Tag Archives: PLANNING

Episode 11 – Infrastructure Lifecycle

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:53 — 20.1MB)

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We returned to record our eleventh episode on Sunday August 28, 2016.

Interesting News and Events

Roundtable Discussion – Infrastructure Lifecycle

 

Reasons for a refresh?

  • End of Life (EoL)
  • End of Support (EoS)
  • Performance
  • Expansion
  • Budgeting (new equipment might be less costly than maintaining older equipment under maintenance contracts)
  • New features requirement (PoE+ vs PoE / 10Gbps vs 1Gbps / 1Gbps vs 100Mbps)
  • Manageability

Strategic Lifecycle Planning – often companies plan and budget to replace their infrastructure every 5 – 7 years.

What kind of refresh ?

  • The easy one; 1:1 like e.g. one core switch for a newer cores witch
  • Technology change; like e.g. from classic STP to multi chassis link aggregation
  • Fabrics
  • Software Defined Networking

You can really stretch the budget by looking at second hand equipment, especially for non-critical sections of the infrastructure. Avoid grey market equipment and only work with a reputable vendor.

 

Reach out for the Vendors:

  • Educate yourself before the vendors show up
  • Compare different vendors and technologies with each other
  • Document the features that you are looking for in the solution
  • Proof of Concept – prove out the possible solution
  • Rollout Planning
  • Maintenance window – new product gets implemented to the production environment
  • Finger crossed (look for bugs)

What tools are you using?

Synergy – Synergy combines your desktop devices together into one cohesive experience. It’s software for sharing your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers on your desk. It works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It’s only $10 for the basic version and well worth the money in Dominik’s opinion.

Michael’s technical challenge?

T460-heroThese past two weeks I’ve been working to figure out why the Lenovo ThinkPad T460 w/Intel AC 8260 wireless adapter wasn’t playing well with a Cisco 5508 Wireless LAN Controller and Cisco 1262N and 3702E Access Points. The device itself is pretty nice… very thin, not very heavy, great keyboard and doubles as a tablet. I’ll be sad to give it up when I figure out what’s broken. Watch my blog for a follow-up and possible conclusion.

Update: August 30, 2016 – workaround is to enable A-MPDU for 802.11n – Lenovo ThinkPad T460 Yoga with Intel AC 8260 Wireless Issues

Cheers!

Episode 2 – We are back for more

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:41 — 16.8MB)

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We returned to record on second episode on Sunday March 20, 2016.

Interesting News and Events

  • Dominik came across an interesting story on ZDNet by Larry Seltzer title, “Is paying for antivirus a waste of money?” Larry is essentially proposing that since Microsoft’s Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware solution for Windows 10 is a big improvement over previous versions (credit AVTest), then perhaps you don’t need a commercial solution. In the closing paragraph he makes this statement:

It’s like a motorcycle helmet. Lots of people don’t wear them and never have a problem. Some people wear them and still get in fatal accidents. But it can make a big difference. If a real threat comes my way and the anti-malware stops it then it has definitely paid for itself.

  • Dominik also came across a post from BigThink by Frank Jacobs entitled, “Tokelau, the World’s Online Superpower“. In surprising fashion the country/territory with the largest number of unique domain names isn’t any of the current super powers. Instead it’s a small New Zealand territory with a population of approximately 1,400 people. Yet the .tk domain has more than 31,311,498 registered domains.
  • Several of new vulnerabilities were recently found in Palo Alto firewalls by Felix Wilhelm @ Troopers Conference in Heidelberg Germany.

  • Pwn2Own which was held last week at the CanSecWest security conference awarded some $460,000 to multiple teams for vulnerabilities discovered in Windows, Apple OS X, Adobe Flash, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge and Google’s Chrome.

Roundtable Discussion

Dominik recently posted an article entitled, “FastDeployment vs Planing” discussing the pitfalls that can befall people that don’t take the time to properly plan and think out all the associated challenges and issues of making a change to a production system. Sometimes this isn’t necessarily the engineer’s fault, it’s the responsibility of the management team to provide the time and resources for that engineer to be successful in his or her’s endeavors.

We also briefly touched on automation, and I recalled a post from Lindsay Hill titled, “Help! My Boss is Scared of Automation!!!“.  I would highly recommend you check out Lindsay’s post.

What tools are you using?

USB to Serial Adapters – Dominik has done one better using Airconsole by get console. Dominik posted his own thoughts about Airconsole back in January 2015. In short the Airconsole allows Bluetooth or WiFi connectivity to the serial port of your choice with good support and battery life.

I’ve run into all sorts of problems with Prolific chip based adapters, where the laptop would either blue screen or the serial port would just stop working until the laptop is physically restarted. I just recently purchased a number of FTDI chip based adapters and so far they seem to work much better in Windows 8 and Windows 10 – time will tell.

Cheers!