So I was talking to one of my guys at work tonight and he indicated that my shots have Cisco have been a recent thing in my career. I told him he was wrong and went back to a post that I had taken private. It ends up being this post. I want to start by saying I took this private when I went to a Cisco Gold VAR. I did so because after this post I had seen some good indications of change and I felt like it was a bit to hard of a slap in the face for people who were in large part paying my salary. That said after re-reading it I think I had lots of things right. So without further adieu here is my original post Published on: May 11, 2007 @ 13:52 taken right from my WP Dashboard. Enjoy! Read more
Category: Consulting
Vendors Beware
Simply put I am not going to target a specific vendor in this post but if you work for an IT vendor (Telco, SP, MSP, Hardware/Software maker, VAR, LAR, distributor, consultant) this list is a warning of the things you can do to really piss me off. It is not just me it is all of us. We have way to much to do on a daily basis to have to babysit the people who we pay to help us. So read, pay attention and don’t do this stuff!
1. Lie – Tell me what you can or can’t do and stick to it. This includes what your products can or can’t do.
2. Have a messy house – If your provisioning team does not talk to your sales team and no one talks to support you’ll piss me off.
3. Wing it – If I wanted to you to wing it on my project I would not have paid your your stupidly high rate. My 7 year old can wing it.
4. When you are getting it wrong ask me to not be me – Piss Off I am the customer I am right because I pay you monies.
5. Cover up your lie/mistake/bug/whatever else your covering up – Be honest with me I may not fire you.
6. Presume you know me by watching my twitter feed – I am more than 128 characters.
7. Blame your contractors – You hired them you fix it. I have to do that when you mess up!
8. Get me in trouble – If your stupidity makes me eat a bullet for you the world will know!
9. Lead with List price – We all know its BS. Give me the best deal you can and we’ll each do better by wasting less time.
10. Take a social or political stand corporately that makes me have to hate you – Really an Internet company siding with SOPA….
I am sure I have like 1000 more and I encourage my readers to jump on board and add them to the comments. In the end we all have jobs to do please don’t make me regret engaging you by making mine harder.
Storage Wars the Epic Battle Rages On
So tonight as I was getting into bed I did my normal scan twitter to see who I have pissed off or what might be going on that should rob me of sleep. Well tonight @david_Strebel asked the following questions;
“Who thinks FCoE will win over iSCSI?” and I responded “Not I” and then David asked the next logical question which was why not and here is what I had to say in the incredible detail that Twitter allows; “l2 boundaries, specialized hardware other than nics, hate relationship from most network people.”
The problem with this answer is pretty clear though. It does not really answer the question just gives a few power point bullets to appease the crowd. I don’t feel like this is enough though. So I am going to attempt to lay out my overall view on this issue of who will win iSCSI or FCoE and why. For those of you who don’t want to read the whole article which might get a a tad windy I don’t think either will win. But I don’t think FCoE will emerge as the leader until something better come along. For those masochists who like this kind of crap read on.
Method and Madness: How to fix what other people broke
I will be the first to admit that I make mistakes. I make lots of mistakes. But I learned a long time ago that it is not the mistakes that define us but
what we do when we make them. To that point it is both fascinating and infuriating when I enter someone’s network land and find that they have gone out of their way to do nothing to solve their own problem or in many cases to even
build a proper functioning network. So I am going to set out to show the Methods I use to deal with these people and their problems and the Madness that they have brought to the table to cause the issue.
This is going to be a series. Really my first series of posts, and they will all fall under the heading of Method and Madness with some sort of witty little
tagline. I will be pulling on a careers worth of situations that were totally preventable and how we resolved the problem or moved past it.
The format for each of this will be as follows:
Situation: This will be the “lab” Scenario piece of the post in which I outline
the base problem as well as the end goals of the situation. This section will
include a base diagram for use as reference.
The Method: This will be the troubleshooting and resolution phase of the post and
will breakdown the ultimate solution or bypass to the problem.
The Madness: This section will be my analysis of how things got to this point in the first
place. Keep in mind I have no in interest in posting garbage about oh look the senior
network engineer put a wrong static route in at 4am and a junior guy had to find it.
No I am more interested in exposing the issues where a Network Engineer or worse a team could not solve a problem that should be second nature for them to solve. In doing so I hope others will learn from and not find themselves in these situation.
So with all that said look for them. I hope to have the first one out by the end of
the week with about 50 Million other projects so bear with me. I think these will be a great recap for me and both education and humorous for you. I really encourage your feedback on these posts because I am not always right and there are lots of different paths so resolution of a problem.
“the best $1.80 I ever spent”
If your not sure what the title quote is from Check out Young Guns 2. As for this post however keep reading to see if I ever get to a point. Currently it is 3:37am in the morning. Again I can’t sleep. Not sure if I rested to much today after a week of almost not sleep, drank a bit to much caffeine or if I am just currently unable to calm down during this career transition. No matter what the cause I did what I normally do when I realize I wont sleep before I have to get dressed and head into work (in this case a my old office, my current clients office and the new office by the end of the day) I took a shower shaved and put on some coffee. I don’t know about you, but I do some of my best thinking in the shower or when driving on long trips alone. It was durring the above mentioned shower that this post and the thoughts it contain popped into my racing mind. Enjoy it could be a fun read.
Most of the feedback I have received concerning my new job and career path has been overwhelmingly positive. But some has not. Quite bluntly a few feel I have whored myself out for money. So let me tell you what I told them…Yes as a matter of fact I did. I did it for the money.
Josh’s Rules on Selling Solutions
So here I am at 2:15 AM. Storming outside and me all hopped up on caffeine. I just took a break from righting my last post:
Welcome to the HP Dream world where reality does not apply.
During that little breather I though you know what people must think I am a Cisco Zealot. Well that could not be further from the truth. I am a self confessed Technology Zealot. It it is new, shiny, blinks, chirps or at some point in its lifecycle lived in a Data Center I want it. But alas at least at this point in my life I have to make money. I do that by working for a Cisco VAR. We sell 90% plus Cisco. Unlike past jobs I do not rep Juniper, HP, F5, Foundry oops I mean Brocade, Arista, 3com, Shoretel, Avaya or anyone else that directly competes with Cisco Networking, Compute or Unified Communications.
That being said I do not think Cisco has the best product in every segment. But I wont flesh that out on my blog. If you want that info there is a price. You are either a customer with a requirement I cant meet at which point I will be honest with you or you are a professional friend who I feel comfortable discussion the finer and rougher points of our industry with. What I will say though is I have some Rules for what I will sell and I wont sell. I am going to lay those out to you and in a few cases why I feel how I feel. I hope this will provide insight to others who design, sell and deploy solutions in our industry for clients. At the end of the day our integrity is all we really have, Vendors crash, employers go under and clients come and go.
1. If I wont run it in my basement I wont install it at a client!
Free Prize Inside
So I will start off by admitting that the title of this post comes from Seth Godin and his book Free Prize Inside. Let me start of by saying if you are an idea person read this book. But that is not what I want to focus on today. Part of this blog that I seldom touch on is that I am a consultant. I honestly think it is what I was born to be. I love sharing information, expertise and honestly my thoughts with other people. I don’t like to do so in a pushy or demeaning way (although I’m sure some think I do) but more from the perspective of there is more than any one of us can ever know so lets share and work together.
So when I am on client site I often find that I am referring clients to tools that they have no idea about. Things like my old favourite Ziptie (not a huge fan since Alterpoint was sold and the staff all laid off) or Angry IP Scanner. These are free tools that if leveraged correctly can do huge things for your management, troubleshooting and planning of your network. So when my General Manager sent out a request for what we should do at eTech this years I threw out some real challenges for what I would like to see us pull together in 11 days. Two of those things are major free prizes and its those that I would like to discuss briefly. Read more
Seven more reasons Packetlife.net ROCKS!
Stretch over at Packetlife goes above and beyond when it comes to practical network blogging. Even more he publishes insanely good cheet sheets that I print, laminate and carry with me every day. Often a customer will have a question and I pull out the handy cheet sheet and just leave it with them. So today Strech posted Seven Free ways to improve your networks security so click through to it and do these things TODAY! So often it is the little things that bite us in the ass when it comes to security and while letting just one little thing slip through is bad enough, so often we are lettting lots of little things through. So start here and lets lockdown the tubes baby!
I put my bird in Fort Knox…go on try to steal it.
If you follow staticnat then you will know that I recently started a new job. They issued me a new Dell Latitude D630 including the upgraded video card. This was bit a of a change since I have been using a Macbook exclusively for the past two years. What I learned to love about the the Macbook was the strength of the underling OS and its elegant GUI for day to day use. Knowing my OS opt out of the Win32 world and take the dive into Linux as my primary work environment. This was easy enough considering my laptop came installed with WinXP and the Ubuntu 7.10 installer CD does a great job creating a dual boot system with minimal hassle to the end user. Read more
The Great Hope
This is outside of my normal topics but still kinda relevent. Last june we went on vacation with my inlaws. My father is law is a cool guy who worked in the accounting department of Ohio University after his stint in the Army and a brief trip to the FBI as a runner for Agents and a run in with J Edgar Hoover. He retired shortly after my wife and her sisters graduated from OU. Since then he has worked for Valic and is getting ready to start with another retirment/insurance group. All that said he is a pretty smart guy when it comes to money and finances. But back to vacation…on our way home we were talking about investing and I mentioned that I was trying to save up $10,000 to invest. Let me say this is not an easy thing and I am not there yet. If I had been able to pull that money together then this story would be alot more interesting. Anway when he asked me what I wanted to invest in I said I thought playing the stock market would be the best and most interesting return at least in the begining until I figured out what all the investment options are. He followed that question by asking how much I thought I could get in a return on my 10k, to which I informed him I thought I could pull 70% in a year. Lets just say this gave him a good laugh.
So that very day I logged into the hotels wireless and chose 10k in stock picks. They were; Read more
Always Flush when your done!!!
One of my clients has had their web server exposed to the wild world of the internet now for several years. Up till about a year and a half ago many systems on their network actually had IP ANY ANY statements cut through from the Outside of their Firewall to the Inside. However it has been one of my many jobs since I started with them to eradicate these problems and start securing their infrastructure. The firewall changes have been easy for the most part and any problems that remain are policy issues that we are working to eliminate. However their web server sitting outside of the firewall has been an ongoing issue and due to some anomaly’s on the server they are deploying the recommended DMZ and migrating their web server there. Read more