this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore tools technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information that will expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers welcome to the art of network engineering i am aj murray at no blinky blinky and tonight i am joined by none other than dan dan how are you dan howdy aj i'm doing great how are you doing i'm doing well yeah real well what's new in dan's world uh well we recorded an episode two nights ago and i was talking about bounce or the trampoline place but since then nothing really new has happened so nothing crazy the trampoline place yeah like a trampoline park well it's okay so it's like this indoor trampoline just massive trampoline right like uh like it's not like one big trampoline but it's uh a bunch of smaller trampolines but in one big sure area right and uh we took around here they call that get air okay yeah yeah uh it's like a chain i can't remember what this one was called but it's something like that right and uh we took the kid to it and i was telling my wife that if we had one of these closer to where we live i could go to the gym and play with my kid at the exact same time because it was a leg workout oh yeah it was just like talk about your core and your legs and stuff it was uh it was definitely a workout but nice but i don't have anything new since then so awesome that was two nights ago yeah exactly awesome lexi how are you i'm great doing real well thanks what is new in my life um i i okay i'll tell you about the saga the thing the problem that i'm dealing with in my personal life right now because everybody wants to hear this right no um i'm trying to get hummingbirds to come to my house and i can't get them to come to my house what are you putting out it's a really it's been tough um a hummingbird feeder with hummingbird with pre-made hummingbird food in it right because i'm hearing that like you're not supposed to actually give them sugar water it's not as healthy so okay i thought i'm gonna go get this pre-made hummingbird uh like mix and put it in there and it's it's a red like mix and so and the feeder's red and so i figured like okay red that's supposed to be what attracts hummingbirds and they there's there's this house like block for me that has like 80 hummingbirds just hanging out outside of it all the time i'm serious it is a tree full of hummingbirds i'm not kidding it's wild and uh the little fuckers will not come to my house so upset about it i tweeted about it i got attacked a little bit for like not planning native bushes and it's like i rent this house i can't like i can't like plant stuff that's not supposed to be in the flower bed so i'm i'm trying my best i'm very upset about it so so with me so could you say i hear i've been in that position like we had a hummingbird feeder for like uh a summer on our back deck and we attracted way more ants than we ever did i think i saw maybe one hummingbird yeah what what is it about some places some houses some feeders they get all the hummingbirds i don't know yeah their sugar water brings the hummingbirds to the yard and if that was wrong yeah that's correct that was bad that's great i wish tim was here he would have appreciated that oh man that was good so that's my life anyway how are you aj what's going on any cool critters in your yard uh no no not lately not lately uh no it's it's like teasing like it wants to warm up around here today was a beautiful day but we're supposed to get like completely dumped on snow this weekend like a foot so yeah that's that's the hell i'm in right now i really want spring to be here but winter's still here what temperature is it there right now uh today it was 41 at this particular moment 30 degrees i'm not much better than you outside moving yeah we're still pretty cold over here oh yeah it's gross is it snowing out there does it snow yeah does it just rain it doesn't move right there it does snow everyone as well we actually got like a number of inches more than i'm used to oh which is not saying much but certainly coming from texas yeah well you know what there's parts of texas that do get snow sort of on the rig but not where i'm from so anyway good luck with your snowstorm i'm sorry just a little bit longer it'll all be hanging in there yeah i think we're supposed to be getting some of that too after it hits you guys oh really yeah yeah well tennessee is like you know directly in the path of vermont so that makes sense yeah well tennessee also you can uh you can also get like you know four seasons within a week so there's that too oh yeah yeah that happens vermont too yeah it's just kind of weird like that all right well i think we'll cut to some wins and then after that we'll talk to our guest and now it's time for some wins winning in our discord channel this week is jared muck jared got a promotion to network engineer 2. freeman ed tech passed the aruba clear pass associate the eoc passed the palo alto network micro credential for remote user administration congratulations charlie o'riordan is joining aviatrix as a senior network architect congratulations charlie dupsy passed to ccna huge congratulations hmmv 3 passed the nrc exam that's a tough one congrats jeffrey passed the dc core exam that's huge congratulations jeffrey and robin c passed the sisa the cyber security specialist exam from comptia congratulations robin new patreons joining us this week is jp williams josh lopez and stefan k thank you so much for your support of what we do here at the art of network engineering podcast now back to the show all right i am excited to welcome back to the show jordan villarreal uh and i say welcome back and if you're a faithful listener of the podcast you probably are like what are you talking about aj we've never heard that name well unfortunately jordan's episode was one that never came to fruition because we had problems with our recording platform so we're going to record the episode again for the first time jordan welcome to the show hey thanks aja i appreciate the intro yeah that was uh that was rough losing that uh we had so much fun recording it and just vanished i was not a part of the original uh recording and i heard nothing but huge praise to you from the co-host and everybody from the audience said and they're like jordan's episode was awesome i'm like oh i can't wait to edit it and then i tried to pull down the files and it's like well that's funny like everybody else has like two hours worth of content but jordan has like 11 minutes what happened yeah you know we i worked with them like directly in a live call with the uh the riverside tech support and by the end of the call i could see it on his face and it just seemed like he didn't want to say it so he emailed it afterwards well let me look at the logs and then like an hour later sorry there's nothing else all right thanks for trying well they they are going to get the bill that jordan sent us for having to come on the show again and spare his valuable time with us so it's double my hourly rate so i'm looking forward to it well jordan uh let's let's start off with what do you do today where do you work what do you do so um the first time i recorded this episode was the day that i had accepted a new role uh it was literally like maybe eight hours after i accepted the position oh my gosh but now i am so it would have been fun to announce it you know on that day thank you riverside um so i am now the technical advocate for netbox at ns1 very cool and i've been at it for two weeks now so how's the two weeks technical advocate um it's been interesting um there's the the phrase that's uh drinking through a fire hose definitely in that stage um and it's a brand new position so this it's not like i was back filling someone uh this is a new role so it's not super well defined just yet and when we're kind of getting the right fit and feel for it and that'll take some time but um that's my title um that's that's where i'm at and i mean hey two weeks i'm still coming back for more but now you were a uh netbox user before this right correct yeah i'd been a netbox user for about three maybe four years um and it kind of got to a point where i was even making videos just in my own spare time for things that you can do with in that box um well actually more more on the the setup side than the functionality side because i realize i'm not super strong at linux but i really wanted to learn how to use netbox so that i could use it in my environment so i set out to make the videos as more as a reminder for myself like how did i configure this application how do i do upgrades and then i mean other people watch the videos and i think that may have helped me a bit because community engagement is uh definitely going to be part of this role right so i was kind of already doing it and now i'm kind of getting paid to do it and some having a lot of fun with it so far so it's a journey nice two weeks i i have to mention this because i feel like i've hit a point in my blogging career i too write blog articles not only for the community but for myself because i suffer from the syndrome known as can't remember shit yeah it's a real thing i uh i googled something the other day i was trying to remember how to do something and i found my own article nice how does that feel i was like hey this is really oh shit that's me why am i googling this i suffer from this thing that i have no other way to describe it other than lightening hands lightening okay so when i sneeze i get pain that runs down my shoulders to my palms and my hands you should probably get there i have and doctors that are you just building your lightning fingers lightning hands yeah i was wrong calling it like no hands hands yeah jazz fingers they're spirit fingers jesus um so i tried googling it kind like within the past two or three years like somebody else has to have this and i found an entry i'm like oh my god this guy called it lightning hands and then i looked closer and it was me from like 15 years ago some random medical blog like nope just you man you're the only one with lightning yeah that's hilarious oh my gosh on the bright side it sounds like you have a superpower if you don't explain what it is so you twist a little bit when i sneeze i shoot lightning out of my fingers and you're like ah well it took a hard left all right yeah i drove off a little bit sorry about that hey y'all it's lexi aka track it pacer or as my most recent burner account hater described me quote she can't configure a switch for shit i'm really sorry to interrupt you in the middle of the podcast but i have a cool story to tell you and it'll only take a minute and then we'll get back to the show okay so i come from a knock background i started out in a knock and the most annoying thing that would happen back then is when a user would come in complaining about a problem blaming the network but our network monitoring system was showing zero signs that anything was wrong and suspend your disbelief for just a moment and we're assuming that the network actually is at fault okay sadly most network monitoring software really only pings devices and shows you utilization on maybe a few interfaces but overall this doesn't really help us in the end what if you knew everything that your network equipment knows like everything path solutions actually has a product that does this and it's called total view it provides automated root cause troubleshooting of the entire network i'm talking monitoring every interface on every switch router gateway and firewall it also goes deep collecting performance data 19 different error counters qos cdp ldp and poe on every interface the whole kit and caboodle uh total view is also smart it has a built-in heuristics engine that analyzes the information to provide you the user with plain english root cause resolutions to problems that other nms systems really wouldn't even be aware of you're responsible for the entire network right so shouldn't you have visibility that matches your responsibility visit passsolutions.com today to learn more about total view and get total network visibility on your network now back to the show we uh jordan let's talk about how you got into it and networking so um i started in technology at a really young age um about five and to keep working consumers no i'm just kidding well i've been working with technology since i was about five um so to frame that that had been about 1986 and um we had a commodore 64. and it was i don't and it was something that my grandparents had so my my parents got divorced we moved in uh with uh my grandparents and my grandfather worked for i think at the time it was an indiana bell before all the bells became at t and split up and everything but he always had some form of technology in the house that he got from work somehow and that happened to be a commodore 64. so that was my real first exposure to tech when i was five nice and and did you like do you remember doing anything fun on the commodore 64 that like triggered uh your desire to work in tech i wouldn't say triggered my desire but it definitely sparked the interest sure um it had a book where you could do like there were some programs you know just basic programs like 10 go to 20 20 print whatever 30 and like just some real basic programs and i tinkered with it and i mean i don't know if you can call that programming when you're just typing what's in the book but that's definitely where it started and then it progressed to me taking toys apart not being able to put them back together got a little keyboard for christmas that came apart christmas day and was it was dead by new year's yeah yeah yeah nice so yeah young age very cool you know that triggered something in uh back in like high school those what were they called the t81 td2 or t85s calculate something yeah ti 80 you know whatever old you were at that point you know but they used to have a function on there where you could do some basic programming right um and and so when you're like you know if if whatever jump to line 20 and all that like i remember doing some of that stuff messing around with those things me too actually i hadn't thought about that in years yeah same here but when he said that i was like hey wait a second i used to do stuff on calculators like that but did you guys have games on your calculators were they kind of passed around like you pay someone five bucks and they'll load all the games on your calculator because i'm trying to remember did you have to put it on a like a card somehow or did you have was there like a usb link that you could hook them together or i'm trying to remember how you'd get that on there i think it was a cable but it wasn't usb it may have been like an audio cable or some proprietary camera i can't remember i did not remember yeah all right well uh you got bit by the tech bug at five uh playing with the commodore 64. so from there did you do like tech clubs at school did you do like a ccna academy in high school or college so the real really there wasn't a whole lot um i mean you gotta remember we're i'm late 80s mid 90s or early 90s here and there just wasn't a whole lot uh in northwest indiana in terms of tech oh sure i can see that yeah i mean i had but i had right i had computers though all through elementary school we had the the green screen uh max that you'd play organ oregon trail and number munchers and all that stuff so um i i got to keep progressing with technology as i got older um but by the time i got to high school the the basic there was there's some basic programming classes they were i think they were c um and we did all of the programming on basically grid paper uh okay and then then we would turn it in and our teacher would say okay that that compiled you didn't even get to see it compiled was we did have computers so we would still like get to actually compile code but the the tests were were on paper which i don't i don't know why you would do it that way but the paper was specifically for this it was specifically for writing programs it's not like it was just grid paper so it must have been something somewhere else other than my high school um but that's that that's when i at least started getting into kind of more advanced in in what i was doing with it but that wasn't like a punch card thing right like i've seen those before it wasn't punch card it was it was a stack of paper and you do your programming on it rip it off and put your name on it and turn it in okay there's just to make sure you memorize you know the syntax properly right and i i think that's what it was but it was still it's a punishing way to do it yeah chris said what year was this 1995 or something 96 when the n64 came out right all right yeah somewhere right around there but i mean high school was where i started having more fun with technology um it's where i got into networking okay i i had a buddy who wanted to play quake and i also wanted to play quake and we didn't have ethernet cards in our machine so we said well it says connectivity uh com lpt like well i know lpt is printer so we get a null printer cable between our two machines enabled ipx spx and was able to play quake across a serial printer cable oh my gosh that's awesome so that that was my first uh intro to networking and then from that point more or less um i was down the the networking board did you say that was a direct connect to both machines there okay yeah which i mean if if you're old enough to remember the cables those even in high school like that but then i also i didn't necessarily get mischievous on the computer networks at the school but most of the issues were blamed on me no matter what um it kind of got to the point where in my computer classes i was helping the teacher teach some of the stuff um she'd asked me the teacher would come to the back and ask me like how do you do this how do you do that again like you're the teacher you go teach a teacher it boiled over um when i decided to see if i could eat up all of the hard drive space on the novell server the novel file server oh gosh all four members i mean i wasn't mischievous or anything but it was successful and they said you do this again and we're pulling you out of every computer class more computer yeah oh okay okay what was the thing in xp where you could send a message to another xp machine do you know what i'm talking about wasn't it yes i think that's it i think that's it and it would pop up on your on your on your desktop it looked like it looked like an error message or something like that but you can make it say whatever you wanted to right and so that's that's what i used to do is because all the all the computers in the class they had um are in in our computer room or whatever they had uh on the on the tower they had their ip addresses now why they did that i really don't know but um and so all you had to do is go find the ip address and then you could see if you could ping it which they're all on the same network and they're i'm pretty positive there weren't any firewalls or anything like that in the middle of them but uh it was i don't know if any of the versions did that but i think it was xp that we were on um and so i would type in like stupid error messages like you're you know whatever's corrupt and and then the teacher be like what's going on here and uh i don't know why you know but uh that was kind of my wishes are funny yeah that's great that's great all right jordan uh so after high school on to college for the i.t degree or jumping right into an i.t job so i um my first it job actually came while i was still in high school oh so i think yeah i think i would still have thank you for presuming oh yeah i know it's it's it's an easy mistake to make um so my mom was a um she wasn't a full professor i think they call it like a a guest professor at uh purdue university uh teaching i.t stuff she did like office suite word excel things like that um but they had a um a job board down at the campus that was hey looking for students to do this do that odd jobs things like that and there was a technology board and i was kind of contemplating web design at the time so she found someone was like hey there's a local company they're looking for a students to um design a website and they'll they'll pay you but you know hey it might be something to let let's see if you like it like okay mom let's let's see if i like it so we go to visit them at their their office in my air quotes office uh which was really just their house okay so my mom and i go inside and the it's two guys and they're immediately confused because they talked to my mom and she said my son is a student and he would like to get into web design they were probably expecting a college student they weren't expecting a high school students uh-huh so we're already off to a good start and then the guys kind of get a little nervous little a little shifty they're looking back and forth at each other and they go okay so we want you to design a website for our products okay that's fine so you're selling things i can't set up an e-commerce thing but i can showcase your products i said yeah okay that's fine we sell adult products oh no so i'm sitting there you know 15 with my mom and like well okay and it's not it's not too bad and it was like like lingerie and corsets and and fishnet stockings and stuff they're like well we want our our stuff on the website like pictures so this is 1995. you can't just jump to google images and find the pictures of things so here's our catalog for you to take home and scan together the pictures for the website and your mom was like okay cool huh she just went with it that's awesome she she didn't seem to mind um shout out to mom i got through it oh that's epic yeah mama's our mom is all right um yeah so we went through a couple revisions of the website and they're like you know what this is a bit amateurish and and honestly it was i mean i was 15 i was using um microsoft front page um so i mean it went through a couple iterations and they eventually wanted to like really get into the e-commerce so that you could at least even do basic form submits were a little bit above my my pay grade so uh we eventually parted ways but that was my in earnest first job 19. that is great i love it dude more than one education has had from that experience mom what's this well what was your second remember what was your second job at it so i mean i guess my second job in it was probably like sales associated as best buy okay sure i sold computers i aspired to be in the geek squad when it never came to be um but out of high school i didn't go straight into college uh tried to go the certification route so now i'm up to 2000 and mom again from the board at school pulls down a flyer for a local tech school that's offering ccna classes yeah okay okay well this i mean i kind of already know that i like networking um there was no at least in my school there wasn't the um netacad program or anything like that so i i went to basically it was night school uh for i think maybe a year year and a half to get my ccna and um eventually got it but wasn't really able to do anything with it because i was 1920 without any form of resume just a kid that graduated high school and uh this certification so i had nothing real world to back it up and no one would have me which i understand so while i was doing that um i was basically a pc bench tech uh for a couple local businesses uh eventually one of those businesses wanted to hire someone full time so that was 2004-ish and i became a one-man i.t shop for a small healthcare provider on the east side of chicago so three clinics nothing too big uh but that was my first post-high school job in i.t so how was it being the solo i.t person at a at a clinic like that it was tough um because it was it was three clinics and they were they were relatively close to each other but it was it was madness at times um there there was no form of you know like help desk or anything so i put in the first electronic ticketing system where end users could put their own tickets in and at least they were tracked at that point it wasn't a series of emails um but at some point i asked for three thousand dollars to implement spam filtering and they said that was too much money i said okay well then this this isn't gonna work long term because if you can't spend a couple thousand dollars to cut down on this monumental problem that everyone's complaining about then this is going to be tough long term and uh that started looking from there how long were you at that spot though it's about a year i think we all just asked the exact same question and together teamwork yeah great mindset um i saw a local a local more local hospital group uh had some positions open they had a network engineer position i applied for that they turned me down a couple months later they had a desktop position open applied for that got that and then after about six months on desktop that network position that i originally had applied for they had fired that guy and opened up a position that i was able to uh promote over to nice nice all worked out and that was a 2006 around there okay all right and and how long did you work at the hospital the first time i worked at the hospital was about seven years oh the first first time the first time someone's telling a story yeah so from there um it was three hospitals a decent sized network we had a wireless microwave long-haul connections that were fun to work with like big old towers with the red blinking lights and huge dishes pointing at each other that was that was some fun stuff but um we started out with hewlett-packard switches um i'm trying to remember we had the old csu dsu banks for our site-to-site connections over uh over isdn lines i don't know what that is um our t1 line 321 lines yeah um so i got to uh really grow with networking um to a point where you know we got the network up we took the the the network from standalone access points the autonomous to lightweights kylie wouldn't wasn't that like an awesome change right there it was so nice i mean to because our largest hospital had maybe 50 access points in it and we had to monitor all 50 of them configure all 50 of them like this the hospital only had 20 switches and we had more access points it's like that that's so much and then when we got our first controllers the the wisdoms that slid into the 6509s they were a blade um it changed everything overnight it made managing wireless so much easier yeah i remember when uh we upgraded to a controller and it was just like you're just like what's that meme you know i was like man this is so much better yeah it it and it's and it's crazy to think that it ever used to be individual access points and now it's kind of getting that way with switching technology like when you start looking at dna center and automation like well you no longer really control the individual things right you control this brain and this brain does the magic on the things so it's that was pretty uh pretty ahead of the game at that point and i think we're seeing you know the rest of the industry catch up with that very true very true so if yeah if i remember correctly here you just said you worked for the hospital for the first time so where'd you go in between before you went back to the hospital in between uh i went to a national licensure uh organization um every nurse in the united states has to pass a single there's other requirements but there's a test that they all have to pass it's the organization that owns that test oh interesting okay the pearson so i was or something actually medical pearson actually proctors the exam they just write the questions of course not interesting so at that point um i was a more senior type position um managing the network uh we had colo space managing the colo site uh got me a little bit more exposure to ucs vmware man i'm i'm in an urn a lot tonight this is because i was put on the spot i just want to put that out there my first episode had no ums in it well it's okay we won't edit them out yeah excellent i have to do a count by the end so it did that for about three years and the the most difficult part about that job for me was that it was downtown chicago oh and i'm in northwest indiana yeah so i mean we're we're still technically a chicago suburb but still it's how far was the three hours oh my god three hours i mean not not one way three hours a day yeah but still about an hour and a half an hour and a half away is still considered a suburb yeah yeah it is when you're in when you're in dead stop traffic yeah oh all right all right i see what you're saying well uh yeah on a sunday afternoon i can get downtown chicago in 30 minutes oh no kidding okay so did they not have like a train option or something like that that was taking the train that was taking the train so i i don't know where how what trains are like where y'all have them i feel blessed that we even have a train option because i mean it's public transit in the united states it's one train and it runs a very specific schedule they've got one track and it's a 20 minute drive to the train then a 50-some minute train ride in then the walk to my office and that's assuming that there's no problems with the train that there's not a breakdown because it is a single track coming out of indiana and then when you get into illinois there's tons of tracks but just getting out of indiana because could uh i don't know just be a burden for that train so leave like two hours before you had to be at work at least about that oh my god nope wow no and while i was working downtown uh that's when um we had our our son and it just got to a point where i didn't feel like making that commute anymore so i started looking for something a little bit more locally and wouldn't you know it the hospital was hiring a network engineer level 2 position when you know serendipitous when you know so i went back to there as a level two network engineer and uh basically all that meant was they paid me a little bit more uh the projects that i didn't like before i left were still waiting for me when i came back how long were you going for yeah we're talking about like months years three and a half years oh wow okay so that's a decent stress yeah so in three and a half years though the projects that you left were still like left in limbo basically so in 2007 my first go around with the hospital i let i let in on a dirty secret that i knew how to hook up a vcr and because i knew how to hook up a vcr i became in charge of the hospital's entire video conferencing setup oh my gosh and it started with we got this little polycom thing it's got these things on here can you can you hook that up sure i can even write the firewall rules to let it through and then it just it went out of control and no one else really owned it i was a network engineer i was in the network engineering team the rest of the network engineers didn't want to take over this av stuff so it sort of sat there for the three and a half years that i was gone no one touched it and when i came back in they said oh goody we're ready to refresh video conferences he's back jordan's he's back he's back we got a guy our av guy that was my first project yeah so that's how you became an av guy yeah that's like i got a light av background hey a1 fans aj here for an ally you ever heard of that ally sure you have they came from the same group of engineers that brought us network tools from fluke networks netscout and now their net ally they know networking i'm a network engineer for a partner and when i go to customers and see they use netaly i know it's going to be so much easier to troubleshoot issues we might run into the name may have changed in an ally but the way they build tools hasn't changed a bit they ask what would a network engineer want to help make their job faster and easier and then they go build it just like this etherscope nxg net ally is here to help net ally simplicity visibility collaboration visit netally.com today now back to the show so i i think this is kind of common for you know at least i've heard about this a lot right like people work at one place they leave for a little bit then they go back so when the you were working there the first time what made you consider leaving and ultimately why did you leave was it just you were looking for a seniority kind of thing you wanted more challenging something different um i would say seniority and challenge really came into it um man more ums i was really looking to to cut my teeth in a different environment that was the only network that i had ever worked in formally at that point you know the things that just weren't tinkering and i wanted to i wanted to get a little bit more of a challenge and stepping up into a more senior position definitely offered me uh offered me that challenge sure sure that's what drew me out i knew a few people that were working there too so that definitely helped stepping in over there yeah but that's what i was really looking for and then ultimately what drove the decision to go back as opposed to like looking for work elsewhere i know you said the i didn't drive was one but was there anything else why back to that specific you know place so northwest indiana is not really a hotbed for technology we have a lot of steel we have a lot of health care and we have a lot of fast food i mean there's that song there's more than corn in indiana those are the other three things and i guess the indy 500 so yeah it was i i started looking around the city initially but it was it became and this was well before remote work was an established thing sure so you know if i was going to get another job downtown it was going to be full-time you know maybe i could find something on the south side of chicago that was a little bit easier to get into but i didn't know when another network engineer position was going to pop up in northwest indiana it was an organization i was familiar with designs i already knew all right let's do this let's i'm i'm getting a bump and pay i'm getting a bump in title uh that should come with a bump in responsibility and challenge so yeah let's go ahead and head on back nice what's the saying uh the devil you know yeah yeah versus the devil you don't yeah for sure so i i kind of skipped over my entire college career in this process so i didn't start college out of high school i did start college in 2004 when i was at the uh the one man i.t shop and said you know if someone's really going to take me seriously i i i've got to put a degree behind this so it took me i believe it was nine years to finish my bachelor's i finished it while i was downtown at the licensure place uh i don't know i just wanted to to fit that in there uh because i i did end up going back to college what was your degree in i.t i i i know that's not i don't know exactly what the program was called but some they didn't break it down by like a programming track or a systems administration you were just basically kind of technology and then you could pick little focuses in there but it was information technology systems well it seems like degrees like that tend to like give you like a taste of everything which seems very useful to me you know yeah oh yeah it absolutely was and kind of the cool part about it is i was already working in industry so i could sort of offer that real world counterpart to that academia painting that they put on the wall well that's not really how that works this isn't really a no that was not me uh but it was interesting because since it did take me nine years there were so many graduating classes that i was i mean not part of but typically you know you go into college with the people that you graduate with and there were people just graduating above and beyond i had so many different friend groups and peer groups throughout that period uh just because i was going at half pace and everyone else was going full speed you made a lot of friends then huh got a big network a couple got quite a few that i still talk to this day it's awesome yeah take it at your own pace why not that's great i can't imagine working and doing that so i mean at all so perhaps it's the best that i could do working full-time uh was just take it take evening classes and take it as it could that's awesome whatever way you got it done that's great so how much longer did you work at the hospital it was about another three years okay and then and then i started to get that itch of i want to do a little bit more oh yeah that growth mindset there you go yeah so when i was at the licensure place i was senior but in in reality it was a pretty small network it was it was really two offices a small data center and um the cola was a small one and there's actually on my youtube channel i have a video i think it has 1.6 1.8 million views of me re-cabling that data center okay it's a 20-minute time-lapse video that people like to watch of me re-cabling and pulling out old switches and putting in your switch that sounds awesome yeah and if i yeah we'll put that in the show notes if i recall you're wearing like dress clothes during this right like what on days like where i work we have uh you know business casual or whatever they call it dress casual or um whatnot but when we come in to do work like that uh we always our manager always basically like hey y'all can wear jeans and t-shirts and stuff because you're not going to be out in the building right you're going to be down in the dark server room in the corner you know in the holding ground basically and you're going to be like on the floor you're going to be on ladders and and that kind of stuff so we always get that like manager's approval of we don't have to wear dress clothes but when i watch that video jordan i get cracked up because i was like i mean you almost had a tie on basically like you're down there re-cabling all that junk and you're dressed in like full business clothes yeah it was even in the the controlled data center it was still a little warm out yeah i'm gonna go sell a car after this guys you know like nice yeah so that i just want to put it in terms of the size of the environment so even though i had been sort of senior it wasn't senior of a whole lot i was senior of a molehill so one evening at the hospital doing these we were doing ice upgrades um going from 2 2 to 2 3 or might have been a patch or whatever and just so many nights of doing them over and over i i just got frustrated and started looking at jobs and i saw a company on the south side of chicago called panduit that was hiring for a senior network engineer pandora huh i think a few of us have heard of that name before i would think a couple people have so i had uh initially applied and they turned me down and didn't really give me an explanation for why but then two three months later i got an email out of the blue saying that my application was now under consideration and it turned out that they were initially looking for someone who was more and those sorts of people didn't want to get physical with the hardware they didn't want to be hands-on so then they came back to me and i ultimately accepted and uh that's that's where i was how long were you there for got pretty close to four years so my team was the general data team so we handled switching wireless routing firewalls uh voice was under us uh just basically claiming kind of like your bread and butter networking no more av stuff that was that was no longer made nice nice and uh oversaw that what's that doesn't that must be nice to drop that yeah it was it actually came in helpful a couple different times at panduit uh is they actually acquired an av company named atlona who if you're familiar with crestron yeah yeah basically a crestron competitor okay okay and i got pulled into some some things with that because they they knew i had some av backgrounds but oversaw the the global network i think there were 10 manufacturing facilities somewhere around there sites all over the globe uh and just just manage that network can i just go back to sorry when you said that they were considering other people at first for that position but they didn't want to get physical with the hardware like what does that mean all joking aside right like what does that mean yeah yeah well i mean they wanted someone who wasn't afraid to um throw the ear protection and the steel toe boots on and go into the factory and put a switch in so people were that implies that people were refusing to do that work yeah they they just wanted to tell the people to go what to do they didn't want to do the work yeah i think that's kind of typical for an architect right because like you know we if we've heard the comments from from tim um you know he he as a senior network engineer was still somebody that was doing the night shift doing the maintenance windows uh but he was looking to escalate or move up to an architect position where he could help drive the long-term plan okay and not do the maintenance windows okay i have a bit of a skewed view on it i haven't done a whole lot of hardware handling and so i i want hardware experience right so it's a little backwards for me but yeah and then lexi you're kind of unique in that right now and and i think i fall into that as well because when covid hit we tagged one person within our group and he was the on-site guy so if we needed a cable plugged we needed something done it was that guy and after about a year of that i i started to miss my babies i wanted to go hear the fans i wanted to turn the screens i get emotional about my networking yeah i missed you all right so i have a question you you you worked at panduit when you opened up the closets your idf and mdf closets and stuff like that was it like you know like i mean pure gold everything and it it had to be that way right in some places it definitely was so at the headquarters location so if you you're ever in chicago you're driving around chicago if you're any of the listeners you you pass on 80 you'll see the five-story glass building with the giant panduin logo in front of it that's world headquarters and every closet in there is pristine uh and it it sort of serves as um multifunction it's well number one it's our production data center it's our production headquarters uh but pandu is very proud of their products and what can be done with them so headquarters for the for a long period of time was the showcase as well so if you wanted to see panduit product in in production in work you'd come over to the headquarters and they'd show you around the data center and they still do those tours they'd show you around the building so that you could see the product in work there's uh there's a better customer i think the customer experience center something like that now where it's it's no longer at headquarters but i think people um prospective customers can still get a tour there if they want to but on the manufacturing side it was manufacturing and i would say the challenges there were no different than most other places so when a building gets built maybe not everyone from i.t is involved maybe you don't get a closet that's hvac controlled maybe you've just got a two post rack sitting on a mezzanine in a manufacturing area and that's all you got so those areas i mean i i don't think that's uncommon for a lot of places for it not to get properly informed in the building selection and i can't say that that was a hundred percent of the time because a lot of those buildings existed before i was born but um the manufacturing side was it was manufacturing it was dirty gotcha so did you have to like i don't know if you did any of the budgets or purchasing but did you have to buy the panduit stuff that you use for production or was it just like uh you know hey i need some cables it buys a funny word um we had a process by which we could uh acquire uh internally order panduit products and that was actually the mandate is if we were putting anything we were doing anything data if panduit sold that product you use that product sure that makes sense and that got so much to the point where after i believe was after an acquisition of a small office they had two racks and they were non-handling racks were they star tech or something i don't know i think they might have an apc but um yeah they had to get pulled out and replaced with pandora right and i i some executive walked past and noted nope that's not panduit stuff put it get it in it it's our stuff yep crazy so what were the lead times for that stuff well they were fine back then yeah well i mean for things without processors in it yeah real fast yeah yeah but lead times were generally pretty good especially if you were uh at the warehouse yeah so everything came to the warehouse all right uh so i if i understand correctly panduit was the last place that you worked before you jumped over to ns1 that's correct all right and you were at pandora for about you know four ish years um what was it that drew you to ns1 so uh i've been familiar with ns1 i'd seen them out in the internet but i didn't really get attracted to ns1 as much as i got attracted to the position within the net box team okay all right so i mean if it was if uh obviously if it was a bad company if it was if it seems sketchy or seem like well there's no benefits the pay is not good or you know any number of things that you would normally disqualify a job over sure or even applying for a place like i'm not saying that i would have followed netbox to a place that was like that but um because they went to a good founded company uh that made sense like hey this position's open this makes a lot of sense for me i'm going to apply for it nice okay and here you are and so you've been there for a couple weeks tell us about the job what are some of the things that you get to work on so uh right now so netbox um if you're familiar with it it's an open source project it's not a packaged product uh product that you can go pull off the shelf or order from cdw uh it is and will remain an open source project so at ns1 we're trying to build a sas model around it to help people with netbox okay so let's say you don't want the hassle of running the software because you don't have linux gurus on your team okay we can host that for you in the cloud and give you support for that and that's that's where we're seeing a lot of interest where the network engineering teams they don't want to run the application they just want to be network engineering teams yep so we're going to run the application we're going to run that in in amazon for them okay cool very cool yeah it doesn't surprise me that's probably and um very neat yeah and and it's still super early uh jeremy stretch has been there since i think last april uh there's a gm uh mark coleman over the project now and uh ns1's in investing pretty seriously into it i don't know exactly how many people we're going to be hiring this year but the the team's building up to build around that product and um obviously i can't name names but i've been genuinely shocked by some of the big names that are using netbox and are looking to offload the support and it's not all big big names there's you know even small one two-person shop that that they don't want to handle the the linux side they're looking to get some help with it too so it's a it's a pretty broad spectrum of people who are looking to use the product but not manage the product that's right what about the automation side of it like do you get are you guys going to be providing support for that as well or is it just handling the linux side of it a lot of that's still being broken we're trying to understand what everybody's needs are right now there is a place out there on the internet and i and uh on the yeah that i suspect you'll hear more from in a user story from us at some point but they've got their automation down to the point where if a desktop technician goes into a room they can look at a patch a number on a data jack go into the system and say change the switch port that connects to this data jack to this vlan through net box through the automation plugins that are available that's incredible so they don't have to give them switch access they don't have to they don't have to know the vlans that are available by they just have to know you know user vlan by name and it does netbox is the source of truth that the automation relies upon to carry out that uh that work that's incredible yeah i love that i feel like that could be a little dangerous though yeah yeah it could be um i mean as long as you as you don't put the ability to uh to reboot a switch or like make sure that they only have good things that they can choose from like are back the hell out of it so that they don't have access to those commands or don't mess with like trunk up links or something like that yeah i don't know yeah i'm just thinking of the ways like a technician could blow that up oh there's always where there's a will there's a way i was just about to say that use your permissions easy these are permissions yeah i mean the automation's a big seller but then there's people who don't want who aren't really tooled to do all the automation you know they just want to have a good dsm they just want to have a good ipam they want to know where their routers and their switches are they want to get out of spreadsheets and into something that's easier to use so yeah automation's a big part of it but it's not automation for everyone well i can see that yeah we used to use netbox what's it like uh oh sorry go go for it um yeah i know i had a previous position where we used netbox um not for automation i actually wasn't aware that that was a feature so that's pretty cool um but for like you said uh i think we stored like vendor information in there we stored everything it was our single source of truth um and when i left we were like migrating everything we weren't completely finished with getting it to that point but it was definitely like a very powerful tool even being partially used right so that's pretty cool let's let's talk about that for a second so jordan um the way that it doesn't provide automation you have your automation tool that uses like api calls to the net box right right okay all right yeah i just wanted to be sure that's my that was my understanding but i wanted to check so i mean the main idea is source of truth it's where you've got all the stuff and then you drive the stuff from there so take um like service now servicenow um has an ability to keep track of assets but it has to discover them so either servicenow is going to go do that on its own and then you're going to get some basic inventory listings or you can point service now at netbox and it can learn your network devices from there so you keep all your ticketing your change management all that stuff in service now it just learns about the network devices from networks or if you're running ansible and you want to say hey all the switches at this site all right point it at netbox so if you have dna center let's say you're a pure cisco shop and you've got the money and the willpower to pay cisco for all those licenses you can pretty much do all that stuff natively inside of dna center but if you're multi-vendor if you don't have uh the the money to spend on all that and you're willing to invest into more robust automation technologies netbox is a great place for all that data to live so it sounds like lexi you all were headed in that direction then you were getting there now that i'm like realizing what automation is for the first time in my life apparently um no yeah that that does sound like the direction we were going uh yeah cause that's exactly i think what we were gonna be using it for eventually was the service now pointing to netbox in part okay and some other things too yeah cause we we also use the service now so it's all coming together in my brain all right gotcha yeah very cool well jordan i think it's a perfect role for you because you know you're you're very outward you're you're very social you're a great talker uh i know tonight we caught you off guard and had a last minute request and uh i know you you feel like you've been following a little bit i think you're doing a great job i wouldn't worry about it yeah um and so you know when you first told me about this opportunity you know you you love the product anyway you're already a content creator match made in heaven so you know huge congratulations to you for for landing the job and um you know we'll definitely want to check back in with you here in you know a couple months and see how it's going that's awesome i appreciate it the the the wildest thing happened while i was talking with a a a var rep of mine and he kind of knew that i was looking to get out and we just kind of started talking about netbox off the cuff he's like well what are you working on right now and i explained it to him he said see that's what you need you need to find something that you love and and and go represent that and it was it was before they were putting the team together it was before the ns1 was doing the cloud project and then as soon as it popped up i was like oh my god it's real now i can apply for that i could really make that happen and sure enough awesome here we are congrats that's great uh jordan is there anything that we should have asked you that we didn't ask you i'm trying to remember back to my episode like what i feel like i'm missing stories i feel like i'm missing things well we got the fishnets in there so i'm happy yeah i knew that had to make it back in because that's so i i told my mom about this i said hey i'm doing this thing and i'm going to tell the story and she's like what happened she's trying to pull that off oh man so she i i just genuinely think she didn't remember it and then after i told her the story she's like oh yeah i remember that that was funny yeah that was funny mom um things that you should have asked me i don't i don't know aj see now i just want to talk shop now that i i've got my whole career side out of the way now i want to talk shop i want to gripe about aci i want to talk about dna licensing you want to talk about how awesome the 9800 wireless platform is you know i just want to ramp right well unfortunately our time is coming to a close but if you want to keep hanging with us and having a good time you can go to patreon.com forward slash art of netenge and join us raise of the hand i'm raising my hand yeah yeah go ahead yeah i i sorry i do want to drop one more thing out there that i definitely remember talking about um and i dan i think you may have asked it it was like anything that you could um tell people who are are coming up now and obviously we're preaching to a bit of a choir here when we say find a good community because back all the way back to 2001-ish when i first started my journey there weren't communities there weren't i mean the everyone that i was going to school with then they were old telco guys that were looking to understand this new networking thing that was uh that was coming up so um find a community that works for you i mean hopefully it's this community because coming up not having that was it was hard and i get envious of the the people who are coming up today with the the virtualization that you can do how easy it is to get in touch with people uh how easy it is to throw a question out there and get someone to help you out so um two people coming up today find a good community to stick with and to this community and you guys um specifically thank you for running this um i know there's a lot of lurkers in discord and out on twitter who who never interact they just listen to this thank you for running this for all of them because it is truly amazing wow jordan thank you so much we really truly appreciate that if you're not a member of our discord you can uh go back into your favorite podcatcher and scroll down to the bottom of the show notes and there are a whole bunch of links related to the podcast one of them is of course the it's all about the journey discord and that's exactly the community that jordan's talking about where there are tons of people in there just like you looking to break in or maybe they're already in their career and they're willing to share their knowledge so go on click that link create your crazy username that i will read when you uh win uh post in winning uh and uh and join us and just have a bunch of fun excellent uh jordan where can uh what's that like sorry i just said thanks for thanks for saying that jordan yes absolutely thank you thank you thanks for doing it um jordan where can people find you um you can find me on twitter and youtube under systemmtu1 and you probably find me on reddits and other places let's look for me a little bit more officially out of ns1 social channels once they once we start doing some fun stuff with ns1 uh i'm i'm gonna get to do some of this stuff kind of professionally so look for that too well you know jordan if ns1 is ever looking to partner with a podcast i think they could find a home here at the art of network engineering yeah you got a recommendation i do yeah yeah yeah bring them on bring them over i'll send you the media kit i think i already have it well we updated our prices so don't share that one yeah that's why that went up old news old news awesome all right well uh jordan thank you so much for joining us and uh join us next week for another episode of the art of network engineering podcast hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of net eng that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at art of network engineering dot com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you