Author Archives: sr71rocks

CiscoLive and a Leap Second

Greetings everyone…

Yes, I’ve been way too busy…sorry for the lack of posts. I am going to try and get back in the swing of things!!

First, a bit of fun news…I’ll be out of town next week, down in San Diego, attending CiscoLive 2015!! And even better, my wife is going with me! I bought her a Social Events Pass…this allows her to attend all of the Keynote speeches, the evening vendor meets, and the closing night concert with Aerosmith at Petco Park (the Padre’s stadium)!! We are both very excited!! I will try to post some notes next week from CiscoLive…if I can find the time.

Next…since we are talking about time….on Tuesday, June 30th, there is going to be a leap second event. (I’m not kidding folks…this is actually very cool stuff!!) Over time, the Earth is gradually slowing down…and to keep the “real” time sync’d with our perception of time (sundown, etc.) they have to add a second to the day. The last time this happened was back in 2012. Is this something you need to worry about? Probably not, but you should be aware of it, and keep an eye on things that might be acting strange (frozen, pegged CPU, etc). Here is Cisco’s take on this years leap second.

Details:  The leap second is going to occur at 23:59:59 UTC on June 30th, 2015. In other words, one second before midnight UTC time. For me, here on the west coast with daylight savings time, it will be 4:59:59 PM in the afternoon (PDT). That final minute will actually last 61 seconds. This will be orchestrated by all of the NTP servers on the Internet…so if all of your network equipment is time sync’d to NTP servers, you should be fine. If you equipment is not time sync’d, well…I guess you don’t really care about all of this anyway. (And you are not being a good network engineer either…get your network time sync’d!!)

Linux and UNIX systems should handle this well…NTP will announce to any system running true NTP that a leap second will occur (there is a leap second flag that gets set). Windows systems do not know how to handle the NTP announcement, so they will just end up a second off. However, within 20 minutes they will be re-sync’d properly. What to watch for? Anything acting strange that relies on exact time…applications that use GPS would be key to watch.

So…you have been warned. Hopefully the addition of a leap second will not trigger Armageddon.

The SR-72 — This is SO Cool…

My favorite plane is the Lockheed SR-71…the fastest air-breathing plane ever developed. It could travel above Mach 3+ (2,200+ MPH), and at an altitude of 80,000 feet. During high school and early college, I lived near Plant 42 (in Palmdale, California), where Lockheed had a maintenance facility for the SR-71. Seeing the SR-71 in flight was a common occurrence, and one I will never forget. Sometimes I would sit near the end of the runway, and watch/listen to it thunder overhead while it did touch & goes. Life did not get any better than that. The SR-71 was fully retired in 1998.

SR-71 in flight (USAF - public domain)

SR-71 in flight (USAF – public domain)

Now there is news of a new “spy” plane which is in development by Lockheed Martin and Areojet Rocketdyne…the SR-72. Take a look at an article published by Popular Science in their June 2015 issue…in it they report on the SR-72 and related details, which may or may not be accurate. But who cares at this time…I just can’t wait to see it!!

CiscoPress – eBook Deals, a Good Value

I love to keep up on the latest technologies and I love to read, which tends to be a good combination. I also like a good deal, so every Monday morning I check the CiscoPress website and see what the current eBook special is. You can get an eBook version of a Cisco book at a very good price, typically 50% off. Of course, if you are not interested in the weekly deal, then just pass on it…it changes every week. I’ve bought a number of eBooks over the last year or two…books on Data Center technologies, IPv6, Cisco Unity and the updated CCIE Routing (v2)…all at a great price.  I then upload them on my iPad. Look on the right side of the page, about a third of the way down…

CiscoPress eBook Deal of the Week

CiscoPress eBook Deal of the Week

There is also a Video deal of the week, if you are into that…I’m not.

A Shocking, Amazing and Jaw-Dropping Post Today

There are days when I just can’t stand to see the state of the Internet. And today is one of those days….ugh!! It used to be that the Internet was a resource for one and all…a place to get and give information, to lend a helping hand, and to provide encouragement where needed. Sure, you can still do that, but now you have to navigate through a quagmire of commercialism. Everybody wants you to click on their links, earn a few pennies more…”Such a Wonderful Story, but What She Did Next Just Shocked Me!!”. Give me a break for crying out loud!!

Just look at Facebook as an example…I’m on it so that I can stay in touch with my kids. But the tons of junk you have to put up with is incredible. I’m at the point of why bother…it’s just not worth it.

But, my kids use it, and I love seeing their posts. After college, they ended up halfway across the country. (Note…don’t let your kids transfer to far-off colleges…they may never return!!). Guess I’ll keep using Facebook…at least for another day. Or two.

Access Layer – New Switches and Cleanup…Finally!!

In our corporate office, we have a rather large IDF feeding multiple floors. It’s not my ideal setup, but it was here long before I got here, and it’s grown over the years. And it’s become a bit of a mess…a thorn in my side and something I’ve long wanted to clean up…but just never made the time. Well now we have made the time, due mainly to the end-of-life of the existing (8) 3560 switches (three switches in the rack 1, three in rack 2 and two in rack 4). Here is the ugly “before”…

Such an embarrassing mess...

Such an embarrassing mess…

We stayed late Friday evening and ripped everything out…and I mean everything. We installed 8 new Cisco 2960-X switches, all stacked as a single switch. Nice!! We also installed additional vertical and horizontal cable managers, and had all new CAT 6 patch cables in various lengths to reduce clutter. What a difference it makes…

Ahhh...much better!

Ahhh…much better!

We started the project right at 5:30 PM, Friday evening, which works well as employees wanted to get home! And we finished at 1 AM. Not bad at all. For verification, we walked almost the entire building, checking that everyone’s Cisco phones were booted up and properly registered. One of us will be at work early Monday morning just in case we missed anything.

Having a clean and organized cabling infrastructure pays off big in terms of easier maintenance and troubleshooting. Trust me!

Royal Canadian Snowbirds TankCam Video – Awesome

One of my many hobbies is flying…in fact, I used to be a flight instructor many years ago. I still love aviation, although I have not flown in about 9 years. Take a look at this video if you have a bit of time…it’s of the Royal Canadian Snowbirds aerial demonstration team (and they are very good). They mounted a camera underneath the lead plane, and the results are incredible…

Novell NetWare – Another Blast From the Past

Yes, I’m still cleaning up my LAB (and office). In addition to the Bay Networks surprise “find” which I posted about yesterday, I found this today…

Novell GroupWise Installation Disks

Novell GroupWise Installation Disks

Ahhhh…Novell…my first love (with apologies to my wife Debbie). My very first job was as a NetWare Administrator, managing NetWare 3.12 servers and the related network devices (UB Networks hubs and Bay Networks routers). What a powerful and solid combination of hardware and software. You may have heard stories of NetWare servers with an uptime of years…yes, those stories are true, I can attest to it. Windows NT servers had uptimes of perhaps a week or two…and I can attest to that too. NetWare was light years ahead of Microsoft. In fact, I am not exaggerating when I say that Novell (and NetWare) ENABLED the PC revolution. PC’s and businesses had a central storage to share files and manage printing and backups, and GroupWise gave the users email and calendaring functionality.  And all of this was decades ago!!

So, why is Windows Server everywhere and Novell is history? One word…marketing. Novell marketed their products to us geeks…the people that operated the servers and networks. Microsoft marketed to the suits…the managers and VP’s of IT. So…of those two groups, who controlled the budgets? Yup…it was not us geeks, that’s for sure. Of course, it didn’t help that Novell couldn’t market their way out of a paper bag. But that’s another story.

Summary:  Novell rocked. Their products rocked. Their support rocked. Their people rocked.

And I proudly say that I used to be a Novell CNE.

ComputerWorld – Reminder of How Weak Email Really Is

ComputerWorld just posted a great article today on how weak email really is in terms of securing sensitive information, yet so many corporations and users still use it for critical communications. Just ask Sony. Be warned. Check out the article here…

Sony reminds us all what a pathetically weak link email is

On a side note…if you don’t regularly check out ComputerWorld’s website you should. They do a great job of reporting on the IT industry and all it’s various nooks and cranny’s. Plus they publish a monthly magazine in PDF format, which I download on my iPad and read at my leisure. Staying up to date on the IT industry is an important part of a successful IT career, and ComputerWorld will help with that.

Bay Networks – It’s Been A Long Time

I stayed home today, working on my LAB and cleaning up a lot of junk. I came across this…

My attendance "cert" for the Advanced IP class

My attendance “cert” for the Advanced IP class

Wow…this was a long time ago, and I still remember the class and the instructor (great instructors will do that…thank you Johan Van Besouw). This was back when Bay Networks was relatively young…it was a merger between Wellfleet Communications (routers) and SynOptics Communications (Ethernet products). They had some great stuff, and their hardware just worked. Over those early years of my career, I installed many Bay routers and hubs, and some of their early switches. I do remember that router configuration was a bit problematic at times due to their Site Manager software, which we fondly referred to as  “Site Mangler”.

At the time I was working for a non-profit company in the San Francisco Bay area, and one of our projects was bringing the Internet into schools all over the Silicon Valley. I spent months installing T1 circuits at various schools, and upgrading their networks (if they even had one) with new Bay equipment. I remember many school principles would just look at me, and ask “So now what?”, after I got the Internet working….too funny, they just didn’t know what to do with it.

In the late 90’s, Bay Networks was purchased by Nortel. Around that time, I was at another company, and was looking at what direction to go for my network hardware needs….Bay or Cisco? I could not get a call back from Nortel…none of my old contacts were around, and the new reps were either too swamped or too clueless. It was an easy decision. About three months later, after my Cisco upgrades were almost completed, I finally got a callback from Nortel. It was a very short phone call.

And that, my friends, is why most of you have never heard of Bay Networks. And that is unfortunate.