rschroeder · NAM SME · ✭✭✭✭✭

I'm reminded of Harrison Ford implementing an ACL in "Firewall". He applied a canned ACL to an interface and his underling commented to the effect "Well, THAT'LL shut 'em ALL out!"

I hope it's not too late to save someone from a Thanksgiving Deep-Fried Turkey Disaster by dredging up this old info from a previous year: For successful cooking experiences: * Plan, get advice, Google the topic, get trained/certified, etc. When fire is potential a potential result, your research should include videos for…

Staying current while retaining the "tribal knowledge" is not only the responsibility of employees; it's Management's responsibility to allocate resources to provide training opportunities for staff to keep them current. If you've read many of my posts, you'll know I have Some Thoughts on Professional IT Training. If you…

Show me the questions!

That's quite a process. Do you use ACI in your data center yet? I've used DCNM for our Nexus data center; it's an interesting GUI. In the last year we've moved to Cisco's ACI and replaced DCNM; now there's a completely new process for building a new VLAN throughout a multi-data-center solution. It takes about 5 minutes,…

What's next? Something to help us manage, monitor, and better-leverage ACI and ISE (I hope)?

Another case of poor assumptions, I think. Assuming: * If it was cool in Star Trek, it can be built and sold today, and it'll be cool in the real world. * Anything IoT must be / will be properly designed and protected by the manufacturer. Hey, all this voice-operated / IoT stuff worked securely on Star Trek (except when…

The list of seventeen things we should have learned, but didn't, is significant. I've shared that off with team members and some friends. Until government gets the message in that story, and causes enforcement of better practices to be mandatory, there will still be gaping holes in business and government and personal…

Just disable SMB1 everywhere. These should not have to be said: * Keep your systems patched * Keep your systems up-to-date with anti-virus / anti-malware solutions * Back up your files to off-line / off-site storage solutions * Retire obsolete operating systems like XP * Do all these things in a timely fashion It doesn't…

One cloud vendor is seeing 11% greater use than another? I don't think MS has this market cornered, and I don't think AWS is going to be limited to the same markets as MS.

Organizations who do not provide training to critical employees are not taking care of their futures. Some examples: * Imagine relying on a doctor who has had no training in the last five or ten years. Without those Continuing Medical Educational credits, she or he will likely remain unaware of improved procedures that may…

The Bulk-Dialing Gecko story left me unsatisfied. I expected to learn exactly how the gecko's toe pads could be dialing out, what it was touching, how it was making contacts, where it got access to some interface that was vulnerable to gecko toes, etc. I guess you can't have everything. I mean, where would you put it?

I am honestly surprised at the outcome. My idea of what makes a great captain varies from the average by a significant amount.

These definitions expand my mind. For example: * Risk and Threat have been so closely associated in my mind that they've become indistinguishable from each other to me. * Vulnerability and Risk also seem to me to be too close to tell apart for my team's purposes. To do our job, we must reduce and/or eliminate both. *…

I watch about 800 Cisco routers, firewalls, and switches with NPM, in additional to numerous F5 load balancers, over a hundred UPS's of various brands, and plenty of SQL and Windows servers. I rely on NPM to tell me what's happening, NCM to ensure compliance and easy recoveries, and NTA to shine the light on what kind of…

You're right, but I didn't want to suggest the nuclear option. Yet it's happened MANY times where I work today--other network team members have become frustrated and left before the goodness was accomplished. I think, in the last 15 years, we've gone through a dozen or more Network Analysts who came, tried, became…

I was going to add parallels from The Last Jedi, but it's too soon--too many people haven't seen it yet, and I don't want to be the spoiler. Although, when I saw it on opening night at the earliest show, I confess I was tempted to shout out to the people waiting in line "Darth Vader is Luke's Father!" But only tempted a…

It's hard when organizations may only see the costs involved in bringing in thorough monitoring through Solarwinds. Hardware, licenses, Support contracts, training, and staff to set it up, discover everything, learning your network and its systems and applications thoroughly enough to correctly set up SAM and NPM and NCM…

We have a self-service function in our Help Desk solution (LAN Desk Service Desk) for our users. It's problematic. Issues that arise include: * Users not including their current call-back number. They may not provide ANY callback number, or rely on their auto-populated desk phone number while they're experiencing a VOIP…

If most database breaches occur in CA and NY, isn't it most likely to surmise that most databases are also located in those spots?

After all the problems with Yahoo's users losing their ID's and accounts' security, I wouldn't have a problem with Yahoo going away entirely. Solarwinds and Thwack direct us occasionally to connections and polls with third-provider sites who won't even accept a Yahoo mail account as a contact. That should tell us something…

Definitely looking forward to your writings!

Our InfoSec team has shown us several articles revealing that wiping a hard drive, even multiple erase passes, isn't sufficient for legal / liability purposes. I (mistakenly / naively?) thought "an erase is an erase"; that it was "completely erased". Especially when the erase pass writes random 1's and 0's. It's not…

The first couple facial expressions were priceless--highly confused, but very-much-appreciating the weirdness of it all.

Custom SQL Alert? Talk about a hassle! But I'm pressed you've got the skillset to make it work. +1

If only Microsoft were listening to Robert Scoble before they roll out a new Office package, or Server OS, or PC OS. I can see it now: "F-CASS" (Frictionless Consumption for Any Service or Solution) becomes the new wave of a user-experience-centric design mode. Robert is hailed as the new leader in anticipating and…

It might happen, but for now, all the things we monitor are our own, not those of our customers. The opposite could also happen--all IT could be outsourced to another company that would have to monitor/manage our internal systems. It wouldn't be pretty, nor would it come without painful and extended outages.

It's been challenging to try to squeak a wedge into those silos' cracks and try to get a single-pane-of-glass product in. Maybe if I had some time on the golf course with the Director and CIO, I could explain the problems with silos and how they slow down troubleshooting. And how more SW products like VNQM and and DPA and…

One reason I monitor links on both sides is to ensure I know when one side's down and the other side's up. An example: 1. A pair of VSS-paired Cisco 6509 distribution switches (HA for a hospital) have a two-port port-channel to every access layer switch down stream, and four 10G port-channeled links upstream to a pair of…

It's unfortunate we aren't all given, or required to take, training to ensure our performance is efficient and optimized. People dropped into new positions but not given training, not knowing which wheels have previously been invented, and how to do the new job well (by working closely with PMs, Clients, Networks,…