wbrown

We've been happy with webex when necessary. We can monitor what the vendor is doing and sometimes learn a few undocumented troubleshooting secrets. Something I was very unhappy with a few lifetimes ago was remote support from WatchGuard. Watchguard support would ask us to enable remote support on the appliance so they…

I would argue that Change Management is a subcomponent of standardization, monitoring, and improvement.

TACACS is also helpful for answering exactly what happened, in what sequence, by who. I've had situations where we know something was changed as evidenced by symptoms (i.e. issues) and the config differences. Comparing the before and after configs is good for seeing end-states but it doesn't really tell you what was being…

Mostly its a matter of making sure all the supplies in a single chassis are online and dealing with the ones that are not, rather than waiting for both supplies to take a hit and causing upset customers. Monitoring PoE became a necessity because we've had too many departments move locations without getting us involved in…

You want to see poor effects? Try rewatching Blake's 7, especially the first season. The effects got better by the last season, but not by much. Memory was definitely better.

Myself, I could use a SAN for Dummies style quick reference. I deal with firewalls and LAN switches daily, but my only interaction with our SAN switches is to investigate why the NCM backups didn't get the configs. Having a document that can quickly provide a refresher of vocabulary and concepts that isn't too high level…

Something I've seen mentioned in a few previous posts is the use of another custom field to signify Alert Y/N. If the field is Y and node is down then send alert, otherwise don't send alert. This allows the continued gathering of stats while suppressing alerts for rebooting nodes. Now if someone provides a means to modify…

This is a serious issue in the healthcare industry as well. Doctors like to get new personal gadgets and then use those gadgets while seeing their patients. This results in frustrating calls to get devices online, make sure the web interfaces for whatever systems are compatible with the browsers on the personal gadgets…

One other issue that slowed down restores from tape: finding the correct version of the correct file that contains what you're looking for. I can't count how many hours I've wasted restoring a particular file or directory only to find that the required data was in a different location or in a different date's backup.

Every time I see "free" I think of a point made in Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress : TANSTAAFL - There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

I recall an Openview NNM class where the instructor specifically mentioned changing some of the default display icons, such as the red ones, so that tours coming through wouldn't see anything obviously out of the ordinary.

A well managed network is an ideal to strive for. In a well managed network all required resources are availabe to all users at all required times. Problems are detected before they cause an impact. Applications play nicely and don't overconsume resources. Configurations are consistent and backed-up. Everyone has bought…

Patches? We don' need no stinkin' patches! <It's Friday, somebody had to say it.>

The all caps just worked for me. Probably the only combo of capitalization I didn't try previously.

Siloed? Maybe on paper but not operationally. Being Network Operations my silo is the network, but since so many problems get blamed on the network we have to have knowledge of servers and applications so we can tell "application owners" how their application really works and why their problem is not a network issue.…

And while looking at the certs, show a status regarding the expiration date of the cert. I'm thinking a green/yellow/red status for expiration greater than 60 days/ between 59 and 30 days/ less than 30 days.

Automation is great when it works, but are a HUGE problem when the processing rules haven't been fully tested, or the product doesn't really do what it says it does. Case in point: I've had a NAC product configured to ban particular devices from the wireless network. The problem arose when the particular devices were no…

I suspect I may know the temperature issue you're referring to. Having NCM provide a list of serial numbers along with IP addresses and locations is helping me to locate hardware that is subject to a now known memory issue from the same manufacturer. Using NCM's policy reporter literally saves me days or weeks of time when…

Thanks to tape changers I had a few decent naps during some of those sessions.

Two of the SLA operations I like are http and pathEcho. I run these on the access switches close to the user rather than at my core so that the load of the SLA operations are distributed as well as providing more user-like measurements. Http operations are great to run on user access switches because it gives a better…

Bummer - this sounds like a tool I could get some real troubleshooting use out of. My only x64 box is my home Linux workstation. Also a bummer for any questions that require pulling the answer directly out of the product.

We gained a great deal of visibility once we had NPM monitoring our gear. Some of the things we suddenly could see: Switches A,B,C have been running out of memory. That explains the random reboot every couple months. Power supplies (redundant luckily) in switches D, E, F are dead. Better check breakers and cords. Redundant…

Detecting a breach is easy: Do you have users? Yes? Then you've been breached. Now, the real question is what undesired actions have been taken?

We may be moving to UCS chassis and we've been given logins to UCS manager for the few installed, so hopefully we can eliminate some of those situations.

Agreed - nice analogy. Although, I'm not a ham but in general I find using the soldering iron to be much more satisfying that just downloading a patch, unless I'm the one that wrote the software update.

Tricky question today. The question asks for 3 words but the crossword will only fit 2.

Same timeframe. '98 or '99 I believe, in Gaithersburg.

Cool. 6000 or 9000, still plenty of points for a single month.

I agree that retaining logs is great from a network admin point of view. However, any given organization's legal department may have the final say. Regulatory compliance is part of the answer, but discoverable data retention must also be considered as Nick hints at in the main post. Many organizations limit email data…

You are entirely correct - I apologize for my misread. In my previous lifetimes as a consultant the certs definitely paid off and most of my managers understood the benefits. Even had some cases where we got the work because we were the only ones in the area that had the right certs (plus referenceable experience) on hand.