Reflections on the year

December 30, 2013August 31, 2015 Josh Reichardt 12 Comments

It is the time of year again to reflect on some of the things that happened during 2013. As usual, it is impossible to predict what will happen in the future and what kinds of experiences will shape you and what kinds of difficult challenges you will encounter and overcome. Luckily in 2013 there weren’t any challenges that I wasn’t able to overcome in one way or another.

There was a lot that happened in the past year that is worth going over. The first main thing I’d like to mention is that I hit my 2nd full year of blogging, which was really exciting for me. I have nearly 100 blog posts published to date and I really feel like I am just getting started. I began to experiment a lot more with the format and content of the blog and I have found that to be enjoyable. I have also begun to experiment with different techniques to monetize the blog, which has been interesting to me as well. I think that it will be really fun to see what happens with all of the different ways the blog is growing in the coming year. One thing I would like to see more of are some unique perspectives from other sysadmin/IT bloggers because I feel like it will really spark some other areas of growth.

Other high notes of the year include my first trip to Cisco Live! which was a great experience, I learned so much from that conference and it wound up being a great trip. I have taken on more responsibilities in my current position. I have begun implementing some fun interesting techniques and projects as well, including a fully featured testing environment with load balancers, SAN, clustered Hyper-V, SQL, etc. That was been a great tool not only for myself and my own experience learning the technologies but has been a valuable tool for the organization as well to help prototype and test potential technologies. This past year has also been valuable from a networking standpoint, I took part in a full blown wireless upgrade project, I helped with the management and move forward plan with our current switches, and in general learned a ton of new stuff about networking technologies that I did not see myself learning, which has been valuable and fun for me.

While things went well for the most part there is always room for improvement. Areas of improvement for next year include more involvement in automation, for one. I am really getting a good taste now of automation and I think it will be huge for my career growth as well as a benefit to my current employer. I would also like to see myself involved in more (people) networking, whether it be through conferences or other user group gatherings. I think networking with other IT pros is something I need to continue to work on.

Finally, outside of work I have some other stuff I’m working on getting up off the ground that I’d like to mention. First, and most excitingly for me is my side business; I repair mobile devices, iPads, iPhones, Android, etc. The learning experience from that project has been great so far and I would really like to expand some of things I’m doing with it into the next year. Part of getting this up and going will be learning how to develop Android and iOS apps, building a repair tracking system, and learning much more of the nuances that go into running a business that I had no idea about before I started this project. Last but not least, I met my wonderful girlfriend. She has been a true blessing to me so far and I just wanted to get her a shout out while I am writing this up. So to bring things together here, I am really looking forward to all of the rewards and opportunities that go along with hard work and persistence.

There will be more of the same this coming year and I am excited for it. From career goals to personal projects, I would like to see myself continuing to learn, continuing to improve processes and continuing to become a person that can take on responsibilities and people can depend on to get things done. I know it will be hard work and won’t always be fun but I know it will be worth it. Next year should be fun, so until then have a happy new years!

Some quick tips for getting ahead

November 5, 2013August 31, 2015 Josh Reichardt 9 Comments

Do you want to get ahead in this field? In my experience in the industry, there are a lot of great ways to improve yourself and to put yourself in position to get ahead. One of the best ways is to show that you are interested in your craft. There are numerous ways to demonstrate this desire, and dedication; a simple yet great way to do so is by attending industry related conferences and networking events. Pay for these events as well as certification courses out of pocket if your employer is unwilling to do so. Paying for your own career betterment out of your own pocket shows your level of commitment to those around you that you may meet at these events as well as those that you work with. I guarantee you people will notice this. I would also like to mention that if you are interested in training, certification, or anything the will help you do your job better and employers aren’t willing to help pay for any of these opportunities then often times it is a sign that you have outgrown your current position or will be in the not so distant future.

Another great area to focus on is to never stop learning. This applies not only to IT but to everything that you do in your life. Taking the time to learn something new is a great way to help boost your career. Interested in business? Take a business class or at least start researching different aspects of business and find what interests you. Then leverage that newly found knowledge in every day aspects of your life. I am a firm believer in education overlapping and translating skills from one area to contribute to others. If you learn a seemingly unrelated skill you never know when and where it will be applicable and it will all contribute to furthering your education and improving your knowledge. It can be devotion to skills like Documentation, attention to detail, writing, programming, whatever it may be will help to improve and strengthen your IT skills, I promise. Many of these skills are things that I work on improving outside of my life in IT but certainly they contribute to the success I have experienced in my career.

The final tip I’d like to mention is doing things that others either aren’t willing to do or are not aware of doing. This is a more subtle point but I believe it is something that will separate people that want to be good at something from those that are content with where they are at in life. For example, many individuals in IT don’t like to leave their comfort zone for many things. Learn how to talk to people and network with others in the industry who have already discovered how to get ahead. They will give you so many great pieces of information and can potentially help you get into new positions as well. We all know that social skills are not a strong suit for many that are in the IT profession so learning how to talk to people is incredibly valuable. Yes it will feel awkward and unnatural at first but the more you do it and the more you practice it (just like anything else) the better you will get at it. And since it is so uncomfortable for many individuals they simply won’t attempt it because it is out of their comfort zone. There are many other examples of simple ways to get ahead but just by knowing how to leverage and utilize things like networking and being social will help your career more than you might realize.

I am taking a different approach from the usual subject matter, I have just found it difficult recently to find anything technically interesting enough to write about. I would love to cover more of these areas if there is any interest in the future, I think its an oft missed subject in the IT profession and I happen to like writing about it so hopefully I can get some positive feedback. As always, if you have anything that you find interesting or think would be a positive contribution let me know, I’m always looking for guest posters and guest content and I welcome the fresh perspective and ideas.

OpenFlow and the Future of Networking

October 9, 2013August 31, 2015 Josh Reichardt 9 Comments

OpenFlow is all the rage right now and since I just got done doing a product overview of it and its relation to the HP product line we just recently purchased, I thought I would get in a quick post about all of it while the topics and ideas are still fresh in my mind. So this post will be less of a technical post than usual and more of a detour about my thoughts on networking and the effect OpenFlow is having on it.

I am still trying to wrap my head around some of the key concepts and applications that OpenFlow has to offer but I think I am beginning to understand the core concepts behind it, and honestly I don’t understand all the OpenFlow hate and SDN bashing from other network professionals.

Even thought OpenFlow is a fresh concept for me I can already see potential benefits and possible use cases and I think that there is some great potential with SDN in general. There must be some interesting value here, otherwise there wouldn’t be so much interest by all of the heavy hitting networking industry leaders like IBM, Cisco, HP, Google, etc. collaborating and working on projects like OpenDaylight and Floodlight. Since the concepts and ideas behind OpenFlow are so new and are largely unexplored there is a very mysterious and exciting quality behind the technology and because of this I believe that creativity can help drive its development and adoption. The other nice part about OpenFlow is that it is an open standard so it can be developed and extended by whomever feels like participating or contributing (Cisco and its OnePK API and other vendor specific API’s are a different story) to the project and the code base. I am a huge proponent of Open Source and I feel like having an open standard creates better code and more opportunities for everybody involved, it doesn’t benefit one but rather the collective.

I also want to touch briefly on the technical side of OpenFlow for all the IT pros. Technology evolves and changes all the time, we’ve seen it time and again in our industry. If you are stubborn to the point that you won’t dedicate the time to learn something new just because its not what you are familiar with then you probably won’t have much of a future in IT and ops or at least a future going forward in the networking world. Sure you’ve built a career on your niche ability and skill set to solve complex and challenging networking problems, but that is not a unique quality. All IT professionals build their careers on their ability to do this (at least the good ones I’ve seen so far), and every other area of IT is subject to these same types of issues that new technology brings. In my opinion the haters just need to grow up and accept the fact that they will need to remodel their skills from time to time. It’s not that big of a deal. And besides, OpenFlow actually looks promising and looks like it will be a great tool for IT pros to utilize to solve interesting problems.

Rather than complain and find fault, embrace OpenFlow, because whether you like it or not, it will have its place in the networking world moving forward.

The Cisco Live! 2013 Experience

July 1, 2013August 31, 2015 Josh Reichardt 1 Comment

I recently returned from my trip to Orlando and the Cisco Live! 2013 conference this year, so I thought I would take some time to reflect and go over the experience and report on some key highlights I was able to take away from this years conference. This year was my first Cisco Live! event and I have to say I was really impressed with the experience as a whole. There were maybe a few gripes here and there but overall the event in its entirety was pretty awesome. So in this post I just want to discuss some of the details of the event further. I don’t have a lot else to report on so I will go ahead and get get going, and begin by going over some of the Cisco specific trends that I noticed. Of course this is all a subjective experience and some may disagree but here is what I felt to be generally true throughout much of the event.

Technological takeaways (in my personal experience).

Cisco is hedging a huge bet that SDN is going to take off in the immediate future.
Mobility is going to continue to explode and increase the diversity of networks so we need to prepare and build our network infrastructures to handle the drive towards mobility.
Cisco really drove home the concept of the future connectedness of devices by pushing their idea of “the internet of everything”. This is the concept that technological experiences will converge and be tightly coupled. One example that was presented was a seamless experience at a hotel. The real chunk of info to take away is that as technology continues to evolve we will need to adapt networks to suit these needs.

In general, I felt these were the main drivers and ideas for a lot of what will be happening in the future of networking, at Cisco and abroad. Obviously Cisco was there to push their products so I will go ahead and cover a few of the key ideas and products that Cisco believes will help drive these future changes

The maturation of the ISE platform. This will be the convergence of a number of disparate technologies Cisco currently offers into a unified identity and access platform, this will correlate with the increase of mobile and the BYOD movement.
The SDN components. Essentially this is Cisco One line of products focused on the evolving SDN space. This includes the OnePK toolkit for OpenFlow development, the One controller for OpenFlow traffic control. There were more SDN components, I just can’t think of them right now.
New product introductions and evolutions. The Nexus 7710 and 7718 for scaling out the data center, the 6800 series to augment the capabilities of the 6500 series, improving performance, scale and speed.

There were many more announcements and products covered but to me, these aforementioned products were the main focus and effort. If I missed anything you thought was important let me know. Now that I have the big announcements covered I’d like to cover some of the other key highlights from the event.

The Good

Organization. Everything from hotel shuttles, information kiosks, to a very helpful event staff. I must say the event planners and organizers really thought things through (for the most part).
Deep dive sessions. The presenters were often the people who helped create the RFC’s or were responsible for writing the code. You can’t get much closer to the source than that. The few presenters I spoke with were all super nice people as well.
Free certification tests. This ranged all the way from CCNA all the way up to CCIE tests.
Universal Studios. Free food, amazing rides, it was just a great all around experience. Plus free booze, so you know, that was pretty awesome.
Journey. Do I even need to say more?
World of Solutions. This was their product and demo floor. Other than the fact that I sold my sole, I learned a lot here and was introduced to a ton of new products I otherwise would not have known about, plus I got about 20 t-shirts. Also free booze here as well.
Keynote speech by sir Richard Branson. It took on the format of a question/answer type interview, it was really cool to hear Branson talk and answer questions so candidly. No free booze but I gained some respect for him.

The Bad

The mobile apps. It almost seemed like this was an afterthought because much of the functionality either didn’t work at all or was crippled. It was a good idea but the execution was lacking, I’m sure this will get fixed next year.
The website was down the first day, due to a load balancer that broke. This caused a lot of confusion and problems, but I was able to print my schedule out at a kiosk so it wasn’t a huge issue for me.
The shuttle to and from Universal was a disaster for me. Many others didn’t experience this issue but it took about 45 minutes to get to the theme park and at least an hour to get back to my hotel. I can’t really complain looking back but it was frustrating at the time.

I would definitely recommend that anybody responsible for supporting their network at any capacity to attend this event at least one time. One nice thing about this event is that it doesn’t matter what skill level you are at, all ranges were covered and represented. I am lucky that I was able to attend this year and am very thankful. This was a great experience, it was incredibly eye opening and the positive effect it had on my own thought process can’t be overstated. I think that it will benefit me throughout my career and hopefully can be used to create opportunities for myself in the future.

Creating new a instance-store AMI for Amazon AWS EC2

June 23, 2013August 31, 2015 Jake Alheid 5 Comments

This is a HOWTO build your own instance-store backed AMI image which is suitable for creating a Paid AMI. The motivation for doing this HOWTO is simple: I tried it, and it has a lot of little gotchas, so I want some notes for myself. This HOWTO assumes you’re familiar with launching EC2 instances, logging into them, and doing basic command line tasks.

Choosing a starting AMI

There’s a whole ton of AMIs available for use with EC2, but not quite so many which are backed by instance-store storage. Why’s that? Well, EBS is a lot more flexible and scalable. The instance-store images have a fairly limited size for their root partition. For my use case, this isn’t particularly important, and for many use cases, it’s trivial to mount some EBS volumes for persistant storage.

Amazon provides some of their Amazon Linux AMIs which are backed by EBS or instance-store, but they’re based on CentOS, and frankly, I’ve had so much troubles with CentOS in the past, that I just prefer my old standby: Ubuntu. Unfortunately, I had a lot of trouble finding a vanilla Ubuntu 12.04 LTS instance-store backed image through the AWS Console. They do exist, however, and they’re provided by Canonical. Thanks guys!

Here’s a list of all the 12.04 Precise official AMIs:
http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/releases/precise/release/

Conveniently, there’s a Launch button right there for each AMI instance. Couldn’t be easier!

Installing the EC2 Tools

Once you’ve got an instance launched and you’re logged in and sudo‘d to root, you’ll need to install the EC2 API and AMI tools provided by Amazon. The first step is, of course, to download them. Beware! The tools available through the Ubuntu multiverse repositories are unfortunately out of date.

The latest EC2 API tools can be found here:
http://aws.amazon.com/developertools/351

The latest EC2 AMI tools can be found here:
http://aws.amazon.com/developertools/368

I like to copy the download link and use wget to download them rather than scp‘ing them from my client machine.

sudo su
mkdir -p /tmp/ec2-tools
cd /tmp/ec2-tools
wget -O ec2-api-tools.zip 'http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html/ref=aws_rc_ec2tools?location=http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-api-tools.zip&token=A80325AA4DAB186C80828ED5138633E3F49160D9'
wget -O ec2-ami-tools.zip 'http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2-downloads/ec2-ami-tools.zip'

Before we can install the EC2 tools, we need to install a few packages that our vanilla Ubuntu is lacking, namely zip and Java.

apt-get install zip
apt-get install openjdk-6-jre-lib
apt-get install ruby

Once we have those installed, we need to unzip our packages and install them to the /usr/local directory.

unzip "*.zip"
find . \( -name bin -o -name lib -o -name etc \) | \
    xargs -I path cp -r path /usr/local

Lastly we have to set the EC2_HOME and the JAVA_HOME environment variables for the EC2 tools to work properly. I like to do this by editing /etc/bash.bashrc so anyone on the machine can use the tools without issue.

echo -e "\nexport EC2_HOME=/usr/local\nexport JAVA_HOME=/usr\n" >> /etc/bash.bashrc

Once we log out and back in, those variables will be set, and the EC2 tools will be working.

# exit
$ sudo su
# ec2-version
1.6.7.4 2013-02-01

Customizing Your AMI

At this point, your machine should be all set for you to do whatever customization you need to do. Install libraries, configure boot scripts, create users, get your applications set up, anything at all. Once you’ve got a nice, stable (rebootable) machine going, then you can image it.

Bundling, Uploading and Registering your AMI

This is actually pretty easy, but I’ll still go through it. The Amazon documentation is fairly clear, and I recommend following along with that as well, as it explains all the options to each command.

Here’s the official Amazon documentation:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/creating-snapshot-s3-linux.html

Create an S3 bucket. This is where you’ll upload your AMI images. If you already have a bucket, you can use that.
Download your AWS security certificates and copy your API keys. They can be found here: https://portal.aws.amazon.com/gp/aws/securityCredentials
Copy your credentials to the instance you’re going to image. First, create a directory to store them in on your instance:
```
mkdir -p /tmp/cert
chmod 777 /tmp/cert
```
Then copy them from the place you downloaded them on your client machine, to your instance:
```
scp -i <keypair_name> pk-*.pem cert-*.pem ubuntu@<host_name>:/tmp/cert
```

Bundle your instance image. The actual image bundle and manifest will end up in /tmp.

cd /tmp/cert
ec2-bundle-vol -k <private_keyfile> -c <certificate_file> \
    -u <user_id> -e <cert_location>
cd /tmp

Upload your bundled image. Note that <your-s3-bucket> should include a path that is unique to this image, such as my-bucket/ami/ubuntu/my-ami-1, otherwise things will get very messy for you, because an image consists of an image.manifest.xml file and many chunks which compose the image itself, which are generically named by default when you use this tool.
```
ec2-upload-bundle -b <your-s3-bucket> -m <manifest_path> \
    -a <access_key> -s <secret_key>
```

ec2-register <your-s3-bucket>/<path>/image.manifest.xml -n <image_name> \
    -O <your_access_key> -W <your_secret_key>

That’s it! You should be all set with a new AMI, which should also show up in the AWS Console.