg variable to include the syslog message in the e-mail body:

event manager environment _ifDown_rcpt admin@lab.com!event manager applet MailOnIfDown event syslog occurs 1 →    pattern "LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN.*to down" →    period 1 action 1.0 mail server "mail-gw" →    to "$_ifDown_rcpt" from "R1@lab.com" →    subject "Interface down on R1" →    body "$_syslog_msg"

You can make the applet even more generic with the help of action info type routername command, which stores the current router’s name into the $_info_routername environment variable:

event manager environment _ifDown_rcpt admin@lab.com!event manager applet MailOnIfDown event syslog occurs 1 →    pattern "LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN.*to down" →    period 1 action 1.0 info type routername action 2.0 mail server "mail-gw" →    to "$_ifDown_rcpt" from "$_info_routername@lab.com" →    subject "Interface down on $_info_routername" →    body "$_syslog_msg"

"

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Routers can email you when they go down

How close did the fire come?

colinmcnamara — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:40:00 +0000

On google maps, it shows that the fire came withing two thousand feet of our place. It circled us on three sides, basically surrounding the valley. I took a screenshot from one of the news sites for everyone. The little red houses are homes that did not make it. The neighborhood to the right (just over the hill is rancho bernardo).

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

How close did the fire come?

San Diego WildFIre Update

colinmcnamara — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 03:25:00 +0000

Great news,

Mandatory evacuations for our neighborhood were lifeted at 11:30 this morning. We returned home, and everything is here. The fire burned on three sides of our neighborhood, and took out a couple of the homes up on the hill.

Thanks to everyone for being so supportive.

–Colin
Copyright ©2008 | Colin McNamara | CCIE 18233 | All Rights Reserved”

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

San Diego WildFIre Update

Witch fire in San Diego – Notes from an evacuee

colinmcnamara — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:32:00 +0000

On the fire maps of the San Diego Witch fire, we are pretty much under the big red spot (directly under lake hodges, to the west of the 15). We moved to 4s ranch in June , on the intersection of rancho bernardo and ralphs ranch road. (pretty much right under the big red spot). We left on on monday at around 10 am with fire on 3 sides of our community.We got out with a couple changes of clothes, important documents, and the kids. Almost everything else is replaceable.

the fire directly upwind of us, coming up the ridge -

Getting out of 4s ranch was crazy though, traffic was jammed up through camino del sur, and the police were not helping. We ended up sneaking out through a backroad and coming out through Del Mar. Our final destination (and temporary home base) is the Ramada plaza hotel in Anaheim.

The winds were blowing 60 mph +

While it is rough having to flee from our home, we are much more fortunate then those people stuck at Qualcom, or Del Mar, etc. While they have been sleeping on the cold cement for two days my family has enjoyed two queen size beds + a fold out couch. Kylie is a little shell shocked, I think fleeing from her home was a bit much, while Chris is just being a normal little two year old terror.

Fireman going after the fire where it wrapped around our neighborhood -

We have also been very fortunate to have many supportive friends. I thank everyone of them for all the support and help they have given. It makes things much easier when you know that you aren’t alone in this struggle. We have a couple standing offers of homes to stay in, a home cooked meal (from the best mexican food cook I have ever met) waiting for us tonight, clothes / diapers for Chris, pretty much everything we could have wanted.

The view as we were leaving (sorry about the blur, we were in the truck)

During this whole ordeal I there have of course been challenges, but I am amazed how everyone is pulling together. In the hour before the police forced the evacuation neighbors were helping each other with information, people were grabbing hopping in trucks and running to help with the fire lines. While it was a post apocalyptic scene with the choking smoke, ash everyone, and blood red sun, people were helping each other. It is to see the best of people when they are under the worst conditions.

The blood red Sun

The two big questions every day are – Is my home still there ? and If it is there, when can I go back? As of right now the evacuation order still stands for my neighborhood. It is directly downwind (about 1 kilometer) from the homes in Rancho Bernardo they have been showing on the news. When we left, fire was coming up the Ridge that separates our neighborhoods. On signonsandiego.com ’s firemap it looks like we may have been spared, but we are still in the middle and downwind of the major fire. The only thing that will signal a change an all clear is for the santa anna winds to subside.

neighbor checking taking pictures of the fire prior to the evacuation order

One thing that is important in any emergency is to go through a lessons learned.

The things that worked well were -

1. Having a 4×4, it allowed us to choose creative escape routes, and avoid the possibility of getting stuck in traffic with the fire behind us.

2. Having decent non-perishable snacks (granola, raisins, etc)

3. Having lots of water bottles laying around – dehydration is a big issue with the dry air.

4. having travel kits ready – because I travel a bit, I normally have my carry-on bags prepped.

5. Bringing a toy, and a little video player for Chris – this saved lots of heartache for everyone

Things that I could have done better -

1. Inspected my wife, daughters, and sons bags before we left – they didn’t pack enough clothes, my daughter forgot things like underwear, socks, etc.

2. Had the key to the breachlock on my shotgun handy – i couldn’t find the key to unlock my weapon. If this would have devolved to Katrina standards then this would have been essential. In retrospect I would have done better with a semi-auto handgun. It is easier to transport and conceal while traveling.

3. I should have had better radios. I am a ham operator, have my license. But I have always used peoples base stations tethered through the Internet (basically a big ip based microphone / speaker connected to their transceiver. Ham operators are a godsend in situations like this, and having a mobile unit in my truck would have added valuable information in a time when we had none.

Colin McNamara
CCIE #18233

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Witch fire in San Diego – Notes from an evacuee

Cool new features in 12.2(33)SXH

colinmcnamara — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 01:45:00 +0000

Cool new features in 12.2(33)SXH

Hell has frozen over, you now no longer need to explicitly configure peers in a BGP configuration. You now can set up peer group templates that allow connections from a range of ip address’s. This has a multitude of implications. The main scenarios that I can think of are -

1. dynamic configuration of peers in a fully bgp enabled datacenter (replacement for eigrp / ospf)
2. dynamic advertisement of host routes from servers

Other cool things include tracking of SSO status in hsrp / glbp groups and an embeded syslog manager which allows you to have full filtering capability on device without needing an external server. I see this will be great for troubleshooting.

Colin McNamara
CCIE #18233
Copyright ©2008 | Colin McNamara | CCIE 18233 | All Rights Reserved”

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Cool new features in 12.2(33)SXH

Great TCL and EEM preso found on IOS hints and tricks -

colinmcnamara — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 04:39:00 +0000

Great TCL and EEM preso found on IOS hints and tricks -

http://www.cisco.com/application/pdf/en/us/guest/products/ps6555/c1161/cdccont_0900aecd805456f7.pdf

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Great TCL and EEM preso found on IOS hints and tricks -

New features in VMware 3.1

colinmcnamara — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 19:11:00 +0000

New features in VMware 3.1

* Solid State Drive (SSD) boot support
As initially discovered last month, VMware will make available a special version of ESX Server (mentioned with terms like ESX Lite and Embedded ESX) for OEM vendors, to be installed into bootable Solid State storage devices (flash drives, etc.). This option will allow creation of ESX Server hardware appliances for easy jumpstart, granting smaller form-factors and improved reliability.
Dell, IBM and possibly other vendors will offer this option at announcement time in Q3 2007.
* DMotion
Unofficially introduced with ESX Server 3.0.1, in its first version DMotion is a special VMotion operation only capable of moving running virtual machines from an ESX Server 2.5.x host to a new ESX Server 3.x., without shared SAN LUN mandatory requirement.
In ESX Server 3.1 this capability will be extended, allowing hot migration of running virtual machines between ESX 3.1 hosts through the Ethernet cable.
* Patch management system for host and virtual machines (Update Manager 1.0)
ESX Server 3.1 will finally introduce an automated patch management system called Update Manager. This solution will be able to update both host itself and virtual machines (both Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux).
Update Manager will look for available updates from Shavlik Technologies website (a possible acquisition after IPO), and will allow VI administrators to decide which patches to deliver to virtual machines.
Before applying them, Update Manager will take a snapshot and will even rollback automatically if something goes wrong.

(this product was originally codenamed VM Integrity and its developement started more than one year ago, when virtualization.info discovered it in June 2006)
* VMware Consolidate Backup (VCB) and VMware Converter 4.0 integration
VirtualCenter 2.1 will now allow restoring VCB images with an integrated version of VMware Converter, which reaches 4.0 release number.
* Server consolidation advisor
VirtualCenter 2.1 will expose a server consolidation assistant able to analyze which physical machines should be converted in virtual ones, and where to move existing VMs among available hosts.
(note that with this feature VMware is further extending competition with PlateSpin, covering both features with PowerRecon and PowerConvert)
* Guest OS disaster recovery capability
VirtualCenter 2.1 will be able to recognize a failure inside a virtual machine and restart it through VMware HA module.
* Support for VMware Server 2.0
VirtualCenter 2.1 will be finally able to seamless manage both ESX Server and VMware Server 2.0 hosts.
* Lockdown Mode
ESX Server 3.1 will expose a new security feature to completely disable local administrative account after a VirtualCenter 2.1 takes remote control.
* Power saving capability (Distributed Power Management)
VirtualCenter 2.1 will introduce a new resources utilization analysis feature, able to verify when a physical host can be powered off, VMotion-ing its virtual machines on other hosts without impacting performances.
* Support for Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP)
VirtualCenter 2.1 will be able to recognize and use CDP to discover physical and virtual network topologies.
It stays unconfirmed if ESX Server 3.1 will already expose new virtual network architecture, allowing 3rd party virtual switches, as it will be announced by Cisco CEO at VMworld 2007.
* Support for 10Gbit Ethernet network cards
* Support for TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) network cards
* Support for network load balancing algorithms
* Support for 200 hosts and 2000 virtual machines
* Support for 128GB RAM per host and for 64GB RAM per virtual machine
* Support for SATA storage devices
* Support for N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV)
* Support for VCB over iSCSI SANs
* Support for IPv6 in virtual networking
* Support for Para-virtualization guest OSes

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

New features in VMware 3.1

Cool new features in 12.4(15)T

colinmcnamara — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 05:16:00 +0000

Cool new features in 12.4(15)T -

Link – http://www.cisco.com/application/pdf/en/us/guest/products/ps8258/c1161/cdccont_0900aecd80679ce3.pdf

From Cisco’s site -

Cisco IOS Software Release 12.4T integrates a portfolio of new capabilities, including security, voice, and wireless, with powerful hardware support to deliver advanced services for enterprise and access customers. It will be issued as a series of regularly scheduled individual releases, which Cisco will ultimately consolidate to form the next major release.

Release 12.4(15)T, the sixth release of the 12.4T family, streamlines the Cisco IOS Software upgrade process, provides sub-second link failure detection and faster convergence, delivers next-generation Layer 2-7 flexible packet classification, enhances intrusion protection and SSL VPN capabilities, and provides support for the new Cisco 7201 Router, amongst other features.

Like all releases in the 12.4T family, Release 12.4(15)T integrates innovations that span multiple technology areas, including Cisco IOS Security, Voice, Cisco IOS Infrastructure, Access, High Availability, Management Instrumentation, Quality of Service, IP Multicast, Broadband, IP Routing, and IP Services. Release 12.4(15)T delivers these integrated technologies on the broadest range of hardware in the industry, including the Cisco Integrated Services Routers, Cisco 7200 Series, and Cisco 7301 Router.
Copyright ©2008 | Colin McNamara | CCIE 18233 | All Rights Reserved”

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Cool new features in 12.4(15)T

The emergence of MDS features in Cisco’s datacenter networking equipment

colinmcnamara — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 05:18:00 +0000

The emergence of MDS features in Cisco’s datacenter networking equipment

For those that have been watching, there has been a trend of helpful MDS (Cisco’s director class storage switch) features into core networking products. The first feature I have noticed is the “do” command now available in configuraiton mode in ios 12.4. It allows you to execute exec commands from the configuration section in IOS. Needless to say this is very handy, primarily due to not having to exit to your shell to do a show command.

Things like that make me very happy. They decrease the time needed complete tasks, and improve your accuracy.

One of the features that I have always loved with the MDS is call home. It is a deamon that monitors the hardware and software for faults, and when one is found it posts an email to TAC and your support staff.

This feature now has made it into the 6500 series switches as of 12.2(22)SXH which should be out mid August. It will integrate directly with Cisco TAC, and your own internal Monitoring and management systems. The really cool thing is that this ties right into the GOLD (Generic On Line Diagnostics) tests. If your GOLD tests find a hardware problem TAC will automatically be contacted, a RMA issued, engineer contacted, and parts shipped to the devices location. The target for this is SmartNet time + 1.5 hours. So if you had 4 hour smartnet, you could expect hardware onsite, with no additional troubleshooting in 5.5 hours.

Cisco portal for smartcall is located at http://www.cisco.com/go/smartcall

Colin McNamara, CCIE #18233
Copyright ©2008 | Colin McNamara | CCIE 18233 | All Rights Reserved”

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

The emergence of MDS features in Cisco’s datacenter networking equipment

Why was Storage Networking my first CCIE? And What did I do to prepare?

colinmcnamara — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 04:59:00 +0000

I got a question on groupstudy about my background, and why I chose Storage as my first CCIE. It seems like a good idea to post it here also.

My background is all over the place. It goes from running a small ISP when I was 18 to managing international CallManager clusters, to enterprise data center design and migrations. I swear that I have tech ADD. I see something new and I am like.. oooooh shiny, lets do a sniff and see how it works.

I actually attempted the Route Switch lab twice in 2002 (still had token ring and dlsw still) but got activated for the war before I could get my number. I can tell you.. that sucked horribly.

So, why did I choose to get my Storage CCIE first instead of finishing up my Route Switch first? Well, over the past couple years I have done a significant amount of IP storage (NFS, ISCSI, ATA over Ethernet, etc) including building my own IP storage heads based on linux. I had also done a little bit of fiber channel work. I felt that I had a significant advantage compared to most network engineers in the storage networking space. And, I think more importantly, the topics that I had to study were new and fresh. Whereas when I cracked open my Route Switch books.. I honestly wasn’t to excited about it at the time ( I think I was holding a grudge from my first attempts in 2002).

The partner e-learning central portion of Cisco has an Excellent lab access to labgear.net. It gives you 2 hour segments of time with 2 mds’s (both with IPS blades), 1 2 port jbod, and 2 2 port servers. They also have introductory tutorials for most major technology segments.

I did all of those, along with the every E-learning class that was on PEC. I think the major ones were the Design, Support, and CASSI classes.I took that, sat for the design and support specialist exams, and took my written last December.

After doing all that work, I was honestly 70% there. I took a little break for january and febuary (There was no open lab dates) and then started hitting the labs I think at the end of febuary.

For the majority of my practice I used the labs available through PEC. I also was able to weasel my way into 8 hour sessions every sunday from our channel SE. (I owe him plenty of drinks at networkers this year) For those 8 hour sessions I had labs created to summarize the major technology areas and to be as evil as possible to myself.

I had one attempt which didn’t work out as well as I would have liked. In RTP the lab starts at 7:15. This means if you are from the west coast like I am you will be getting up at 3:00 am in the morning for your lab. That royally kicked my but. I diverted from my attack plan and ended up
running out of time. It was a classic example of letting the lab run you, instead of you running the lab.

Luckily a data opened up just over a month later. I spent that time just working on my speed (speed is the secret sauce). I migrated to using Fabric Manager (gui interface) instead of command line. After 2 practice runs my time had dropped 25%. I also flew out to RTP 3 days before, and made sure to relax and get on east coast time.

For my final prep I got access to iementor’s lab. Their lab is excellent. I cannot reinforce enough how much it contributed to my confidence in that final week. Roman was really cool about working with an existing candidate to get me squeezed in. They are really cool guys, and they have the only workbook on the market right now.

So, I used their lab 2 days before mine, and then just chilled the day before. The day of the lab I had 70 points by lunch, and had completed configuration of the lab by 12:30. I spent the rest of the day reviewing my configurations (found 2 errors), fixing one bug, and generally harassing the proctor to make sure I didn’t misinterpret anything.

So.. if I had it all to do over again what would I do. I would still do the PEC stuff, and continue to primarily live in the Doc CD. Though I would probably pony up the cash and buy the iementor book and more lab time with them.

--Colin McNamara

Why was Storage Networking my first CCIE? And What did I do to prepare?

What does it take to pass the CCIE exam?

colinmcnamara — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

What does it take to pass the CCIE exam?

For those who haven’t heard yet, I passed my CCIE Lab on June 14th. Now I can officially put CCIE #18233 after my name.

Anyone who has been down the same path understands how long of a road this is.
I started down this path in the spring of 1999 as the 432nd student ever in Cisco’s Networking Academy (which I promptly dropped out of to move to the bay area). I grew my networking skills all the way to passing my CCIE Written in 2001. I attempted my Route Switch lab in 2002, however I got called away to war for a year. Being away from it all for a year really cramped my style technically. In that time many of my certs expired, and I lost much of the momentum I had built of the past half decade.

Since I got back to the real world I had focused on work to the detriment of my certifications. I really did some great things, however I really neglected my resume.
In July of 2006 I had worked 2038 hours that year (for those not mathematically inclined, that is a full work year, in 1/2 a year) . At that point I decided it was time to stop neglecting my certifications. At that point I dedicated 8 hours each saturday, along with two nights a week to studies. By December of that year I had Certified on a few of the technologies that I had tons of experience in.

I managed to get my RHCE, Cisco Storage Support and Design Specialist, update my old IP Telephony specialist certifications to CCVP, get my Netapp Certified Administrator, and pass my CCIE Written for storage networking all by the end of the year. This spring I finished my Netapp Certified Expert and scheduled my Storage lab for early summer.

Anyone who knows me well knows how closely I track my time. That time tracking extends to my training. I tracked my training (reading, lab practice, testing, etc) just like any other part of my professional life. I spent around 150 hours studying for my Design, Support specialist certs, along with reading the recommended books of the CCIE reading list, and around 300 hours preparing for my lab exam. That is 300 hours configuring every possible combination and permutation of technology that could be setup, and then refining my speed in configuring those technologies until i got to the point where speed as well as brains would be an advantage in the lab.

So now that I have my CCIE, whats next? Well, oddly enough.. I am thinking of getting my second CCIE cert. In my office I will be the Jr guy by only having a single CCIE (on of our guys has all five). I also need to take my VMware certified professional cert, and probably get my HP Master Accredited Storage Engineer. I guess I am just a glutton for punishment.

--Colin McNamara

What does it take to pass the CCIE exam?

3 minute management course

colinmcnamara — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 21:09:00 +0000

Lesson One!

An eagle was sitting on a tree resting, doing nothing. A small rabbit saw the eagle and asked him, “Can I also sit like you and do nothing?”
The eagle answered: “Sure, why not” So, the rabbit sat on the ground below the eagle and rested.
All of a sudden, a fox appeared, jumped on the rabbit and ate it.

Management Lesson:
To be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high up.

Lesson Two:
A turkey was chatting with a bull. “I would love to be able to get to the top of that tree,” sighed the turkey, “but I haven’t got the energy.”
“Well, why don’t you nibble on some of my droppings?” replied the bull.” They’re packed with nutrients.”
The turkey pecked at a lump of dung, and found it actually gave him enough strength to reach the lowest branch of the tree. The next day he reached the second branch and, finally, after a fourth
night, the turkey was proudly perched at the top of the tree. He was promptly spotted by a farmer, who shot him out of the tree.

Management Lesson:
Bullshit might get you to the top, but it won’t keep you there.

Lesson Three:
A little bird was flying south for the winter. It was so cold, the bird froze and fell to the ground into a large field. there, a cow came by and dropped some dung on him. As the frozen bird lay there in the pile of cow dung, he began to realize how warm he was. The dung was actually thawing him out! He laid
there all warm and happy, and soon began to sing for joy.
A passing cat heard the bird singing and came to investigate. Following the sound, the cat discovered the bird under the pile of cow dung, and promptly dug him out and ate him.

Management Lesson :
(1) Not everyone who craps on you is your enemy.
(2) Not everyone who gets you out of crap is your friend..
(3) And when you’re in deep crap, it’s best to keep your mouth shut!

This ends the three minute management course.

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

3 minute management course

And it begins again – On the road to my CCIE in Storage

colinmcnamara — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 05:29:00 +0000

And it begins again. The road to CCIE certification is a long one. The last time I stepped down this path I was attempting my Routing and Switching certification. I learned some hard lessons during my two attempts at the lab.

The first lesson was that knowledge alone is not suffient to pass the lab.
The second was that the lab is not the real world, and the procotors do not intend to replicate real world problems.
The third lesson was that speed is as important as brains.
The fourth lesson is that you can’t make it alone.

This time I am taking a different tack. I am studying with a partner. My focus will not be real world implementations, it will be on all possible hellish combinations a proctor could come up with. . I will be spending many late nights working on my speed.

I have passed All of Cisco’s storage exams, including the Written qualification for the CCIE Storage Networking exam. At first I thought the biggest challenge would be getting ahold of lab gear. It is not like this stuff is cheap. However I have been finding more gear out there then I had though I would. This is a good sign.

I will be posting my experiences throughout this entire process. I am not under the illusion that it will be easy. Luckily I have the lessons learned from my attempts before the war, and a new found enthusiam.

–Colin
Copyright ©2008 | Colin McNamara | CCIE 18233 | All Rights Reserved”

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And it begins again – On the road to my CCIE in Storage

Christmas Trivia

colinmcnamara — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 02:53:00 +0000

Christmas comes from Old English, “Cristes maesse” or “Mass of Christ.”

A traditional Christmas dinner in early England was the head of a pig prepared with mustard.

“White Christmas,” released in 1954, starring Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye, was the first movie to be made in Vista Vision.

The holiday classic, “It’s A Wonderful Life,” was originally a box office flop.

The real Santa Claus was born in 280 A.D. as Nicholas. He commonly wore a red and white Bishop’s robe.

“Xmas” is considered by some to be a disrespectful abbreviation. But the Old English word for Christmas begins with X. The Greek word for “Christ,” from which the English is derived, begins with the Greek letter chi, or X. So, X is an appropriate abbreviation for Christ.

The first electric Christmas tree lights were telephone switchboard lights.

About 400,000 people get sick each year from consuming tainted Christmas leftovers.

In 1907, Oklahoma became the last U.S. state to make Christmas a legal holiday.

America’s official national Christmas tree grows in California’s King’s Canyon National Park. The tree is a giant sequoia standing more than 300 feet high, and it’s called the “General Grant Tree.”

Christmas trees are edible. Many parts of pines, spruces and firs can be eaten.

According to the laws of the time, Joseph could have had Mary stoned to death for becoming pregnant.

“Hot Cockles” was a popular game at Christmas in medieval times. In the game, players took turns striking a blindfolded player, who had to guess the name of the person delivering each blow.

Toys for Tots held its first toy drive in 1947.

Boris Karloff was the voice of the Grinch in the animated classic, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”

During the Christmas shopping season, Visa cards alone are used an average of 5,340 times every minute in the US

According to a recent survey, seven out of 10 dogs in Great Britain get Christmas gifts from their owners.

“Wassail” comes from the Old Norse term, “ves heill,” meaning “to be of good health.” This evolved into the popular holiday tradition of visiting neighbors on Christmas Eve and drinking to their health.

The average American household will send out 28 Christmas cards each year, and will receive the same number in return.

Boxing Day, celebrated in Canada, has nothing to do with fighting. It refers to the custom of giving gift boxes to employees the day after Christmas. Originally, it was the day Christmas presents were given in England.

Jesus Christ was born in a cave, not in a stable.

The first Christmas card was made in England on December 9, 1842.

The ancient Druids believed the sparks from a burning log carried wishes for a prosperous New Year to the gods, hence the tradition of yule logs.

According to the National Christmas Tree Association, Americans buy 37.1 million real Christmas trees each year.

Charles Dickens wrote several Christmas stories after “A Christmas Carol,” one each year, in fact, but none could match the success of the original.

The Julbock is a common Christmas decoration in Sweden. It’s a small figurine of a goat made from straw.

In Sweden, the “tomte” is a Christmas gnome.

According to “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” the Grinch was so mean because his heart was two sizes too small.

There are about 5,000 “choose and cut” Christmas tree farms in the US

St. Nicholas is the patron saint of children, scholars, merchants, sailors and women without dowries.
Copyright ©2008 | Colin McNamara | CCIE 18233 | All Rights Reserved”

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Christmas Trivia

How to succede in 2007 – By Tim O’Reilly

colinmcnamara — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 21:22:00 +0000

There is a great piece on Business 2.0 detailing imporatant peoples thoughts on how to be successfull in 2007. Tim O’Reilly’s thoughts really caught my eye.Tim O’Reilly

Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media

Put Yourself at the Center of the Action

The rules for marketing a conference like our Web 2.0 event are pretty much the same as those for marketing anything else. Here are the ones we follow.

1. Be first. This is one of the immutable laws of marketing. Who was the first person to fly across the Atlantic? Lindbergh. Who was the second? No idea.

2. If you can’t be first, create a new category so you can be first. Who was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic? Amelia Earhart. New category. We didn’t have the first Web conference out there, but when we applied “Web 2.0″ to the category, we created something new.

3. Position yourself at the leading edge of a new wave. The way to make sure you recognize the next big wave is by watching what I call the alpha geeks. You find people who are cool, by whatever metric you want to apply. It would be the same thing if you were marketing sneakers. And then you find out what the cool people are doing and you spread the word about it. This isn’t to say there aren’t audiences for whom cool might not be the right measurement, but it works for us.

4. Tell a big story. We don’t market products narrowly. We market big stories about the industry, things that matter to a lot of people. In 1992 we came out with The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog. Instead of marketing the book, we marketed the Internet using the book, and said the Internet is coming and by the way here’s a book where you can learn about it. In planning Web 2.0 in 2003, we came up with a goal to reignite enthusiasm in the computer industry. We said, here’s something that distinguishes the companies that survived the dotcom bust, here is something that is bubbling up again, so we gave it a name – Web 2.0 – and started telling a story about what was new and important in technology. Sometimes giving it a name helps people to see it.

5. Make it an A-list party. Conferences are really like parties, and an A-list party is one where A-list people are in attendance. You figure out who are the really important people to invite and get them to show up as speakers or as guests. Then everybody wants to be there. If you don’t know who the important people are, you shouldn’t be doing a conference.

6. Care about the attendees. There are a lot of lousy conferences that pander to sponsors. They end up creating an opportunity for boring speakers who are paid shills for their companies. We still get a few of those, but we really try to police it. Think about who the audience is and what works for them, and deliver high-quality content.
Copyright ©2008 | Colin McNamara | CCIE 18233 | All Rights Reserved”

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How to succede in 2007 – By Tim O’Reilly

Storage partners nationwide – 14

colinmcnamara — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 02:49:00 +0000

	BASIC SEARCH	ADVANCED SEARCH	QUICK SEARCH

Search Criteria

Note : Only 150 random matches will be displayed

Partner List

Sort By

Company Name

Country

Authorizations

Sites

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Storage partners nationwide – 14

Cisco Storage Partners – California… a very small list

colinmcnamara — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 02:35:00 +0000

Partner List

Sort By

Company Name

Country

Authorizations

Sites

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Cisco Storage Partners – California… a very small list

The difference between a consultant and a partner

colinmcnamara — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 21:17:00 +0000

A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW drives up in a cloud of dust. The driver, a young man in an Armani suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd: “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”

The shepherd looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers: “Sure. Why not?” The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer,connects it to his AT&T cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with hundreds of complex formulas. He uploads all of this data via an email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the shepherd and says:

“You have exactly 1586 sheep.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep.”, says the shepherd. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. Then the shepherd says to the young man: “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my sheep? ” The young man thinks about it for a second and then says:“Okay, why not?”

“You’re a consultant.” says the shepherd.

“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required”, answered the shepherd.

“You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked; and you don’t know crap about my business… Now give me back my dog.”

–Colin
Copyright ©2008 | Colin McNamara | CCIE 18233 | All Rights Reserved”

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“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

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The difference between a consultant and a partner

My CCIE Storage Shopping List

colinmcnamara — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 04:54:00 +0000

My CCIE Storage Shopping List

Lets just start this out by saying, darn.. this is going to be expensive.
Now that that is out of the way, lets get started. Cisco publishes the hardware that is in the Storage lab.

Here is the hardware summary -

Cisco Routers
Cisco Catalyst Switches
Cisco Secure Access Control System
MDS 9506*
MDS 9216*
Port Analyzer Adapter
JBOD
RAID storage
HBA
3rd Party Fibre Channel Switch

My guess is that this equals a basic routed network with a CS-ACS server on the backend.
It looks like there is also at least 1 pc with an HBA connected into one MDS. The one big question I have is on the connected storage.
My guess is that Cisco’s JBOD reference = Fibre Channel connected storage, and the RAID array mentioned is connected to at least one server.
If my guess is right then there is the 9506 and 9216 – (note, no I in the name) and a third party switch.

So lets start the shopping list.

1. Cisco Routers
I have those coming out of the yinyang, no need to purchase anymore for this lab.

2. Cisco Catalyst Switches
Mine are a little old, but I don’t expect a storage exam to have anything challenging in the switching arena. No need to upgrade there.

3. Cisco Secure Access Control System
Thankfully Cisco provides VAR’s with NFR binders. ACS will be loaded on HMB-SERVER1 in a vmware image. No expenditure needed.

4. MDS 9506*
Holy smokes, this is a lot of money. I have seen them on ebay for $8,000. This includes both sup modules. I would need to buy a line card, which I see going for about 1k. so $9000

5. MDS 9216
Still bad, but not horrible. I just saw one on ebay for $5500. Depending on lab requirements it may be smart just to get to 9216’s. so $5500

6. Port Analyzer Adapter
Best I can find is $2000 refurbished. I have a feeling practicing using this, and seeing the ethereal dumps is going to be integral to success. worst case this is 2k, best case beg or borrow $2000

7. JBOD
Normally you are looking at 2-4k for one of these. My strategy is to find an old Netapp shelf, and low level format it. I found one on ebay that ends in 22 hours for $89. Sounds good to me.

8. RAID storage
I am going with my guess that this is just to facilitate data transfers between storage and host. My tactic is to use the existing storage inside one of my servers. $0

9. HBA
Interesting – Only one HBA .This can be up to $2000 to buy new. Luckily ebay is my friend. I found a qlogic 2340 card for $50. My kind of deal

10. 3rd party Fibre Channel Switch
Luckily Brocade resells to everyone and their mother. IBM, Dell, HP, Compaq, ETC. I have found some Silkworm 2800’s for as low as $50 on ebay.
I do have my eye on a 3800 that is going for $24 right now (I hope it stays low).

So how much is the damage?

$16,700

Holy smokes I could sell my truck just to buy the lab gear.

–Colin
Copyright ©2008 | Colin McNamara | CCIE 18233 | All Rights Reserved”

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

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My CCIE Storage Shopping List

Why can’t I post from docs.google.com to blogger beta?

colinmcnamara — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 04:51:00 +0000

Why can’t I post from docs.google.com to blogger beta?

–Colin
Copyright ©2008 | Colin McNamara | CCIE 18233 | All Rights Reserved”

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Why can’t I post from docs.google.com to blogger beta?

What should I do this thanksgiving break?

colinmcnamara — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 18:43:00 +0000

What should I do this thanksgiving break?

1. Write a host auditing application

Existing Features -
Generates XML configs based on specific command generation
Outputs to flat XML database
New Features -
Runs from central monitoring platform
Gathers host information first by shelling into boxes and gathering packages / processes
Verifies application application by NMAP of high number ports
Outputs into individual HTTP / XML formatted files
Creates index for easy host data access
Could run locally to create a host status page
Create nagios byhost config on output
Should I output through Apache, or a servlet…
Thoughts
This could go over really well
Would be fun to write
Could land me in scope creep hell

2. Update the Real Time System config generator

Existing Features-
Generates Content Switching configs from application data
Has a web interface for development access
Notifies help desk
New Features -
Create firewall definition files
Create nagios probe config
Integrate XML submission probe generation
Thoughts
Nice to have, but 90% of the functionality is already there

3. Update Nagios system config generator (nagiosuploader)

Existing Features-
Grabs system info when run locally
Posts configs to monitoring server for processing
New features
Host auditing to determine services monitored
Clean up error condition handling
Web interface for config generation
Thoughts
Having a web interface for users to fill out would lower my workload

4. Automate web application error reporting

Existing features -
None, well.. manually executed text processing on log files. I wouldn’t call that an application
New features -
Automation of customer / error code matrix grep statements
Output in XML / http format web page and email
Text only output in commented form <– text –> for command line mail clients
Thoughts -
Proves the point that certain people can be replaced by very small shell scripts (Unix humor)
Should be a big with with Client services
Could drive the application “digital dashboard”
Should be a fun to practice using AWK for formatting data in a standard output
Serious danger of scope creep
May be better implemented in a MySQL back-end

5. Do some personal growth items

Finish the Vmware image for the 7206 emulator and post to Vmware Technology Network for general use (delete IOS files before uploading)
Read some more of Long’s storage book
Write a sample chapter for Stay at Home Photography
Get GTK pod to run under my cmcnamar account, not root (I think the IPOD’s file system doesn’t like changing ownership or file attributes)
Redo the 2cups homepage
Clean the Garage……..
Copyright ©2008 | Colin McNamara | CCIE 18233 | All Rights Reserved”

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

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What should I do this thanksgiving break?

Book Review – Security Threat Mitigation and Response: Understanding Cisco Security MARS

colinmcnamara — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 01:35:00 +0000

Book Review – Security Threat Mitigation and Response: Understanding Cisco Security MARS

Security Threat Mitigation and Response: Understanding Cisco Security MARS
by Dale Tesch, Greg Abelar
Publisher: Cisco Press
Pub Date: September 28, 2006
Print ISBN-10: 1-58705-260-1
Print ISBN-13: 978-1-58705-260-6
Pages: 408

This book had so much potential to be a great. Sadly it turned out to be an overgrown technical manual. The author does try to lighten things up by interspersing real world technical details throughout the book, however he could have just written a “hacks” style book with that material and been much better off.

This book is organized into four major divisions. The first, Security threat identification and response challenge reviews basic security theory and response. A network engineer breaking into security may find this interesting. Anyone else can just skip over this chapter.

I actually found the second, CS-MARS theory and operation to be the most useful. The author laid out a pretty good flowchart of the designing process used to process alerts. He also hinted out the back end architecture supporting the device.

The third section, CS-MARS operation was just blatantly lifted from the users guide. The only difference is that the online users guide is organized a little more clearly. I recommend skipping this chapter and going straight to the on-line documentation, you will be much happier.

The fourth section, CS-MARS in action had great potential, however the author just stuck in some really salesy usage scenarios. I can’t reinforce this enough – This needs to be updated. I have been to customer talks where users presented how the MARS box has made their life easier in many ways. The stories presented here do a disservice to the product, and do not highlight the core differentiators that this product offers.

Would I recommend this book? Yes and No. I would recommend that entry level engineers with no security experience, and business users pick this up. Other then that, log onto CCO and just read through the docs. You will learn more in less time. And as a plus, you will have $50 sitting in your wallet still.

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”

Sun Project Backbox

colinmcnamara — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 17:54:00 +0000

Q: What do internal Sun employees call project blackbox?
A: The trailer trash datacenter

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Sun Project Backbox

Happy Birthday Marines!!

colinmcnamara — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 04:24:00 +0000

Happy Birthday Marines!!

231 years old, and still kicking.
To all my brothers and sisters in the sandbox, keep your head down and make it home safely.

Semper Fi

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Happy Birthday Marines!!

I found a great tutorial on PHP + MySQL+Flash integration

colinmcnamara — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 18:29:00 +0000

I found a great tutorial on PHP + MySQL+Flash integration

Going through bludomain’s source code really got my interest going on the possibilities for dynamic flash content generation. Some Google searches brought up this tutorial – http://www.creativecow.net/articles/brimelow_lee/php_mysql/php_mysql_flash.html

Colin McNamara

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

I found a great tutorial on PHP + MySQL+Flash integration

PHP / MySQL / FLASH website integration

colinmcnamara — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 21:27:00 +0000

First I have to say, check out the new Ashley McNamara Photography website at http://www.ashleymcnamara.com/

We had it designed by Bludomain.com. At first I was a little reticent about using them, but now I am very happy about the move. The interface for maintaining gallery’s is superior to how I was doing them before. In the past Ashley would bug me to update her pictures, and I would bug her to provide them in for proper format. Now she just logs onto a web interface and uploads her pictures, updates her content, and whaam.. the site is updated. All this happens without one honey do this. I say that is worth its price in gold

Once I saw this “seamless” interface I had to figure out how they are doing it. After a little pocking around their source code I found out that they were using PHP to pull information out of a MySQL database, and use that for dynamic content insertion into a flash template. From what I can tell, the first thing that happens is the base flash template loads. Each button shape is hard coded in flash, and an actionscript is bound to each button.
This actionscript runs a PHP web application that logs into a local MySQL database, selects from a table, creates an array, then runs a for loop to populate each submenu for items in each drop down.

The net net of this is that you can have a few default templates, and just populate unique configuration options a MySQL db. This simplifies the whole content management issue while still providing the Content Protection that flash gives you.

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“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

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PHP / MySQL / FLASH website integration

Why does SUSE linux make it so rough?

colinmcnamara — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 00:02:00 +0000

#!/bin/sh
# Figure out kernel source version & you server location, echo string to install
# Written by Colin McNamara 10/27/2006
# http://www.2cups.com
# “The impossible we do difficult we do immidiatly, the impossible just takes a little longer.”
KERNELVER=`uname -r | sed ’s/-smp//g; s/-bigsmp//g’`
PLATFORM=`uname -i`

YOUSERVER=`cat /var/lib/YaST2/you/config | grep LastServer= | sed ’s/LastServer=”//g; s/;;”//g’`
YOU64=$YOUSERVER/$PLATFORM/update/SUSE-CORE/9/rpm/x86_64
YOU32=$YOUSERVER/$PLATFORM/update/SUSE-CORE/9/rpm/i586

if [[ `uname -i` = x86_64 ]]; then
echo $YOU64/kernel-source-$KERNELVER.x86_64.rpm

else
echo $YOU32/kernel-source-$KERNELVER.i586.rpm
fi

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Why does SUSE linux make it so rough?

Taking a closer look

colinmcnamara — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 17:45:00 +0000

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Taking a closer look

Study on Perspective – Set 1

colinmcnamara — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 17:03:00 +0000

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Study on Perspective – Set 1

Update on the Cisco / Nuova connection

colinmcnamara — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 21:15:00 +0000

This Nuova aquisition just became much more interesting.

I found an intersting article on Light Reading
Let me summarize the interesting Items.

Team hightlights
1. Nuova is led by Cisco’s former Chief Development Officer, Mario Mazzola
2. J.R. Rivers, a Cisco Distinguished Engineer who led the team that developed the Catalyst 3750 switch is on board.
3. Tom Lyon, who founded Ipsilion is also on board.

Visibility
This company is almost entirely in stealth mode. No press releases or released products.

Funding
Asside from Cisco’s investments they have refused all offers of VC funding.

Gossip
from Light Reading –

“The startup is presumed to be working on a virtualization project in the storage networking space — at the intersection of storage, networking, and computing.

The idea is that they’re trying to “aggregate compute IO from the server and centralize it into a single or small number of network elements, connected back to the servers via a high-speed low-latency ‘closed’ network,” one source says. This frees up processor memory and CPU cycles so that larger clusters of servers are possible.”

My opinion

I think that Cisco plans to jump into the clustered storage market head first. Netapp has just finished the integration of Spinnaker software with the deployment of Ontap GX. Isilion is making a killing on distributed storage. And everyone in their mother is trying to copy Googles GFS filesystem.

I think that Cisco is going to leverage the recently deployed Storage Services Module with its storage virtualization features to create an abstraction layer between products such as Nuova’s and the classic FC or SCSI connected server.

–Colin McNamara

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

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Update on the Cisco / Nuova connection

Will Cisco succede where Sun has failed?

colinmcnamara — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 01:10:00 +0000

News just in, Cisco has aquired Nuova systems. They have a distributed computing and storage platform very similar to plan 9.
News Release

This news is interesting as it shows that Cisco is continuing their push into the application layer.
Its Application Oriented Networking blade directly competes with IBM. The content services switch competes with Sun, F5, Juniper and Netscaler. If Cisco can bring a distributed backend to the market that integrates smoothly with the middleware solutions they are currently proposing it will be unstopable. Anybody care to jump on this bandwagon?

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Will Cisco succede where Sun has failed?

Weddings, Measles and Podcasting -

colinmcnamara — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 02:40:00 +0000

So I have had an interesting week or so,
It started with 18 hours on the road doing a trip to Huntington Beach for an old USMC buddies wedding. Since Ashley can’t fly this late in pregnancy we were forced to drive. And me being the consumate explorer we decided to go down the Pacific Coast Highway. What could possible go wrong ? … right……. It actually wasnt that bad, until we got to Ventura. From there our trip time doubled. The drive, combined with the X Games selling out pretty much every hotel room really added up to a long day getting down south.

The wedding was great. A classic SoCal wedding, complete with the surfer priest. No joke, he even had a soul patch. The reception was held at the Costa Mesa Country Club. This place is shwank, 100k a year for membership. Erin’s parents really came through on this one. Aside from the location, it was great seeing Adam, Erin, Dan, Lott, and Linda again. I have changed so much, that no one recognized me at first. I guess 60 pounds, a beard, and longer hair can hide things .

Ashley and I drove north of LA that night, and made it to scenic Buttonwillow. Or maybe it was buttwillow. We got a room at the scenic Motel 6, the best room in town. After 5 hours sleeping in this room we recieved a call from the red cross. The lady on the phone informed my wife that someone who had german measles stayed in the room the night before. Ashley turned white on the phone. She responded “I am nine months pregnant” and the lady on phone said “Oh my god”. Shortly after the lady asks if we were in a specific room. Luckily it was a large number off. Then at the end, she asks if we were in Nebraska. At that point Ashley returned to a normal color. Crisis averted, same thing for sleep.
So that trip ended about 3:00 pm that day. I had a little break, fixed my laptop, got everything set up to be autonomous again. Did some phone interviews looking for that right place to land. Checked surflines (sadly it has been pretty flat), worked on the motorcycle, gossiped with friends, chatted up Kylie, surfed the net, did pretty much everything I have been putting off for so long.

Later that week I was back down south for the day. Sadly I had to get back up to the city that evening, or I would have gotten dinner with Dan down in PB. So everything went well down south, and I ended up being late for my flight. Luckily Southwest has pretty much the nicest employees on earth. I ended up on the next available flight without any charge or problem. You can’t beat that. I ran into some interesting people on the flight up. One was a MIT Business school grad. He moved up to the bay to do work with alternative energy development. Things like this give me that 1999 vibe. The bay is starting to get that buzz again. There are deals dropping everywhere. All that money the VC’s have held back is starting to flow. Even podcasting startups are getting 9 million in funding. I mean, come on – Podcasting ? Are we in this build a cool product, advertise, get rich mode again? Scary and fun at the same time. I guess its time to party like its 1999.

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Weddings, Measles and Podcasting -

I am back on the market !!!

colinmcnamara — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 15:59:00 +0000

Its amazing how the the market is right now, its almost like a flashback to 1999.
I am back on the market, entertaining a few offers. And in the mean time I am working on my golf with Kylie .

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

I am back on the market !!!

New Buzzword Enterprise Service Bus

colinmcnamara — Mon, 01 Aug 2005 23:23:00 +0000

Time for buzzword bingo. here is a three word combo.
Enterprise Service Bus
Now you use this with all your Service Oriented Architecture applications.
With this new word for middleware you now can avoid the disgusted looking faces in the meeting you just attended.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=372∂=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdblog
–Colin
Copyright ©2008 | Colin McNamara | CCIE 18233 | All Rights Reserved”

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

New Buzzword Enterprise Service Bus

Gall stones update – Kaiser sucks

colinmcnamara — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 20:33:00 +0000

I recieved a call from Kaiser radiology today to schedule my ultrasound.
Well, the earliest they can get me in is august 12. Yes, that is over one month out. amazing isn’t it.

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Gall stones update – Kaiser sucks

Dragged to the hospital

colinmcnamara — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 04:34:00 +0000

It is interesting how some men [such as me] will avoid the hospital at all costs. I am in the Kaiser building on average once ever two weeks waiting with my wife for her pregnancy appointments. Yet when I know something is wrong with me, I refuse to get a check up.

About three weeks ago I had a some major pain in the upper right side of my abdomen, right under the rib cage. It hurt so bad, that I made sure the phone was near.. Just in case the ambulance needed to be called. This was followed by a noticeable swelling in the affected area.

Ever since then the discomfort has been pretty steady. This results in me getting up and pacing about ever 40 minutes or so. Needless to say, this is rather inconvenient, and tends to interrupt my day.

Fast forward to last Friday. Ashley and I were at a pregnancy checkup when the doctor was going through her list of questions. One of the questions involved the doctor pointing at Ashley’s gall bladder. A light went on in my head, and quickly the pain I was having had a culprit. The first thing I did when I got home was to get on google, and do some research. I had about 95 percent of the symptoms of gall bladder stones.

On Saturday Ashley made me go to the hospital. The doctor confirmed our research, and scheduled a sonogram to check for gall stones. So this pretty much ruined my Saturday. Although the doc did give me some pain relievers, which makes things a bit better.

Sunday was spent researching gall bladder disease. I have learned pretty much all the gory details, and will give you a 10 cent summary. The gall bladder is a muscle surrounded sack that collects bile from the liver.
This “bile” also known as “gall” contains additional enzymes and salts to break down fat. The gall bladder concentrates the key elements in bile until they reach between four and eight times the amount per volume that exited the liver. Sometimes in certain people that concentration process goes a bit overboard. This can cause the salts and other elements to form into stones.

These stone pool up at the bottom of the Gall bladder like waiting time bombs. When you eat a fatty meal, the Gall bladder receives a signal to dump its contents into the bile duct, which empties into the small intestine.

Sometimes if there are stones present they can become lodged into the bile ducts when the Gall bladder is emptied. This can cause pain under the rib cage, back pain, cold sweats, and nausea. The worst thing is, that once you start having Gall stones, you are pretty much prone to get them again.

It seems the most popular solution to Gall stones is the removal of the Gall bladder. Now I try to pretend I am a rough tough man, but surgery scares the living daylights out of me. However, pain for the rest of my life isn’t high on my list either. Considering both sides, I think surgery is going to win.

There are 2 types of Gall bladder removal surgery. The first involves cutting up the abdomen and ripping the problem child out. This method involves up to 6 weeks of recovery. I am not especially thrilled with this. Luckily there is a laproscopic surgery. This has a 2 day required stay, along with a week recovery time. The surgery involves cutting a few 1/2 inch incisions. ASmall tools are inserted into the abdomen, one blows up the abdominal cavity with carbon dioxide, while the others cut the bile duct, and bring the Gall bladder opening to the outside of the body. The Gall bladder is then emptied through that opening. Once empty the deflated bladder is then pulled out of the body. The hole left in the bile duct is then sewn up, the abdominal cavity deflated, and the access holes sewn shut.

I am really hoping that I will get the 2nd surgery. I am a big fan of the shorter recovery time. And since both require that I get knocked out, the risk is the same. The one thing that gets me the most, is that that I am going to have to go on a special diet for the rest of my life.

I will actually have to eat healthy. Holy crap… actually eat healthy.. I don’t know what I am going to do. The bile in the Gall bladder is a key player in the process of digesting fats. So I will basically be without a large majority of the tools needed to process fat. I am guessing this will equal emergency shits after a fatty meal. Now that I have to choose between diarea and healthy food, with much diliberation I choose to eat a low fat diet. With that being said, the even harder thing is that Ashley is going to have to live on that same diet. And she cant eat healthy to save her life.. or mine.

I’ll keep you updated,
–Colin McNamara

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Dragged to the hospital

Google Translate API and speech recognition

colinmcnamara — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 15:22:00 +0000

Good morning,

It seems like the best idea’s always come in two places – The toilet and the shower. This morning I used both items, and had a pretty good idea bubble to the surface.

The idea, or should I say collection of ideas revolves around my inability to communicate in other languages. I try to work around this by using google translate, and texting back and forth. But even this fails in the event that I actually have to speek to someone. My only alternative then is to whip open my laptop, hop online, and type something out.

As I am writing this …. I just had a no crap eureka moment. My original direction and idea with this blog was to use speach recognition software to pipe text into a translation engine. This translated text would then be speach synthisysed back through your cell phone. This would be great, but I would think would have a long time to market.

So my no shit eureka moment – why not use SMS. The message is already in text format, limited to short sentances (reducing the likely hood of gross mistranslation). The idea being that whenever I need to speak spanish, it is generally short and to the point.

So the idea is to set up a sms server to collect sms messages. These messages would be piped into an API and sent off to google translate.
The resulting text would then be sent back to the client handheld.

This text would then be sent back to the client, displayed on the handheld.
The end user would read the response, alound. And hopefully communicate with the person.

This could build a working product user base, while a voice translation engine was being built from scratch.

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Google Translate API and speech recognition

User experience testing – enhanced

colinmcnamara — Wed, 29 Jun 2005 02:37:00 +0000

Good afternoon,
Everyone who knows me, knows that I have special spot in my heart for user experience testing. My personal favorite platform is Nagios, formerly Netsaint. It’s a linux based monitoring system located at http://www.nagios.com . I have set it up at pretty much everywhere I have worked. Like many monitoring systems, Nagios uses a plugin based architecture for its service checks. These plugins classically either connect to the TCP port that a service runs on, or does basic protocol validation.. e.g. issue a http get, and pattern match the response string.

This is great information to have, however when you have a multi tiered application it becomes harder to get a true status of your application stack. Luckily most new applications nowadays incorporate a HTTP interfaces.
However, this interface responding to a http get request generally does not indicate full application functionality. To get that level of information out you usually need to present some authentication to the web app, execute a click through, etc.

Now this has always presented a problem for me. I can check the availability of each level of the application stack. What I can’t do is verify that the application is truly working properly. This puts a major blind spot in my monitoring strategies. Luckily I just came across a very cool application. This sweet application is webinject – http://www.webinject.org/
It can be configured to graph application performance to mrtg, or output to nagios network monitor. Below is some information about this project.

What is WebInject?
WebInject is a free tool for automated testing of web applications and services. It can be used to test individual system components that have HTTP interfaces (JSP, ASP, CGI, PHP, Servlets, HTML Forms, etc), and can be used as a test harness to create a suite of [HTTP level] automated functional, acceptance, and regression tests. A test harness, also referred to as a test driver or a test framework, allows you to run many test cases and collect/report your results. WebInject offers real-time results display and may also be used for monitoring system response times.
WebInject can be used as a complete test framework that is controlled by the WebInject User Interface (GUI). Optionally, it can be used as a standalone test runner (text/console application) which can be integrated and called from other test frameworks or applications.

Programming Language and Platforms
WebInject uses an XML API (interface) for defining and loading test cases. You can use WebInject without ever seeing it’s internal implementation (no scripting or programming necessary to use it).
WebInject is written in Perl and can run on any platform that a Perl interpreter can be installed on (MS Windows, GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, MAC OS, and many more). Currently, binary executables of WebInject are only available for MS Windows. If you would like to run on other platforms, you must have a Perl interpreter and run it from the Perl source code.

Test Cases
Test cases are written in XML files, using XML elements and attributes, and passed to the WebInject engine for execution against the application/service under test. This abstracts the internals of WebInject’s implementation away from the non-technical tester, while using an open architecture [written in Perl] for those that require more customization or modifications.

Results/Reporting
Result reports are generated in HTML (for viewing) and XML (for tranformation by external programs). These detailed results include pass/fail status, errors, response times, etc. Results are also displayed in a window on the User Interface if you are running the WebInject GUI, and are sent to the STDOUT channel if you are running the WebInject Engine as a standalone (console) application.

Service-Level Monitoring
HTTP response times can be collected and monitored in real-time during test execution. Timer statistics are calculated and displayed in a monitor window during runtime. When used along with gnuplot (a plotting utility), a response time graph is generated and updated in real-time as the test runs. This is used to verify responses from the web application or web service under test are within an acceptable range (to meet your SLA or quality of service criteria). This also enables WebInject to be run as a performance probe for application/service monitoring.
WebInject can also be integrated as a plugin for external monitoring systems. In this case, it is used in console mode as an intelligent test agent that returns status and response times to your external program.
For real-time monitoring of your web applications or web services, WebInject is able to run in a mode that makes it compatible with Nagios. Nagios is an open source host, service, and network monitoring program.
For graphical trending of web service-levels over a long period of time, WebInject is able to run in a mode that makes it compatible with MRTG. MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) is an open source tool for collecting, storing, and graphing time-series data.

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

User experience testing – enhanced

Interesting thoughts from Mark Cuban

colinmcnamara — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 01:44:00 +0000

So pretty much everybody knows Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Mavericks. I was reading his blog and came accross some quotes from him.

“When you sit at the business table you always look for the sucker or fool. If you don’t see one, it’s you.”

“you only have to win once in business”

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Interesting thoughts from Mark Cuban

Redhat AS3.3 and VMware ESX network issues

colinmcnamara — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 20:27:00 +0000

OK, normally I can say nothing bad about VMware. However today I can definately say that I have gone past annoyed. Let me set the mood for you.
At work we have a pretty decent VMware envioronment. We have an IBM Blade Center, Gig switches, hooked to a Netapp San. All and all pretty bitchen. Once of the things we run in VMware is our M$ Exchange 2003 staging envioronment, along with a working copy of Active Directory. Needless to say, this has to be seggregated from our production copy, or all sorts of hell breaks loose.

Now this system work pretty good, except when we have to do usability testing. Its just not the same on a XP image, as it is from your laptop, on wireless, at home.. etc etc. So we decide we need some sort of VPN solution into our Exchange staging environment. After not alot of thought, I decide to set up a linux PPTP server. Its a protocol that pretty much everybody can use, pretty lightweight, and free .

I have set these boxes up before, and its not terribly hard. Until I had to do it on VMware. Let me set the stage for you – Redhat AS 3.3 / VMware Esx server / VMware tools installed / 1 nic . One NIC generally isn’t best for a VPN server, so I used Virtual Center to deploy a 2nd NIC to my PPTP box.
For anyone reasonably familiar with Redhat or Manadrake, we are used to installing well known hardware and seeing Kudzu add it on boot. Not this time. I rebooted, Kudzu came.. Kudzu went. I ran Kudzu manually no dice.

I know I know, auto anything never works… So I moved on to manually defining this network adapter. The first thing to check – is it actually plugged in. LSPCI reports the adapter as plugged in, and recognises it as a pcnet32 adapter. Normally I would take this as a positive sign, but not today. I issue IFCONFIG -a , network adapter is still not found. I was definately feeling a bit frustrated at this point. To be sure it wasn’t me, I bugged a friend and a co-worker (remind you of a game show?). Anson, who runs the VMware enviornment tried removing VMware tools, adding them…. still no dice. Shad tried to help through Yahoo, although to no avail.

By this time, I am frustrated, feeling like a moron, and ready for a break.
I went to get lunch from the Cafe, and settled down to eat at my desk.
Funny thing, how when you aren’t thinking about a problem is when you normally think of the solution. Let me give you a little background. Earlier when we were troubleshooting this problem, I googled this usenet post -
http://content.ix2.net/arc/t-4236.html . This fellow describes his headaches with debian, in which he had a very similar problem.

His problem, along with mine was that the proper modules werent loading for his network devices. He had tried, along with me to add the module listing to /etc/modules.conf. The one thing however that I hadn’t tried was manually loading pcnet32 using modprobe.

needless to say, modprobe pcnet32 now sits in my rc.local file. Its lame, but it works.

http://www.2cups.com

“The difficult we do immediately, the impossible just takes a little longer.”Similar Posts:

--Colin McNamara

Redhat AS3.3 and VMware ESX network issues

RSS feeds – an intranet aggregation solution?

colinmcnamara — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:43:00 +0000

So I am sitting at work last week, and the boss suggests that everyone on my team starts a blog. He has valid reasons – Communication of random ideas, encouraging collaboration, etc etc. So this gets me thinking of challenges that are faced aggregating information within corporate intranets, file stores, and databases. One of the large challenges I face day in day out is “where is that file on X”. Most of the time, I really have no clue. I may hit up our legacy intranet search app. Or maybe search a share point index, assuming that the users actually published the information. Maybe next hit up Docman. This continues on and on, until I finally give up and start asking around.

This highlights a pretty fundamental trend. Vendors imbed search functionality inside their own apps, or at least they attempt to. But god forbid you want to search across multiple applications or repositories.

In the past the solution was to expose a http interface into your repository, then use a spider to index said interface. This presents one problem – documents placed into repositories have horribly non-descriptive url’s. So as I am running my intranet search I hope and pray that someone put descriptive comments that are indexed by the spider. Sadly, I rarely have luck.

That highlights the second problem. Users are horrible about populating metadata within their documents. I am as guilty as anybody. I have been known to publish files with a less then descriptive name, and then leave my metadata blank. Recently however, I have improved my behavior. This behavior modification was brought on by using M$ SharePoint. Its basically a wiki front end to a SQL database, which is good and bad. What it does do good is encourage end users like me to utilize metadata for organizational structures instead of the classic folder method. It seems that as time goes on, metadata becomes more and more important in data classification. And it seems like both end users and large sites are catching on.

One thing I have noticed, is that pretty much every content provider is publishing their information via RSS feeds. It is about freaking time. Now end users just like me can have all their favorite information sources presented to them in one aggregated view.

This tactic is being used on the large user sites, because that is exactly what they want. If they make it easy for end users to get to content, they sell more product / show adds. This same tactic seems valid for corporate intranets. I can see an RSS feed of a project site you are working on, or coworkers site. Communicating status without adding to meeting burdens. Or to expand on that idea, RSS feeds doing keyword searches for patterns that you are interested in. I think there is true value is gathering information relevant to your job, without working to hard to do it.

This would be quite an accomplishment. Classically corporate apps seem to be architected to focus on capturing files and data. And on the flipside, they are pretty bad at expressing said information outside or themselves. You might call it a black hole of corporate data. So by combining RSS output of disparate corporate applications, with a RSS spider engine you should be able to get a nice summary pushed from disparate applications with links to extended metadata contained in these feeds. Maybe now I can find that file…