Category: Real World

Learning something new? Make a plan!

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Learning something new is always a task and challenge. Maybe you are studying for a certification. Or maybe just want to learn a new technology or concept. That most daunting task of learning is following through with it and complete it. It is easy to get side tracked and halted or maybe just complete stop and forget about it. One of the best things you can do to keep forward progress is to make a plan. Lay it out and organize it. It’s like a recipe. Make this first, then this second, then put it all together. I’ll go over some things I do for my plan.

The first thing I do is plan time. Set aside time for learning/studying/labing. We all have lives and things to do like laundry, dishes, mowing the lawn, etc. Many have kids with events and sports to go to. This can be a hard thing to do. For me I choose to wake up early to give myself an hour of study/lab time before breakfast (or maybe during breakfast). Maybe you choose the first hour after dinner or an hour after the kids go to bed. Being a NHL fan all the games are in the evenings so after making dinner and doing dishes it’s game time which is why I choose the wake up early method. Maybe you don’t watch much TV so evening may be better. But choose a time and map it out daily.

Leverage weekends! Unless you work on weekends or have migrations/cut overs etc there is more time in the day. In the summer it’s great to just sit on the back deck enjoying the sunshine and warmth and study/learn. For me I get great quiet time lounging around in the summer and since I’m in Michigan in the winter well, you just snow blow the driveway and then relax from the work so it’s good quiet time.

Another thing is “wait/bonus time”. Maybe you have a doctors appoint and are sitting in the waiting room. Or maybe getting an oil change/maintenance at a car shop or dealer. Some have kids at sporting practice. This is a great time to read blogs about your study subject or documentation. Short clips around the topic are great.

A lot of us eat lunch at our desks or at a company food court. Maybe you go out to a fast food restaurant or quick food restaurant to fill your hour lunch break. This is also a great time for blogs or technology documentation reading.

The next thing I do is pick my material. We all learn differently so this is an important decision. For me I usually pick a book, a video course, and a way to lab. You may use all of these or maybe you are just a reader. The important thing is to gather the material you need to study the topic. This is a pivotal point to laying out your plan.

From here I break things into chunks. If studying for a certification this is easy as it usually has a published blueprint for the exam. Even within that blueprint you can break it down even further. Maybe it’s a video course that has modules already broken down for you. Or if it’s a book it can be broken into chapters. You can further break these down into topics within a chapter or module. I like to take these chunks and make a Microsoft OneNote notebook with sections and pages for each topic I break down. I lay the sections and pages out based on my breakdown and leave them empty. As I study I take notes and fill in the pages. This acts like a check list as I proceed down the breakdown I made. If there are notes in it, I attempted/completed it. You might prefer a task board or excel sheet for this. Do whatever works for you.

You can do the same thing with just studying a technology/product. Most products have features that you are going to study. You can break your study plan up into the individual features. For example a firewall you might break it down into firewall rules, connectivity options, protocols, NAT options, and now-a-days some SD-WAN options. You can break your studying up into chunks.

Finally set a goal. This might be a successful deployment (I did this back in the day with a Gigamon deployment which was a device/company I never deployed before). Or if it’s a certification give your self a goal date to take the exam. Pass or not setting that goal date gives you a driving point to keep you motivated to make sure you stay on your study schedule. If you are like me and tend to get distracted another possible motivator is to actually pre-book the exam. This means you already dropped the cash and have to do your work. Or set a deployment date if you are just learning something for work and no exam. Motivate yourself!

For me it’s a chapter/module/chapter/feature a day if possible for whatever I’m studying. Whether certification or just learning a new technology. No, it’s not always possible but it’s a goal to push for.

The short story is set yourself up for success. We all have busy days and life’s and adding in studying something new is tough to fit in our daily schedule. Below is a short list of this post.

Schedule and set aside a time for study
Pick your study materials
Break down your focus (certification or technology) into chunks
Create a checklist (OneNote sections and pages, excel spreadsheet, etc) to cross off
Set a target (date for exam, date for deployment, etc)

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What a trip!

Reading Time: 7 minutes

So I chose to tweet if I should write a post about how I got to where I am. I got a bit of feed back to do it so here it goes.

It all started growing up as a kid. My dad spent his entire career at the telco. He started out climbing poles and getting stung by yellow jacket nests hidden in transformers while he was roped in and spiked in so he had to climb down slowly while being attacked. After his hard work on the lines he ended up working in the CO’s as a senior guy. He used to take me fishing but if we were ever near one of the CO’s he would stop and fix something he knew needed fixing. The way he would entertain me when he was working on it was an empty block, a cable tool, and some leftover cable. I’d sit there and terminate cable for fun. There is a good chance I still remember the floor tile on the raised floor they hid a case of soda in to keep it cool.

In fact, I still remember two of my favorite toys were promotional aluminum toy GTE trucks that were coin banks. I still have one of his original GTE buttsets he gave me when I started my network career. He went to school for electrical engineering and is an active HAMM radio operator.

Anyways from there I went to elementary school, Junior High, and eventually High School. The first two were mostly filled with sports, broken bones, and stitches. (I’m really good at ER visits now days). The biggest thing about those early days was my early access to computers and the internet. Since dad worked at the telco we were early adopters in my town of computers and the good ol’ dial up internet. Who remembers callwave internet answering machine?

Come to High School and I found music. Technically the music started in 6th grade where we had to try out for instruments. I really wanted to play trumpet but I sucked at it and they handed me drum sticks so in Junior High I ended up in percussion. When I got to High School I got introduced through friends to a lot of punk rock, asked my band director to let me take the drum set home during summer, pissed my neighbors off, and taught myself how to play drum set. Thanks Mr. Bishop for letting me steal the High Schools jazz drum set to teach my self how to play rock music.

At this point I was a High School percussionist in the symphony band and the marching band. I decided to join a punk band which was overall an adventure. In the end I ended up traveling around a 3 state area playing concerts with the band, recording a CD in a lake side cottage, and started getting tattooed. Played in front of record executives at the Hard Rock Cafe in Cleveland Ohio. Of course I was also a skateboarder so spent a lot of time thrashing the town. All of which my parents were great fans of (Sarcasm).

During that time I did all the odd jobs to make money to travel around with the band and afford gear. I worked as a stock boy at a convenience store gas station the town over. I worked as a roofer under the table where the rule was “3 feet before you hit the ground if you fall off you are fired”. Liability you know since I wasn’t on pay roll. Worked as a logger for an old High School teacher during the summer. Worked 3rd shift one summer through a temporary services company at a business that made peg board (yes that stuff to hang your tools on in your garage) for a summer. Then a Jimmy Johns opened up in town. I worked a while making sandwiches and delivering sandwiches and got tired of it.

The band ultimately broke up. Guitarist moved to the Detroit area and my bassist moved to Texas. So I broke down and applied at Staples and my local community college. I ultimately got the job at Staples and got into college. I went into a program that was labeled as “Network Administration”. It was more or less a glorified program that should have been called “Help Desk Associate”. Classes started with basic computer work following the CompTIA A+ and Network+ blueprints. I picked it because I was around computers and networks growing up. It just felt natural. Ultimately I ended up working myself up to an Easy Tech at Staples after passing those two exams and gaining those certifications. I finally achieved my Associated Degree and got engaged to my fiance. That’s when I quit college and decided not to chase a 4 year degree. Instead I kept working and she graduated and wanted to go to a college 5 hours away from our home town.

We went to visit the college and ultimately decided to look for an apartment instead of living so far away from each other and her paying for a dorm. I eventually told my parents what I was going to do and they accepted my fate of quitting chasing a 4 year degree, getting engaged, and moving. I somehow got a transfer to a Staples 30 minutes away from what would ultimately be our first apartment.

That’s the year I started chasing further learning. I was working odd hours at Staples and my fiance was working hard at college. I somehow managed to pay for two people to live off a retail store income and her to go to college. Proud of myself for fighting through that. While she was studying, I was studying and ultimately got a few more certifications.

Fast forward I got tired of the 30 minute drive as it was getting costly paying for two people to live and only me working so I started applying to everything I could find in the area we lived. Then I got a call from two guys that were starting a call center for computers in their basement. I took the shot and accepted their “interview”. They asked to meet at a Starbucks so I said sure and we scheduled a time. What a risk that was. I met them there and they were in full blown suits (pants, dress shirts, ties, suit coats) and SANDALS……..

Either way they offered me a spot and after some thinking I decided to take it hesitantly but sometimes you have to take a chance. Luckily before I started a healthcare company in the area called me about a help desk position that actually offered benefits, a steady job in an office, and had facilities all over the county. So I turned the guys call center down and joined the healthcare company.

I worked help desk for a few years and they promoted the one network engineer to an I.T. Manager. Slowly he quit doing network tasks so I asked if they would send me to a CCENT training course. They eventually said yes and that turned into an awfully awkward situation. The course was in person and an hours drive away for 5 days in a row. As I didn’t really have much disposable income I needed to stay up in the city an hour away. My then wife somehow set up for me to stay on her friends couch up there who was an ex girlfriend of mine. That was super awkward but I pushed through.

After the training I bought the book (Still have it. Thanks Wendell!) and starting studying to take the exam. Eventually I passed CCENT and starting taking over network tasks. Then I started taking over Server, VMWare, and Cisco Voice tasks. So ultimately I got studying and certified in all of those because I didn’t know what my next move would be. There were more certs involved but no one wants to read what is already a long post and read about every exam I took and when I took it. (If interested you can see everything I achieved here.

After all the time I spent the healthcare company got bought by a 3 county hospital system will 2 hospitals and dozens of specialty clinics. They transferred my role to a “Network Engineer II” role where I shared an office with the level III voice technician. I ended up building clinics networks, rolling out an entire layer 2 refresh, migrated from P2P VPN’s to DMVPN, and built a backup data centers network. Shhhh….. There was a bit of voice in there with some UCCX scripting and an analog line to VG224 migration (42? VG224s) and a telehealth setup to call manager complete with video.

Eventually I got bored of all the VLAN changes and chasing down of MAC addresses and a friend of mine put my resume into a VAR. They ultimately called me and I did the awkward thing of doing a technical interview in my car during lunch. I got the job and started the fun.

At that VAR I built networks for the states board of water and light, built an entire new high schools network from the ground up (I’m talking them pouring the foundation and once the building was done I build the IDFs), refreshes for Universities and water sanitation plants, fixed the department of transportation multicast issue’s for their highway camera system, migrated a dental insurance companies DMVPN to Viptela SD-WAN and many more projects. Got sent to a Viptela training in Atlanta, did SD-WAN training through Silverpeaks partner program. Then ultimately got let go because of a lack of new projects coming in.

Back to the drawing board. I did some searching and fairly quickly got into another VAR who ultimately let me go fairly quickly for the same reason. Lack of new projects. I’ve been unemployed ever since (over a year and a half now) but luckily because all of my hard work I was able to save enough to survive that long. It was quite the adventure being laid off that long. The stress got to me and I ended up spending a week in a mental health facility for hallucinations and having two seizures.

While being laid off I didn’t stop. I used cash back from my credit card to buy some books and Udemy courses and have continued to study and read. I’ve been able to mostly keep up on things thanks to all my friends on twitter (somehow during all this adventure I grew to over 2k followers) and all my great friends in the Cisco Champions group (Member since 2017).

The TL;DR……don’t give up and keep on pushing. I kept pushing and went from odd jobs to getting to meet awesome people, do cool projects, and keep on trucking.

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Quick Take: Continued Learning

Reading Time: < 1 minutes

Being in my current situation I am jobless. In fact I’ve been jobless for the longest I’ve ever been and the lack of interest in my job site profiles is really starting to bother me to the point that it’s just racing thoughts all around my brain about all sorts of different focal points.

One of these focal points is continued learning. You see, a large reason I left to go to a VAR was to be forced to stay on the forefront of new topics and technologies of interest in the I.T. field. Now that I am in a situation where I’ll be strong handed into any job I have to try and convince myself to not rationalize this fear I have.

That fear is getting stuck in an enterprise role where nothing moves fast and you get stuck in legacy technologies without the ability to move forward. However, I know this isn’t true as I have quite a few friends in enterprise roles that can school me on many new technologies. The truth is I can keep up in my free time with tools such as books, lab environments, video courses, etc. Which would then put me in a position to advise and help drive the enterprise role towards modern technology and idea’s and still progress myself as well.

That’s it, that’s my quick take.

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Remote Troubleshooting Crossed Fiber Using Port Channels

Reading Time: 5 minutesLast year I was involved in assisting a datacenter core and access-layer refresh. In this case the IDF’s were reusing existing fiber patches and the run to the datacenter stayed in place. however, within the datacenter core equipment was placed across the room required new cross connects to be ran to the new core cabinet. When the cutovers began to take place the IDF’s were spread out over a large campus. Meaning troubleshooting by walking back and forth to check cabling was extremely time consuming and inefficient. Since all the IDF’s were connected via port channels I was able to figure out which runs were crossed and go fix them all at once using only the ether channel show output. I’ll walk you through the process now.

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Python + XLRD SecureCRT Import

Reading Time: 8 minutesFirst of all a disclaimer. I am NOT a programer. I promise this could probably be cleaned up considerably by someone that actually does programming. Also, It may require some tweaking to work on your system. This is tested on Mac 10.12.3 and SecureCRT 8.1*

I’ve always loved using SecureCRT. I often find myself needing to add anywhere from a small to a large number of sessions to my list. Especially in my current role. I had remembered in my past at an old roll where I used Windows as my primary OS (work issued) that I had discovered a forum that had a python and VBS script to import sessions out of a CSV. Now that I am running on Apple I sought out that old forum and grabbed the python script. Drats!!! The python script doesn’t work on my new version of SecureCRT for Mac (8.1). Then I started thinking. Most of the time clients give me a nice spreadsheet of IP addresses. This got me thinking, why not write my own that uses Excel. So here it is!

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Cisco Champions 2017 – A reason to reflect

Reading Time: 4 minutes

tl;dr – THANK YOU ALL!

Yesterday morning I opened up my Spark app and was surprised to see I was added to the Cisco Champions room. I checked my e-mail and saw nothing. I knew it was being announced soon do to some twitter chatter. After validating with members it was true. I was selected as a 2017 member of Cisco Champions. I’m going to say I’m blown away even still today. I am absolutely honored to be part of such an amazing group of individuals. It has caused me to sit back and think about how I even came to know the people I look up to. So how did it start?

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MS KB 3161639/3161608 break CUCM – UCCX web access

Reading Time: 4 minutesThe other week I ran into an instance where a group of customers were unable to access Cisco Unified Intelligence Center. Upon further investigation I was unable to get to admin pages of much of the collaboration suite and call control systems from these users computers either. The suite was on various versions of 9.0.X and 9.1.X due to restraints with many third party integration’s. This issue will occur on anything using the cipher suite mentioned below and is not limited to these versions or applications. This is ultimately where the problem stems from but I’ll take you down the path.

To start I’m going to list the fixes in case you don’t want to read my troubleshooting methodology. Then I will walk you through my discovery and detail the fixes. Remember, which fix is correct for your situation will vary based on use case, security policies, etc.

Fix 1: Uninstall Microsoft Updates causing issue
Fix 2: Re-issue certificate (if possible) using strong ciphers (may require upgrading applications)
Fix 3: Use a different web browser
Fix 4: Re-order ciphers via Group Policy

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Config-ease with Sublime Text Snippets

Reading Time: 3 minutesI love when tools make my life easier. A conversation came up online the other night and I had shown someone a quick summary of the awesome power of Sublime Text. They wanted to know how I made the magic happen in that video. I felt I should and share it with everyone via a blog post. Here’s a quick video of my uses along with a description of what you can do with it, as well as how to make it work.

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Back To Basics – Patching A Switch

Reading Time: 5 minutesThe other day someone joked that I should write a post about plugging in a cable, or at least something to that extent. Then I started thinking about it. It’s actually a good idea. Everyone has their own way of cabling up a rack of patch panels and switches. Most of us would love to get the exact right length cables for the job however, that’s often not the case. There is a patching strategy I like to use when you are stuck using a box of 7 foot cables when all you really need are 3 foot cables. None the less, we all want it to look as neat as it can when we are done. I’m going to show you my practice when it comes to patching which can be easily modified whether you’r racks follow a panel-switch-panel-switch arrangement or a panel-panel-switch-switch arrangement.

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The Raven or The Macaw

Reading Time: 4 minutesI.T. has had a large past of using animals to describe individuals, their attitudes, their skill sets, etc. Some of these originated outside of Information Technology such as the age old “Paper Tiger”. We’ve used terms like coding monkey to describe a programmer capable of knocking out code repetitively and constantly.

I’m going to take a slightly different approach on this concept with a thought and philosophy I’ve been trying to get myself into the mindset of applying on a daily basis. This mindset is something we all have the chance to challenge ourselves on everyday in different situations.  The concept is simple and the question goes like this. “Why not become the Raven, rather than the Macaw?” So what am I getting at here? It’s simple, we have two very different birds and many people will chose one or the other based on certain criteria. Here is my logic between the two.

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