Michael McNamara

technology, networking, virtualization and IP telephony

Conclusion – 30 Days of Peak

by

It was back on November 24, 2014 that I accepted Greg’s challenge to write 30 blog posts in 30 days. I’ve made it to day 30 and I’m still here, although I’m honestly more than a little tired and burnt out. Working for a retail company makes the Christmas holidays extremely stressful – the holiday peak is extremely important for every retailers balance sheet so there’s extra scrutiny around any technical issues whether they are actual or just perceived. I’ve heard horror stories of past holiday peaks so it appears that this holiday has been pretty successful. We had no major issues in our stores or on our websites and thankfully we didn’t have any major issues on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. We had a few challenges in one of our distribution centers thanks to ICMPv6 traffic flooding the network. Overall I’d like to think that I had something to-do with that success, probably not at as much as I’d like to take credit for. I’ve got a great team working for me so I need to credit them as well. I had been at my previous employer for 17 years and had the network infrastructure pretty well greased and running without issues, I’ve come to the realization that it’s going to take me a lot longer than 12 months to get the network infrastructure where I’d like it to be with my new employer.

As I mentioned when I started this challenge that I thought there might only be a handful of decent posts.

There were a few posts that I wrote but after I thought about them for a while I decided not to post them. I now work for a publicly traded company so I need to be mindful of not inadvertently publishing something that isn’t public knowledge – such as sales figures. I also work for a global retailer that’s been the target of some very intricate hacking attempts so I need to be mindful of what I reveal about our security posture. I have some stories from consulting engagements that would make great posts, but again I need to be mindful of my clients privacy even if I don’t name them outright. Especially if they are repeat clients which most of mine are.

Here are my favorite posts from the past 30 days;

Cheers!

Image Credit: Ted C.

Note: This is a series of posts made under the Network Engineer in Retail 30 Days of Peak, this is post number 30 of 30. All the posts can be viewed from the 30in30 tag.

Vizio 39″ LED TV – Google Chromecast

by

It just happened that my 30″ Sony WEGA TV finally gave up the ghost this past week. That beast weighed at least 150 lbs, and I wasn’t looking forward to getting it out of the wall hutch I had built almost 10 years ago. I had to ask both my wife and 14 year for help getting it out of the hutch and out into the garage.

I had to make a quick purchase and I was limited by the dimensions that the wall hutch would allow, a width of 38 3/4″. I did some research and landed on the Vizio 39″ LED TV sold by Best Buy – yes, I still frequent Best Buy and enjoy having a brick and mortar store that I can run down to in a pinch and pickup an item. I decided to pickup a third Google Chromecast already having two others elsewhere in the house.

HDMI-CEC

Google-ChromecastWith Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) you can simultaneously turn on your TV and Chromecast and even change the TV to the correct HDMI input without ever touching your TV remote. I had to enable this feature in the Vizio TV, it was automatically enabled in my 40′ Samsung LED TV, but it makes using the Chromecast very user friendly. You just select the Chromecast on your smart phone, tablet or laptop and it turns on the TV, changes to the correct HDMI input and starts showing your content.

The Chromecast supports 2.4Ghz 802.11bg wireless networks although a 5Ghz version is rumored to be in the works. There’s a deployment guide from Cisco that details how the Chromecast works and what settings are needed in an enterprise wireless network. There’s a little known tidbit about which data rate Multicast traffic is transmitted at;

Multicast applications, such as Chromecast, require special consideration when being deployed over a wireless network because a multicast in 802.11 is sent out as a broadcast so that all clients can hear it. The actual data rate used by the AP in order to transmit the Chromecast frames is the highest mandatory rate configured within that band. For 2.4 GHz, the default rate is 11 Mbps.

In order to optimize the delivery of these frames, it is important to tune the 802.11 data rates within the controller to allow multicast to be delivered at the highest rate that the coverage model of the network can support. For networks with a low density of APs, it may be necessary to keep the data rates at the default. For a network that does not have any requirement to support 802.11b clients, tuning the data rate to 12 Mbps mandatory and lower rates disabled will help to reduce multicast airtime utilization.

I’ve run into similar issues in my enterprise wireless network with Apple TVs as opposed to Google Chomecast, but the same issues apply.

There’s a great article from How-To Geek that details how you can stream your browser tabs and even your entire desktop to the Chromecast. There’s also a dizzying array of applications that now support Chromecast.

Cheers!

Note: This is a series of posts made under the Network Engineer in Retail 30 Days of Peak, this is post number 28 of 30. All the posts can be viewed from the 30in30 tag.

Dear Internet – Family Fun

by

I asked my three daughters and the loving wife if they had anything they wanted to share on my blog. Any bits of interesting news or observations. I thought for sure they would write about Minecraft or Roboblox or something long those lines. Interestingly enough Margaret, my second oldest at the age of 10, volunteered the following piece.

img005

If I loosely translate I believe it reads as follows; “Dear Internet, I alway[s] wonder why my dad always comes home and says “My belly is in my backbone, what’s for dinner”. Plus ever time he comes up from his so called lair I mean has he even eaten lunch?”

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Margaret. I’m usually running during the morning and afternoon and sometimes dinner is my first meal of the day.

Cheers!

Note: This is a series of posts made under the Network Engineer in Retail 30 Days of Peak, this is post number 25 of 30. Special credit goes to Margaret for helping provide the content for this post! Although I’m not sure this one counts. All the posts can be viewed from the 30in30 tag.

Image Credit Cécile Graat

It’s the networks fault #17

by

Here’s a look at a few different articles and posts that caught me eye over the past week or two…

Articles

Banks: Park-n-Fly Online Card Breach by Brian Krebs – the retail breaches continue. I was amused by the quote Brian provided from Park-n-Fly, “…we just upgraded on 12/9 to the latest EV SSL certificate from Entrust, one of the leading certificate issuers in the industry.” As if the actual SSL certificate or certificate authority has ever been the culprit or issue behind any of the recent retail intrusions.

30 Blogs in 30 Days – Lessons Learned by John Herbert – I would definitely agree with most of John’s suggestions. The biggest challenge for me is finding interesting and relative topics to write about… unfortunately some of the more interesting topics aren’t really suitable to share publicly so that limits me somewhat. For example, load testing a production environment on Black Friday – that would make a great story but you won’t be hearing it from me. ;)

The End of Fixed Voice by Greg Ferro – I would agree that voice is slowly fading but it’s still very prevalent within businesses. I migrated from traditional voice to residential VoIP back in 2006, more than 8 years ago. I know a number of folks who have completely cut their home landlines in favor of their cell/mobile phone. Lync was a solution that along with SIP promised to do away with the traditional handsets in the business environment and it failed miserably in a number of high profile deployments. While I would agree that voice both TDM and IP are definitely shrinking we’ll have both TDM and IP voice solutions for sometime to come.

Wi-Fi Tools by Andrew von Nagy – lists a detailed assortment of tools that covers WiFi and beyond. This is an older post from Andrew which I recently stumbled over. I’m a big fan of AirMagnet Survey Pro and WildPackets OmniPeeek two tools that have helped unravel some interesting past mysteries.

Cheers!

Note: This is a series of posts made under the Network Engineer in Retail 30 Days of Peak, this is post number 23 of 30. All the posts can be viewed from the 30in30 tag.

Recent Posts

Categories

SUBSCRIBE BY EMAIL