Category: On the Job

Why I do what I do.

Hi my name is Josh O’Brien.  I am the CTO of Language Access Network.  We provide remote video language services to hospitals and clinics across the United States.  Blah Blah Blah….I go through this at least once a day and sometimes as many as ten times a day.  Also every day I hear about all the cool new milestones that Language Access Network is reaching.  Most of these go something like today our interpreters provided 70 more interpretations than our last high water mark a week ago.  My answer has always been that’s nice please let me get back to work making sure everything is working, scalable and supportable.  I know I am a cold bastard, but it has been the reality of what I do.

Don’t get me wrong, I 100 percent believe in our company, what it does and the profound impact we make in the medical market…I really do!  But I am not an interpreter, doctor or customer advocate my job is to make the zeros and ones fly down the correct pipe at the correct time and to so as efficiently as possible.  I just don’t have time for all the slaps on the back an congratulations for doing what I was brought here to do which is to massively grow the company and win.  Even my own staff does not get me, they love reveling in the record breaking and I am thrilled that they are because at the end of that day it is one more amazing testament to how good they are and the hard work they put in.  But I am a geek, not a mercenary in it for the cash but just a flat out geek, nerd, packet pusher whatever you want to call me.  I get excited about the tech.  I have always been that way.  If I won $100,000,000 in cash today I would renounce my salary, hire more staff, reduce my travel load and then out of my pocket buy all sorts of cool gear for Language Access Network and my team.  I just freaking love what I do! Read more

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.

Fake it till ya make it!

So no one who is reading this should be in the dark about some of the interesting things I have been doing as of late.  But if you are here is a quick re-cap.

Language Access Network my employer is undergoing an installation of a first of its kind Video Call Center.  I will more on that to write soon.  As part of this process we had a WHOLE LOT of infrastructure put into place.  For starters we needed a “SAN”, we needed Servers, we needed DC Switching and we needed lots and lots of licensing and that all before the developers and engineers jump in to make the whole thing work.  The cool bits of this first part are what we did for “SAN”, Server and Network.  As you all know I am a past Cisco UCS zealot and I have a NetApp in my basement so you would think that it would be simple math as to what I would have installed.  You would be right.  UCS and NetApp were about $100,000 more than I could scrape out of my budget and still have anything left for other major components.  Before people get bent out of shape about me saying Cisco UCS and NetApp are to expensive, I did not say that.  Honestly I think within existing DC platforms they are both very well priced if you don’t bring next gen platforms into the mix.  In my case the next gen platform is Nutanix.  If you don’t know anything about these guys click the link and check them out.

In a nutshell Nutanix is 4 Blades of Compute and 20TB of Storage in a 2RU chassis with FusionIO, SSD and SAS Drives and no common backplane between the 4 nodes.  Along with my four pod node we added Arista 7124SX as our DC Switching/Fabric.  There are lots of details around this combination like currently Nutanix does not support using the Node for a bare metal server like you can do with UCS or other Blade Enclosures and the storage has limited access to the outside world (it is setup to presented to ESXi Hosts as iSCSI targets and VMs as ViSCSI targets) but so far I love the platform.  It gave me what I needed in the price point I needed and offers huge scale out options considering it is based of the GFS files system that Google uses across their DC’s. Read more

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.

Quick and Dirty…Ooohhhh….Yeahhhh

Quick and dirty is how I like it when I have 4000 menial tasks to get done.  So another oldy but goody that I had to dig up today was how to delete a full directory structure and its contents from a Cisco files system.  So here it is enjoy.

From normal enable mode:

delete /recursive /force flash:(enter the root file name)

So delete is the easy one.

/recursive sets the flag to recursively cycle through the whole directory structure you specified.  So you should probably never type

delete /recursive /force flash:  BAD DON’T DO IT!

And finally /force eliminates all the are you sure you don’t want to shoot yourself in the forehead messages.

Again quick and dirty saves time but if your dumb about using it can get you in trouble.