Just over seven years ago I started consulting on the side in addition to my full-time employment, While I’ve always enjoyed working for my primary employer, I’ve found consulting to be an exciting diversion from the everyday grind not to mention the few extra dollars that I can put towards my daughters’ college funds.

I got started in an all too familiar way… a reseller reached out to me via this blog and asked for assistance on a configuration problem. The solution was so simple that I didn’t even bother to charge the person – it would have taken me longer to draft up an invoice than it took to solve the problem. Eventually other resellers and end-users reached out to me and I ended up developing a great business relationship with a number of them which continues today. At one point I was making almost a quarter of my regular yearly salary from consulting, a number which sadly was over 50% of the average median income in the United States in 2012. And while I was putting in quite a few long nights and weekends I wasn’t working that hard… I was working smarter using my experience and skill-sets to help other users and resellers that couldn’t afford the time to figure it out for themselves.

In 2012 I decided to make things official and registered the fictitious name of KJMJ Consulting with the great state of Pennsylvania and spun up a website, purchased a PO box, a Skype phone number and had a logo designed by a friend. At the time I decided the easiest path was to run my consulting business was as a sole proprietorship. This limited the paperwork although it did bring it’s own challenges and tax implications.

When consulting I spend the majority of my time designing and implementing network infrastructures including storage and virtualization using equipment and solutions from companies like Avaya, Cisco, EMC, HPE, Juniper and VMware. On occasion I’m asked to step into an existing problem and help right the ship. If the consulting project (implementation or migration) is large or complex I’ll often bring in a additional resources to help me, fellow professionals that like myself already have full-time jobs but are experts in their fields.  I’ve successfully completed a number of migrations over a weekend that larger full-time consulting companies had wanted to-do over a multi-week time frame with considerably larger costs. In a few cases I’ve referred potential clients to friends/professionals in their local country, most of these have been in the EU.

In the past year or two there’s definitely been a shift in what clients are asking for, more jobs involving Microsoft Office 365 migrations, Active Directory migrations/upgrade and more jobs involving the cloud, namely Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. I have yet to-do much with Google Cloud Compute but I suspect it’s only a matter for time before I end up working in that platform as well. Jumping into Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure did require some additional learning and research so I could get myself up to speed on the capabilities of each platform and what’s available in each. I’ve already had two sizable deployments in each environment which were very successful so that was pretty exciting. It’s always exciting working with new technology and seeing it actually work as intended.

There’s a balance to be struck between my responsibilities to my employer and my personal time spent consulting. All my consulting clients know that I have a full-time job and understand that I’m not available in the traditional 9 – 5, Monday – Friday model. That’s usually not a problem because of two observations, 1) they tell me that I get the job done in a fraction of the time needed by larger more established consulting firms – which results in my services being hugely cost competitive and 2) the work I do is reliable and solid. I make sure that all my consulting happens on my personal time and doesn’t interfere or conflict with my full-time job. On one or two occasions I’ve had to cancel and reschedule a consulting engagement because of an off-hours support issue that required my attention from my primary employer. It’s rare but it definitely happens and all of my clients don’t have an issue with that trade-off.

I was so successful in my part-time consulting that I had to turn away clients and occasionally toyed with the idea of quitting my full-time job and going out on my own as a full-time independent consultant. I ultimately decided it was best to wait until I had put all three of my daughters through college before contemplating that potential reality any further.

Have you considered doing some IT consulting?

Cheers!

I learned a long long time ago that you need to test the test plan. All too often I’ve found items listed in the test plan never worked even before the change, and many hours were wasted trying to fix something that never worked in the beginning and had nothing to-do with the change that was in progress.

I had mentioned this fact to this specific client but I guess my warning fell on deaf ears. The client was unable to reach site Z via their VPN. I checked all the routing and ACLs and everything looked good. I asked the client if this had worked before today and the client was adamant that it had worked before this change. It was time for truth or dare. I launched a Windows 7 VM and fired up Cisco AnyConnect so I could observe the problem first hand. I quickly noticed that my Windows VM didn’t have a route for the remote network in question, the IP network for site Z wasn’t in the split tunnel list. I hadn’t changed anything regarding the VPN AnyConnect configuration so in short it had never worked. I added the IP network to the split tunnel list and asked the client to disconnect and reconnect and bingo it was now working.

Please do yourself a favor and make life easier on yourself. Why don’t you run through that test plan before do anything and make sure that everything works as expected before you make any changes. It will save you time and money. I’m happy to take on the challenge of unraveling the mystery but my time isn’t cheap.

Cheers!
Image Credit: Flaviu Lupoian

I thought I would share my default Wireshark setup I use when examining packet traces. In addition to the defaults I like having the Time (since capture start), the DateTime, (absolute time is useful when correlating against other packet traces and log files), DeltaX (time between displayed packets), Seq, Ack, and Bytes in flight.

I have a color rule which highlights the frames in yellow if the frame.time_delta_diplayed is greater than 3 seconds (frame.time_delta_displayed > 3). It helps me to quickly focus on long pauses in communication between two or more devices. While working on this problem I also happened to stumble upon a bug in Wireshark 2.0 that affects the delta time displayed. I discovered bug 11786 was already documented in the Wireshark bug database.

Stumbled onto a known Wireshark 2.0 bug with delta displayed time not showing up properly. https://t.co/RrchR8WBGV

— Michael McNamara (@mfMcNamara) December 23, 2015

If you’re not familiar with how to read packet traces I would suggest you check out Kary Rogers Packet Bomb website. Karry has a number of useful videos covering how to read and interpret a packet trace, along with a few tips on leveraging tools like Wireshark. In the screenshot above I used Jasper Bongertz’s tool TraceWrangler to sanitize the IP addresses from the packet trace before post a screenshot.

Cheers!

Update: The delta time issue has been fixed in Wireshark 2.0.1

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;

I 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