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.

Evo 4G Customization Goodness

May 13, 2013August 31, 2015 Josh Reichardt 13 Comments

Since my initial rooting and unlocking project last weekend I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the shiny new ROM I have installed and how awesome it is. So now that I have the taste for flashing custom ROM’s, I wanted to see what else was out there. I did some digging and learned (to my happy surprise) that the Evo 4G, or the “OG” as community members refer to it as, is still alive and well, with a very talented community and very active user base. Especially for a device that is nearly 3 years old.

If you missed my original ROM flashing post you can view it here. That should get you up speed.

Custom ROM’s can be confusing and maybe a bit intimidating at first but once you start to wrap your head around the concept then things get much easier. If you have any questions let me know and I will do my best to help explain things as best I can (from my own understanding of how it all works at this point). I am certainly new to this as well but am quickly beginning to understand the power and draw behind custom ROM’s, especially for tinkerers and people that are interested in DIY tech projects, there is really a whole world out there to go explore for this type of stuff. I would take a look at XDA Developers forum for a good place to get started on many of these topics.

I am working on putting together a list of the latest and greatest ROM’s that I have stumbled across since my initial flash using the MazWoz Jelly Bean ROM last week. I will also try to offer some perspective and comparisons between these custom ROM’s to help you choose which one will suit your needs and will work best in your use case. All of the ROM’s that I have been testing are currently all 4.2.x (Jelly Bean) and are all fantastic, so if you are having trouble picking one out I would advise that you just pick one. More than likely it will be a good fit. The only difference between many of these are small subtleties such as specific themes, customization options, look and feel and a few packaged apps here and there. So for example, Slim Bean offers a UI “pie controls” that aren’t built in to some of the other ROM’s. But for the most part many of these ROM’s are using a lot of the same “stuff” in the background. There are probably more out there but I will just be covering the most popular and most active ROM’s that I cam across, so let’s go ahead get started.

MazWoz – http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1947452

This is a great ROM and the first custom ROM that I tried. Nearly everything is working currently, it is certainly stable enough for every day use IMO. It did a hot reboot on me once and the camera was a little bit on the glitchy side, there were some strange GUI effect glitches every now and WiMax is broken (which won’t get a fix it doesn’t look like but who cares) but otherwise worked flawlessly, it is very snappy and responsive, it provides a buttery smooth experience. I would highly recommend giving this ROM a shot since it is both stable and smooth. It isn’t quite there 100% on all the new Jelly Bean features but it is getting there and is under active development by its creator and maintainer. The latest release was about a month ago so hopefully there will be an update to provide some of these niceties in the near future.

Slim Bean – http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2217412

Currently testing this ROM out. So far so good, it is fast and everything I’ve tried seems to be working correctly. This ROM is designed to be light weight and snappy, so only basic themes, look and feel and apps although I will say that after booting initially it felt a very tiny bit slower than the MazWoz ROM but this slowdown was still very tolerable. I suspect there may have been issues since it was trying to sync up and download things in the background, because everything has been working much more smoothly after the everything is in sync. The camera works slightly more fluidly than the MazWoz camera and there do not appear to be any other noticibly odd glicthy behaviors with the GUI. Other initial findings were that there is no WiMax (again expected) and no front camera. This ROM is very smooth and there is support for facial recognition and unlock which is pretty slick. There are some other cool features baked in such that other ROM’s do not offer such as “The Real Dark Slim (TRDS)” which is basically a customization engine for this particular ROM as well as Slim PIE and a few other unique customizations for this ROM which allow for a more fine tuned experience.

Cyanogenmod 10.1 – http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2244061

This is the defacto for custom ROM’s currently, it easily has the largest user and developer base and its latest version has been ported over to the Evo 4G. This is pretty much the most complete package as far as custom 4.2.x ROM’s go. It has basically every standard feature that comes along with this version of Android as well as a ton of tweaks and improvement, including pie controls and speed/optimization improvements and other nice goodies. There is no official release for this build because this current port literally just happened not more than a few weeks ago but I’m sure the word will spread quickly. So far I have liked this release for the most part, there are some issues though, such as a little big of glitchiness as with the other releases I have tried, the swype style keyboard doesn’t work all the time, the launcher (trebuchet) crashed ones, no front camera, some of the camera options aren’t perfect either and there is no WiMax support. These are really just small gripes though and outside of that it is snappy and also probably the smoothest ROM I’ve tried so far. It has some slick features built in including a custom launcher, file manager and media player, as well as some additional themes and widgets built in which are a really nice touch. The CyanogenMod is an all around good experience and with all of the little additions and bells and whistles built in has been my favorite ROM so far.

AOKP – http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2257194

This is one of the newer projects out there but it is gathering steam and the community as well as developers have really worked hard to make this ROM very nice. The features of this ROM are on par (some may even say better) than Cyanognmod and this ROM certainly delivers so very nice customization options as well as a stable and fast platform. I have only recently tried this ROM out myself yet so I can’t report on all of the issues that it has other than the standard issues that all of these ROM’s suffer from. No front camera, no WiMax, some weird camera issues, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary. I have really liked the quickness of this ROM so far, I’d say it is on par or better than Slim Bean and offers a really nice experience overall and the ability for a lot of customization. I would definitely recommend trying this ROM out. The only caveat for getting this ROM to work correctly is that you need to partition your SD card prior to flashing, otherwise you will suffer from boot loops which caught me originally. Other than that, it is pretty straight forward to flash and use.

Evervolv – http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2172323

This one is worth a mention as well but seems to be losing some of its previous favor amongst the community as of late (at least as far as I can tell, I could be totally wrong about this though). It seems like a lot of ROM’s are built using much of Evervolv’s code but the project itself isn’t quite as popular as it was at one time. I haven’t tried this ROM out for myself yet, I just found that it was worth a mention because of its support for the Evo 4 G. I might come back and update this post if I ever switch and try this ROM out, but I just can’t get away from Cyanogenmod right now.