Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

Your customer needs help? Tell them to hire me!

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This is a little off-topic but I’ve probably let this slide for too long and unfortunately I’ve been going around with this bent up anger for quite sometime now and it’s time to vent and rant.

I provide a blog and forum to the community as a way to help educate people and hopefully learn a little something myself along the way. I’m generally interested in targeting the actual end-user, the network engineer or system administrator that’s working for Acme Corp. or Wayne Enterprises or the Umbrella Corp, hopefully you get the idea. Inevitably there will be a reseller or even a consultant that will show up with a genuinely honest question and/or problem. Unfortunately it’s been my experience as of late that there are far too many resellers and even consultants that overstate their  depth of knowledge and abilities and somehow end up on my proverbial front door asking for help. All to often I get something like the sample below;

VendorRequestingHelpI can respect that at least this person is honest enough to admit that this is for one of his/her customers. All too often I start a dialog with someone only for them to accidentally reveal later on in the discussion that the customer doesn’t want this or doesn’t want that, “what customer?” I usually ask. Are you going to reimburse me for my time and effort in architecting and designing your solution? Is my time not valuable or important? These same people continually post new questions to the forum but rarely ever answer any other questions or help further any of the ongoing  discussions or threads. They only show up when they get that next gig and haven’t a clue how to start configuring the gear.

If your customer is important to you and you don’t know the answer or understand the technology then you can hire me or any number of highly skilled independent consultants! Yes, I’ve done it hundreds of times for dozens of happy clients. And I can promise you this, I won’t oversell my skills or experience.

Cheers!

Image Credit: Alessandro Paiva

CrashPlan filling up your SSD?

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Over the weekend I actually had some downtime and was hoping to play a little Planetside 2 until I noticed that my Windows 7 desktop was down to only 8GB of free space on my 256GB SSD.  A quick check with WinDirStat found that I had over 133GB of files in C:\ProgramData\CrashPlan, even though I had installed the software into D:\Program Files (x86)\CrashPlan. I’ve been testing CrashPlan for the past 30 days trying to decide if it was the best tool available for me to use in backing up the numerous desktops and laptops throughout the house. I had been manually backing up my desktop (along with the loving wife’s) over the years using a few hastily written scripts and kludgy batch files. I was searching for something a little more reliable and less prone to human error (or lack of attention to performing the actual task of backing up). I took to Google like all skilled engineers do but was unable to find any quick solutions to the problem although there was a mention of how to change the cache folder to a different directory. I wanted a solution to cover all the potential data under C:\ProgramData\CrashPlan and not just the cache directory.

I decided to create a symbolic link (yes you can do that in Windows 7 and later) from C:\ProgramData\CrashPlan to D:\ProgramData\CrashPlan. I had to stop the CrashPlan service, move the data, delete the original folder and then create the symbolic link with the following command;

mklink /d C:\ProgramData\CrashPlan D:\ProgramData\CrashPlan

If you don’t have User Account Control (UAC) disabled you’ll need to run the Command Prompt as an administrator in order to properly execute the command above.

With those steps done I restarted the CrashPlan service and verified that everything was fine by launching the CrashPlan application.

Any comments about CrashPlan? I really like it so far, and you can’t really complain too much when it’s free (if you backup to a local hard drive). I have yet to restore a file so I’ll have more to say when I get a chance to actually test that portion of the solution. I did have to make a few tweaks to the configuration – notably setting data de-duplication to minimal in order to speed up the backup time.

Cheers!

Update: Wednesday July 3, 2-014
I just realized that the WD My Passport that I was backing up to was itself having issues. Upon unplugging the USB drive and reconnecting it I was prompted the format the drive – not good! So it may have been an issue with the destination that was causing CrashPlan to store all the backup information in the cache directories on my SSD. Now I need to go run some discovery software to see what I can recover from the USB hard drive.

100% Cable Patching in the Closet?

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With the move to a new organization comes some adjustment and occasionally some surprises. While my last employer was very rigid and bureaucratic, my new employer is extremely flexible, deplores ‘process for the sake of process’ and is extremely fast paced. There are pros and cons to everything in life although I’m not going to talk about my employers today.

Instead let’s talk about patching in the closet, sometimes referred to as the ICR (Intermediate Communications Room) but more often referred to as the IDF (Intermediate Distribution Frame).  There are a few different mindsets when it comes to patching the data jack to the network switch. Some organizations, including my new employer, believe in 100% patching to eliminate the need for any local technician to patch ports. Some organizations believe in running lots of cabling, and only patching what’s needed at that point in time. In July 2012 I showed off some of the closets that I personally built and others that I inherited in a post titled, Wiring Closets – Done Right!

IMG_20140428_074659617Here’s a recently constructed IDF with a stack of Cisco 3850X switches and 6″ patch cables. It looks pretty clean doesn’t it? Although, you can see that the 6″ patch cable doesn’t allow too many options when patching the data jack. You essentially need to connect the data jack to the switch port either directly above or below the patch panel.

I would probably personally choose a 1′ patch cable to allow a little more freedom and slack. There are no free rack units in that layout so replacing a failed switch will require the engineer to label  some if not all of the ports, remove the cables, remove the failed switch and reverse the process. In previous switch stack deployments I had left 1 open RU below every switch so a technician could place a new switch in the rack (put the switch in from the rear if necessary then install the ears) and then just move the patch cables to the new switch.

There are pros and cons to each approach, it really depends on the organization and what makes sense for them and how they do business.

How to you patch your closets?

Are you still using chassis based switches?

Cheers!

Network is Slow!

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Those are the words that almost every network engineer loathes to hear, the “network is slow”. And those words are usually spoken by folks who really have no idea of how the network works let alone the understanding to quantify the word “slow”. In my past life I had built a fairly large dark fiber metropolitan network where the smallest link, outside of remote VPN offices, was 1Gbps. I spent years training the IT staff around me to understand the difference between a under performing application, an overloaded server and a congested (slow) network. In that past life I rarely heard the words, the “network is slow”. Fast forward to current day and it seems I have my work cutout for me since I hear those glowing words on average 3-4 times a day.

Add in 100Mbps to the desktop (thanks to the Avaya 4621 IP Phones) and you’ll even find me occasionally grinding my mouse in frustration as I wait for a large Visio diagram or Excel spreadsheet to open.  That’s not even mentioning the added delay if the document has been archived by an electronic vaulting or archiving solution. It’s even more grinding when that solution prompts me to authenticate in order to retrieve the archived document – that’s a great user experience.

Any reasonable user would blame the network because that’s the piece that ties everything together so that’s probably what’s broken. I wouldn’t fault the user for that assumption because they really don’t know any better, in their view it’s just plain slow and occasionally painfully so. So next time you hear the “network is slow”, just remember to smile!

Cheers!

Apple iOS 8 randomises WiFi MAC addresses

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We learned this past week that Apple’s iOS 8 will offer the ability to randomize the WiFi MAC address while it scans for wireless networks. While the feature itself seems appealing from a privacy perspective it has me seeking to understand how they intend to technically implement this feature.

iOS8MACAddress

I’ve seen more than my fair share of duplicate IP address issues over the years and I’m wondering how Apple is going to implement this feature to prevent duplicate MAC addresses? And in that same thought how is this change going to impact other systems. It’s obviously going to impact those solutions that promise to track customers through retail spaces. Although the proposed change by Apple only covers the WiFi SSID scanning, once you connect to a guest/public hotspot iOS 8 will use the real WiFi MAC address which can then be tracked. How will this impact an Access Point or Wireless LAN Controller? What if a wireless network utilizes band steering and probe response spoofing?

Anyone have any technical details regarding how they will actually randomize the MAC address?

Cheers!

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