It’s been an incredibly busy January for me as I transitioned from managing a large regional network with 10Gbps WAN links to managing a large global network with 100Mbps WAN links. It’s always interesting to see yet another meshed VLAN and IP addressing scheme. An engineer at my last employer would always say, “The best thing about standards? There’s always more than one to choose from.”

I had to actually go shopping for a few more pairs of jeans and t-shirts.

Articles

Gain 30% Linux Disk Performance with noatime, nodiratime, and relatime by Bob Plankers – Bob shared a number of performance tips throughout the month of December. Those of us that have been working with virtualization will recognize most of the tips. The one I’ve highlighted above usually get’s missed by the first timers (and even some small VPS providers) and can provide a real measurable boost to your performance.

New Opportunity at Red Hat by Brent Salisbury – I’m not the only one to be switching jobs in the new year. Brent has joined Red Hat and will be working with the Open Daylight development team. Brent has been a prolific blogger around SDN for quite sometime now and that’s sure to continue. I wish Brent the best of luck in his new position.

Debating Whether Network Engineers Need to Learn Programming by Greg Ferro – Greg discusses the need for network engineers to learn programming in an ever evolving SDN world. Greg makes a clear delineation between programming and scripting, however, I’m not so sure that line is so clear.  I’ve written 1,000+ line scripts that could easily be considered standalone programs and/or applications. That said I see Greg’s point, in learing to program you’ll be better equipped to understand how applications and software utilize the network.  I graduated as a Computer Science major so I learned to program first,  then took up being a system administrator and eventually moved into networking. I would encourage all network engineers to at least take up scripting if not programming. It’s a very handy skill set to have and can even save you hours of monotonous work.

Target: Names, Emails, Phone Numbers on Up To 70 Million Customers Stolen by Brian Krebs – Brian Krebs continues his detective like reporting on the latest and greatest hacker breaches. I’ve been paying closer attention to Brian’s reports in the past few weeks now that I’m in the retail vertical. I’ve also been reading up on PCI and SOX reporting and compliance instead of HIPAA and HITECH.

Show 174 – War Stories From the Hot Aisle: The Nightmare Before Christmas, Part 2 by Packet Pushers – With my new job I now have at least an hour commute to and from my job everyday into Philadelphia. This has allowed me the opportunity to catch up on all the great content the Packet Pushers (Greg and Ethan) have posted out there. On Friday evenings commute I had the opportunity to listen to Show 174 which brought back a lot of fond memories. What’s a NetWare abend? I’ve been there, try performing a memory dump to floppy disk – I can’t remember how many it was but it was at least 2 boxes of floppy disks (10 floppy disks to a box), and then overnight the floppies to NetWare via FedEx. I can almost remember the commands, “load tcpip.nlm”. It was truly entertaining to hear all the different stories from everyone on the show.

Cheers!