Kurt Bales on Network Janitor

A New Year, A New Job and New Challenges

Mon, 27 Jan 2014 09:29:40 +0000

Well by the time I get around to clicking “Publish” on this post it will no longer be a secret, and you don’t know how hard its been for me not to talk about this in overly public forums.

As some of you may have heard, after five months of interviews and immigration paperwork, I have accepted a new role with Juniper Networks as a Sr Data Center* Technical Marketing Engineer. This role will see me move to the San Francisco Bay Area in the next week or so, and be based directly out of the Sunnyvale office for at least the next two years.

On Python, Networks and the py-junos-eznc library

Fri, 29 Nov 2013 03:05:41 +0000

One of my recent forays into Increasing the Awesome has involved learning about NETCONF and the Python programming language. I was lucky enough to spend some time with Jeremy Schulman during my trip to Sunnyvale for the Juniper Ambassadors Summit, and he introduced me to the new py-junos-eznc Python library he has been working on. I had spent a little bit of time earlier in the year looking at the original Ruby library, and I was amazed at how much thought had been put into this new library - obviously Jeremy’s learned a lot on the way!

MrsJanitor's Aus-Some Tour of SFO / SJC

Fri, 06 Sep 2013 02:08:52 +0000

Well I just got my itinerary for my trip to Sunnyvale for the Juniper Ambassador’s Summit in October and my wife and I have decided to spend an extra couple of days either side to get out and see the sites. We will be arriving in San Francisco at 11am Sat 5th of October and flying out around 11pm on Friday 12th, and we are looking to fill our schedule!

This is my wife’s first trip to the US, and I know she wants to get out and about and see things (also probably while Im in conference too). I know her list includes seeing the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz… oh… and… “The Full House House”.

Software Defined Data Centres and the blending of cultures

Tue, 23 Jul 2013 13:50:29 +0000

As some of you may know, I have spent a fair amount of my time in the last few years designing and improving multi-tennant hosting environments. Each revision attempts to learn from the mistakes of the previous iterations, as well as bundle in new features and “advancements” from each of the different vendors in the stack.

New offerings on the storage fronts, developments in the server space in the form of the boom of virtualisation, and the simple existence of the network amongst the fact that none of these technologies changed the existing/fundamental laws of networking.

Vendor mandated certs only degrade integrity

Wed, 10 Jul 2013 13:54:40 +0000

I dont doubt that vendors have a tight line to walk when it comes maintaining their brand integrity. To build up a skill set in the market the certification teams put in many weeks developing a program that is relevant, useful and achieves the goals required. Followed by countless hours reviewing each of the certifications regularly to ensure integrity. There is the added benefit that these certifications build of community of loyal followers - The Cisco and VMWare certification programs are evidence to this.

The Smartest Guy in the Room

Mon, 08 Jul 2013 11:51:06 +0000

There is one thing that anybody who has been in a room with me longer than 5 minutes can tell you - I am not a smart guy! I have lots of smart friends. I am not one of them. Sometimes I feel like I’ve done more stupid things, more often than I would like to admit, and its only that I have been stupid enough often enough that I have eventually learned “dont do that!”.

On accents, colloquialisms and proprietary extensions

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 13:28:11 +0000

I may not be the most “travelled” person in the world, but over the past couple of years I have managed to find myself in several places across Asia, the Pacific Islands and also the US. One thing has always stood out - Speaking the same language is the hardest part of travelling! Now when I travel to parts of Asia and Im dealing either in hand gestures or with somebody trying their very best speak English (Their English is 1000x better than my Cantonese or my Khmer), and we both make allowances for the difficulty of not speaking the same language.

Increase the Awesome

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:44:54 +0000

I’m sitting at my desk right now (9pm Sydney time), waiting for my 3am change window that I need to be onsite at the data centre for. Now I am supposed to be working on a presentation I am giving on Friday entitled “Automation, Orchestration, and SDN”. I’ve been given about 20 minutes to cover these topics, so I’m spending quite a bit of time trying to get the right mix of content without geeking out too far for the intended audience (C-levels, project managers and lead engineers).

Eventually - My JNCIE-ENT Success!

Wed, 22 May 2013 01:45:26 +0000

Finally… it was bound to happen. My three year journey is complete.

It was about this time last year that I posted about my second JNCIE-ENT lab attempt, and sadly it didn’t go the way I wanted it to! Due to work commitments I was not going to be prepared to sit the 2012 Q3 round of lab offerings, so I resolved to sit the December / January round.

I picked up my studies again and worked on my weak areas noted during my first two attempts. I paid particular attention to areas of multicast and switch security as these two topics were areas of weakness for me last time. I was lucky enough to work on a project at the end of last year that included nearly 1000 ports of 802.1x with dynamic VLAN allocation, so that proved to be an excellent “lab environment” for me.

The VAR-y good upsides to being a consultant!

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 13:04:39 +0000

Earlier today Ethan Banks wrote a really good blog posts about “Thoughts on Working as a Consultant for a VAR”. I found his point of view quite interesting and I will say I can understand his points. I can also say that I would rather be a consultant than a full time engineer at a customer site. As a little bit of background I have spent most of my career working as a consultant. I did do a two year stint as network operations manager for a wireless ISP which itself was quite fast paced, but other than that Ive work as a consultant in one form or another.

Midnight in Silicon Valley

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 07:19:49 +0000

The Setup

So there I was, setting up my “command centre” for the 15 hour flight from Sydney to San Jose via San Francisco. I had my Macbook and my iPad fully charged, as well as ye olde print book ready just in case. I idly flipped through the inflight entertainment guide to see what movie would be playing on the main cabin display.

“Midnight in Paris” ? What’s this rubbish? Oh… Woody Allen… right… yeah… that’s just what I need :(

Be My Valentines

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:11:27 +0000

Im not sure how many of you follow my wife, @MrsJanitor, on Twitter but we met 7 years ago today.

When I asked about our plans for today she surprised me with some information. Ever the romantic I decided to publicly share my love, and thus I present you:

And to show just how much she “gets me” her only reply was:

New Year, New Layout!

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 07:04:15 +0000

Well, now that we’re into February, I guess I should probably do a post about the new website layout I worked on over the Christmas break. Hopefully if your viewing this from my website, as opposed to via an RSS feed, you notice my new theme as well as the amazing new logo provided by Stijn from Studio Stayne.

I approached Stijn in November about some design ideas I had for a logo for the blog, asking very non-creative questions with some pretty broad strokes ideas of what I was after. Within a couple of days he had presented me with a handful of options that were all unique, yet still managed to meet my design “spec”. Im not good at making decisions, but after some ideas back and forth about the things I liked I received several more workshopped ideas taking the best bits of each design. The fact that I am not very creative is probably obvious given the layout of my blog for the previous two years, but taking some advice from Stijn and incorporating his selection of colour scheme into the theme I had been testing out really helped me make the right decisions. I cannot guarantee that the content of my blog posts will get any better, but it certainly will look a lot better while you’re here ;)

On the Premature Death of Spanning Tree and the Indiscriminate Killing of Canaries

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 14:29:36 +0000

I have a bee in my bonnet. After my last post full of love and bromance, this one is full of hate and vitriol - and I don’t apologise! We have all seen many presentations on each vendors latest and greatest “fabric” technologies over the past 18 months. It doesn’t matter which vendor, whether the presenter is sales or tech, or even enterprise or service provider focused - at some point almost every one declares that their solution is “the end of spanning tree”. It gets worse when they actively advise that you do not run spanning tree in your environment.

Mentoring your way to better career happiness

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 13:03:46 +0000

Yesterday was possibly one of the proudest days in my professional life. My very good friend Anthony Burke sent me a text message just after 9am to tell me that he had passed his JNCIA-Junos exam. This is a close tie with when he earned his place as a delegate to Network Field Day 4 back in October.

So why am I so proud about this? Well Anthony and I have become great friends over the past 18 months all through the magic of social media. One day for no reason (as is the way of things) we just started talking. Tweets became skypes and in January, even though we had only ever met face to face once, my wife and I drove the 10 hour trip to Melbourne to attend his wedding. (Sitting at table answering the question of “So how do you know Anthony?” with “Oh. From the Internet” was a humorous experience)

Pessimistic Engineering

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 07:43:55 +0000

I don’t know about you, but I am regularly told “You worry too much” or “You don’t need to worry about that”. Sometimes its “What are the chances of that ever happening?”. These are things that Ive heard from many people over the years and the best I can come up with is:

"That's what you pay me for! Im here to think of the worst case scenario and then mitigate against that.".

This is usually followed by confused looks from those around me who do not seem to grasp what I am getting at here.

Juniper Lab Experiences - My second attempt at JNCIE-ENT

Sun, 27 May 2012 04:17:01 +0000

As many of you know, I had the honour and good fortune of being able to take part in beta testing the JNCIE-ENT lab in August of 2011. The day completely wiped me out and I was walking around in a daze for the remainder of that week. While I knew the technologies I was unprepared for the time-management skills required to pass this lab. Needless to say it was no surprise when I received my fail-mail advising me that I was unsuccessful.

Of all good things...

Mon, 21 May 2012 14:11:13 +0000

Well it appears that I am well on my way to holding onto the title for two years running, and once again, I haven’t posted anything for a couple of months. There have been a lot of changes going on around here in the past few months which have really taken me away from my “janitorial duties”.

There are three key items that I would like to take the time to update everyone on:

SlackArse of the Year - 2011

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:11:13 +0000

Hey All,

I know I have kind of been MIA for the past 3 months. Ivan reminded me recently that I haven’t actually published a single post since September, so I wanted to give a brief “status update”.

The last couple of months have included the following:

Network Field Day
Meeting some of my “Industry Heros” (Read ‘Rockstars’)
My wife spent 3 months living 12 hours away, teaching at a remote Aboriginal Community.

Pin the taildrop on the NetDonkey

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 11:38:48 +0000

Hey everyone, this is just a short blog post to let you know that my good friend, Nick Ryce (@NetDonkey) has moved his blog over to taildrop.net. He has recently featured as a guest blogger with Juniper EMEA where he has written a post on his certification path towards his JNCIE-ENT.

Nick was my “Study Buddy” for the JNCIE-ENT lab preparation and we have been bouncing design ideas an strategies off each other for over a year now. Make sure you add him to your RSS feeds :)

Wholesale Virtualisation and Selective QinQ

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 12:16:54 +0000

Recently I have been working on a solution to provide Wholesale Access to hosted VMs. Several of my customers have “Cloud Environments” - call it IaaS, virtualisation, a fad or whatever, this is something that I have been asked to come up with a solution for more than once.

To explain the requirements outlined in this article, I should give a little background on the design requirements and constraints. For some of my customers the standard build is to include 2x VLANs for each Customer - a Live VLAN, and an Internal/Backend network. If the customer has more than one VM in a cluster then all servers will share these VLANs. Unfortunately this quickly runs through the available VLANs (And we love that the Nexus 5k only supports 512 vlans). This limited the number of customers in a single VM cluster, due to VLAN limitations inherent in Data Centre switches.

Banished from Priv15

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 12:32:00 +0000

I was recently called into a new customer’s network to help recover some passwords on some Cisco switches and to map out the network structure. Unfortunately nobody had any idea of the last time the switches had had their configs saved or even when the last time the switches had been power cycled. From what I can gather the previous IT guy didnt leave any information for those who followed.

My favourite tool in my toolbag!

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 05:00:17 +0000

It’s seems to be the craze this week to write all about our tool bags. Stretch wrote an article on it, followed by Jeff Fry’s blog post and Tony Mattke over at Router Jockey. Not to be out done (and ever the trend setter) Jennifer Huber wrote her post 18 months ago!

So I guess to be just like the cool kids, I should write a post about my tool bag. Well I was going to, then I realised that despite how nerdy we all really are, there a limit to how many pictures of screwdrivers, cable testers and multimeters that we can actually all look at. Yes I carry the usual sorts of cables, screwdrivers, multimeters and crimping kit. I used to take my Leatherman everywhere until a run in with Airport Security on the way to Cisco Live in Melbourne (a moments silence please!).

Finally - I am a swimming pool!

Tue, 17 May 2011 15:01:40 +0000

Ok all, Im going to let out a secret. Long ago when I was a small child (long before I dreamed of being a janitor), when people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would answer:

"I want to be a swimming pool".

Cute, no? I guess not, but that never stopped my folks from telling it to everyone of my friends. In fact my Dad put that in his speech he made at my wedding. Usually I would go all red in the face, but denying it was pointless.

You can't buy Innovation

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 14:35:14 +0000

Last weekend I was interviewing a potential new staff member for a job we have going, and we started discussing various vendors strengths and weaknesses. I put forward that I would question buying hardware from a vendor who just copies everyone else and doesn’t innovate on their own undertaking.

The response from one of the people present was that you can buy innovation (eg Cisco buying back Nuova, HP buying 3Com and thus H3C). I didn’t respond at first to this statement because I wasn’t really sure how I felt. After some thought I have decided how I feel.

Introduction to Data Centre 3.0

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 16:00:09 +0000

So I woke up this morning to a couple of people on twitter talking about my Data Centre 3.0 presentation from NZNOG in January. I was really confused why people would all of a sudden start talking about this 2.5 months after it was presented. As I was leaving work tonight I checked my RSS feeds to see that Greg Ferro had posted a new article to his blog with a link to the video recording of that presentation.

First Step Down - Written Complete

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:57:35 +0000

I havent blogged at all for March (and this is only a very brief one) because I have been very busy studying and it seems to have paid off! I managed to get the first step towards my CCIE R&S exam out of the way last week - I passed my CCIE Written exam :)

I made the commitment back in December to sit the exam while I was at Cisco Live Melbourne 2011. If you have been following any of my tweets so far this year you may have noticed that I have spent nearly as many days out of the country as I have in. My work travel schedule was pretty hectic for January and February and I didnt have as much time dedicated to study as had hoped.

Multi-Vendor Networking - The Two Edged Sword

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:30:45 +0000

A couple of weeks back, when we recorded Episode 33 of Packet Pushers Podcast, one of the items we had on the list of topics to discuss was that of multi-vendor networks and the recent Gartner report on the topic.

Due to various reasons this topic was taken off the list, but I still had a few thoughts on the topic so I decided to write this blog post to discuss some of them.

Proprietary Cometh before the Standard

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 06:09:52 +0000

Driving home the other night I was listening to the latest episode of the podcast “Coffee with Thomas”. This episode had our host, Thomas Jones, interviewing Steve Chambers of ViewYonder (and also a history of great vendors!). During the interview, Steve made the following comment:

It amazes me that people criticise Cisco for not be standardised on things that are brand new, as if the standards bodies are innovators. That is not their job. They follow up after things have been invented.

This statement took me back at first, and I was about to write it off as protecting your own team, but the further I drove (I have a very long commute - about 100km each way) the more I thought about this statement and the evidence - both historical and current.

Cambodia: Networking in a world of contrasts

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 01:57:04 +0000

As some of my readers may know, I have spent the last week and a bit in Phnom Penh (Cambodia), setting up the new office for my company (eintellego). I had never been to Asia before this trip - outside of a couple of lay-overs in Japan in 2002 and 2003, or the 45 mins sitting on the plane in Bangkok Airport on the way to Abu Dhabi last November. I had no idea what to expect when stepping out of the airport.

DCB: How to Engineer your way out of a poor architecture decision!

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 02:29:12 +0000

I recently gave a presentation to the New Zealand Network Operators Group (NZNOG) 2011 conference on “Data Centre 3.0”. During my research over the last 8 months coupled with the fact checking I had been following up during the creation of the slides, I kept asking myself:

"Would we need all these protocols if we, as an industry, had made better technology implementation decisions?"

I understand the background and requirements for some of the different technology proposals, particularly Layer 2 Multi-path and the various Data Centre Bridging (DCB) QoS standards, but I cant help but feel that we are trying to bring features of the higher layer protocols down into Layer 2.

RADIUS "Auth-Type" Attribute

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 06:46:06 +0000

The Intro

One of the things I do regularly for my clients is to build LNS Infrastructure to take wholesale L2TP handoff. It is not uncommon to take these handoffs from several suppliers covering technologies such as DSL, Dialup ports, Wireless, 3G etc.

Wholesale pricing in Australia means that it is not unreasonable to take a wholesale L2TP handoff from an Aggregator company and to build your corporate WAN using wholesale DSL services. Often these networks are built for customers who’s primary business is not running networks, but rather delivering a service. I have an upcoming series of blog posts that will cover creating these services in more detail.

Exam Review: JNCIS-ENT (JN0-343)

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 03:50:01 +0000

As you may have heard, Juniper has been shaking up their certification program - and all I can say is “It’s for the better!”.

In an effort to consolidate the disparate certification tracks (which were previously product based), they have moved towards being more centered around the market segments (and by extension the careers of the engineers going for the certs).

The first change was migrating the M track to becoming the Service Provider track. This is actually the track that would have made the most sense for my 9 to 5 (also 5 - 9) job, but as usual I don’t like to follow convention.

Wireless Drinking Stories

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:06:16 +0000

I had a “peaceful” weekend pretending to study for my upcoming CCDA exam in a couple weeks. Trying to convince myself that I cared, I decided the best course of action was to watch a movie! Sounds reasonable, right? I’ve been working my way back through Kevin Smith’s movies over the last couple of nights, and decided “Chasing Amy” was the perfect way to concentrate on what needed to be done.

Shout out: Junos Firewall Filters by Robert Juric

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 01:55:22 +0000

In my previous blog post about Juniper Training, I discussed how Juniper Firewall Filters were quite interesting and new to me because I have been using SRX since I started with Juniper equipment 12 months ago.

Robert Juric (@robertjuric) has written two really good blog posts about this topic that provides a really good overview of the topic. Robert is currently studying for his JNCIA-EX exam and has written several articles about Junos configuration.

CCIE BootCamp World Tour!

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 13:52:46 +0000

Living in Australia, I have gotten used to hearing about “once in a lifetime opportunities” and expecting they will always be on the other side of the world. This is a nice way of protecting myself from the inevitable disappointment that follows… BUT NOT TODAY!

The news is out that Emmanuel Conde from CCIE Flyer has brought together two of the biggest names in CCIE training and taken the show on the road. Narbik Kocharians and Scott Morris have joined together to create a 12 day tag team CCIE R&S Bootcamp. Details are on his website.

Exam Review - JNCIA-ER (JN0-342)

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 14:30:34 +0000

As a Network Janitor, I spend a lot of time mopping up other peoples mess! When called in for a consulting job, it doesnt pay to be a vendor bigot. This is why we decided that staff at my company would need to get trained in the key vendors in the networking space. We identified our first 3 targets as Cisco, Juniper and HP. We then started working towards improving our partner levels with each of these vendors, and this is a process that is still underway.

Reflections on Juniper Training

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 14:01:56 +0000

If you follow my @networkjanitor twitter feed than you may know that I spent 3 days last week in training provided by Juniper and the local distributer Avnet.

In the old tradition of “free training for channel partners”, I signed up for “Junos Routing Essentials (JRE)” and “Junos for Security Platforms”. There was an “Introduction to Junos Software” course on the Monday that I sent one of my engineers along to, but I didnt attend personally. I have included below my review of the two courses.

CCIE Assault - Part 1

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 14:50:13 +0000

Im currently working on my plan of attack on the CCIE R&S and I need some advice. I finally finished my CCNP in June after years of putting it off (I first got my CCNA in 2001!), and now I am trying to determine the best course of action moving forward.

So far my plan is this:

Buy CCIE Written Certification Guide - Check!
Improve my Skills in QoS, BGP and MPLS - Sit each of the CCIP exams associated with these subjects as confirmation of understanding of the base knowledge.

Packet Pushers - Making my commute educational!

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 15:08:37 +0000

During my research into the new world of storage network and all the wonders contained within, I stumbled across a really great podcast - The Packet Pushers Podcast!

I think the tagline of the series says it all for me “Where too MUCH networking is NEVER enough”.

Now I’m a network geek and this has provided something I have been looking for - A networking specific podcast, that is entertaining, informative, not specifically vendor biased. Sure there is a tendancy to be Cisco-centric when dealing with networking, but there is a line between discussing discussing networking at a technical depth and being a vendor bigot. This team has pulled that off quite well.

First dive into Storage Networking

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 14:51:05 +0000

When I started this blog last week, I certainly didn’t think my first post would be on the topic of Storage Networking. My background is R&S / SP more than it is storage. I work as a consultant building ISPs in Australia (and occasionally across Asia Pacific).

Some of my customers are End User ISPs, others are Content Providers, so I often get thrown at interesting new projects (sometimes at the whim of engineers on a tech-fetish, sometimes from the buzzword bingo of Sales and Marketing).

Where did I put my mop and bucket?

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:42:56 +0000

Well this is my first post on my new blog - “Network Janitor”. I started this new blog as sort of an online notebook and as a place to record interesting things I have discovered both through my day job as a Network Consultant at eintellego, as well as during my studies for my career certifications. I chose to keep this seperate from my personal website to keep my non-geek friends from going insane with my posts.