First, if you missed my public apology to Fluke Networks, you should read it. Besides giving some backstory to this post, it’s not very often you will see me eat my words. Wait, nah, that’s not true, I do it all the time.

A quick synopsis. In an event hosted by Fluke, I asked the question “When are you going to release a Mac client?” The response I received struck a nerve, and while I do not remember exactly what was said, it was something like “Why would we ever do that?”

So, this post will lay out the many problems I have with the current version of Fluke Networks solutions for the wireless industry.

The expense – AirMagnet Survey, Spectrum XT, and WiFi Analyzer are expensive products! I realize that they are complicated to build and maintain, but the cost is exceptionally high.

I have spent plenty of money on professional level tools without complaint, and yet every time I spend money on “Yellow and Blue” I can expect to be yelled at by my finance person and bruised by the purchase process.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that many organizations simply won’t spend the money. I spent four years working for a major global manufacturer with hundreds of sites, and many thousands of AP’s and I could not get them to purchase AirMagnet. In my current role, there is still no budget for the software. That means I end up spending my own money for software. I could get over this, except:

The software is OLD! AirMagnet Survey Pro is especially old code. It is clear in so many ways that the software hasn’t been refactored in many many years. I made a harsh comment at WLPC regarding the “Walking Man” animation when performing  surveys, but the comment stands. The little walking man is wasting CPU cycles on a laptop that is running on battery, and doesn’t even perform it’s primary function. I need a set of crosshairs to indicate where I stop, nothing more.

Spending money on AirMagnet feels like I am spending money on software that will be discontinued momentarily by a company that no longer cares about it.

Most importantly, AirMagnet only supports Microsoft Windows. I won’t rant about how much I despise, abhor, and generally hate Windows, really I won’t. A quick survey of their users would show Fluke that a surprisingly high number of users are Mac’s. We use Mac’s for many reasons and most of us only ever boot Windows to use AirMagnet products. Many have tried to use VM’s, and most have found issues with the USB sharing which makes it difficult to do our jobs. Even if we are able to make a VM work, we are now eating through our batteries much faster than we should be. If we are surveying a large facility, we are wasting our time, and our customers money waiting on devices to charge.

Based on conversations with Fluke during their session and after, I was given the impression (not told, simply given the impression) that Fluke is looking at an OptiView-like device as a future AirMagnet tool. I understand their thoughts. Control both the hardware and software, and you have fine grain control to make the most of the solution. I can only hope that Fluke Networks hears and understood from the feedback they received at WLPC that we want a single device for ALL of our work. We have that device, our laptop. We do not need a uni-tasker to drag through the airports and risk losing, stealing or breakage. The other concern with this solution is the OptiView is INSANELY expensive.

Fluke Networks repeatedly asked “What would you like to see?” to the audience. I’ve also spent some time thinking about that question. Here is what I hope could resolve many of the issues that are occurring on both Windows and potentially Mac and Linux clients.

Build the intelligence into a Docker App. That’s right, I’ll say it again. Build the intelligence to run on Docker. Immediately, you can now move the app to Windows, OS X, and Linux.

The most important code base can now be ran in a custom environment, easily reproduced on any piece of hardware thrown at it. Wait, you might say. Then I would have to install Docker on my laptop. How is that better than a VM?

I’ll answer that question in two ways. First, look at all of the redistributable apps that get installed along with AirMagnet. Imagine all of that going away. Just imagine…

Next, the resource utilization for Docker should be less than 1/4 of the utilization for a VM. Plus, there is no underlying windows OS to babysit. No updates to validate and install. No weird driver issues. No licensing issues do to a minor change in the VM.

Once the important code is running in Docker, build a GUI for each client that includes the hooks for the hardware (Spectrum Analyzers, USB NIC, etc.) and presents them to the Docker app in a standard consistent way. The GUI would include all of the OS customization, visuals, hardware hooks, but none of the intelligence.

I think I am most disappointed that Fluke Networks became comfortable as the market leader and chose not to push forward with new ideas. I have a ton of respect for the company and I own a lot of yellow and blue tools. Now that they have a serious market contender in Ekahau, I hope they take a serious look at their current situation, and choose to focus on the customer, rather than attempt to force the market to their will.

In May, I made my way to San Francisco for CLUS 2014. I had very fond memories from last year, and was looking forward to catching up with all of the great people that I met in Orlando.

This year was a little different for me. I purchased a full pass, paid for airfare, and my hotel all out of my own pocket. The ultimate question this year was going to be answered. How much is CLUS worth? Is the experience equally important when thousands of dollars come out of my pocket to experience it.

First, the most obvious difference this year was how crowded the experience was. Moscone was simply not big enough for 26,000 people. I recognized on day one, as I was looking for a place to sit for breakfast, that when San Francisco was chosen 5 years ago, the conference was much smaller. Conferences book their locations years in advance, and in this case the attendee base grew faster then they expected.

The large crowds definitely affected the experience. The World of Solutions reception on Monday was so crowded that I spent only 15 minutes there, and the majority of that time was trying to get back out. The crowds also affected the on-site meals. Lunch each day consisted of a boxed meal, breakfast was carb heavy, and the days that I went into the dining hall, it was extremely crowded.

On Thursday, I had an opportunity to talk with Kathleen Mudge, who manages the Social Media Team, and Kathy Doyle, the Director of Cisco Live, about the scale of the conference. Kathy mentioned that there were over 6,000 people who registered for Cisco Live at the conference. That is an incredible 23% of the attendees that could not be accounted for until the first day.

With that in mind, I can’t fault the conference. In-fact, I am surprised that the conference was able to absorb that many people and function at all. That is an amazing feat.

The next few years are in bigger venues, so I expect the conference won’t experience these growing pains again.

The sessions that I attended were all excellent, and allowed me to expand my knowledge in a few key areas that I had identified as needing more work. I didn’t attend as many sessions as I had planned, but that was simply a matter of not having enough time.

As for the social side of CLUS, it was everything I was hoping for. I was able to reconnect with friends made at CLUS 2013, and made many more. The Social Media Hub (which we quickly renamed the Social Media Routed Bridge) was in a great location. Power was easily available for recharging devices. The arrival Tweetup was well attended, and we were able to gather on Thursday for the final picture by the Cisco Live sign.

The Cisco Live Social Media Team at CLUS is always on top of the game. They work incredibly hard to help anyone who ask. They also keep things interesting with various games and prizes. I can’t say enough about the team, and how their work affects the positive experiences of so many attendees.

The parties and the Customer Appreciation Event were all excellent. I was able to participate in three Tech Field Day events, attended the CCIE party again as a non-CCIE, and participated in multiple Cisco Champion events. They were all opportunities to meet more people, and hang out with this huge group of engineers that I get to call friends.

Now for the question. Was attending CLUS on my own dime worth it? If my Cisco Live 2014 experience only included the standard CLUS sessions, the Customer Appreciation Event, and the World of Solutions, I would have to say “no”.

However, Cisco Live is much more than sessions, expo, and parties to attend. Cisco Live is a gathering of people who are passionate about technology and life. Cisco live is space camp, or as Denise Fishburne has begun calling it, simply “Summer Camp”.

Was Cisco Live worth it? Oh yeah. I’ll be back.

While I was at Cisco Live, I was invited to sit in on a Tech Field Day event with OpenGear. This was my first Tech Field Day, and hopefully not my last. You can see the full video here: http://techfieldday.com/event/clus13/

Additionally, you can see a great blog post, written by Bob McCouch,
about the event here:
http://herdingpackets.net/2013/07/13/openly-passionate/

and Blake Krone’s take on the event here:
http://blakekrone.com/2013/07/09/one-console-to-rule-them-all

In short, OpenGear did a awesome job presenting a new product, the IM7200. They asked us about use cases, answered all of our questions, and impressed quite a few of us in the room.

After the event, I ended up speaking with their team about a couple of ideas that I had for their product. Based on that conversation, they were nice enough to make a unit available for testing. I received it a couple of weeks after Cisco Live, set it up on my network, and began playing.

For the past three to four weeks, I have been using the console server on my network, and trying to figure out what I wanted to write about it. I’ve started this post at least three different times, and each time scrapped the post after an hour of work. Why was it so hard to write about you ask?

Because this is one loaded device! This thing has EVERYTHING you could want on your network.

WHAT IS GOOD?
-RJ45 ports for connecting to console ports. No special cables, no adapters in most cases, no rollover cables. Plug one end of a straight-through cable into the console sever, and the other end into the console port of a switch or router, and away you go.
-In addition to standard console ports, the ports can be configured in a number of various ways. This should allow for connection to almost any device in your network.
-SSH, Telnet, FTP, TFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, DHCP, NTP, SNMP, DNS Server/Relay, and the list goes on.
-Once you have devices connected, you can access them various ways. SSH, Telnet, no surprises, right? How about a web terminal? Yes, it is that awesome.
-I/0 ports. These ports can be sensed (door sensors, environmental monitoring, etc) or set (activate a relay to release a door.) Imagine with me working on a remote site, you ask the user on the phone to walk over to the door. You unlock the door for them, and see when the door is ajar. You ask them to complete your task, and then to close the door. Does the user close the door, or hang out and play in your IDF? Well, now you know.
-USB Port. The usb port can be used for flash storage, or it can be used to connect to devices which only support USB console devices.
-Easy to set firewall rules. Do you only want SSH allowable outside of the trusted network? No problem. Settings are made with a checkbox.

I could keep going. I could mention the IPSec, OpenVPN, and DDNS options…but I won’t.

WHAT COULD USE WORK?
My gripes are pretty small with this device.
-The documentation and product CD push additional software (SDT Connector) for creating connections. Really, I don’t see the purpose. Connections to the ports are easily made over SSH (or Telnet if you like living on the edge) by specifing the correct tcp port; 300X for SSH and 200X for telnet, where X is the console port number.
-Because this device has SO MANY OPTIONS, I think some default options would make setup faster and easier. If you could select a group of ports and assign a Cisco Console Profile to them, and choose another group and assign a APC Environmental Monitoring Profile to those, setup would go much easier.

Ultimately, what you need to know is that this device is a Linux server. It is capable of doing anything that a small Linux server can do. What makes this such a compelling product is that Opengear has packaged all of the daemons and services that can be used in a network into a single simple to use form-factor. Let’s face it, we spend our day configuring complex network services. Our network and device management shouldn’t be
difficult.

This isn’t the last that you will hear about my impressions with the Opengear ACM5004. I’m currently working on a use-case at work which I will write up in the near future. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments.

***Opengear provided an ACM5004 for this review. No other services or payment were received.***

We have once again started the process of expanding our team at my workplace. We always bring new employees in as a contractor first, and if things work out, the contractor is usually offered a full time position.

Our interview process is fairly hard. First, all recruiters are provided with 10 questions, of which each candidate must answer 8 out of 10.These are all basic CCNA level questions.

Next, we schedule a phone screening, where we ask more specific questions that are broken up into different areas. Layer 2, Layer 3, OSPF, and QOS are all on tap for this portion of the interview process. If we feel that the person was able to answer enough questions correctly without frantically searching for answers to recite back to us on the internet, we move them onto the third phase.

In the third phase, the person comes into our offices, and we provide them with equipment and instructions. They have 2.5 hours to configure a router, switch, and an AP per our instructions and answer a few questions based on those configurations. Once they have completed the configuration, we move into a Q&A portion of the interview, where we ask off the wall questions, mixed with troubleshooting scenarios of increasing complexity.

Every person who has ever left an interview felt well abused. If they paid attention, they know their weaknesses, and could use it to start a personal improvement plan. We in-turn, have a solid read on each candidates abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, and whether they would make a good addition to the team.

This process is long and arduous; the last time we went through this process, we started the interview process on almost 60 people before we found three we liked. 

I can’t knock our process though. In-fact, our team is so strong that I have turned down multiple offers at other positions, which payed more, simply because I like my teammates in my current role.

It seems that every time I consider taking a different role, I get pulled into interviewing more candidates, and am reminded what it is like out there in the rest of the world. Case-in-point, here is an email excerpt from a potential job candidate:

What did I say about scheduling issues earlier in one of your calls.  All day long not a single trouble call comes in.  5 minutes before the time for the phone interview I get a call and 3 tickets logged into our dell kace service desk.  Figured since I was finally done withe the remote assistance calls working from my terminal I would drop you a line while I am on the phone with one of the users that is having problems at the entire locationlocations that is having a problem that I am trying to get through to them it is sunding like a provider problem to let me let them go and get a hold of the provider.  Always love a network that uses back up internet connections that are all from the same cable provider(comcast) so come off the same pole and think that it is a gfood redundancy feature.  Not the one I am working with but we have one service center location that has all 3 retail branches of our company and instead of  getting an upgrade on the connection type with 3 static ips for the way they like to do things but really makes no sense what so ever they have 3 cable modems all coming off the same pole so that they can supposedly have a better more stable connection makes me have nightmares about wasted money and the stupidity of the outside consultants that engineered this network.  

After speaking to you prior to the interview time and you mentioning questions about switch configurations I will kinda admit you got me thinking it has been almost 10 years since I have programmed a true cisco switch do little netgear knock offs almost weekly and switches had always been my weak point give me a router or a pix device and I could make it sing but even on those I am rusty.  Put me in a lab environment and it would be just like riding a bicycle but just giving me verbal questions I would be stumbling all over myself.  Which looking at things makes me belive that this wouldn’t be the right position for me until I get back into the game and work away some of this rust.

If you don’t feel sick after reading that email, then a part of your soul is dead already.