wbrown

Can the bonus questions be made visible after the answer period has closed? Checking this morning I see that bonus question 2 was opened yesterday, but I don't remember seeing it when I checked. I know I answered at least 1 question yesterday but I don't know if it was the daily and the bonus, or just the daily. Making the…

My config management procedures have followed a similar evolution. Started out just keeping configs on my hard drive. I was the only one looking at them, so why keep them anywhere else? Then more people involved, more devices. We started keeping the manual backups in a central location. Moved to someplace where MANY more…

I was testing NCM 7.2.1 a couple weeks ago and that appears to get the entire config minus the certs. It wasn't in a form that can be easily copied into .ucs files, but it is definitely better than NCM 6.1.

As I responded to sevier.toby, I don't think users should have any expectation of privacy regarding what they do on company equipment, on the company network, during company time. However I like the regulations requiring privacy or non-leakage of sensitive data (i.e. PHI, PII, PCI, etc) because they give me excuse and…

To add to the list: "You gotta be able to laugh at yourself". I knew the movie was going to be entertaining from the very first opening credit.

I did the same thing first time through. That's why there's currently another cup of coffee in hand.

Data is helpful but change often requires funding. Many of us on my team have tried to get changes made using great data but have often gotten stymied when a price tag gets attached. We've gotten around that sometimes by using phrases such as "unplanned [uber-critical app name] downtime may result if change is not…

Is today's (day 18) question supposed to be exactly the same as yesterday's question? The answers provided don't seem to go with the question.

Multiple vendor firewalls didn't do Anthem much good. The CMMS guidelines they are subject to specify that different vendor firewalls must be used between successive application layers (i.e. Web interface, app server, DB server).

I'd have to say that this pretty much mirrors our current environment also.

My guess is that they are remembering the legend of the Chevy Nova being unpopular in Spanish-speaking locales and so are trying to avoid a lack of Windows sales in German speaking locales ("Windows, Nein!").

A problem I run into too often is that after assisting with and troubleshooting the problem and advising the customer on next steps/future planning they do not follow through. This then leads to a repeat of the issue which is now a network issue since I "did something" to fix it last time the issue occurred.

Yes. Just delete your cookies for the sgizmo.com site and then click the link again.

We've tried to schedule at least an hour every other week to get everybody in the same room (or webex) to go through a Cisco Live video. Unfortunately this eventually fell by the wayside as we couldn't get enough people together at the same time to make it worthwhile. My current employer is in support of everyone getting…

I can see this being useful in the NPM interface details view. I'm still on 10.3.1 - the details shows configured speed but it would be nice to have the duplex displayed there as well. The label on the data implies that the displayed speed is statically configured as such. However I have interfaces where I've confirmed the…

I believe QoE/IP SLA/whatever is getting more attention for multiple reasons. First, IT really is about delivering a service to the end user so we need some way to monitor and verify that service delivery. Second, from a network support viewpoing monitoring the user experience is necessary to stop those annoying "the…

My home boxes are currently patched manually. I may have to check out that video to set up a repository for home.

Migrating my firewalls from Cisco ASA to Cisco FTD. The centralized management and some basic searchable logging is something I've been wanting for my ASAs for some time. Next is integration of that functionality and automation with the rest of the stack we're implementing.....

Looks like they're there now. Thanks. Maybe someday I'll get around to spending some of them.

I've only rarely had to drop back to tcpdump, but the most memorable has been when working with Solaris admins troubleshooting name resolution on a remote box. We were able to use tcpdump to show that the server wasn't even trying to query any DNS servers; in which case we can stop wasting time by looking at the firewall…

Same. One of the screenshots seemed to indicate something but apparently that was not where the answer was.

Another issue I've directly observed is that of knowledge drain. If the teams using or managing the NMS have too much turnover then the knowledge of what the NMS is looking at and why can be lost. Over time the knowledge may be less useful to the newer teams and thus the NMS becomes deprioritized, alerts get auto-routed to…

Proprietary, copy, old, etc: that is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether a large enough portion of the Orion user base is using the technology and would like to see visualization of that tech in their monitoring solution. I for one would like to get some visualization of the VSS health status as we are actively…

Something I'm hoping to implement here is configuring useful IP SLA operations at my various facilities and placing the results on a display for our helpdesk. The hope is that we can use this to stop some of the typical tickets like "everything is down here" or "application X is running slow" or "the Internet is down". The…

Rather than pressuring Solarwinds to poll these stats, I think we would be better off in the long run to pressure Cisco to implement OIDs specific to the modules we would like to poll. Using the table mentioned above is much better than having no monitoring at all but it is still just a workaround.

A frustration we often run into is someone will ask for an IP reservation, to which we will then respond by asking for a MAC address or the currently assigned IP, only to receive the response "it doesn't have one because it's a virtual NIC" or "we don't know it yet because we're still building the server". The response…

To put it simply, without standards how can you have any expectation of how things are supposed to be configured or operate?

Managing the NMS is not my full-time duty in this job - it has been in previous ones. Having the previous experience of customizing NMS for previous customers gave me a great number of examples of things that could be done in the right use case. Combining the previous NMS customization experience with the current duty of…

In one particular case PAD allowed us to identify some unauthorized traffic and eliminate GBs of wasted bandwidth. The traffic in that case was HTTP traffic going to a web server in Russia listening on TCP 53. My primary firewall just identified the traffic as being DNS based on the destination port. However, my content…

The basic question to me is if the the web service metrics cannot be correlated to business metrics, even if only qualitatively rather than quantitatively, then why is the business spending mony on the web service? I've not received any requests to provide metrics but what I have looked at when assisting with…