rschroeder · NAM SME · ✭✭✭✭✭

Cicadas. I grew up with them "singing" in tree tops in the late summer, just north of St. Paul, MN. It was rare to see one down at ground level, and when we DID find one we'd be perplexed at its shape & color. Sort of like a beautiful tree-leaf-green, and sort of like an art-deco / abstract / aerodynamic version of the…

I'm not certain of the value (or veracity) of the 750 Million year old locator. It's a pretty graphic. But not much else gained from it, except understanding that things change, and people don't live long enough to remember this kind of scope.

Each time I read the title to this (Explain Like I'm Five) I'm reminded of Galaxy Quest's sad scene: Galaxy Quest - We pretended, we lied. - YouTube

My wife (and others!) clued me in to the idea that I have Sleep Apnea. A quick overnight trip to the local Sleep Lab confirmed it, and now I sleep with a CPAP. I hate to say it so dramatically, but if not for that CPAP machine I'd likely no longer be alive. I was falling asleep five times WHILE DRIVING home to work each…

Losing Net Neutrality feels like it will cost us a lot of money to do the things we've been doing without extra fees. And where there are profits to be expanded, politicians continue to listen with their wallets to big money lobbyists and big corporations. Perhaps the biggest mistake I've seen government make is bestowing…

It seems like the GDPR Black Hat info privacy issue is a matter of education, enforcement, and deployment of consistent options and responses. I recently listened to a podcast from National Public Radio where an unhappy person harassed others for years with false and spurious court claims, ruining their credit and tying up…

​Decision Making Under Stress:​ Never a good idea, but sometimes it's necessary. Deep thinking is difficult then, and it's where people plan to fail by failing to plan. I'm thinking of ways to deal with problems during stress--from a network point of view. * The data center's down at 3 a.m. Sunday, the SA's and Network…

Thank you for the kind words, asheppard970​. If only there were a way to consistently and reliably employ one's self through bardic output, I'd give it a shot (AFTER I'd found the statistics and track record of success achieved by others). You know--baselining and then comparing my expected results with others'. I know…

As you consider this feature request, realize that some organizations' devices will not respond to ICMP due to security considerations. I understand those few exceptions are not what you're looking to discover--although reporting on them MIGHT be useful, too--just to ensure that addresses which are supposed to be…

There's a part of me that suspects employees are MORE of a risk to a business than hackers and other outsiders. You KNOW the outsiders are there, trying to get in and do bad things. You don't expect employees to be doing the same, either inadvertently or maliciously.

In honor of newbies writing code, and experienced coders being able to write better code, I offer this paraphrased version of Billy Joel's song "Get it Right the First Time:" I don't believe in frequent rewrites So just this once I hope my code is gonna work Well-written lines are always delights I've got to make that…

I was tired of mowing grass, too. My solution: build a home beneath towering Red or White Pines. Their needles make the soil quite acid, and I rarely need to mow. Another solution I tried and liked was bringing in black dirt for over the sandy loam and clay and seeding it with clover. I never needed to mow the clover, and…

Lots of folks voted for "From my own infrastructure to/from my public cloud providers", and I'm a bit confused by their thoughts. I'd expect everyone to already be able to monitor that with Solarwinds products that company's either already own, or could purchase. Even NPM should be able to provide in/out info about that…

Thanks for that last graphic--it made me laugh out loud as I saw what had been crossed out & penciled in.

Oh my Dog.

Wow--CMD.exe is dead! Long live PowerShell. Now, where's the training for the CMD folks who never had to use PowerShell, or who were able to avoid it in the past? It's the passing of an era.

Thanks for saying what we MUST understand. Reading it in differing blogs, reading it presented in different ways, helps remind us that it's easy to go down the wrong path when troubleshooting, and that wastes everyone's time. I'm guilty of this myself. If I'm troubleshooting OTV or BGP issues for a few hours and an…

Maybe both. All I know is jigs that used to cost $.15 at the tackle shop now costs $3.95 or more. Rapala's that were $.95 are now $8.95. Tiny teardrop ice fishing jigs were $.03 apiece, and now they're a buck ore more. That's a hard pill to swallow. It's also one of the drawbacks of living a long time and remembering what…

I'm seeing a common theme among these letters. Networks are aging, Network Analysts want to do a good job replacing and upgrading them, but don't have time or funds (or both) to do it. Increasing demands by users, by security, and vendors, all are generating apologetic feelings towards networks for what's happened on them…

Big Pharma remaining greedy? They've a reputation for it, and using P.R. to spin an overpriced medicine that's mandatory for life doesn't make amends for greed that remains present. I understand their arguments that developing medicines is expensive and time-consuming. But how many big Pharma companies have you seen fold…

"Dirty Data" seems to be inevitable if Humans are involved in creating or storing it. This might be a job for an AI--one with all the right rules to do the job cleanly and correctly. And then bring in an army of tools and AI's and other things that verify and prove the data was properly created, stored, adjusted, deleted,…

I've submitted a White Paper for Thwack Administrator to consider; the topic is Solarwinds' recommendation for removing "unknown interfaces" caused by replacing a node with a different model while keeping the same name and IP address. Yes, the recommended process remains deleting the node and re-adding it, when anyone who…

My organization purchased EOC several years ago to build a solution that could give insight into the network status of three separate and remote organizations that had been brought under one management. Each organization is several hundreds miles apart from the others, and is comprised of dozens of smaller regional and…

Appreciated the info from a historical aspect.

We require users to NOT store information locally on laptops or PC's, and to store it on mapped network drives that are backed up. There ARE exceptions, particularly for people who have laptops that are transported to home and back for working from home, or to patients' homes and back, for work at a patient's bedside at…

Lots of times businesses cross the lines for profit, citizens or states or cities react or overreact. Sometimes I think it's all the result of there being too many people in the world. I could be wrong. If Air B&B is a bad thing, forbid / prohibit them or tax them out of existence. If they're not, get over the changes they…

Yes, the U.S. has some pretty egregious violations of our home living budget for telephone, Internet, and television/cable services. We can charged for initiating a cell phone call, AND we get charged for receiving a cell phone call. I understand European providers do not charge customers for incoming calls. Of course, the…

It reminds me of the way our Security Admins refuse to delete old user accounts in Active Directory. When someone changes jobs or is let go or retires (or worse), their user name is deactivated but kept in AD forever because it's a SID--and they never want to delete any SID. It has something to do with this thread:…