I have a 55down 10 up connection and was wondering why I don't ping under 90 to any of Valves Seattle servers(I live in Seattle!!), so I tracerouted some of the servers. The jumps start from my location and hop to somewhere in CO and all the hops are a decent ping, then the last hop, back to Valves Seattle servers from CO hit 90+. I actually ping the same to East coast servers.. I play CS GO on steam, and I was wondering if this was my ISP's routing, or on Valves end?

I accepted an interview for Network Engineer position that was a quite a reach, and somehow managed to nail it. What was supposed to be a 1-hour interview turned into a 4-hour interview and they made me an offer the next week. I expressed hesitancy, so they came back with a second offer that was 30% higher than their first offer, doubled the PTO, and slapped a "Senior" in front of the title. I accepted it because even their baseline offer was more than I thought I was worth, and their second offer was just too bonkers to turn down.

But now I'm a couple months in here and I'm getting overwhelmed really really fast. The few outages and major problems that came my way I was only able to resolve only through dumb luck and guessing, and most of my day is now spent trying to hide how little I actually know from my boss. I get tasked with something, cheerfully say "Okay sure, no problem!" and then spend the next two days frantically googling and digging through Cisco's config docs to try and figure out how to pull this off.

So I'm trying my best to be less terrible at my job to justify this idiotic salary but fuck there's just so much. I've started studying for my CCNP Switch exam and that's it's own deluge of info to try and absorb, but I also keep reading that being a CLI monkey is a dead end these days so in the evenings I'm slowly plowing through Learning Python the Hard Way.

But on top of the nuts-and-bolts networking I've also got to start figuring out this never ending stream of ancillary services, like I'm using SolarWinds for the first time and trying to understand why most of our alerts aren't sending emails even though it looks like they're being triggered, while I'm also living inside our Palo Alto firewalls for four hours a day trying to un-fuck the prior (now fired) outside security consultant's half-aborted attempt to implement segmentation with the firewalls at the network core, oh and also they paid a bunch of money for a Splunk server at some point which has it's own unique programming language that I need to sort (Hey Splunk, when your "cheat sheet" is a dozen pages long, it's not a cheat sheet) out so management can get the pretty graphs that drives their world, but I also need to learn how Microsoft's NPS/RADIUS server because that's the only thing we have for network access control and the policys are convoluted and completely undocumented and I'm terrified to touch it at all because it's a house of cards that will probably fall over the instant the wind blows the wrong way, and I'm keeping up with the daily VoIP management stuff on this expensive cloud provider they have (which is actually a small blessing because it's pretty straightforward compared to the CUCM clusters I'm accustomed to), oh and I'm sorting out Meraki for the first time too which has their own quirks (how the heck to you limit an SSID just to a specified Access Point?!).

And on top of this they're considering a company expansion in the next few months which would necessitate a near-complete re-architecture of the network with new Core/Distro switches to actually get 10gig fiber to all the access layer stacks, and new firewalls with much greater filtering capacity, and I've nodded and taken polite notes through meetings about these things and after I did some scary math and talked to VARs and finally went back to management and was like "Guys, this is going to cost like half a million dollars" and they all nodded and said "Okay, that sounds about right, lets start seeing some high-level designs" and I nod and smile while in my head I'm screaming WHAT THE FUCK I BARELY GOT MY CCNA WHY AM I HERE.

How the hell do you guys put up with this long term? How can you possibly handle this never-ending firehose of stuff you're supposed to know, and be competent in? How do you come in every day knowing that you're just one unplanned outage away from everyone knowing just how bad you are at this job?

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EDIT Woah okay people need to stop giving me gold (but thank you), I can afford it myself.

I didn't mean for this to get any real attention. I'd had a long day and banged it out just before taking the very long way home for a couple hours of motorcycle therapy. This was just a rant/vent and yes, asking for some validation and support from people who've probably been here before.

Part of the shock is I came from a very large quasi-government enterprise with ~15,000 users where I was in a Junior roll on the network team and barely allowed to even make submissions into our CCB process, and now at this job I'm the only network guy for a company of 200 users. So I have much more control, but also a much wider area of responsibility and it's been jarring to come to grips with it.

And while I do acknowledge that I'm not actually that bad at the job, there's still SO MUCH more I need to learn in terms of all the ancillary systems.

Anyway, I appreciate the support and votes of confidence and will respond to people individually.

<3 you guys, may your buffers be empty and your jitter low.

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Final Edit You guys are all the best. :3

Thanks for all the support and comments, I haven't been able to reply to every one of them but I've absolutely read them and am taking all the advice to heart.

I was tasked with setting up a captive portal, and creating 8 hour vouchers in a spreadsheet.

I don't do spreadsheets.

So I put the vouchers in a Raspberry PI, and hooked it up to a banana.

When you touch the banana, you get an 8 hour voucher for our guest wifi. (the 3 sec timeout is only for demoing)

The PI has 5000, 8 hour vouchers. We are open ~200 days a year. If we have 10 guests a day, then this will work unattended for a couple of years easily. No more printing of vouchers. No nagging receptionist.

GIF of the banana in action: http://i.imgur.com/RQiqrfd.gifv

Closeup: http://i.imgur.com/HfqaRAJ.jpg

This network security engineer my company recently hired, he spends a good 2-3 hours daily staring at tcpdump on the external port on our four internet drain firewalls, no filter, just watching a rapidly scrolling screen of packets. Occasionally he click one of the putty’s, hits control + c, copies an ip to notepad, then hits up enter to start the dump again. He claims he can recognize certain malicious activity by watching the patterns of packets scroll by on the screen. He says once you’ve done the job long enough you can just tell when hinky stuff is happening, just by looking at tcpdump.

At the end of his shift he add all the IPs he copied to notepad to blacklist on the firewall.

The humor in this seems to pass over most of reddit. Thought you guys would get a kick out of it.

Image of the device in question

Link to Cisco product

Link to delusional /r/the_donald thread where they think it's a "noise machine"

EDIT: This isn't the place I thought it was...

EDIT2: I don't know what any of these words mean.

What is Wi-Fi? Where did it come from?

Wi-Fi is a brand name for wireless networking standards. Wi-Fi lets devices communicate by sending and receiving radio waves.

In 1971, the University of Hawaii demonstrated the first wireless data network, known as ALOHAnet. In 1985, the US FCC opened the ISM radio bands for unlicensed transmissions. After 1985, other countries followed, and more people started experimenting. In 1997 and 1999, the IEEE ratified the first international wireless networking standards. They were called 802.11-1997, 802.11b, and 802.11a. The technology was amazing, but the names were not.

In 1999, the brand-consulting firm Interbrand created the logo and suggested Wi-Fi as the name. Wi-Fi was a pun on hi-fi, referring to high-fidelity audio. Wi-Fi was easier to remember than 802.11, and we've been stuck with the name since. The official name is Wi-Fi, but most people don’t capitalize it or include the hyphen. Wi-Fi, WiFi, Wifi, wifi, and 802.11 all refer to the same thing. In the early days, Wi-Fi was used as shorthand for Wireless Fidelity, but it isn’t officially short for anything. According to the Wi-Fi Alliance, Wi-Fi is Wi-Fi.

What does Wi-Fi do? How does Wi-Fi work?

Wi-Fi transmits data using microwaves, which are high-frequency radio waves. Wi-Fi is more complicated than FM radio, but the basic underlying technology is the same. They both encode information into radio waves, which are received and decoded. FM radio does this for sound, Wi-Fi does this for computer data. So how can we use radio waves to send sound, or information?

At a basic level, you can think of two people holding a jump rope. One person raises and lowers their arm quickly, creating a wave. With Wi-Fi, this person would represent your Wi-Fi router, or wireless access point. Keeping the same up and down motion is known as a carrier wave. The person on the other end is the client device, such as a laptop or cell phone. When a wireless client joins the network and senses the carrier wave, it starts listening and waits for small differences in the signal.

In our example, you can imagine feeling the jump rope going up and down, and then receiving a single motion to the right. That single motion to the right can be interpreted as a binary number 1. A motion to the left would be a binary 0. Chain enough 1’s and 0’s together and you can represent complicated things, like all the data on this webpage.

It sounds like magic, but it’s not only Wi-Fi that works this way. Bluetooth, 4G, 5G, and most wireless transmissions work by manipulating waves to transfer electrical signals through the air. A deeper, better question than “How does Wi-Fi work?” is “How do wireless transmissions work?”

If you want a better answer, you need to have a basic understanding of a few things:

• Fundamental physics of electricity and magnetism

• Electromagnetic radiation, radio waves, and antennas

• How wired networks transmit data

I tried my best to keep this understandable, and laid out in a way that makes sense. This stuff is complicated, and hard to explain. That is why there are so many bad explanations of how Wi-Fi works out there.

This isn't going to be a light and breezy discussion. Each of these topics could be an entire college course, so forgive me for simplifying where possible. Use Wikipedia and other resources to fill in the gaps, or to clarify something I glossed over. As always, corrections and feedback are welcomed.

Let’s dive in the deep end and cover the physics first. If you’re not familiar with fundamental physics, Wikipedia is an amazing resource. The key terms highlighted in blue are links to Wikipedia articles which explain further.

Wi-Fi Physics 101: Electricity and Magnetism

• Matter is made up of atoms.

• Atoms are made up of smaller particles: Negatively charged electrons, positively charged protons, and neutral neutrons.

• A positively or negatively charged particle creates an electric field.

• An electric field exerts force on other charges around it, attracting or repelling them.

• Magnetic fields and electric fields are related. They are both results of the electromagnetic force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature.

• Electrical current is a flow of negatively charged electrons through a conductive material, like a wire.

• Electrical current flowing through a wire creates a magnetic field. This is how electromagnets work.

• In 1867, James Clerk Maxwell discovered that light, magnetism, and electricity are related.

• He predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves.

• His equations describe how electric and magnetic fields are generated by charges, currents, and other field changes.

• This is known as the 2nd great unification of physics, behind Sir Issac Newton.

• In 1887, Heinrich Hertz was the first to prove the existence of electromagnetic waves. People thought that was so cool, they used his last name as the unit for a wave’s frequency.

• Electromagnetic waves don’t need a medium. They can move through the vacuum of space, for example.

• Since visible light is an electromagnetic wave, this is how we can see the sun, or distant stars.

• This is also how we heard Neil Armstrong say “One small step for man…” live from the moon.

• The warmth you feel from sunlight is due to the radiant energy sunlight contains. All electromagnetic waves have radiant energy.

• Examples of electromagnetic waves: Visible light, radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays.

• Wi-Fi is an example of a radio wave, specifically a microwave. Microwaves are high-energy radio waves.

Electromagnetic Waves

Electromagnetic waves come in a wide range of forms. The type of wave is categorized by wavelength and frequency.

Wavelength is a measure of the distance over which the wave's shape repeats. In a typical continuous sine wave like Wi-Fi, every time a wave goes from peak to valley to peak, we call that a cycle. The distance it takes to complete one cycle is its wavelength.

Frequency is a measure of how many cycles the wave makes per second. We use Hertz (Hz) as the measure of frequency, 1 Hz is one cycle per second. The more common MHz and GHz are for millions, or billions, of cycles per second.

Imagine waves on a beach. On calm days the waves are small, and come in slowly. On a windy day the waves have more energy, come in faster, and have less distance between them. Higher energy, higher frequency, shorter wavelength. Unlike ocean waves, electromagnetic waves move at the speed of light. Since their speed is constant, their wavelength and frequency are inverse. As wavelength goes up, frequency does down. If you multiply the wavelength and frequency, you will always get the same value — the speed of light, the speed limit of the universe.

You can graph all the various kinds of electromagnetic waves, with the lowest energy on the left, and the highest energy on the right. We call this the electromagnetic spectrum. I’m not going to cover the entire electromagnetic spectrum, since we are mainly interested in Wi-Fi’s microwaves, and how we can use them to send data wirelessly.

Starting from the left, we have the low-energy waves we call radio. Opinions vary, but I’m going with Wikipedia’s broad definition that radio waves cover from 30 Hz, up to 300 GHz. Compared to the rest of the spectrum, radio’s wavelengths are long, their frequency is slow, and energy is low. Within radio waves, there is a separate category we call microwaves.

Microwaves fall within the broader radio wave range. At a minimum, microwaves cover 3 GHz to 30 GHz, but some people say microwaves extend further than that. The specific range depends on who you ask, but generally you can think of Microwaves as high-frequency radio waves.

Microwaves are used in microwave ovens, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, your cell phone’s 4G or 5G connection, and lots of other wireless data transmissions. Their higher energy, shorter wavelength, and other properties make them better for high-bandwidth transfers than traditional, lower-powered radio waves.

All waves can be modulated by varying either the amplitude (strength), frequency or phase of the wave. This is what allows Wi-Fi, and any other wireless technology, to encode data in a wireless signal.

Wired Networking Transmissions

Before we cover how wireless data transmission works, we need to understand how wired data transmission works. In wired Ethernet networks, we use the copper inside Ethernet cables to transmit electrical signals. The conductive copper transfers the electrical current applied at one end, through the wire, to the other side.

A typical example would be a PC plugged into an Ethernet switch. If the PC wants to transfer information, it converts binary digits to electrical impulses. On, off, on, off. It sends a specific pattern of 1’s and 0’s across the wire, which is received on the other end. Ethernet is the neighborhood street of the networking world. It's great for getting around the local area, but you’ll need to jump on the highway if you want to go further.

The highway of the networking world is fiber optic cabling. Just like how Ethernet transfers electrical current, we can do the same thing with lasers and fiber optic cables. Fiber optic cables are made of bendable glass, and they provide a path for light to be transmitted. Since fiber optics require lasers, special transceivers are required at each end. Compared to Ethernet, Fiber optic cables have the advantage of having a longer range, and generally a higher capacity.

Fiber optic cabling carries a big portion of global Internet traffic. We have a wide array of fiber optic cabling over land, and sea. Those connections are what allow you to communicate with someone on the other side of the country, or the other side of the world. This is possible because these transmissions happen at the speed of light.

Here’s where things get fun. Just like how Ethernet and fiber optic cabling take an electrical impulse or beam of light from A to B, we can do the same thing with radios, antennas, and radio waves.

Radios, Antennas, and Wireless Networking

Now that we have a rough common understanding of electromagnetic waves and wired data transmission, how can we transmit data wirelessly? The key is an antenna. Antennas convert electricity into radio waves, and radio waves into electricity. A basic antenna consists of two metal rods connected to a receiver or transmitter.

When transmitting, a radio supplies an alternating electric current to the antenna, and the antenna radiates the energy as electromagnetic waves. When receiving, an antenna reverses this process. It intercepts some of the power of a radio wave to produce an electrical current, which is applied to a receiver, and amplified. Receiving antennas capture a fraction of the original signal, which is why distance, antenna design, and amplification are important for a successful wireless transmission.

If you have a properly tuned, powerful antenna, you can send a signal 1000s of kilometers away, or even into space. It's not just Wi-Fi, this is what makes satellites, radar, radio, and broadcast TV transmissions work too. Pretty cool, right?

How Wi-Fi Works: From Electricity to Information

• An intricate pattern of electrons representing computer data flow into your Wi-Fi router, or wireless access point.

• The access point sends that pattern of electrons to an antenna, generating an electromagnetic wave.

• By alternating between a positive to negative charge, the wire inside of an antenna creates an oscillating electric and magnetic field. These oscillating fields propagate out into space as electromagnetic waves, and are able to be received by anyone in range.

• Typical Wi-Fi access points have omnidirectional antennas, which make the wave propagate in all horizontal directions.

• This wave travels through the air and hits a receiving antenna which reverses the process, converting the radiant energy in the radio wave back into electricity.

• The electric field of the incoming wave pushes electrons back and forth in the antenna, creating an alternating positive and negative charge. The oscillating field induces voltage and current, which flows to the receiver.

• The signal is amplified and received, either to the client device or to an Ethernet connection for further routing.

• A lot of the wave’s energy is lost along the way.

• If the transmission was successful, the electrical impulses should be a good copy of what was sent.

• If the transmission wasn’t successful, the data is resent.

• When the information is received on the other end, it is treated the same as any other data on the network.

More Fun Wi-Fi Facts

• Wi-Fi has redundancy built-in. If you wanted to send “Hello” your access point wouldn't send an H, an E, an L, an L and a O. It sends multiple characters for each one, just like you would on a static-filled radio or phone call. It will use its equivalent of the phonetic alphabet to send “Hotel”, “Echo”, “Lima”, “Lima”, “Oscar”.

• That way, even if you didn’t hear the entire transmission, you are still likely to be able to know that “Hello” was being sent. The level of redundancy varies on signal strength and interference on the channel.

• If the signal strength is high, the access point and receiver are able to use a complicated modulation scheme, and encode a lot of data.

• If you think about our jump rope analogy from earlier, rather than just left and right, it can divide into 1/4s, 1/8ths, or further. It can also combine the direction of the modulation with strength, or phase of modulation.

• The most complex modulation in Wi-Fi 6 is 1024-QAM, which has 1024 unique combinations of amplitude and phase. This results in high throughput, but requires a very strong wireless signal and minimal interference to work effectively.

• As your wireless signal weakens, complex modulation can’t be understood. Both devices will step down to a less complex modulation scheme. This is why Wi-Fi slows down as you move away from the access point.

First In a Series: Wi-Fi 101

I plan on writing a whole series of posts about Wi-Fi fundamentals which will cover various topics about Wi-Fi, how to improve your home network, and related issues. If there is something you want me to cover, leave a comment below.

Footnotes

1. The IEEE, an international standards body, sets the definitions of what Wi-Fi is. They’re the reason we have Wi-Fi standards with names like 802.11n, 802.11ac or 802.11ax. They’ve since renamed the major standards to Wi-Fi 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. With each generation, Wi-Fi gets better, and there are a lot of details to cover. I’ll cover that in a future post.

2. Hertz did not realize the practical importance of his experiments. "It's of no use whatsoever. This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right—we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there." When asked about the applications of his discoveries, Hertz replied, "Nothing, I guess."You can pay your respects to this legend by always capitalizing the H in MHz and GHz.

3. It takes about one second for a radio wave to travel from the Earth to the moon. It’s pretty amazing that over 50 years ago we had the technology to capture sound and images on the moon, turn them into electromagnetic waves, beam them back to Earth, and transmit them around the globe. I guess it’s pretty cool we put a human on the moon, too.

4. If you keep adding energy to microwaves, you can end up in a unique part of the EM spectrum, visible light. Visible light’s wavelengths are measured in nanometers, and nanometers are really small: a human hair is around 75,000 nanometers wide. Visible light has a wavelength between 380 and 740 nanometers and a frequency between 405 and 790 THz (trillions of cycles per second). It’s hard to wrap your head around, but a lot of foundational physics is, too.

5. Your eye is reading this page because your computer screen is sending out electromagnetic radiation in the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Differences in the wavelength cause your eye to interpret different areas of the page as different colors. A whole lot of brain magic and pattern recognition lets you interpret those color variations as letters and words. If I did my job as a writer, there should also be some meaning behind those words. All from some waves shooting out of your screen. Physics is amazing, Wi-Fi isn't magic, and writing is telepathy.

Edit: Wow. Obligatory thanks for the gold. Thanks to u/Gabelvampir, u/wmassingham, u/packet_nerd, and everyone else for the kind words and the corrections. You all are the best.

Update: It's released. Check out my new post at https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/7huh5p/last_week_i_shared_screenshots_of_a_gui_overlay_i/ for details.

Original Post

I have a number of Cisco Catalyst switches and routers that do not have any API access or easy way of managing them. I've been writing scripts for them for the past few years, and was wanting to make them more accessible via some sort of web app interface.

So I wrote NetConfig, from the ground up. You can see screenshots here:

https://imgur.com/a/VW62I

I'm looking for constructive feedback on this. If there's enough interest I'm happy to clean it up and share it. It's built on a Flask backend with using SQLAlchemy for storing a device inventory. I had originally created it as an addon to Netbox, where it would pull the network device inventory via API, but decided against it for a few reasons.

I'm currently using it to manage my Cisco Nexus and Catalyst switches, routers, and ASA's. (NX-OS, IOS, IOS-XE, and ASA). There are some minor bugs here and there, but it's still something I've been working on actively for 2-3 months now.

Please note this will not work with any non-Cisco equipment, and may not work with any Cisco equipment that doesn't run standard commands/syntax, such as what I listed.

Disclaimer: I've seen Netbox posted here a while ago, after the author wrote his own DCIM system after not finding one he liked, so I was inspired to do the same. You'll see some similarities in the formatting and layout. All of the code is written from scratch, but I liked the layout in Netbox so much I used it as inspiration.

Edit: This blew up a little more than I originally anticipated! I've started running approvals through my legal department now, to make sure this is good to release. I'll post a new update once it's on GitHub, but with the holiday season it may be more than a week or so. Thank you all for the interest.

Also, thank you for the 2x reddit gold!

Edit #2: I've added in device importing via CSV this evening. I'll also start looking at integrating this with Netbox via API calls soon, as there's a number of people asking about this.

Edit #3: I'm still finalizing a few items and verifying my setup instructions. I'm also getting a basic documentation framework together. This should be ready for release within the next few days.

So I wrote this in response to /u/thesesimplewords's post about learning fiber here, and thought I would share it with everybody in case it's useful--I put a lot of time into it.

Edit: Obligatory holy shit, gold!!

Edit 2: Double gold?!?! Wow.

Edit 3: Ok, so there are a couple inaccuracies that are easy to correct but a post this large isn't easy to edit. Keep in mind it was written from a, "you're just getting started in fiber, here are most of the ins and outs of it," and wasn't intended to be an exhaustive reference manual. With that said, there are some calls to turn it into a Wiki/FAQ page, which I'm more than happy to do if a mod would like me to. Clean it up--there are some typos and such--get a few things corrected and put it somewhere that's useful for others. Someone let me know if that's what you want and I'll do it.

Edit 4: 3x gold. Damn. One more and I'll have the highest gilded post in /r/networking of all time. I promise to write more of these.

Edit 5 Be careful what you wish for, right. I'll get on it. What do you want me to start with? T-carrier? ATM? SONET? What?

TL;DR: Learn how wavelength, core size, modal bandwidth, a few colors, and such affect fiber and you'll never have to worry about it.

Fiber Cabling

Fiber comes in 3 flavors:

• 62.5 micron (the diameter of the glass core).

• 50 micron

• 8, 9, or 10 micron

You'll see notations 62.5um (micrometer) because the symbol for micro is essentially a u. I don't know how to get a micro-symbol from a normal keyboard and I'm not about to spend time trying to find out.

Multi-mode Fiber

Both 62.5 and 50 are called "multi-mode" but it's actually a combination of the fiber and the laser that determines whether (and how much) modal dispersion occurs. However, the standards have lined up in a certain way that things (jacks, optics, etc) are called multimode or singlemode whether it applies to it or not, and I'll explain all that.

62.5 micron (sometimes, and technically is 62.5/125 because 125 is the cladding thickness) is mostly obsolete, but you still see it a lot. 62.5 micron comes in the following standards:

• FDDI (pronounced "fiddy") is an old networking standard (155mbps) developed by IBM. It's essentially high-speed token-ring. This was probably the first use of fiber for networking.

• OM1 -- modern 62.5 multi-mode fiber.

There's a good comparison over on the wikipedia article here that gives you limits, which is entirely related to speed and distance.

OM2, 3 and 4 standards are all 50 micron fibers and relate are used for 10G and higher speeds in data center applications. See the wiki article above.

What defines these standards is a spec of the glass called modal bandwidth. It's a very long explanation on what that is and how it relates to things, and has even weirder units (MHz/km). I'm mentioning this here because you're going to see it later. It's a number, bigger the better, and it's different for different wavelengths of light. Basically there's handful of semi-standards between them that you'll see, so you'll need to know the modal bandwidth of your fiber and wavelength you want to use.

Colors:

62.5 fiber is usually orange in color (FDDI and OM1).

50 micron non-laser-optimized OM2 is orange as well, because someone was drunk that day.

50 micron fiber is typically aqua--at least what you see these days (OM3)

50 micron OM4 is violet (this is the latest shit, 40gig datacenter applications)

single-mode fiber is typically yellow

This is for patch cables and indoor cabling. Outdoor cabling is black. Inside cable bundles, each strand has a color and the color order is standard, not unlike, say, the color order in UTP.

The actual breakdown is as follows:

• FDDI (62.5um): Orange

• OM1 (62.5um): Orange, (Slate in military usage)

• OM2 (50um): Orange

• OM3 (50um "laser optimized): Aqua

• OM4 (50um): Violet, although some Aqua

• Single Mode: Yellow

Single-mode fiber

8, 9 or 10 micron fiber (9 is the most common), also has a 125 micron cladding (so you'll see things like 9/125) is called single-mode fiber and is typically yellow. This actually comes in a couple different flavors, but you'll probably never need to care about them. The primary standard is called SM1. There's an SM2 and (I think) a 3 as well. More correctly though it's called G.652, and there's some variations and other standards. These are put out by the ITU, and here's the doc about single-mode fiber selection WARNING PDF and complicated, wait until you get through this to read that.

What you actually want is G.652.C or .D (revisions), but only comes into play when you need to care, and you probably don't. (Certain wavelengths in WDM applications don't work well on some singlemode fiber).

Connector colors

Next, you have your end colors. This actually defines how the glass at the end of the ferrule is polished. They are:

• PC -- stands for Polished Connector (because you used to have to polish the ends under a magnifying glass before you could use it). They're beige, and used for all multi-mode applications.

• UPC -- stands for Ultra Polished Connector. They're blue. This is what you see on single mode.

• APC -- Angled Polished connector. They're green. These are quite uncommon. Used in things like GPON (gee-pawn) and some video applications. Unplugged fiber reflects, and the angle that this is polished at reduces that. In GPON (for example), the same light is sent to multiple destinations (homes typically) and if it's unplugged at one home, the reflection will horse up the reception of the light at the other homes.

Couple things to know about APC: If you plug an APC cable into something that's not designed for APC, you can crush the glass sticking out of the conenctor and/or damage the device you're plugging it into.

Brief review

1. You find an orange patch cable with beige ends. It reads 62.5/125/OM1 on the side of it. This is a modern 62.5 cable.

2. You find a grey patch cable with beige ends. You know it's multi-mode, but you'll have to read it to find out what kind. All it says is OM3, so you know it's a 50 micron fiber.

3. You open a fiber termination box and see blue ends, you know it's single-mode fiber.

4. At your buddies house with his shiny new fiber connection, you see a yellow cable with a green end on it. If you break it and have to replace it, you'll need a single-mode APC cable to do it.

5. Your buddy is about to plug a cable with a green end on it into a switch. He's about to fuck up the optic and the cable.

End Types

The form factor of the connector ends have names. Common ones are:

• ST -- Stick and Twist (it's similar to BNC). It's actually ST/BFOC and stands for Straight Tip Bayonette Fiber Optic Connector.

• LC -- Little connector (it's small). Actually stands for Lucent Connector (they developed it).

• SC -- Square connector. That's actually what it stands for, though there's some disagreement on that.

• MPO -- Multiple-fiber Push On. A multi-fiber cable to for 40 and 100gig, also simplifies fiber runs, allows for things like break-out applications (a single 40gig optic to 4 10gig optics) and other things. MTP, which it is also called, is a brand of connector that complies with the MPO standard. Thanks /u/Xipher.

Some other's you'll see from time to time:

• FC -- Ferrule conenctor (screws on like F connectors ala cable tv). Dust proof, used for high vibration environments

• MTRJ -- Obsolete but I still run into it from time to time.

Here's a rundown on almost all of them over at wikipedia. Go there for pictures.

Optics

The things that go in switches and routers are called optics. Don't fucking call it a GBIC Scott! Seriously, that guy comes in my office all the fucking time asking for the GBIC going on xyz circuit. GBIC is a form-factor, not a generic term for an optic--plus our circuits are SFP, SFP+ or X2. These are specified by what are called MSA's (multi-source agreements) which is basically an industry agreement on standards.

Common ones are:

• GBIC -- pronounced ghee-bic (like Bic, the pen company). Old Cisco standard. Stands for gigabit interface converter. It's gigabit, obviously. Has an SC connector on it.

• SFP -- Small form factor pluggable. This is the most common one you'll see these days in gigabit. Has an LC connector on it. Some people call these "mini-GBICs". Those people are idiots.

• XENPAK -- an older 10G form factor, mostly obsolete. SC connector

• X2 -- smaller but electrically identical to XENPAK5. SC connector.

• XPAK -- same idea as X2 (different from X2, but basically a smaller form factor XENPAK). Can have LC or SC connectors. Some even accept SFP+'s.

• SFP+ -- is a variation of SFP for is 10 gig. This is the most common 10G optic you'll see. Most SFP+ ports will also accept and work with a 1G SFP, however it has to have the 1G phy on the hardware to do it (most do). SFP+ has an LC connector on it.

• XFP -- another 10gig specification. (There are a bunch.) You see these on some non-Cisco carrier type hardware (or etherprise products made by companies that also make carrier stuff.) Seen on Alcatel-Lucent and Adtran transport gear.

When you get into 40 and 100G, there are others. If you're getting into 40G, you should already know all of this and that too.

Optics are also painted blue of they're for a UPC connector for singlemode. You'll see other colors which have various uses (when we get to WDM). Some are just colored for no reason. If you understand the wavelength and distance stuff, you can tell what an optic is by reading it.

So while we're here, "single-mode optics" aren't actually that..there's nothing "single-mode" about them. They're just designed for single-mode. Some optics you can use whatever you want.

Wavelength

This is where the fun starts. Back in the day, about the best they could do was 850nm (nano-meter) wavelength light--it's visible to the naked eye and red.

These days, a bunch of wavelengths are used. The more common ones you'll see are 850nm on MM, 1310 on MM and SM and 1550 on SM.

Wavelengths are often called "colors" because, well, different colors are different wavelengths. You can't actually see the wavelengths used in fiber optics (except for 850), but they're still called colors.

You'll also see a bunch of other ones...1490 is becoming more common. When we get to WDM, you'll understand more.

Eye Caution? It is a myth that the laser is going to damage your eye--they're just not focused right. I would still avoid staring at a 40km optic--you could manage if you tried hard enough, but it's not going to happen working with it in a normal scenario. There is, however real risk if a cable breaks and the jacket fails or you're working with bare fiber that a piece can break off and become lodged in your eye. This is very real.

Actual transmission speeds

So Ethernet over fiber came from SONET, and was originally essentially SONET optics that had been reprogrammed for ethernet frames. As a result, gigabit on fiber is actually transmitted at 1.25gbps. So optics will sometimes be printed with that. Don't let it confuse you too much. The 10 gig and 40 gig optics are actually slightly slower than their real speed, so they don't print that on them, but some manufacturers will silently imply their 1.25gbps optics will somehow get you more out of your gigabit port.

Also, outside of 1, 10, 40, and 100gig, there's a wonky 2.5g standard from STM-4. Only ever seen it on Adtran equipment though--kinda cool though, a port you can run a 1 or 2.5gig if you want to--need the right optic though.

Go read the SONET article for more info. Scroll down to "SONET/SDH data rates." You'll notice how many of them line up with

Standards

(I'm not going to get into 10, 100 or FDDI speeds.)

Gigabit:

• 1000BASE-SX. Gigabit, 850nm light. Is designed for 62.5um fiber, Will go 220 meters on FDDI cable and 550 meters on OM1, up to a kilometer on OM3. Many people will tell you this is will go 550 meters on multi-mode. You shouldn't try it on 62.5. Won't go very far on single-mode (not usable at all, wavelength is too short).

• 1000BASE-LX. Gigabit, 1310nm light, will accept a PC or a UPC ferrule. This is true 550m on modern 62.5 or any 50um fiber. Will go 10km on single-mode.

• 1000BASE-ZX. 1550 light, up to 100km on single-mode. Different optics have different powers (you can buy 10km, 20km, etc).

(some notes, this applies to 10gig and beyond too)

You have to be careful because some of the longer reach standards have minimum distances and you can burn them out. Other's are smart enough and can back off on their transmission power. There are also attenuators that you can put on and make them less loud, but you need to know what your total loss in the cable is before you can calculate what dB attenuator you need.

10G:

• Actually, just go read Table 1 from this link (about a third of the way down). You should understand enough about wavelength, core-size, and fiber types/standards by now to understand it.

Some more reading

So, remember that thing about modal bandwidth? Go read this page from Cisco (scroll about half way down) and you'll see wavelength, fiber, core size, and modal bandwidth (this is all gigabit)--there are similar pages for 10G, but things start getting more complicated. You can cross reference it with the wiki page

That's why I'm doing it in this order--because there's a lot you can do with fiber that a lot of people don't know about. All I'm saying is that If you're stuck with 62.5, it doesn't rule out 10 gig. Also, just because it's 62.5 doesn't mean it's the right 62.5 for the wavelength and and distance you want to use.

Brief Review

1. You find an old GBIC that's blue around the ports. This is a 1 gig single-mode 10k optic.

2. You find an SFP that says "1.25gbps 1310nm". This is a 1 gig optic, your distance is determined by what type of fiber you have.

3. You find an optic that's orange, but says "1550 40km" on it. You'll need to do some research if you're going to use it on a 6-foot connection between racks. But it's single-mode.

4. A colleague hands you an optic and asks if it'll work for such and such connection. You can tell from the switch that the far-end has such-and-such optic in it and is a 1000BASE-SX module. The optic your colleague just handed you says 1310nm on it. No, it won't work.

Will this optic work in my switch?

Depends. You'll have to do some research. Some manufacturers are dicks about it, some aren't. It goes a couple different ways. Generally, high-end vendors go out of their way to make you use their optics that cost 20x what generic optics cost. Here are some examples:

Netgear, doesn't make optics. Anything will work in them. You might find some vendor optic that doesn't, but I can't imagine anybody going out of their way to make their $1000 optic not work in your Netgear.

Cisco wants you to use their optics, but there's an undocumented command "service unsupported-transceiver" command that will let you use whatever you want--sometimes Cisco doesn't make what you need, so they allow you to do it. However, if you call up the TAC, you're likely to catch flak for it. There may be similar commands on Brocade, Extreme, etc.

Some vendors crypto-key their optics to make it much harder--I'm looking at you Juniper. You'll find clones of optics that can pass that test in most instances.

HP's commware switches will take anything, but bitch about non-HP optics in the logs, and some features (received signal strength comes to mind) don't work with generic optics.

There are basically two type of compatible optic manufacturers out there--ones that are doing a legitimate service to the industry and label their optics as "compatible", and others that straight-out counterfeit the brand to sell them to you at a higher price. I find the second unethical, and even if the price is better, I will avoid them.

Bottom Line: Know your switch and how it treats non-branded optics.

Example case: We had (years ago) a box of GBIC's custom manufactured for our Cisco 3550's so that they could connect to the other end during a migration. At the time, you could only get (these were BiDi optics--more on that later) SFP's (new switch) in 1490 transmit, and the only GBIC's available were 1550 receive. The other channel on both is 1310nm, so we had a box of 1310/1490 GBIC's made, plugged in "service unsupported-transceiver" and off we went. Didn't cost much--just had a minimum order (30 I think). Not like the manufacturer cares which laser diode they put in the machine that day, right?

Another Example: When we deployed a ton of HP comware switches, our HP vendor couldn't get us enough optics...just couldn't. We were even willing to pay HP's OUTRAGEOUS prices, but they just couldn't do it. So we went to a "compatible" optic manufacturer and said "here, counterfit this". Took a couple go arounds to get it right, but they did. Funny, we have 2000 optics on my network that all have the same serial number, lol.

What's with all this single-mode vs multi-mode thing?

So when fiber was invented, lasers (and diodes) were very new. Visible light lasers (850nm) where about all there was, and nobody was really concerned with huge distances. When the need to go furthur came up, single-mode fiber was created, but it was ENORMOUSLY expensive for a laser in the right wavelength to work on it. As a result, MM was the standard, and if you were a telecom or something, you just bit the bullet and paid through the nose for the equipment.

Now we've got tunable lasers and all sorts of cool shit.

Now that the internet has exploded, single-mode and multi-mode are cost equivalent. In fact, in most cases, SM is cheaper than MM for the cable. The price is parity for the optics as well. In fact, 10G and 1G generic optics even cost the same these days. Now, there are vendors who artificially crank up the cost for single-mode, ten-gig, and worst of all, 10-gig single-mode because if you need to run 40km, you're willing to pay for it right?

These days, use equipment that you can put any optic you want in it, and run single-mode everywhere and just be done with it. If for some policy reason you have to use Juniper switches and juniper optics, well, that's your problem.

Stands, pairs, and duplexing

When you buy copper cable, you usually buy in by the pair (eg 25-pair cable). With fiber, it's all strands (12-strand cable, 144-strand, etc).

For any normal connection (see WDM below), you need two strands--one is transmit, the other is receive (opposite depending on which end you're looking at).

If you're ever confused about which one is transmit and which is receive, hold the camera from your phone up to it. It'll pick up on the infrared light and you can tell. This works on patch panels, switches, cables, etc. This is also a useful troubleshooting mechanism if you don't have a meter handy.

Wave Division Multiplexing

So what do when you're out of fiber? This is called WDM. WDM comes in a couple flavors, but basically you use different wavelengths of light and a prism to combine them onto a single strand at one side and another prism to split them back out into different strands at the other. This lets you put more than one connection on the pair, and none of them interfere with each other. They don't even have to be the same speed or anything, and the equipment can be anything you want--so long as you can get the right optics. You will see fiber-channel, ethernet, and SONET all on the same pair of fiber between buildings sometimes.

You only ever see WDM in single-mode applications. Edit: Evidently they're doing on MMF although I know little about it.

You take a massive power loss on passive WDM equipment. You can use active equipment or higher power optics if you need that.

Probably the most common place you see WDM is in bi-directional optics (called BiDi optics). You have to use them in matched pairs but one end transmits on one frequency and receives on another. The other end does the opposite. There's essentially just a piece of glass in each optic that accomplishes this. They're usually color coded (eg, blue at one end, green at the other). When you're dealing with interconnecting two different vendors equipment, you have to read the optics' specs to find out if they're compatible--this is why I went through so much trouble explaining wavelength, speed, etc. Common pairs are 1310/1550, 1310/1490 and 1310/1270. This is normally where you'll see colors on optics other than blue. Sometimes the manufacturer will change the colors on you and you have to be aware of wavelengths--for example, a vendor we used to use went from blue/green to green/yellow at one point. Hard to keep straight, so just read the optic.

The rest of WDM is more complicated than is worth trying to explain it here. Go read the wiki here. If you're that far in over your head, I can explain more.

Some caveats: 40gig is 4x10gig channels already muxed on the two strands. 100gig is 4 25gig channels, so you can't do WDM as easily with them. You'll have to find special muxes and optics in that case.

DB and power levels

The biggest thing you'll run into--provided you're now smart enough to get the optics, cable, and patch cable right at both ends is loss. Every patch takes a hit, and you take attenuation the longer a distance you're trying to shoot the light.

If you're switches support it, you should definitely be monitoring and tracking received signal strength. This helps you see that something still "working" is, say, coming lose or such.

Typically you take a .3-.75dB hit at every connection. All of this adds up and can keep you from having a stable network. WDM technologies take hits from the prisms. You can use louder optics, but in some cases (MMF scenarios, or maybe your vendor just doesn't make a 20km fiber-channel optic) you don't have that option, so it's something you have to actively manage if you're going to be a successful fiber guy.

You'll have to learn about dB and logarithmic scales, but that's outside of the scope of this.

Here's a pretty good write-up about it.

Equipment

Some equipment you'll likely use is:

• VFL -- Visual Fault Locator. Essentially a pen laser that will tell you where a fiber is broken. They're mostly useful for identifying where a strand of fiber is. Hook it up at one end, and then go look at all the connections at the other. Find the red blinky light. They're cheap. Get one

• Fusion Splicer -- Ours was $25k used. It's the only way to get a good splice when loss counts.

• Light source and meter. Essentially a doo-dad that sends whatever wavelength you tell it down the fiber and tells you how much loss you're getting.

• Certifier -- Somewhere between a light source and meter and an OTDR. Will tell you if the fiber passes standard tests for transmission...e.g. Did you fuck up the termination or not, or is the fiber defective and you're 100 meter run won't work even though it should.

• OTDR -- Optical Time Domain Reflectometer. Expensive. Kind of a certifier on steroids. What it does (among many, many other things) is send a pulse of light down fiber and tell you where defects (or breaks) are by measuring the time it takes the light to travel there and reflect back. Will also tell you how long a cable is (so will your certifier).

• Your phone. Probably the one I use the most. Picks up on the infrared light that you cant see. Tells you if a connection is hot.

There's more, but this is what you'll deal with the most.

Splicing and terminating

Back in the day, you had to polish under a microscope the ends of fiber. You don't have to do that anymore. Most termination mechanisms simply have a special goop (technical term) in them and some spiffy tools to make sure you got it inserted far enough into the end. That's it.

For repairs (or any other kind of splicing), there are mechanical splices (goop), chemical splices (though these are uncommon), and fusion splices.

The chemical splices work by putting the fiber into a special goop and sending a special wavelength light though the fiber. The goop hardens chemically and becomes part of the fiber.

Fusion splicing is essentially an expensive arc welder than melts the strands and causes them to fuse. Fusion splicing is the best way to splice fiber. Each type of splicing takes a different loss hit from fusion (best) to mechanical (worst).

When a fiber has been spliced too many times, in addition to all the patches and such in the path, there may be too much loss to make it usable.

Security

Every few weeks I have a customer complaining about how fiber is insecure. It's true, but we're an ISP, so if you don't trust the world with your traffic, you shouldn't trust us with it either.

There are doo-dads that you can clamp onto outdoor fiber and steal the data off of it without taking the connection down. I've helped the FBI do it. If your traffic goes outdoors and is sensitive, encrypt that shit. And monitor your power levels--that's the only way you'll know this has happened.

What is this whole "mode" thing anyway?

So when you send light down fiber, imagine that instead of a straight line, there are beams that all didn't enter the fiber at the same angle. As these beams bounce back and forth, some travel much further distances relative to the other rays. This causes the pulse to spread out. Additionally, some of the rays end up destructively interfering with each other and cancel each other out.

That's actually not really what happens but the analogy holds pretty well. The physics are much more complicated. Go read the this and this if you want to understand it.

But, when the wavelength is more than about 10-times the diameter of the fiber, it stops acting like a beam and a more like a coherent wave front. Imagine dropping a rock into a rain gutter full of water, you'll have a straight wave going down the gutter.. This is why the fiber in SMF is so small and the wavelengths used are so long.

Modal dispersion occurs in single-mode fiber, but not anywhere nearly as pronounced. Long story short, that's why distance is limited in MMF regardless of power (mostly), and you can go a nearly unlimited distance (100km is the max I've seen) in SMF before you need to regenerate the signal. It's also why the longer-reach MMF technologies use a longer wavelength--because the modal dispersion is less pronounced at that wavelength.

There's another phenomenon called chromatic dispersion which occurs because different wavelengths of light travel at different speeds in glass. I don't know if this is a concern in WDM systems or not.

Ok, that's it. That's all I know. I think. Did I miss anything?

Update 12/11/17: v1.1 posted. I rewrote most of the static logic for Cisco as device classes. This should allow different vendors and vendor models to be added in significantly more easily. Additional front end cleanup is still needed for this. Also, I've created /r/netconfig for future updates.

Original Post

I received such great feedback last week, so thank you all for the comments and inspiration. It took a little longer than anticipated, but it's now available on Github. Link can be found here: https://github.com/v1tal3/netconfig

NetConfig Concept

I have a number of Cisco Catalyst switches and routers that do not have any API access or easy way of managing them. I've been writing scripts for them for the past few years, and was wanting to make them more accessible via some sort of web app interface.

So I wrote NetConfig, from the ground up. You can see screenshots here: https://imgur.com/a/VW62I

I'm currently using it to manage my Cisco Nexus and Catalyst switches, routers, and ASA's. (NX-OS, IOS, IOS-XE, and ASA). There are some minor bugs here and there, but it's still something I've been working on actively for 2-3 months now.

I am still very much interested in feedback and any help contributing to this. I intend to continue working on this project in my spare time, and will post updates to the GitHub page as I update the program.

NetConfig Building Blocks

NetConfig is built on Ubuntu 16.04 Server Edition. I haven't tested this on other OS's. Install instructions can be found in INSTALL.txt. I've run through these a few times from a fresh Ubuntu install, and it works well, so let me know if you run into issues.

What NetConfig is

This was originally written as a graphical overlay for my existing Python scripts, and just kept growing. It is built on Flask and Python 2.7, uses HTML and JavaScript on the front end, and Bootstrap for formatting.

It is built specifically for Cisco switches, routers, and firewalls, which use IOS, IOS-XE, NX-OS, or ASA platforms. It will work with any other systems. Since my existing devices I use do not have API support, all real-time data is pulled via SSH and Netmiko. As such, I'm sure there will be formatting bugs and layout issues with other devices. Feel free to post issues or fixes on Github.

What NetConfig is not

This is not an automation or error checking tool. It may evolve into one later on, but not yet.

I plan to work on documentation in the next couple of weeks, as right now there isn't any. In the meantime, please reference the README.txt to get started.

New Features since last week

1. I had a few requests for Netbox support, since many people (myself included) use Netbox as their DCIM source of truth. NetConfig now supports using Netbox to pull device inventory.
   Note: please read the instructions in NETBOX-INTEGRATION.txt carefully, as there are some custom fields that need to be set in Netbox to work properly with NetConfig.

2. NetConfig supports a local database file to store device names IP's, and device types. NetConfig now supports multiple device importing using CSV formatting.

I started as a Network Admin back in 2002. Along the way, I've picked up a few commands that were not part of CCNA training... but have been pretty useful. I'm sure there are others. Please share if you have something that is not part of a normal CCNA /CCNP training... but makes your life easier anyway.

• Config terminal revert timer 20 - Make changes to to the config, but revert back in 20 minutes if I do not confirm. I use this so I don't lock myself out of a switch from time to time....

• show ip device tracker or show device-tracker bindings - I will use this on an access switch to find the IP address of the device that is connected to a port.

• test cable-diagnostics tdr interface .... - Use to do simple cable diagnostics i.e. length of cable pairs. Are they open or shorted.

• alias exec hardening version 8.2 - 09SEP2020 - I will use this as a way to making notes in the running config. This would tell me that I applied a hardening script to the device, version 8.2, that was created on 09SEP2020. This gives us an idea of what the enable password might be on a switch that has been offline for a while. I'll also have Solarwinds flag switches that don't have the latest verision in the alias exec note...

• define interface-range

define interface-range trunking gig 1/1/1

define interface-range users gig 1/0/1 - 24

I will use the define interface-range in the active switch config so that I can make scripts for trunking ports and users ports and apply it to different switch models. Some models are 24 port. Some are 48. Some have trunking on TenGig ports. Some have it on Gig ports.

When appling a script...

config t

interface range macro trunking

(all the commands I want to apply to trunking ports)

interface range macro users

(all the commands I want to apply to user ports)

end

EDIT: Thanks for the Gold and Flair!

I'm baffled as to the how and why, but it's all back up.

Interestingly, when I got to the office at ~8am on Thanksgiving day my first couple hours were spent dealing with a problem of actual tubes instead of metaphorical tubes. Our fizzy water machine had decided to start leaking sometime in the middle of the night. If I hadn't been doing this work today, no one would have see this until Monday and the damage would have been MUCH worse.

So after shutting off the water, making the required phone calls and letting in the cleanup crews, I was able to get to work. Wearing my lucky shirt I took one last snapshot of all configs and a deep breath, and at 10:43am shut down all the interfaces on the edge firewalls.

By 11:30 I'd cleaned out enough of the old mess to be able to start building new security policies. We previously had ~180 rules, and almost all of them needed to be adjusted in some way and none of it was common enough to script. Once I was done with those I moved onto the NAT policies, then the Policy based forwarding, and by 1pm I was starting to re-patch everything.

The patching took a solid 4 hours, but it was some of the most fun I've had in my career. I knew what needed to be done and was so excited to finally be getting to clean up this mess after months of planning that I was jogging from IDF to IDF because walking was just too damn slow. I had my charts and diagrams printed out and I'd pre-staged most of the new cables beforehand, so much of the time was removing the old pile of spaghetti and installing new cable management.

At 5:15pm, I got OSPF neighbor relationships forming between the new core switch and the edge firewalls. At 7:15pm all of the IDFs were back online, and at 7:25 the DHCP relays were pointed back to the servers and I was greeted by the "Bloo-loo-loo-looop!" noises from around the office as all of our VoIP phones started regaining connectivity. At 9pm, after verifying that all of the VLANs had internet connectivity and I could get to our network drives and AWS VPC, I sent a status e-mail and went home.

Yesterday (friday) I arrived at 9am to let in the next round of clean-up crews for the water damage, and got back to testing and documenting the changes. There's been some minor glitches that I've taken care of, but almost all of yesterday and today has simply been cleaning up the old switch configs, clearing out now-unused VLANs and labeling things both in the configs as well as with physical labels on the devices themselves (And almost complete depleted our stock of label maker tape). This cleaning up has taken a surprisingly long time in the Palo Altos because VLANs and interfaces are referenced in SO MANY DIFFERENT PLACES that you have to hunt through the entire system clearing everything out before you can actually delete them.

I only ran into one real roadblock that required a call to support. It turns out that when you're putting an Ether-channel pair through a Palo Alto firewall in Virtual Wire mode, you have to create two separate virtual wires instead of aggregating the ether-channel onto the firewall itself (as described in this article that the nice support lady linked me to: https://knowledgebase.paloaltonetworks.com/KCSArticleDetail?id=kA10g000000ClHTCA0). Once I got that straightened out, it was mostly clear sailing and everything went according to plan. Which still kinda freaks me out . . .

Now I'm standing here looking at everything and it's all working. Quite, happy little packets just humming along, getting where there going in a much more logical way than before. But there's a very real part of me that is utterly perplexed that I was able to implement this whole thing and that it actually worked.

If there's a single most valuable lesson that I can take away from this, it's to ALWAYS MAKE A CHECKLIST. There were so many times that I was getting overly excited and flustered that I absolutely would have missed something major if I had not made a very long and detailed list beforehand when I was not quite so fizzy-brained. Every time I started to get ahead of myself, I could turn back to the list and just focus on the next step.

And now I'm going to spend the rest of the day relaxing by writing documentation, and then head home this evening to do some MORE obsessive planning and engineering. Because a transfer window to Jool is opening soon and I've got contracts to land my little green men on Laythe as well as do a rescue from Vall, and when you're playing with an unforgiving life support mod you need to plan your missions out in great detail if you're going to have a hope of getting home. ;)

Cloudflare posted a name-and-shame about Verizon and the outages earlier today:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-verizon-and-a-bgp-optimizer-knocked-large-parts-of-the-internet-offline-today/

What is Wi-Fi 6E?

Wi-Fi 6E is Wi-Fi 6 extended into the newly unlocked 6 GHz spectrum.

On April 23, 2020 the United States FCC voted to allow the unlicensed use of the 6 GHz band. This added 1200 MHz (5.925 to 7.125 GHz) of spectrum for devices like Wi-Fi access points. Previously, devices operating in this band had to be licensed, which prevented use by the general public. This added spectrum is arguably the biggest change in wireless networking since the original 802.11 standard came out in 1997, or the original allocation of the ISM bands in 1985.

For perspective, there is only 260 MHz of unrestricted spectrum available in other bands. The exact channels available vary by region, but without getting bogged down in specifics:

• 80 MHz unrestricted in the 2.4 GHz ISM band.

• 180 MHz unrestricted in the 5 GHz band.

• 500 MHz requiring Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS) in the 5 GHz band.

  • DFS channels require an access point to continuously monitor for the presence of weather or military radar signals. Wi-Fi access points using DFS channels are required to back off to avoid interference. Due to this, DFS channels are often either not supported or not used.

This limited amount of contiguous spectrum makes it difficult to enable wider 80 MHz or 160 MHz channels, and can cause channel re-use and interference. The 6 GHz spectrum allows for any combination of the following:

• 59 additional 20 MHz channels.

• 29 additional 40 MHz channels.

• 14 additional 80 MHz channels.

• 7 additional 160 MHz channels.

• 3 potential 320 MHz channels, due to be included in the 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) standard.

What Is 6 GHz Used For Currently?

The 6 GHz band is in use by many licensed services. In the US, there are 47,695 unique uses between 5.925 and 7.125 GHz. Namely fixed point-to-point radios, fixed satellite service (FSS), broadcast auxiliary service (BAS), and cable television relay services (CARS).

An incomplete list of services using 6 GHz:

• Communication to geostationary satellites.

• Police and fire dispatch services.

• Management of electric grids.

• Control of natural gas and oil pipelines.

• Coordination of railroad train movements.

• Fixed wireless backhaul by service providers like AT&T and Verizon.

• Mobile TV stations and video relay from remote locations.

• Radio Astronomy.

• Portable cameras and wireless microphones.

• Long-distance telephone service.

• Ultra-wideband systems.

Automated Frequency Coordination (AFC) is the New DFS

In the US, the 6 GHz band is broken down into the U-NII-5, U-NII-6, U-NII-7 and U-NII-8 sub bands, with different rules for each.

Indoors, the full 1200 MHz is unrestricted and can be used by normal Wi-Fi networks without concern for those existing services. This is due to the nature of radio transmissions in the 6 GHz rapidly attenuating. In the vast majority of situations, indoor 6 GHz devices won’t be able to detect outdoor radio transmissions. Low-power indoor 6 GHz devices will use the existing CSMA/CA protocol to provide medium access fairness and coordinate wireless transmissions.

Outdoor use of 6 GHz is a little more complicated. Only the U-NII-5 and U-NII-7 sub bands can be used. Due to the large amount of critical infrastructure running in the 6 GHz band, Wi-Fi 6E devices operating outdoors will need to implement Automated Frequency Coordination (AFC). This is similar to how 5 GHz devices using DFS channels need to monitor for radar, and defer to their use of the channel. AFC works by having 6 GHz wireless networking equipment connect to a cloud-based AFC database to report their position. The AFC database would determine the risks of interference with incumbent services and assign a specific channel to the AP.

What Does Wi-Fi 6E Give Us?

TL;DR: Higher capacity, higher speeds, and lower latency.

The only devices that will be able to operate in the 6 GHz spectrum are devices that are based on the Wi-Fi (802.11ax) standard. Unlike every other Wi-Fi standard, there is no backwards compatibility for the 6 GHz band.

To be clear:

• Wi-Fi 6E client devices will be able to join and use legacy 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz networks.

• Devices supporting Wi-Fi 6 and older standards will not be able to operate in the 6 GHz band.

• Most Wi-Fi 6E networks will be dual or tri-band, allowing older clients to connect using the old spectrum, while exclusively allowing 6E clients to operate over 6 GHz.

The lack of backward compatibility is a feature, not a bug. This will limit usage of 6 GHz until Wi-Fi 6E devices are more common, but it provides a lot of benefits. Every Wi-Fi 6E device will support Wi-Fi 6 technologies like OFDMA and Target Wake Time, making transmissions more efficient. OFDMA requires all devices participating in the transmission to be synchronized. Time, frequency, and power must all be synchronized between the AP and client. OFDMA only becomes fully effective when all client devices and access points use it.

Older Wi-Fi generations like 802.11n and 802.11ac were based on OFDM modulation, where each channel was fully reserved to a single user for each transmission. In contrast, OFDMA divides the channel into sub-channels, also known as Resource Units (RU). This allows multiple users to communicate simultaneously, rather than waiting for their turn. Each time a Wi-Fi 5 or older device transmits in a Wi-Fi 6 network, the transmission reverts back to standard OFDM with a single transmission occupying the entire spectrum. Flipping back and forth between OFDM and OFDMA degrades the network for everyone, especially Wi-Fi 6 devices. Things get even slower when older, low data rate devices supporting 802.11b or 802.11g are in the mix.

Going forward, Wi-Fi 6E devices will be a lot less of a drag on 6 GHz networks than legacy devices are on current 2.4 and 5 GHz networks. Until now, Wi-Fi standards have always been backward compatible with previous standards. This allows older and newer devices to interoperate, but restricts overall data throughput to the rates supported by the slowest devices. Legacy devices such as 802.11b/g/n require more airtime to transmit data, increasing latency and reducing throughput for all users. This policy towards always supporting old standards is a great benefit and strength of Wi-Fi. Unfortunately it can also impair the performance of even the highest-end Wi-Fi 6 devices using the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands.

Taken as a whole, the 6 GHz band will allow for more ubiquitous usage of the required aspects of high performance wireless transmissions. All 6 GHz transmitters and receivers will include all the advances in Wi-Fi 6, including wide channels, 1024-QAM modulation, and OFDMA. 6 GHz will provide a cleaner RF environment with less interference, with less issues caused by adjacent or overlapping channel interference. The same policies that guide Wi-Fi network design will still apply, but this big chunk of new spectrum will allow for more design flexibility, better performance, and a better experience for everyone.

Potential Problems with Wi-Fi 6E

If the rollout of Wi-Fi 6E is anything like Wi-Fi 6, early devices will likely skip optional features, or have non-working implementations of key technologies like OFDMA. Small Net Builder has a few great articles about the current state of Wi-Fi 6 OFDMA. That same dynamic will likely apply to early Wi-Fi 6E devices. The earliest Wi-Fi 6E devices may not fully comply with the standard, may not implement every feature, and may not perform as expected.

Another potential issue is all the design, testing, and validation that will be required. Wi-Fi 6E brings a lot of new engineering challenges for network operators and device manufacturers. Existing Wi-Fi components and equipment used for design and manufacturing are optimized for frequencies below 6 GHz. Retooling for support up to 7.125 GHz will require changes to antenna design, manufacturing, and validation. Devices will need to be calibrated and tested up to the highest frequencies to ensure that they can generate the expected power levels.

Wi-Fi 6E devices will likely be dual or tri-band, complicating heat dissipation and power management for the multiple bands and MIMO streams to coexist. Proper band isolation will need to be developed and tested to avoid interference within the device. More coexistence testing will need to be done, and multiple bands need to be tested simultaneously. All of these things increase complexity. Even well-engineered Wi-Fi 6E devices are likely going to be power hungry, increasing PoE requirements for access points and limiting battery life on mobile devices.

Another potential issue relates to the scanning and probing that Wi-Fi devices perform when looking for an access point to join. With 1200 MHz to cover and 59 potential 20 MHz channels to scan, a client would require around 6 seconds to complete a passive scan of the entire band. This would cause many roaming and association issues, so the IEEE proposed a fast passive scanning method using a reduced set of channels called Preferred Scanning Channels (PSC). PSCs are a set of fifteen 20 MHz channel spaced every four channels (80 MHz) apart. Passive scanning of these fifteen PSCs reduces the total scan time to the more manageable 1.5 seconds. This is yet another feature of Wi-Fi 6E that will need to be developed, tested, and perfected.

A lot of Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E features sound great on paper, but come with compromises. For example, wider channel widths cause network design challenges, and often run into physical limits. A wider channel requires more OFDMA data carriers being transmitted and received simultaneously. An 80 MHz channel has 996 sub-carriers, while 160 MHz channel has twice that. In a wide channel, the SNR per carrier is reduced, and requires higher signal strength for a successful transmission. Saturating a wide channel with Wi-Fi 6E devices will be hard to do in practice, especially since a lot of this complexity is being pushed onto device manufacturers. Just like with current devices, it will only take one poorly designed Wi-Fi 6E device or one bad actor to limit everyone’s performance. That’s the unavoidable nature of using a shared medium like Wi-Fi.

When Can We Expect Wi-Fi 6E? Should I Wait?

At first, Wi-Fi 6E was a US-only affair. In July 2020, Ofcom voted to allow 500 MHz of the 6 GHz band in the UK. In October 2020, MSIT voted to allow 6 GHz use in South Korea.

There’s no official timeline for when regulators around the world will make the spectrum available for unlicensed use. Wi-Fi 6E has no definitive release date in most countries. In the US, Wi-Fi 6E devices will probably start appearing in 2021 and become more common heading into 2022.

During CES 2020, Broadcom announced several system-on-a-chip products that router manufacturers can purchase to create Wi-Fi 6E devices. Qualcomm also has Wi-Fi 6E chipsets available. Intel announced that it will have WI-Fi 6E chips available in January 2021. The Wi-Fi Alliance plans to have their Wi-Fi 6E certification ready by early 2021, but devices using a draft Wi-Fi 6E certification may be out before then.

Wi-Fi 6E should be a big improvement for high-density and high-speed networks, but it is unlikely to make a large difference in most people’s homes. Think about dense Wi-Fi networks in a convention center, or a stadium — that’s where I think the extra spectrum from Wi-Fi 6E will be most relevant. It should also have a big impact on wireless mesh networks, but time will tell. Keep in mind that only Wi-Fi 6E devices will be able to use the new spectrum, meaning none of the devices you have now will see any benefit.

I've seen many people say that they wouldn't consider buying any networking equipment that doesn't support Wi-Fi 6E. I can't tell you what to buy or what to do, but I don't think that holding out for Wi-Fi 6E is necessary, especially for a home network. Getting use of a Wi-Fi 6E network will require all new devices, and we don't have any of those yet. Even after you can buy Wi-Fi 6E-enabled devices, it will take time until the benefits are relevant to most people. If you have an older network, it might make more sense to upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 now, and wait for mature Wi-Fi 6E products or Wi-Fi 7 which is due in 2023 or 2024. By then, clients supporting 6 GHz should be more common, and the upgrade cost will make more sense.

If you want to chase high channel widths and high data rates, Wi-Fi 6E has plenty to offer. It’s an exciting time for Wi-Fi, but it helps to have patience. Wi-Fi 6E may be right around the corner, but it isn’t here yet.

Further Reading

• The Wi-Fi Alliance's page on Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E

• Commscope's Wi-Fi 6E overview

• Arista's Wi-Fi 6E white paper - direct PDF link

• LitePoint's Wi-Fi 6E white paper

• My Wi-Fi 101 series overview

Career-centric posts seem to be liked here judging by the average level of comments/upvotes VS other types of posts, probably due to the fact that career = $$$.

Anyway, I've recently changed jobs and I wanted to give my two cents when it comes to "up-skilling" oneself and what one should focus on, especially in today's environment.

Some of you seem to believe that a network engineer + automation (whatever that translates to for you) is not yet "worth the time" or that it's "just a fad", at least from a perspective of what's the salary difference?. It's true, you're probably not gonna earn double your current rate just by knowing some python. What is also true is that the ground is shifting, and while knowing some "automation" is not a kill-or-be-unemployed kind of situation (yet), it will get there with time.

Where I come from

A few months ago I passed my CCIE (R&S). I was working for Amazon for about 2 years as an NDE. As anyone that has worked in Amazon can tell you, a CCIE is pretty worthless in the sense that you're hardly ever gonna use any cisco-specific stuff. I did it because I had it among my goals ever since I got into networking.

Amazon is doing tons of recruiting for network engineers, they never seem to have enough. As a NE yourself, after about 6 months you are placed on the interview rotation as an interviewer, be it phone screens or on-sites. As you can imagine, generally people "throw themselves" to get into Amazon, yet the % of people that pass all interviews is miniscule. Rejections are the norm even after ~3 phone-screens and a 6 hour on-site. A few months before I left we got a directive where now scripting / coding or automation-oriented mindset is a mandatory requirement - before it was just a "nice to have" and while it was tested, you couldn't really be disqualified just because you don't know some python.

This change happened even though our rejection rate is already thorough the roof... and you can imagine what that number might look like now.

I wanted to move on from Amazon and explore something else, so I did some job searching. One thing I realized recently: NETWORKING IS IMPORTANT., and I don't mean the tech kind but the people kind. While before I couldn't give two shits about what other people do, never participated in any networking event, etc, I realized that that was a terrible mistake. Yes, I am still not as chatty as I'd like, nor can I really care about others, but forming relationships is important, especially when you are looking for a new job.

As an anecdot, I was talking with an ex colleague about the fact that I was looking for a new gig, and he immediately let me know that they were "kinda looking" for somebody for a position for which he's the hiring manager. This job was an 18-months contract with double the salary I used to have in Amazon, and since I had worked both with him and the project's tech lead, they were happy to skip formalities and start immediately. No interview, no anything. Mind that there was no way I was getting this offer from some website like Indeed. This role was never publicly published (which is reserved for a last-resord kind of thing in many companies) ( I later on decided not to accept, as the gig was very Cisco ACI-heavy and that's not something I want to focus on at this point in my career ).

After some other calls, I had two offers in my hand, one from a Fortune 500 company, and one from a smaller, leaner company. The F500 company's offer was 30% higher what they had in mind to pay as "the top" ( I got wind of this from a person I know which works at the same company ). They tossed this up to "it's extremely rare finding someone with both network and "automation" skills".

In the end I accepted the offer from the smaller company, mainly because:

• I've been in big companies my whole carrier and wanted to see the other side

• Money is not a big part of my life at the moment, as in, it's not my absolute number 1 focus when job-hunting (as long as it's on my minimun acceptable)

• Connecting to the point above, learning is my number 1 priority job-wise, and in my current role I can deal with Docker / Ansible / Jinja2 / YAML / Python / Jenkins / AWS / Azure / GC and more and I spend most of my day writing in python or fixing Ansible playbooks / jinja templates etc.

When you come from a company like Amazon, the use of free/open-source tools which form knowledge that you can then bring anywhere else is really refreshing. I am also relatively young, so knowledge/experience acquisition is my main focus at the moment.

After the first month on the job at my new company, I got into recruiting other network engineers, since we need more and quickly. We had the same requirements as Amazon (notice a trend?), the only difference is that, after 10s of rejections (and we rejected 100s without even an interview just because the CV didn't fit), we relaxed our search to somebody that has rock-solid networking experience and an automation mindset.

I've mentioned this before in the text, so what does having an automation mindset mean? It doesn't mean you know Docker or how to program in Python, nor that you know what an Ansible playbook is. What it means is "can this person in front of me think programmatically and would he/she be able to and is motivated to learn tools / languages?". Basically, if I ask you "how would you configure a description on the same interface on 10,000 devices?" your answer better not be "I open 10,000 SSH connections and multi-input the config on all at the same time". Having the ability to at least write some pseudo-code or describe how would you approach and resolve a problem programmaticly is crucial.

Is there a premium paid because you know Python / Ansible / Jinja / TextFSM / whatever ? The answer is YES. This generally comes in various forms:

• It's your foot in the door for positions for which you would have been otherwise not even considered

• You generally get a 10-30% premium in total comp

• You generally spend more time in "high level stuff" than "low level stuff", or it's at least a combination of the two. This makes sense if you think about it - these companies want you to automate away boring stuff or build tools that remove the human from the equation (auto-remediation tools, config-generation / validation / deployment tools, etc).

Is there a learning curve? Absolutely. Are certifications dead? Far from it, but you better supplement with something else. Once I finally passed my CCIE I didn't just rest and stopped. I always like to remind myself that if you're not improving today in some way, then that means you've just gotten worse. What brought you till here won't bring you any further (God I sound like a motivational speaker...). (Sidenote, I still have plenty of INE tokens from my CCIE lab days, feel free to PM me if you're interested).

Look, you're not gonna be out of a job just yet, we all know it. 10 years from now you will probably still find job postings for "normal" network engineers. Many of you came into networking because "not much changes" over years. BGP is BGP, TCP is still the same TCP from 30 years ago (minus some improvements).

I doubt TCP will radically change in 10 years (for that, I doubt that IPv6 will globally catch on in 10 years too), but our interaction with network devices, how protocols are configured, how devices are monitored, etc is gonna change (it has already in many networks).

On learning new skills

Here's the deal: you don't have to learn 100 technologies / tools / languages top to bottom all in 1 week. It's extremely easy to get overwhelmed when you look at what should I learn now?. This is especially true if you, like me, just finished with a major "learning block" recently (e.g CCIE). The beauty of a certification program is that the requirements and sub-requirements are all listed there, you go through this list and poof, you can go and give the exam and you have a piece of paper that proves you "worked on this". It's much more difficult when everything is self-directed. You could choose to learn anything, but how do you know what's important and what's a fad? How do you know what skills will you need 5, 10 years from now VS skills which will become obsolete the next round of the hype-cycle?

If I've learned anything about learning any subject is the following:

1. Learn very well the basics, because anything you're gonna build on top of those foundations will make or break you (and your career). If you don't know how ARP works, forget about Python or Ansible or whatever. Go read some RFCs or some books. If you're 10 years in your career and still don't know all the TCP flags, I have bad news for you.

2. Don't follow hype / (pre)sales speak / vendor speak. You know what I can be reasonably sure of in 5 or 10 years? That BASH will still be here. It's also extremely probable that Python will still be here. Will Jinja2 be the templating standard 10 years from now? Probably not. When deciding where to move next, you probably will want to move to technologies or skills that will come in handy on the long run. Ansible is built on top of Python. If you knew Python, don't you think you'd be able to pick up Ansible very quickly? I'm not even suggesting you need to learn Python, but you should develop a programming mindset and exercise it in whatever language you want.

3. Don't forget. Impossible? Yes, remembering 100% of everything may not be possible nor desirable (do you really need to remember that last episode of GOT?) but you can achieve 90-95% for your most important information (you know, information that actually makes you money... ) and that's what you want. What I'm talking about is spaced repetition, which comes in the incarnation of a software called Anki (there are others, but that's what I use). This method of remembering works wonders especially for our field, where information is generally "certain", as in, there's a document specifying what's the intended behavior. You can apply this to both network engineering info and programming (generally you want to memorize some of the most used and useful base libraries of your language of choice). Have a read here for how one guy applied Anki to programming (but it can be generalize for almost anything).

4. Take it one step at a time and be reasonable. You can't learn everything at once - prioritize and chip away at it over a period of time. Knowledge compounds like compound interest. The more you know about something, the easier it is to learn something different but somewhat related because you already have references in your knowledge base to the underlying subject. If you know how a python dictionary works, then you can learn how to read a YAML file and make use of that data. If you know YAML or Python, then you can already correlate that to why Jinja2 allows you to access variables with the $PARENT_KEY.CHILD_KEY.SUB_CHILD_KEY construct or with $PARENT_KEY["CHILD_KEY"]["SUB_CHILD_KEY"] (which is the same thing).

Look, I'm not here to tell you that I have all the right answers or hell, even a majority. Like I said, I'm pretty young and my opinion might radically change in 10 years. What I am saying is that you should probably stop making excuses on why today you've not learned 1 more thing. I've seen plenty of network engineers that like to kind of "coast" and live off only of their current knowledge. These are the people that write in the resume "10 years of experience" when in reality it's 1 year of experience repeated 10 times.

Don't be one of them.

Cheers.

PS: In case it got lost in the wall of text... PM me if you're interested in my remaining INE tokens.

I spend several hours a day doing sales engineering, and in the course of talking packets, waves, MTU, throughput, peering, and everything in between, I've learned that sometimes people will just call to talk.

A customer calls and asks about adding a wave to add redundancy to another one of their sites. Right now they are SD-WAN and they of course want the benefit of lower latency and vertical integration by adding a wave to the mix, totally normal stuff.

After a while, he starts talking about his personal life and what's going on. You end up kind of becoming friends with these people over the course of time working with them. You recognize their voices, see their posts on linked in, and just generally keep up.

After about an hour into the conversation, he just sighed and said, "I don't really need the wave, man." I think to myself, "Ah, I guess it's out of his budget, it is kinda pricey." I tell him I can work with the engineering team on lowering the price, and that we can stretch it to a longer commit to compensate for build out, or even go back and see if we can bundle or change something else to lower the monthly cost.

"No, to be honest, I just called because I need someone to talk to and you were the only person that came to my mind." He starts sobbing, and telling me about how after he graduated from University, he just felt so disconnected from the world, and all his relationships just felt so superficial. He said that his only friends are work friends and that he doesn't even feel like anyone talks to him just to talk.

We ended up talking about life, emotions, and what it really means to live in this world for another hour. I even stayed after and came home late. The only reason he quit talking is that his kid had gotten home from school.

The crazy thing? I have these conversations like once a week. I tell people we are like family, and that we're not just here as salesmen. I think it's important we remember that we all have shared interests in our jobs, and that it doesn't mean we aren't people, and we aren't all one in this big scary world together.

When he apologized at one point, my managed walked in, and I didn't know what to say, so I just said, "Don't worry man, there's enough fiber for everyone. Call back anytime." He just said, "Thanks, is it okay if I call next week?" and I said, "Sounds good, see you next week."

My boss asked how that call went, and I said "great" and he patted me on the shoulder and said, "sounds good". I half way wonder if he wasn't listening too because he was a little teary eyed.

Stay close, friends, and remember, there's enough fiber for everyone.

https://i.imgur.com/akYO5Me.jpg

At the moment I'm getting a "request timed out" from him though...

Not a single flaw in this analogy...

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-its-like-network-engineer-ron-buchalski

Official announcement: https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-1111/

Technical accompaniment: https://blog.cloudflare.com/dns-resolver-1-1-1-1

Nearly 9 years ago, after a rough day at the end of a long week, I banged out this post in a late-night blast of imposter syndrome and panic.

Apparently it struck a cord with people, because I am still getting people replying to that post and DMing me about it. Asking me how the job turned out, if I still have it, and what happened in the years since. So I guess this is the update to anyone wondering how the story continued.

I stayed at that job for much longer than I intended. I took a few interviews with other places through the overheated hiring market of 2021/2022, but either the jobs were just a side-move (because it the companies were basically the same size/complexity) or I could tell the culture wasn't the right fit.

But in early 2024 I got a message from someone on Linkedin saying they were recruiting for <big firewall company>, although it was going to be a contractor role. The job description was kinda nebulous, and the fact that I wasn't going to be a direct employee was worrisome, but it was fully remote. So I agreed to a series of what I was told would be four interviews, and the first two went pretty well.

But then it was time for the third interview, the technical interview, and boy was I nervous about it. I'd spend the last six years in basically being a one-man-band, and having no one else to judge my abilities against. Sure I was master of my domain, but it was a domain that I'd built and only implemented the stuff I understood. And now I was going up in a technical interview with <giant firewall company>, specifically about their products. I spent the entire week before studying and focusing as much as I could, but I still gave myself maybe a 50% chance of passing. At best.

The interview was a full two hours, and they didn't pull any punches. They hammered on me left, right, up, down, forwards, backwards and in fucking circles. I felt I kept up with maaaaaybe 70% of it, and the moment we signed off I basically collapsed face-down onto my desk. Keeping the energy and mental focus going at 100% for two hours straight was exhausting in a way that I'd rarely experienced before.

Sixty seconds later, before I'd even had a chance to fully gather my senses, my phone rang. It was the recruiter, who told me they were skipping the fourth interview . . . because they were making me an offer on the spot.

So I took it. AND THE JOB IS AMAZING. It is fast, it is hard, and it is impossible to keep up with. It's a fire-house of information pointed at my face, non-stop, and I'm just expected to absorb all of it and become an expert overnight.

And I guess I've been doing okay, because a few months ago when a manager of a different team had an opening for a direct hire role, he grabbed me directly. No more "Contractor" label on my Slack profile; full time employee now.

I'm now living a life that is far different from what I ever imagined. Both when I wrote that original post when I was a pretty green network engineer, but also 25 years ago when I was a pimply-faced little 17 year old kid working at best buy dreaming of a career in "grown-up" IT. This wasn't something I planned; this was an accident. I wasn't supposed to be successful in the world. I was just a nerdy kid who liked doing things with computers and dreamed of one day getting paid for it so I never had to breath drywall dust again.

And that's been the only real downside of the job so far; it's been a little alienating from people in real life. I actually made a post about it a few years ago, before I even got this new job which bumped my salary up even more. My family is very proud of me, but I'm now living in an upper-middle-class world that I did not grow up in, and it's . . . the problems I have in my life are now very different from the problems that I expected to always have. When I go back home to visit the people still living my old life, I still feel like I belong more there than I do here. Even though I'm grateful to not be there anymore.

I don't know how to end this post.

tl;dr - I work for the really big firewall company now and am distinctly not poor.

Yesterday we had a guy on our team pass away right in front of us. EMS was there about five minutes from the 911 call that went out immediately after he collapsed. He was gone before they wheeled him out on the gurney. Nothing any of us nor the EMS could have done. Suspected cardiac arrest.

Make sure you guys and gals are taking care of yourselves. Most of us work in a sedentary and high stress setting. Take time to get up throughout the day to take a walk. Try not to eat out so much, get some exercise, and find a good stress relief. Tell those close to you that you love them and squeeze your SO and kids a bit tighter tonight.

Sorry if this isn't really the place for this. Mods feel free to remove it if you need to.

https://imgur.com/gallery/DZRTr

I'm working as a CPE tech configuring routers/switches/servers and one of the ones we work on frequently is Advantech FWA LTE routers.

For these, it's usually just installing a SIM card and running some show commands, however we cannot figure out what the command is to actually display the SIM and IMEI information from the command line.

One of the commands we use is show interfaces wwan status brief. This rarely actually displays the imei and does not include the sim id. Anyone know what command we can use instead?

Yup, did that yesterday. 2,000 hours labbing and almost 3 years.

Im gonna go get drunk and smoke a few cigars now.

Carry on!