Chainring Circus

I have been putting off this post because I didn’t really know what to say. So much has changed in the last six months I didn’t know how best to communicate what was going on in my life. Please understand that I am leaving out quite a bit of this story but I believe it needs to be told so that others will understand when they stumble across my blog.

Let’s start with some background. I have been working for the same employer for the last 8 years. It is a regional medical center and a great place to work. Before Fortune magazine stopped allowing non-profits to be on the “100 Best Places to Work” my employer made the list twice.

I started working at the hospital as a Programmer Analyst in early 2003 writing code that allowed hospital systems to communicate and was also the UNIX/Linux administrator. During this time I managed DNS/DHCP, most of the printing and portions of our email infrastructure on *NIX while also writing mostly TCL and Perl code.

When a Senior Network Engineer slot opened I applied and was promoted in early 2006. I earned my CCNA and began to learn quite a bit about networking. Shortly thereafter I decided I was ready to leave the hospital in order to learn more, but my wife loves working here, knows and trusts many of the doctors and made me promise that we would have our children at this hospital.

As a result of that promise to my wife I decided to work on my CCNP and started this blog, figuring both would help me get my next job. During that time I was selected for “50 for the Future” a two year management training program at the hospital and I finished my CCNP. I also became dedicated to my craft. As I learned more and more about networking, I began to understand how much I did not know and it became a joy to learn something new everyday. Not all of the lessons were fun at the time but I was learning so much I loved coming to work.

The next logical step was starting on my CCIE. It sounded like a great challenge and with a family now depending upon me, it was the next logical step for job security. It surely would allow me to get my next job and my promise to my wife was still not fulfilled. We had suffered through two miscarriages to get our first child, and our second child was born in April 2011.

With the birth of our second child my promise to my wife had been fulfilled and I was ready to leave. Literally the day after my second child was born I started applying for jobs. I was offered an interesting position in South Carolina working with a team that fit my goals. Some had their CCIEs and others were working toward their digits. I would fit right in and I knew it was the place for me, so I turned in my resignation. The wrinkle being that the hospital requests a 30 day notice for professional employees.

I had already spoken with my Director about leaving and he was gracious. I had spent $5,000 on my CCIE lab and the hospital had spent another $5,000, but my boss gave me the whole rack. Everything. I cannot describe how much that meant to me, I am truly grateful.

That day my Vice President asked me what it would take for me to stay and I told him I was chasing a dream. While I appreciated the offer and I knew the hospital was a great place to work, it was a goal I had set for myself and I felt I should leave in order to get the experience I needed.

Two weeks later I had both my AVP and VP stop by my desk within ten minutes of each other. My last day was drawing near and they wanted to discuss what it would take for me to stay. I declined a second time. I had made the decision to try to earn my CCIE and I did not want to let my family down. I believed that South Carolina offered me the best chance to achieve my goal.

My last day at the hospital came and went, but it was a tumultuous day. My AVP literally gave me a hug as I walked out the door for the last time and I cried in her arms.

I had a week off between jobs and I had lunch with friends to say goodbye, finished setting up the lab at home and packed. I made arrangements for long term housing in South Carolina and prepared to leave my family while we tried to sell our home.

Thursday evening of my week off I got a call on my cell phone. It was my VP and AVP calling to chat. The first question they asked was whether I was still in town or had I already left for South Carolina. Then they asked me to stay one last time. They had met with our CEO and Executive Vice President and wanted me to stay. I was floored. I had worked for nearly three years getting ready to leave. I had started down a road and I didn’t want to change direction.

But I did. My wife told me that I will never again be offered the chance to work at a company which knows neither what my job title will be nor what I will be doing, just that they want me to work for them. She was probably right.

I was offered the chance to make a difference working for a company that has been good to me and my family. It is a different challenge than what I had been working toward but an interesting one all the same. I am slowly settling into my new job as Technical Services Manager. Some of the changes I have made are for the better, some of the changes have not lasted and others have yet to be implemented, but I am still learning every day.

And so my goals are slowly evolving. It is hard to give up a goal that I have sacrificed so much to earn, without completing it. In the short term I will begin working toward my CCIP in the new year. Currently I do not have the time to complete the CCIE but I believe working toward my CCIP will keep my mind in networking and it will cover topics that I believe are needed if I decide to again try for my CCIE.

Thank you for reading. I plan to post more regularly in the coming year.

At the Circus we have a network management server that runs all of the normal services needed to manage a small network and so I rarely need to fire up the tftp server on my laptop. Today was one of those days I needed a quick tftp server and I spent too much time figuring it out. This is my attempt to remedy that shortcoming.

What is ironic is that after I googled around I found that I had “self documented” in the /private/tftpboot directory, unfortunately I expected the tftp directory for the tftp server to be in /tftpboot. I realize I can just put a symlink from /tftpboot to /private/tfpboot but I learned when working on AIX it is better to understand the file system layout of a UNIX vendor than it is to make it like another OS. It will bite you eventually.

Here is a listing of the /private/tftboot directory, you will notice the very last file is tftp.txt. That is where I told myself how to do this in the past. It also appears most of the IOS images were for the testlab.

This is what I had listed in the tftp.txt file. It tells how to start and stop a service in Mac OSX using launchctl.

For thoroughness I am including the tftp.plist file below. If I wanted the tftp daemon to start every time I turned on my laptop I would change Disabled to EnableTransactions.

I just finished reading an article in the Atlantic concerning military personnel and recruitment titled “Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving.” As a veteran and former officer who enjoyed my time in service I felt the urge to comment publicly.

My stint in the Air Force was the formative years of my professional development. The military formed many of the core beliefs I have today. My view on documentation and succession are much different than my most of my private sector peers. One maxim that my wife and I do not see eye to eye on, “Early is on time, on time is late, late you have a problem.” Another saying that was often repeated was, “Do your current job well and your next job will take care of itself.”

Today my hair is just as short as when I was in, if not shorter and my shoes are still spit shined. Only my uniform has changed; from blues or BDUs to khakis and polos or slacks and dress shirts.

But what I really wanted to comment on was my career development. My first encounter with the Air Force Personnel Center (AFPC) was even before I went active duty. When we got our assignments as college seniors mine was to Offutt AFB, Nebraska. As a cyclist I was not pleased to be heading to a station with a 2 month summer, with fall and spring similarly abbreviated. My commanding officer at the detachment asked me if I wanted him to make a call to AFPC on my behalf and see if I get a more amenable station. I declined stating that I didn’t want to start my time in the Air Force fighting the system.

I worked hard at Offutt. Not as many hours as I do now, but I learned a great deal. The one big project I handled was the leg work, research and negotiation to settle a $1M lawsuit against the base. Our Colonel had given three of us the project and I was the one that finished the job. The other two lieutenants just didn’t find it interesting.

An aside. I was also given the task to get a squadron t-shirt designed and approved, but I just couldn’t find the time. Someone else finally did it. Now I believe it would have been a good experience because you had to work through all the red tape, but I just didn’t find that appealing.

When it came time for me to change duty stations my commanding officer called me into his office and told me he had made some phone calls and found me a position at the Air Force Logistics Management Agency (AFLMA).

I don’t believe what I did at the AFLMA was outstanding, I ran a website for the Air Force the last couple of years I was in. The website had pretty high visibility and I gave presentations to nearly every full bird Colonel and met privately with every General in my career field. I traveled extensively during this time and gave presentations like I was a salesman.

Another aside. I got married on Saturday and left for Washington, DC Sunday to give a presentation Monday morning at the Pentagon.

When I declared my intention to leave the Air Force the AFPC representative for my career field took me to lunch. He offered to station me anywhere in the world. When I told him my wife was English/South African and we were considering moving to England he offered to double billet me in England. Next he offered me a nice opening in New Zealand where I would be in charge of my own office. I declined them both and ended up in graduate school.

I just figured every Lieutenant and Captain had the same experience I did. You work hard, show initiative and let your mentors steer you through the maze of jobs and promotions. Imagine my surprise when I found that is not the case in the private sector.

A friend of mine has a saying:
“Some companies are so big they stay in business despite themselves.”

My wife and I have the original iPhone and we are thinking about upgrading. I don’t really care anymore if we get another iPhone and won’t get into the details. But what I really like is that if you had an original unlimited data plan and get an iPhone 4, you can keep the unlimited data plan, no tiers. That is important to me long term.

So before I began studying this afternoon I went to the AT&T store to inquire about a microcell. These little guys are basically a cell phone to VOIP router and are advertised as a mini cell phone tower for your home.

Stated another way, AT&T has such poor coverage in our area that we are willing to pay for what is essentially a small cell phone tower for our home in order to use our cell phones at home without having to walk to the second floor. That’s fine, I don’t mind providing back haul service for my own phone calls or a few of my neighbors, but AT&T wants to charge me for the service.

$20. Every. Single. Month.

You read that right. AT&T offers such poor service in my area that I was willing to pay for a microcell for my home, but they want to charge me $20/month or every minute you talk on your cell phone using the microcell is charged to your account, no nights and weekends, no free minutes within AT&T nothing is free.

Looks like we’re moving to Verizon. The iPhone is no longer that much better than the competition to compensate for the poor coverage AT&T provides.

I came across GNS3Vault by accident and thought I would pass it along. I’ve been doing these labs for fun at lunch or in the afternoon on a slow day and have been enjoying them. I’ve learned some new commands and have been turning up the debug output to see how everything interacts. It’s nice because there aren’t many routers involved so you can usually isolate the communication of whatever process you are configuring.

The only complaint I have for some of the labs is that there is so much of what I consider pre-configuration. I don’t want to have to play with adding IP addresses to interfaces. If you’re going to make me, at least give me some random subnet masks to make it interesting.

My hat is off to Rene for such a great resource.

In short, I returned my e-book to Narbik. I would recommend Micronicstraining to anyone. In fact I am now even more likely to go to Narbik’s class then I was before this incident.

The long version.
Later that day I called Micronicstraining to discuss my misgivings with them and actually spoke with Narbik. He was very helpful and understood my concerns saying that there would be no problem giving me licenses for more than one computer. With that I got off the phone placated to some extent. I tried to install LockLizard onto Wine and figured I would just deal with the inconvenience. But the installation onto Wine failed and I did not install LockLizard on Windows nor did I try to open the e-book. I didn’t even unrar the files.

That night I tossed and turned, woke up in the middle of the night and pondered my predicament. I figured I had nothing to loose by asking for my money back. That next morning I sent an email to Narbik explaining my dilemma. It is below.

Sir,

Regretfully I am writing to you to request a refund. I have not
activated my LockLizard license and am requesting that you have it
deactivated.

I would like to thank you for taking the time with me on the phone
yesterday. I had fewer misgivings concerning the number of computers
I would be allowed to study on after our conversation, however, I have
developed a study routine over the past 18 months and shoehorning
Windows into that process would not be beneficial at this time. I do
realize the lab PC runs Windows but I had already decided the last few
months of lab practice would be done in a Windows environment, not the
core of my studies.

I am truly disappointed. I downloaded the free workbook and have done
a number of labs from it. Because of that previous experience with
Micronics I did not expect the type of copy protection used in the
workbook as there is no mention of LockLizard on the Micronics
website. Over the past few months I have frequently visited the table
of contents for your workbook to map out my studies. My work
environment is based upon Linux, I do not have a Windows PC at home,
and I would be forced to change my study process in order to use the
workbook.

If you decide to change your copy protection to something more along
the lines of O’Reilly Media or Internetwork Expert please contact me,
I will be the first to purchase your workbook in a more portable
format. If you need to speak with me directly, my office phone number
is (xxx) xxx-xxxx and my cell phone number is (xxx) xxx-xxxx.

Sincerely,

Jud Bishop

Yesterday I ordered the Advanced CCIE Routing & Switching 2.0 Work Book from Narbik and figured I would share my experience.

If you have read my post on the TSHOOT book you have an understanding of my disdain for DRM and the reasons for it. It boils down to the fact that I use Linux as my primary environment at work and home, we don’t even have a Windows PC at home, and most of the DRM out there requires Windows. So then I have to load whatever I need on my work laptop, but if I am studying at home I have to make sure I bring my laptop home.

Imagine my disappointment when I got the following email from Micronics after I spent $350 on an e-book. I could not find anything on the Micronics website that says the DRM is this draconian.

If you follow the link inside the quote, it says you must use either Windows or a Mac. I am going to say this again, get SafariBooksOnline, O’Reilly is a company that understands technical people and caters to them. I am sure that Narbik is a great teacher and I hope these books are as good as they say, otherwise I will know I got ripped off.

Dear Student,

You will receive three separate emails.
1. Locklizard License
2. Vol. I & II
3. Vol. III

Since you will have only one license, choose a PC or Laptop that your Secured File will reside.

Please follow these procedures before you open the attached file:
1. First you need to open, Download and Install Lizard Safeguard Secure PDF Viewer Email (sometimes this email is considered a SPAM and if you have Gmail it goes to “7 or More” section of your Gmail).

2. Once you completed this step, you need to scroll down the page and double click on the .llv file and download.

3. After installing your PDF Viewer, open the Secured PDF Files that you have received as an attachment.

You can check the operating systems requirement on the following link:

http://www.locklizard.com/LockLizard_Secure_PDF_Viewer_v25.pdf

If you have difficulty opening your files you contact me as soon as possible so we can walk you through this process.

Thank you for your business – we appreciate it very much.

Janet Kocharians
Director of Marketing & Sales
Micronics Inc.
Mobile: (818) 331-2419
Fax: (818) 249-8388

Last week we had in a consultant from one of our electronic medical record (EMR) vendors and we were working on a RedHat cluster. He was asking me to check whether a service started at a runlevel and wanted me to ls /etc/rc.d/rc5.d, I looked at him and said, “There’s a command for that.” (The command is chkconfig.) I’ve been chuckling about it for the past few days.

The Linux and BSD foundations need to get together and start an advertising campaign, it would be a great parody.

Today I read about Vino’s unpopular win at L-B-L. That is fine, we can all sit and wonder why or how, but there was no outrage about Valverde getting third. Valverde could not compete in the 2009 TdF because it went through Italy and the Italians had proved he doped through a genetic match in the Puerto Affair. Now the UCI is trying get a worldwide ban on Valverde racing but no one cares.

On the same front page where they are excoriating the win by Vino they also state that Valverde’s Italian ban has been confirmed by Swiss courts. Why is Valverde still racing? Where is the outrage? Why are fans not complaining that Valverde was caught doping, has been trying to get off on a technicality, and is still racing?

Boggles the mind. Whether or not Vino is contrite has nothing to do with him paying the price. He was suspended for two years, did his time and is back racing. Valverde should not be racing at all.

Tailwinds.

I wish I knew who to attribute the quotes who have no attribution. If you know the author, please contact me. These are not my own. I will update this occasionally.

Associates do a task until they get it right, experts do a task until they can not do it wrong.
— Relevant to CCNA vs. CCIE.

I’m confronted by my own ignorance or misunderstandings all the time.
— Anthony Bourdain

The worst elements in a group reflect on everyone who chooses to associate with them.
— mtbr.com

In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
— Bertrand Russell, this is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence.
— Common saying

We are what we repeatedly do, therefore excellence is not by chance but a habit.
— I have this on my desk at work. Why settle for being mediocre.

When your IQ is higher than your body weight, you can’t always find what you need at the family bookstore.
— Chris MacAskill, SmugMug.com

The patent system should not be a roulette wheel.
— Richard Silver

If it ain’t broke, you’re not trying hard enough.
— Google Test Blog

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
— Albert Einstein

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.
— Howard Aiken

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.
— Albert Einstein

Open source asks “How can I fix this.” Closed source asks, “How can you fix this for me.”
— Richard Silver

Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.
— Albert Einstein

Profit is accounting opinion, but cash is fact.
— Chris MacAskill, SmugMug.com