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This is the Art of Network Engineering podcast.

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In this podcast, we'll explore tools, technologies, and technology keeping. We aim to bring you information that will expand your skill sets at Toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers.

00:24
Welcome to the art of network engineering. I am AJ Murray at no blinky blinky. He is Dan at howdy packet. Dan, how you doing, Dan? I'm tired, AJ. After that conversation we just had, that's how you're going to start us off tonight. Yep. I'm not going to lie. No, I'm good. I appreciate your transparency in the matter. That's great. Yeah.

00:52
What's got you so tired? You got that PC built yet? I do. It's sitting right here. I'm on it. Nice. Very nice. Yeah, that was trying to. Now, I use a NAS. So migrating files and all that stuff, I don't have to worry about that. But I had to install my software and all that stuff. And it's just. It's always a pain, man. Yeah. And then like in Premiere Pro, your projects, when you open it up on a new computer,

01:21
Now you have to go find all the files. And so I had to go back and basically locate it in the project. Is that manual or does it do it for you? Well, it somewhat. You tell it the folder to look in, and then it'll find all the stuff in there. So it's not too bad, but it's just having to go through it kind of thing. Especially if you have things in different folders. But no, it's that and then.

01:48
Weddings, it's wedding season. It's wedding season, that's right. Weddings. That's right. Tomorrow's October 1st. So you're like entering prime, prime wedding season. Dan, does this mean you're gonna be handing off editing duties soon? All right. I don't know, we'll see. Let me know, man. I'm waiting. Yeah. How you doing, AJ? I'm doing well. It's been a weird day. I was up very late last night supporting

02:18
Cut over on a firewall. Things did not go as planned. We had to roll back, which is never fun. I hate admitting defeat, but I also don't want the customer stranded when it's time to start their business day. So we made that decision, rolled back and did some testing, verified things were working as they should and called it a morning. Hey, Jay, when you say cut over, were you going from like an older to a newer version or different platforms or? So cut over.

02:46
Great question. This was a reconfiguration of an existing WAN. So I won't get into too many details, but the current WAN setup they have is a little interesting. And we were trying to optimize it and make some good changes because of some future stuff they have coming up and some problems they've been having with their current WAN design. Busy season is a pond.

03:11
this particular customer and to get this stuff straightened out before busy season starts is going to be key. What was particularly frustrating about this is that I always do my due diligence and I had peer reviews done by tech support to verify my configurations were solid and by a couple of different individuals, it was like, oh yeah, this looks good. Maybe tweak this over here, but this looks good. I think you're going to have a great night.

03:40
And I didn't have a great night, so I'm very frustrated. So it's OK, though. We'll figure it out. We'll get it going, and we'll live to install another one. So how did you know it failed? Was it post-validation? Just things weren't working, or it was blatantly obvious? Critical services weren't coming up as they should have been, despite NAT rules and everything being in place. So.

04:02
Yeah, and we troubleshot for a little while. We gave it the old college try and we just couldn't get those services to work like they were supposed to and just decided it was time to roll back before the business stays. I think we've all been in that position, AJ. At least I know I have. You got a big change and everybody looks at it, including the vendor, and you think you're all good and you even lab it up and then you just, you get in there and you push the button. You get that unexpected reason. That's why the post-validation and that backup plan's so important.

04:30
Oh, yeah. Never know when you're going to run into that. Like, oh, OK. And your back out was probably fine, right? You backed it out. Everything was back up. And everybody was happy, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Back out was great. It happened. I always do a back out plan, no matter what I'm doing. It could be the stupidest change in the world. But I'm going to have a back up plan, especially if I'm working at 4 o'clock in the morning. Yeah. Sometimes I can't remember my name at 4 o'clock in the morning. It's only two letters. Yeah. Doing this job at 2, 3 in the morning is awful. So you better have that plan. Happens at the best of us, though, man. Happens all the time.

05:00
Sorry to hear that. Speaking of remembering names, he is at Andy Lapteff, Andy at perm Andy, I know we've been talking for a little bit during the intro here, but how are you, sir? I think I'm good. I'm drinking some caffeine. I got a maintenance window tonight. Drinking in my delicious Art of Network Engineering pint glass that I love. I feel smarter when I drink out of it. That's a good glass. It's a really good glass, man. I don't know what it is, but beer tastes a little bit crisp in there.

05:30
It's filtered, even if it's not. Yeah. I'm good, man. Not too much going on. In full transparency, I haven't studied for Encore since the last time we met for the podcast. And I told you, I just started studying. So here we are again. And again, I've been working most nights. I've been very busy at work and working nights. You have been doing a lot more nights lately.

05:53
I feel like. Yeah. I feel like more nights out of the week, you're like, ah, I got another window. It's like, damn dude, that's like your third one. And it's not even, honestly, it's not even windows as much as just, I can't get called up during the day. This might be a topic for another time, but I have so many calls during the day that it's very difficult to get scripts written and changes put in, so it just happens to be what's going on right now.

06:21
So I'm just like, you know, I'm trying to do stuff at night just to get called up. You know, there's no calls at night, the kids are in bed. And so yeah, I'm working more hours than I'd like to be. And I'm gonna try to change that up a little bit, but you know, I'm kind of with you guys. I'm a little tired. I've been putting in a lot of hours. I'm not really sleeping the way I should be. I'm getting like six hours a night, which really isn't enough for me. Kind of up in the caffeine intake to keep up. So, you know what happens, right? Like this stuff is cyclical. And right now it seems like the three of us are just, you know, kind of.

06:51
Hanging in there, right? Yeah, exactly. Hanging on by a thread. I'm good, man. Thanks for asking. Of course, of course. All right. Let's jump into some wins. We got some, some good ones this week.

07:05
Excellent. Thank you, Andy. At the top of the list tonight, IPVFO. Chris, this is such a cool story. So Chris posted an article to his personal blog and he got hit up by a VAR out of Oregon that was like, hey, we want you to come do some writing for us and maybe do some articles. And it's just like, whoa, that's cool. I didn't see that. So I've been talking to Chris a little bit this week.

07:32
talking to them, trying to figure out how this is a little side adventure is going to work. But yeah, congratulations, Chris. How long has he been on this path, though? I'm trying to remember. I feel like maybe a year or two. Not long. Yeah, that's just insane. I think when we first introduced to him last year, I think it was because of the pandemic that he was kind of searching for a new career after, you know, being in culinary for so long. I hope he never loses that hunger. He's one of those guys that...

08:01
I'm happy for, but at the same time, I'm like, really, dude? Another win for you? Yeah. Get out, but. Well, then you're not going to like some of the other names on this list. Yeah. Can't come. Network Drew accepted a new position as a sysadmin. Congratulations, Drew. Nice. Endemic. This is huge. Username endemic in the Discord passed the service provider core exam from Cisco.

08:30
Oh, wow. Congratulations. Ray6221 passed the NSE7. That's getting up there. The NSE7. I don't know. I was going to ask too. The Fortinet NSE7. I think it's like networking security engineer or something like that. Very cool. OK, got you. I'm not big on Fortinet, so I'm not familiar with all their stuff.

08:54
Kyle Cleveland passed the JNCIA Junos. Congratulations. Very nice. Here's a name we don't see on this list very often. Oh, God. Adeel Khan, recertified. It's F5 big IP, sir. Congratulations. Hey, there you go. I'm doing an F5 cut over tomorrow. Nice. You should call Adeel. I should. I'm going to hit you up, Adeel. I think he'll be up around this time. We usually see. Yeah.

09:23
Congratulations, Adeel, that's a big one. And I passed a little thing today, so I'm just gonna get myself a little pat on the back. What do you know? I passed the Juniper Certified Design Specialist and Service Provider. Wait a minute. Service Provider Design is what you passed? Service Provider Network Design with Juniper. Bro, you are a beast. Are you gonna go work for an ISP now? No, no I'm not. Okay, can you teach me Service Provider so I'm better at my job?

09:52
Is that a hard track? Juniper being one of them. Yeah, I will because I feel like the vast majority on enterprise networking. the common...

10:17
core things of networking, your spanning tree, your routing protocols, your IGPs, BGPs really big, but you don't find a ton of IS to IS, you don't find a ton of MPLS, and you don't find a ton of like pseudo wire layer to VPN, like you're getting off the beaten path of what's out there for content, you know, and I like to get practice exams, not dumps, practice exams, and there's just nothing available for that. Like I did five Juniper certs last summer and I was using the

10:47
the Juno's platform. And for a lot of their certifications, they have practice exams. They have content. There was some video-based content that I could watch for this course. It scratched the surface of what was covered on that exam. So it was watching the videos and reading a lot of Juniper white papers to get through this one. They don't have like, you know, a post on ExSim

11:16
that stuff or like Juniper doesn't have. Did the books have like the DITGAs and like testing built into the material? I don't think Juniper has that, like there's no certification manuals, at least that I've not seen. Yeah. All right, well good on you, man. It wasn't an easy win and you got it. It was not, it was not. And the worst part was is that it was a required thing for work, right? Like, and today was the deadline.

11:45
So I'm not sure what would have happened if I hadn't passed that today. So I'm really glad that I did. And you weren't planning on being up until 4 o'clock this morning on a crazy meeting. No, no, no. I was not. I knew I had to work last night and I was like, I'll be fine. And then I was, you know, I was up until 4, 4 30 and I was like at the customer location until 4, 4 30. I didn't get home until 5. How are you going to celebrate? I am going to try to cut out a work really tomorrow.

12:14
start my weekend really. Congrats. It's awesome. So we'll see. New Patreons this week. There are no new Patreons to mention, but I just want to give a huge thank you to all of our Patreons for their continued support of what we do. We appreciate it so very much. If you are interested in joining the Patreon program, you can go to patreon.com forward slash art of net eng and check it out. Thank you so much, Patreons, for everything you do. Big time.

12:42
to support us and what we do. Andy, can I get another good screen?

12:49
Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. We can't let the intros finish without doing a little mention of our friends at NordVPN. So October is Cybersecurity Month. And we here at the Art of Network Engineering want to remind you to take your cybersecurity seriously. And you can do that with NordVPN. They also have some other products like NordPass if you're looking for a password manager. NordPass.

13:16
and NordVPN can get bundled together, you can go to nordvpn.com forward slash T-A-O-N-E, and you can save 73% on the two year plan for NordVPN, plus four months free on top of that, and they will bundle the NordPass and the NordVPN together for even better discounts. So do yourself a favor, sign up, and take your cybersecurity seriously.

13:45
And we thank our friends at NordVPN for their support of the Art of Network Engineering podcast. Okay, tonight we are talking about skills with a Z. Skills-z-z-z-z-z. Do these skills help us pay the bills, AJ? Yes, they do. Goodness. Yes, they do. Not the soft skills. We've talked about the soft skills a lot on the show. I think people know by now what soft skills are and why they need them. And I'm sure we'll talk about that again. So tonight.

14:15
We wanted to talk about the skills that are not network engineering related that will help you in your network engineering job. Hmm. And. Hmm. Ha ha ha. With this, well, OK. Keep going. So things that come to mind are virtualization platforms, like having some familiarity with virtualization platforms.

14:41
how to deploy a VM from scratch. Maybe you're deploying a virtual appliance because those are all over the place. Like just being able to navigate around a hypervisor and do what you need to do will go an awful long way for you and your career. So skills like that, is there anything, does that resonate with you guys or are there other skills that you- Yes, oh yeah, definitely. During my, not my day to day.

15:09
But in ACI, I have to go in and create the port groups for the virtual servers in VMware. So yeah, I have to go in, create a port group, set up the VLAN, that kind of stuff. So I'm definitely in. What are they? I'm over here talking about, yeah. But what do they call it? Is it vSphere or is it vCenter? I always forget. Great question.

15:39
So which one of them I have and one of them I don't. You got to pay for one of them. That's all I know. So you can have it for 60 days, Andy. Or 90 days, whatever it is. You can think of vSphere as like Windows, right? There's Windows Server. There's Windows Desktop. There's Windows built in. I forget what they call it, right? But it's like Windows embedded in IoT devices, right? So there's all these different flavors of Windows. Well.

16:07
vSphere has some different flavors. There's vCenter and there's ESXi. ESXi is your hypervisor. That's a bare metal type one hypervisor that lives on your server hardware in your data center. And then there is vCenter, which is the centralized management function that will control all of your ESXi deployments within your data center. Or you can cluster them together and have certain workloads live on.

16:36
This vCenter and other workloads live on another vCenter, but you're not putting VMs on vCenter. vCenter is a management appliance that lets you see all of your ESX hosts clustered together. They could be clustered and sharing resources, or you could just have them all on. Is that a controller? A given data center. Can you? It's kind of like a controller. It's not like an SDN controller. You're not telling it how you want your virtual environment to look like. You are managing your.

17:05
your virtual environment from it. It's more management, right? You're not setting up like, yeah, yeah, it's definitely more management. Yeah, so anyways, I go in that. And I go over to the Network tab. And I create those port groups. And then I let the systems team know which port group to put on which server kind of thing. So yeah, I definitely get in there probably once a week, maybe once every two weeks or so. But it helps knowing a little bit

17:35
You know, because like in my lab, I, you know, I set up ES6I and going through that motion. It's definitely something I think you should do. Yeah. Uh, that way you can at least say you've done it once and you understand like when someone says data store, you know, you'll know what that is if you have to set this up. Right. So I think that if you're, you're entering the IT world, you should definitely become familiar with hypervisors and virtualization because that can help you a lot in your learning. Like you can virtualize.

18:04
if anything that you want to learn, right? Like there's virtual offerings from Cisco if you want to learn Cisco routers and switches. There's virtual offerings from Juniper if you want to do the same there. If you just want to learn Linux and build yourself a dev environment that you can explode and rebuild, whatever, you can do that in a virtual environment. There's hypervisors that you pay for, there's hypervisors you can get for free. There's so much stuff available out there that there's free versions of ESXi you can put on just about any piece of hardware built since like,

18:33
2007 and it'll work just fine. Yeah. Yeah, that's one thing that's nice about ESXi is it's really compatible with a lot of stuff. So if you can find some old hardware, you can usually get it to run on there. Yeah, one of my favorite lab machines that I run some light workloads on, like my Ansible system, it's an old CAD workstation that I got from a place that I used to work. And it works just fine for virtualizing light workloads. Mm-hmm.

19:02
Like I've spun up a domain controller real quick. I've put you know, Cisco ice on another Virtual environment and connected the two together so I could authenticate 80 credentials when I was you know Setting up tack acts or something like that. It's real real easy to do. Gotcha Now do you have any experience with the hyper V? I have zero experience with hyper V I have used hyper V so the one on Windows. I do want to address like to hypervisor Yep. Yep

19:28
So Jordan in the chat is asking about type one versus type two. Great question. So do you guys know the difference? Well, type one lives on bare metal, right? And type two is an abstraction. It's like a VM within an operating system or something, right? Exactly. So your hypervisor is like a compute traffic cop. You're going to direct resources to certain VMs. That's how you allocate memory CPU storage

19:58
of VM is using your hypervisor. The type one, as Andy said, lives on bare metal. Type two lives on top of an operating system. So if you're familiar with VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation, what was it? Openbox, I think is the name of one. Hyper-V, what's that other one? Yep, well so hyper-V, there's actually two versions of hyper-V. There's a type one and a type two. You can have hyper-V on Windows Server OS and you can also have hyper-V bare metal. Oh, okay.

20:26
You can't get a version of Windows Server that just is Hyper-V that you install in bare metal. I got you. Now, have you actually deployed Hyper-V? I have. I have it at home. I may or may not run a VM in there that may or may not do things to download things. Oh, OK. I got you. Say no more. He's probably said too much already. Yeah.

20:55
I'm trying to be funny. I read a blog about how you could do Hyper-V Manager. No, but it's an isolated environment. So like I can do dumb stuff within that environment. And if it blows that environment up, it doesn't hit my main Windows 10 host that I'm on right now. So it's a place you can go in and blow stuff up. What's the advantage? I used to know this and you're our server guy, right AJ? Like you're the VMware expert guy out of us. So why is a Hyper, is a type one hypervisor better?

21:24
than a type two, what's the advantage? It's probably whatever your use case is, right? Yeah, I would really say, like I would not want to run a data center on a type two hypervisor. Right. That would be a good video, let's try that. But why? And I don't know if we have that technical knowledge, but type one, isn't it because it has direct access to the physical hardware? It's definitely closer to the I.O. Right.

21:50
Right? Whereas like, you know, the hypervisor is talking to the operating system or there's doing like some sort of path pass through like a copy of a copy. You're not directly accessing resources to allocate resources to run the operating system. And then, then whatever's left over, you can allocate like hyper V manager. I'm running on my PC has to then talk to the Windows 10 operating system to then get to the hardware. Right? Well, but then your Windows 10 is also taking up resources from the hardware.

22:17
Right. So you're not yet all like, so on my server, right. I have the SXI on there, the type one hypervisor. And it's just, it's directly accessing those resources. There isn't this other operating system, like you're saying, and like Windows 10 that's consuming resources on that box. And then, you know, you're subtracting, there's a net loss there, right. Of the, of the hardware. Well, and like Adil just brought up a good point too. If your Windows 10, you know, just decides, Hey, I want to update off out of the middle of nowhere.

22:46
Now your type 2s, it's going to be hurting now. Yeah. Like the type 2 is an application you install in an operating system. The type 1 is an OS. But what's nice about that is it just lives in Flash. So you can reinstall and still have all of your settings there. Oh, OK. Yeah. All your VMs are still there. All your storage can still be there. If you want to reinstall it fresh and then just pull everything back in, or if you need to upgrade, it just lives.

23:16
It just lives on flash storage and then it pulls into memory and it's a really light workload compared to everything else it's doing that lives in memory. Now one thing too, Adil is mentioning KVM. Is that the Linux? Yep, Linux KVM. I think that's really common in AWS. In AWS, okay. I think a lot of the workloads you run in AWS and maybe other, like maybe GCP and ISR, I think obviously supports a lot more Microsoft stuff. But KVM.

23:43
I believe is primarily what's supported in AWS and stuff. But that is hip fire from me on that one. Jordan in the chat mentioned virtual box, so that was, that'll kick me off. Oh yeah, that's right, I said open box. Yeah, but that's what, right. So I got a quick virtualization story of how I got into it and it made me a better network engineer later, right? This whole topic we're talking about. So I don't know when, or if it was an article, or Jeremy or whoever, but somebody said that

24:13
You know, the more I've been working in data centers a long time and I remember them saying, and even if you're not in a data center, but if you're a network engineer, the more you can learn about the systems that are utilizing that network, the better you'll become. And I've always toyed with like being an architect someday, which again, always makes me giggle because I don't know if I'll ever be at that level, but.

24:33
I wanted to learn more and more about the systems utilizing the network because I've been on plenty of calls at work with application folks or firewall folks or storage folks, like people having problems when I'm on call. And if I know about their systems and can sit in their seat for a little bit and see the interaction between those systems and the network, it will make me a better network engineer. So anyway, I got into virtualization via Oracle Box. It was the free, you know, I put it on my Mac and I forget what I spun up.

25:01
Might even have been GNS, but that was my first foray into it. And then I learned about the type ones and I got fortunate to get a server at work. And long story short, I got ESXi installed on that. And that's where my stuff lives now, the, you know, GNS and Eve and, and all that good lab stuff at home, but through going through all of that, just at home and my studies and my home lab, one day I was on call and I got called in to a problem with their UCS chassis and.

25:31
had I not spent hours and hours and hours building my own virtualization environment at home and building VMs and all that stuff, I was the person on the WAN team that they called and I was the only one on the team who knew what the hell he was talking about with servers because I have it running at home and I know how to get in there and I know what to look for and I'm familiar with the environment, I know how to allocate resources. And what had happened is we had a UCS

26:00
reboot, there was a problem on the motherboard that got swapped, but we had a problem and it rebooted. And when it came back up, the VMs didn't come back up and we had CSRs running on there running prod traffic and they wouldn't come back up. So it was an extended outage as everybody's trying to figure out what the hell's going on and they call me and we get it back up. But then what I found again, because of doing this stuff at home is, you know, why didn't they come back up? And I knew where to look.

26:26
Right. And it was that auto on, I forget what the exact term is, but there's a setting for the VMs to come back up on their own after a timer delay, you know, in a reboot or a power loss and like auto start. Exactly. Yeah. So because someone told me the more systems you learn that you're utilizing your network, the better it got me into virtualization, got in for free type two, got a server, got into type one, learned all that stuff. And then in prod.

26:53
I was able to navigate an ESXi and into the VMs and figure out what to do, how to get them up, look in the log, what happened, and then prevent this. The biggest thing, right, is preventing it from happening again. Like, guys, we need to provision. And we had two pair in two different data centers, you know, active backup, and none of them had auto on provision. It's just whoever stood these up didn't know or whatever. Just didn't do it. So we might have been, we might have avoided another problem like that in the other data center in the future because...

27:21
I went in and got those configured too. So just it. Nice. Yeah. So anyway, that's my little virtualization story. Came in handy for sure. Yeah. So in the chat, it looks like a lot of people were talking about AD. Do we want to shift gears in that? No. Active Directory. I love Active Directory. So I have been a Windows person for a very long time. I have worked in a Windows environment just about every place that I've worked.

27:50
I think every place that I've worked, I've managed Active Directory and Windows Server workloads. And it's something that I teach at college for college students. So it's something very near and dear to my heart. And I will agree, Active Directory is in use by, I think, just about every single one of the Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies out there. And so having a good understanding of Active Directory and how it works, it's basically the authentication.

28:19
piece, as well as other things, centralized group policy, as well. But being able to wrap your head around that and understanding how it works, because there's lots of things that network engineers touch that interact with Active Directory. And whether that's like RADIUS, 802.1x, TACACS, the Active Directory can be a source of authentication for all of those. So understanding how that works, just deploying Windows Server, because there's lots of different workloads that you might utilize as a.

28:48
network admin that you want to run on a Windows server or something like that. So yeah. Yeah. I think, I think one thing too is like, there's, there's a couple of tools that I would also recommend, um, if you can get your hands on them, you know, I know everybody's environments are different. Uh, not everybody can see other people's systems per se. Um, but like where I work.

29:11
I can get in and look at like, oh, you groups and I can look at DNS. I can look at DHCP pools and stuff like that. Like if you guys aren't running DHCP server, like on your routers and whatnot, if you actually have a Microsoft server that's running the DHCP, they've got what I mean, I guess their tools are just called that, right? Like DNS and DHCP. Yeah. DNS, man. Yeah. So.

29:38
But you can run those and it'll query those servers. And I highly recommend just peeking around in there. You don't have to make any changes or anything. Definitely. Well, it's good to see what, because sometimes I'll have a developer reach out to me and say, hey, I'm not able to hit this, or hey, I'm trying to hit this. And it's like, they give me a DNS entry. Well.

30:05
you know, you can easily ping a DNS entry and it'll show you what the IP is. But I also like getting in there just to make sure, cause sometimes they've got, um, what is it? Uh, the aliases and stuff like that. So it act this, this DNS entry might point to a, another DNS entry that might actually point to the real IP address. It, right. You know, I don't know, just things like that, being able to go in there and see that for yourself. It's very nice. Yep. Absolutely. So can we take just a.

30:32
Quick step back and if you could briefly explain AJ, what it is and why it's important. And the reason I'm asking is because I'm not exactly sure how Active Directory works. I could probably give some BS answer, but what I can tell you from my experience at work is when I try to access a resource, maybe a new tool or something, and I can authenticate to a point, but then I hit a wall and then I usually have somebody.

30:58
I'm missing in an AD group, right? Like I need to be added to some group for resources. And then they'll ask me, well, do a who is forward slash all. And I guess it gives you all the groups that I'm in. And then they can see if they need to add me or not. So like, I don't exactly understand. So my username, I guess, is on the Windows domain. And are the AD groups tied to permissions? And like, is there a high level? Like you teach it. What's the high level? What's it doing, right? Right, right. So.

31:26
Active Directory is like a multi-master environment. You have domain controllers, and think of that as like a phone book, right? That's gonna have all of your users, all of your assets in a Windows domain live on domain controllers. You have multiple domain controllers, and they share all of this information back and forth. They synchronize with one another, and you can have domain controllers that live at different sites, and when users log in and authenticate, they will authenticate to their closest Active Directory domain controller if...

31:55
everything is set up correctly. I'm sorry, did you say domain controllers, the phone book? Is that what that is? Okay. So all your people. That's the database. Here's our employees. Everything lives in there. Gotcha, okay. Yep, and so computers are people too. So if we have computers that are joined to a domain, those have passwords just like people do, but the people don't have to type in the computer's password. The computer just knows their password. And once in a while, the computer's password can come out of sync with Active Directory. And you have to like...

32:23
Rejoin it to the domain. Basically, it's a real pain in the ass. Anyway, you have a user account object, and you have user group objects. The best practice is to put users in groups and then assign permissions to groups. So when Andy leaves the company that he works for and they hire Dan, they put Dan in the same groups that Andy had and then.

32:47
Dan has the same permissions that Andy has. And the permissions are resourced, like access to whatever, like IPAM and whatever, like all the tools that you use. OK. Exactly. Or like if you're wanting to log into network devices and whatnot, you can have it set up, either RADIUS or LDAP or whatever, that will query those groups. And you can have it set up in RADIUS where, like, hey, if this user name that, let's say I'm logging into a switch, right?

33:17
If this username comes in and they're in this group, then allow the access, basically. But it's all because of AD, right? It's all because of whatever your group, that your username is assigned to. Here's a goofy question. Do people hack like AD to try to elevate, like a hacker getting in, do they go in and try to mess around to like get elevated privileges? Or is that not even a thing you would do, like hack AD? Yeah, I mean.

33:45
I don't know if they hack AD, but they're probably trying to hack administrator credentials. Yeah, I guess that's it. And so there's lots of best practices. There's default containers that come when you set up Active Directory and you just don't want to store anything in those default containers because it's like having a user account called administrator, like, duh, people are going to guess that. And is Active Directory a Windows thing? Yeah.

34:15
It uses LDAP, which is kind of more open source. There's implementations of LDAP in Linux. Active Directory is the Microsoft implementation of LDAP, which is lightweight directory authentication protocol. But a place that's in love with Linux that doesn't want to run Windows, they have an equivalent AD, something or another. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, and it's a real pain in the ass to get Linux LDAP to work with Microsoft's Active Directory.

34:45
Yeah, try using a Max on an AD domain. It's a lot better than it used to be, I will say. It's still, ugh, it sucks. So I don't know how it necessarily makes us a better network engineer, but I can tell you that when I can't get to a resource, we have a guy on my team that knows how to do all that, and he gets me added to whatever I need. So it makes him a better network engineer to help me get access.

35:11
I think one thing that would make it nice is if you know which group, you know, you need access, you know, for like, like, like, let's say I'm on my team, if a new network engineer comes in, right, and they're going to need access to all the same stuff that the rest of the network engineers need access to. Well, instead of bugging, you know, the service, I mean, the systems team or something, I technically could go in there and just move him into that if I wanted to. Now that could be considered.

35:40
a little bit of a shadow IT type thing, I think. But I think it depends on the size of your company, right? Because some companies are probably going to be like, no network people cannot touch AD, right? Or no programmers definitely don't need to be touching AD, or whatever the case may be. Right. I just want to echo a sentiment that Jordan had from the chat that being able to speak the language of other teams goes miles and miles and miles. So.

36:07
Any extra experience, you know, AD or whatever, that you can then use to communicate with your sysadmin teams that will help out. But like he also said, don't expect them to understand networking and be able to articulate to you what the problem is when they come back. They'll just blame it on the network and then you prove that it's not the network. Everybody blames the network, right? Right. It's the joy of our job.

36:31
So what's the next non-networking skill? Dan, I think off mic you were talking about just having a good understanding of SMTP. Yeah, so like when you're configuring alerts and whatnot on your devices, whether it's your firewalls or anything really, having just a little bit of knowledge of SMTP is nice. Otherwise, you're going to be bugging your systems team like, OK.

36:59
What am I supposed to put in here? So just a little bit. I don't think you have to be an expert by any means, but just so you can fill out those little things. So what is SMTP? All I know is it's mail, right? Yeah. Is it? Simple mail transfer protocol. Yeah, I think that's it. But what does that do? That's the language that mail servers talk to communicate mail messages. Right. And then what about POP?

37:27
Pop three and all that stuff. That's not as common today, I don't think. Is it not? I forget what pops to me. What about, is IMAP, is that another one? IMAP, yep. Yeah. Dang, just throwing around acronyms. I think that's more common with like Exchange and Exchange ActiveSync used to be a big thing. I don't know if that still is. So have you guys run into like SMTP problems, issues, like knowing about it helped? I used to manage Exchange servers and IEI. Okay. So that was your life. Yeah.

37:57
I always, whenever I was trying to describe somebody, what it was like to operate Exchange, I always told them it was like having a fancy foreign car. Like when it runs great, it purrs, it's awesome, it's really great to have Exchange, there's lots of cool features, most organizations don't even scratch the surface of what Exchange can do for you. But when it breaks, man does it break and then you got to find an expert to come in and help you like fix it and get it up running again.

38:22
I think that that landscape has changed a lot now that they've been able to like, sassatize that right? Like, and put it in the office 365 cloud. Um, I think it operates, I don't know, a lot better, uh, in my opinion. I don't, yeah, it's much nicer whenever it breaks, you can just be like, it's the cloud. Did you just make up a word, sassatize? Sassatize. Yeah, that was pretty good. Better go, you better go copyright that.

38:49
I thought that's that's a ties. So I forget my ignorance. So is exchange just the thing that email works on? Like is that a is that a piece of software exchange? Exchange is Microsoft's flagship application for email. Yeah. So even like Office 365 is like exchange is the server. The server version of email outlook is your email client that talks to it. Right. So even Office 365, there's exchange running somewhere in the cloud that's managing all the.

39:19
Email send receive blah blah blah. There's a cloud instance or cloud tenant of exchange that's holding your mail box. Little mailman guy in there virtual mailman guy. Nice. I like the image. Lotus notes. Oh my God. I haven't heard that in forever. That was the IBM exchange. Lotus. No, you used to have that. What wasn't it like same time at some point or was that the IM client? I think that was instant messaging. I don't remember that.

39:48
Linux, a lot of people in the chat are shouting out Linux. I couldn't agree more. So many appliances, solution appliances run on top of Linux. So many network operating systems are Linux based. So being able to navigate Linux for troubleshooting purposes and just knowing Linux in general is really going to help. I personally love to use Ubuntu. It's very easy. I've been using it for years. I started on Fedora.

40:17
Uh, and so there's like a little bit of red hat in there, but, uh, yeah, I, I couldn't agree more having some Linux experience is great. I don't think you need to go get like certified in Linux, but just knowing your way around and understanding how Linux works, especially compared to windows is, is going to help you out an awful lot. I sometimes, I feel like at some point I do want to go get Linux certified, like, um, Linux plus or something like that. Yeah. Uh,

40:45
Because I do struggle with Linux. I'm not going to lie. You've seen my pain with it. I have. I put this static IP address. I'm just trying to put a static IP address on something one time. Yeah, it didn't go so well. Took a little bit longer than I would care to admit. But no, I think, so one thing for me with Linux is navigation.

41:14
once I started figuring out how to actually navigate through Linux. And we're talking about, uh, like just an SSH client to a Linux box, right? Not, not a GUI or anything like that. Cause a bit Ubuntu does have a GUI version. Um, but we're talking about, you know, just straight up command line basically with it, uh, but learning how to navigate and where files and folders and all that stuff are, that was a big help. Um, that's so confusing when you first start out, like navigating that.

41:43
So here's a shout out for Home Labs, right? And I've mentioned this before, but I got a console server in my Home Lab back in the day and it had Linux on it. It was a NaviCent, Cyclades, whatever. And I'm like, what the hell is this? I'd never seen Linux before. And it was a nightmare and it took me forever, but it forced me to learn, like you're saying Dan, how to navigate through that file structure and, you know, PWD, where am I at? Now, LS, what are the options in here? And then CD, whatever, to change directory.

42:13
the dot dot space or whatever nonsense it is to jump back and like, you know, I forget what it is, but, but now in my job, it comes in handy that, you know, our automation, one of our automation platforms, I log into VS code, which connect to these Linux boxes. And it's all like you're saying, it's all command line Linux. And I have to, you know, where am I, where am I going? Where's my repo? Where do I got to go to get this template thing? And it'd be, it'd be a nightmare if I didn't know the basics of just that, you know, file.

42:43
structure navigation. And another thing too is like when you have to edit a file, like I'm talking about like a text editor, right? And you use whatever they, I've forgotten what it is now, but it's like, No pad plus plus. AJ, do you remember? That's what I use. There's Vibe, Vim, there's all the Vibes. Oh, the Linux text editors? Anyways. Yeah, good luck getting out of there once you get in. Nano. Nano is the one I was thinking of. That's it, Jordan.

43:10
But anyways, using their editor and then the spacing, because that's what it was AJ, you remember? Oh yeah, yeah. When I was trying to put that IP address on there, getting the spacing right was tricky. And so going through that, it did let me know that, hey in the future if I start running into weird issues like that, there's something I need to look at, right? Make sure I got my syntax right I guess. But it's weird editing a text document

43:40
in an SSH client. Like, it just, I don't know, it just kind of blows my mind a little bit. Cause you're, you know, you can't just hit save. You have to do some weird key combination or something. Right. You know, that hurts my brain. I didn't even know that was a thing. And just because you can navigate a little bit too, like, so I can navigate a little bit, but when, when we, you helped me, AJ stand up, you know, Ubuntu on my home server. So I could mess with some Ansible and stuff. Cause I, I don't know, man, I just could not figure out how to do that.

44:10
you know, without you there. I mean, I learned something, but Linux seems really, go learn some Linux. And I'm by no means a Linux master, right? Like I just, I've done it enough. I'm dangerous enough. I'm not. There are far better, more worldly Linux people out there than I am, but it's definitely, I think, you know, a good skill to have to be able to do that. And I think just having a good like,

44:36
foundational knowledge of operating systems in general. Like if I'm operating in Windows and I wanna go manipulate something, I know where to go to do that. And I can do that either through the GUI or I can do it through the command line and just opening up MS-DOS and just navigating around or PowerShell even, right? Like PowerShell's an awesome one. Just to be able to navigate around and make those changes, find what you need, will go a long way. Yeah, and I think it also depends on the environment that you're in.

45:05
Because where I work, we're mostly Windows. I mean, we have a few Linux boxes, but the majority is Windows. And so I guess I don't have to run into that too much in my environment. Now, when I'm doing lab stuff, because I mean, Linux is, for the most part, everything that we do that's free is running on Linux of some sort. So that's the most time that I run into Linux. Me personally, right? So I know some places out there.

45:34
might be pretty heavy on Linux for their servers. So maybe Linux is more important to, you know, network engineers and those, those environments, right. But I think it's definitely something that we should all have a little bit understanding of. Absolutely. Can I mention my favorite appliances run off some mashup favorite one? So can I mention my favorite non network engineering skill? One I couldn't live without. Googling.

46:02
Yeah. And let me, you know, I got a little bit of a story with that. In college, I took this class, Electronic Information Gathering, and this was, Dan's going to love this because it was way back in the day. But, you know, this was at a time before...

46:24
of this technology and the internet and Google was just, well yeah, it was just everywhere. Like, you know, the iPhone didn't exist to give you a context and to, you know, but it was a- Did you have to go and check the stone cabinets or something? Here we go. Yes, yes. Let me pull this stone. I gave it a layup, Dan. I laid it up there for you, buddy. You just slammed it down. Good job.

46:48
Hey, you know, I know it's a meat on the bone. It was meat on the bone. I saw you, I saw you, I saw you salivating. The twinkle. But, you know, that's the context is they had a class you could take at a university just to figure out how to find stuff on the internet. Like that's how it wasn't ubiquitous yet where like, of course you could do that. Everybody does it. But it really helped me.

47:11
later in life even as a network engineer. Then it was more like LexisNexis databases, but it was a lot of like Boolean logic in the end and or operators and because the internet is all human knowledge of all time compiled. So to be able to parse all that and find what you're looking for specifically really comes in handy now because you could Google something for network engineering and get 15 million responses and it might not be what you're looking for.

47:39
But I know I hear from most network engineers, we're just good at Google. That's kind of the running joke. Oh, yeah. It's invaluable. Definitely. And I think learning how to properly use Google, like how to, I don't know, as I'm struggling to phrase this, but how to figure out how to search things on Google. What are the right keywords to put in there kind of thing? I think that's.

48:05
That's where the secret sauce is at right there. Yeah, and just how you can string stuff together. If you really want to get specific, you can put stuff in quotations and make sure that you're finding exactly what you're looking for, or add plus signs in there. And you can use the advanced search functions, and that'll help narrow down and filter out your results. There's a lot more to Google than just typing stuff into a bar right there. Right. Well, and I think.

48:31
We can all agree, if you go to the second page of Google, then you've done something wrong. Earl says, copy and paste your error. That's always where you start. What's the Windows event error ID? That's where we'll start. Yeah, and then you just put Cisco in front of it. Cisco iOS.

48:52
And in our industry specifically too, you get some weird ass errors maybe, like you're running into something, you're like, what the hell is that? Or you're looking in your log and you're like, dear God, I don't know what that is, but that timestamp correlates to the issue and you can look that stuff up. I mean, that's how I wind up running into some bugs. So I'll put this weird thing in that happened. And like you said, Dan, kind of figure out a way to word it to get what you're looking for. I'm like, oh yeah, that's a known bug, you need to upgrade. Like, oh hell.

49:21
I love typing in a description of the problem I'm having. And the first link that comes up is the Cisco bug days. It's like, oh, OK. Nailed it. Here we go. What version do I need to upgrade to? Yeah. That's a good one, Andy. Google, definitely for the win. All right, I'm scrolling through on some other people's. Oh, OK. I thought you were getting ready to share your own. Cloud was one.

49:51
I don't know if you want to jump into that or not. Oh yeah. Yeah, that's a really good one. Yep, cloud services in general. I have been a big fan of Google apps and Office 365 for a long time. I'm very familiar with both those environments. I do some consulting on the side and I manage various tenants of either for a few close friends, clients that have their own businesses and stuff like that.

50:18
I think that something like that was revolutionary. I mean, there was a point where you couldn't have your own business domain email unless you could afford Exchange, right? And Exchange was expensive. And so having those cloud services that let you point a domain to it, and Joe Schmoe could have his own email domain and look like a professional business. And it was really just a big game changer, I think, having those services come along. So I've enjoyed, it's just like a personal interest of mine.

50:46
playing around in Office 365 and learning all those services. Like having come from a Microsoft background, it translates really easy to already knowing SharePoint and stuff like that and Office 365 services. But I don't know a ton of AWS, and I certainly don't know a whole lot about Google's cloud platform. At least they're kind of server and services hosting. I'm familiar with Google Apps and G Suite or whatever they're calling it today, Google Workspace. I think they're up to now.

51:16
So you guys, do you use any of those like Azure AWS DCP? Yeah, so I definitely use AWS and a little bit of Azure. AWS is more of their VPC, which I think is like their virtual cloud or something like that. I'm probably not sure about that. But the AWS people are like, no, he screwed it up. No. But.

51:41
I don't do much of the instances and stuff like that, but I definitely know the VPN side of it and whatnot. Agreed. Andy, how about you? Do you cloud around at work? Cloud? Do you even cloud around? Yeah. So my experience has just been the routing in and out, mostly.

52:11
with their gateways and building tunnels and stuff. We have, gotta be careful, because I'm not supposed to say we do, or we have stuff with work, but there's like a cloud center of excellence, whatever they call it. So, one of the upsides, I guess, of being a huge organization and being semi-siloed, because there's so much going on as a cloud team, right? And they build all that connectivity, because there's a lot of stuff that has to be built. I don't have that.

52:39
kind of time to do it has to be built. But, you know, so I would run the routing in and out of our data centers to that environment. And then there's people who build, like you're saying, Dan, you know, the instances and the, I don't know what they're doing, but it's magical. And I did last year start Adrian Cantrell's AWS course, which I have a couple of buddies who work, you know, in AWS and some other cloud providers. And they said, man, this is like the best stuff. It's like 40 bucks. It's their whatever architect thing, but.

53:07
I was amazed as I took it. I probably got through the first few weeks of just how much is going on and how dense it is. There's a ton of cloud jobs. I know we're talking about skills in relation to network engineering, but there's a lot of cloud network jobs out there. Even though some heavy hitters in the community have pivoted the cloud, people who are studying for their CCIA, and they're like, you know what? I'm going to do cloud instead. This is kind of where... And it's magical. I'll tell you that...

53:37
You know, I build infrastructure and it takes a long time sometimes, um, to get all that gear up and running and configured and go, you know, everything you got to do for applications to be able to ride it and, you know, you can provision something in seconds. Remember talking to cloud Bart, like, you know, literally seconds or a minute, like press some buttons, bing bang, boom. And you can spin up as much capacity and compute and

54:00
storage as you want on the fly. Like that's pretty magical, cause it wasn't that long ago. As much as you can pay for it. Yeah, like it's right. The sky's the limit. You know, you talk about like time to market, right? Like you got something new, you want to get out there quick. You know, a couple of years ago, my old team, man, you're talking three to six months by the time you order all the crap and get it and get the circuits and configure it all and get the firewalls. It could take a really long time to get all that crap going in a big environment. Man, the cloud, bing bang boom. It's...

54:30
It's pretty awesome. Very fast, right? I would. I could spin up with them. Serve a job. Circling back to the Google thing real quick. Somebody in here, I want to give them credit in the Discord through YouTube out there, which is I'd say right up there with. Who was it here? Earl. Adjacent to Google is YouTube. Many times I've saved my bacon by finding YouTube video configuring what I was doing. So, and I do that a lot, not only at work, but.

54:58
you know, at home, like on a home project or something like, how the heck do I do this? YouTube is Googling something and reading a document's one thing. You got a video of somebody doing what you're trying to do, that's even better in my opinion. Yeah. Oh yeah. Good. Truth. Another one that Earl just brought up was like layer one, knowing fiber, SFP types, types of fiber, all that stuff. That's huge. That is big because one thing I see people struggle with,

55:26
is and I think we talked about this in the discord one one night, but rolling fiber over like it. I think people struggle with that because they don't they don't realize that, you know, if you flip it on one side, you know, and then you got your two lasers hitting each other. Yeah, you're not getting anywhere. So I I wish they made those easier to flip. It's so hard to do with my big fingers. Yeah. I have gotten actually pretty good at it.

55:55
I get the little clip under one of my fingernails and then I can, you can twist that fiber out of there and just pop around. I got a question. So why don't they, if you just labeled send and receive on each end of the fiber, right? You'd never have to roll, your send on your A side would go to your receive on the B side. Like every time I stand up infrastructure, we wound up rolling fiber and I, in my mind, if it was just labeled, that when they plugged it in, the send goes to the receive.

56:25
Like, is it just because they don't label the send and receive fibers? Would that solve the problem? I think it's because like, I think the big thing is when you jump from one fiber to another fiber, like you go through the whole patch panel, right? Yeah. I forgot about the patch panels. Because the, you know, I mean, it's not the fiber that decides, which is the send and receive it's the transceiver itself that it's plugged into is what's shooting the laser. But the train does the transceiver does the SFP have a send side and a receive side? Transceiver does. Right.

56:55
So if you're looking at your SFP and you can see the SEND side, and then if you had a fiber that had an S, plug the S into the S. When you get to the patch panel, do the same. I think the issue isn't the transceiver or the patch cables. It's the patch panel. And where on one side in the building, it's wired as such. And on the other side, it's wired backwards. You can't fix the cable there. So the only place that you can fix it is the patch cable. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

57:21
That's why it's easier to roll the patch cable. You can't do anything about how the transceiver is set up in the device. And you really can't do anything about how it's spliced at the patch panel. So the only place you can do anything is on one end of the patch cable. And when do you guys decide to roll a fiber? What's the symptom? Like you're not, the interface obviously isn't coming up. It's not working. Yeah. But you're not receiving light either, right? Because there's like, sometimes I'm on and they're like, rolling this will do nothing.

57:50
And I've never really, I just trust my ops people, but sometimes you're like, nah, rolling is a ghost. You can actually, like, I will in a very safe manner use my phone camera and I'll cup the cable around and make it nice and dark, turn off the lights if I have to and then like use my camera to shoot into, cause the camera is a lot more light sensitive than my eyes are. You can see. And I don't wanna look directly at a laser. And you can see which side is lit, which side isn't. They tell you not to do that.

58:19
look right into it. Oh yeah. Maybe that's why I have these glasses. I'm like, yep, it's lit up. But I run into that all the time. If you can be good with fiber, because I'm still not great with it, and there's so many different variations, and the connectors, and the modes, and the nanometers. I mean, it's a nightmare. And I tap myself as a physical guy, because I was a cable guy, but I never touched fiber.

58:46
You know what I mean? So now that I'm like with data centers, every time I got to do fiber, I'm like, Oh God, you know, is it OM four? Is it this? Is it LCSC? Is it multimode single mode? Is it, you know, there's just, there's so many options. Well, and I also want to point out, you know, we're talking about one single, you know, fiber cable, uh, the traffic network, he was talking about 72 count fiber split and it's less like, Oh my God, that would give me anxiety.

59:14
I from a personal experience, I will say that knowing fiber plant is very I don't know critical as an IT person because I once hired a Contractor to come in and run fiber in a building and I said hey for this project We need to do 10 gig and he's like, okay, cool. I know what you need and I took him at face value He goes out he buys fiber. He comes in and he installs it. I was out of the office while he was installing it I came back into the office

59:42
so excited to see my brand new fiber plant. And I find that it's OM1. Oh, OK. Now help me out. You can't get 10 gig on OM1? You can get 10 gig out of OM1 on short runs. Apparently, less than 100 feet, you could theoretically get 10 gig. No, for what I needed in my application, I definitely needed at least OM3 or OM4. And so I had to go back to the.

01:00:12
the fiber plant guy and just like, hey, bro, where's my 10 gig? He's like, well, this is the stuff I install all the time. I'm like, God, I hope not. That's, you're screwing your customers over. This is what you're doing. Yeah. So yeah, it was unfortunate that I had to educate him on stuff and he was super cool about it. We figured out how we were gonna navigate through that. You know, and, but yeah, it just definitely knowing

01:00:42
fiber plant and understanding what works where. Safe to my bacon. So we've talked about an awful lot. I think we're coming up on our hour here. I think if we had to summarize, do you think there's skills that maybe people should prioritize on or immediately outside the network engineering bubble? What would you think are some things that...

01:01:06
Because I feel like this is kind of like something that we could come back to and revisit once or twice a year and just be like, hey, given the market, these are things that you should focus on. I mean, obviously, things we didn't talk about today were automation and scripting. That's obviously a big one. That's huge these days. And I think maybe at this point, I would just consider that part of the network engineering toolkit not necessarily something considered outside the realm. I'd like to just jump on that real quick. I know we're wrapping up. But if I understood coding and programming,

01:01:37
better, I would definitely be able to work with software folks, you know, more efficient. I don't really interact with software folks, but when I work for a software company and when something has a problem, you know, there might be people on a call or something like I, I don't know what they're talking about. And, you know, I'm just like, Hey man, I got routes. I can ping Trace is good. Like, you know, I don't know what to tell you that, I don't know what's wrong with your application, but the network's fine. But you know, I got a network engineer working for a software company.

01:02:06
I would imagine that it would be advantageous for me to be more knowledgeable about software. It's probably why they hire computer science people, right? Yeah, I can't wait for the day where I can blame it on ShadyCode. What do you mean wait for the day? I do that all the time. But I hear... Yeah, but I don't know though, you know? You know what I mean? Like I have a good feeling, but... But I hear heavy hitters say that all the time, like fix your damn application.

01:02:34
I guess they'll come to us saying something like, oh, well, we need, like, nah, bro, go fix your application. Like if you, you know, I know there's been certain scenarios where if the network hiccups at all anywhere, an application falls over and dies, and our architects will come back and be like, yeah, you know, if you can't, if we can't lose a frame without your application falling over and dying, like you need to go, you can't keep saying it's the network. Like you need to, you know.

01:03:02
And that's like a general statement. But I would say out of everything we covered, AJ, like I wrote them down, virtualization, AD, SMTP, Linux, Googling, YouTube, cloud fiber. Like I would think if you had to pick one, Linux would probably be your biggest bang for the buck return on your investment. Everybody says learn Linux and I run into it all the time and all the Cisco boxes are running Linux, right? It's like the Linux kernel. Like there's just, there seems to be Linux everywhere. Like you said, Dan, all the server guys.

01:03:32
What are you two giggling about? Is there something happening I need to know about? Yeah, my freaking cat came in. You're giggling and typing, and I'm trying to answer your question. And it's very distracting. What's happening? Let me see your cat. Get your cat out. I do. Come here, kitty. What's your kitty's name? Name's Kitty. I had a kitty growing up. I didn't even see her face. Hi, kitty. Sorry for the listeners. Script kitty, Eric said. Script kitty.

01:04:00
I think anything you learn as a network person, circling back to what somebody told me early on and I want to give Jeremy the credit because I did everything Jeremy Jarrett told me to do early on and it paid off. But the more you can learn about all the technology stacks traversing your network will make you a better network.

01:04:23
person. You know what I mean? If you're an auto mechanic, you have to know every system in the car, you can't just be the brake guy or the transmission guy, right? Like you need to know all the systems and how they work together. And that's I like that. And that's what we're talking about here. You know, everything is traversing our networks and people are going to come to you with problems. And if you understand their stacks, you can at least communicate with them more effectively. And the better communication, the more likely it is you guys will find and you know, be able to fix a problem. So

01:04:51
Any of them will help. If I had to pick one, I'd probably say Linux, because I run into it often. And I'd like to be better at it. But I think it's low hanging fruit. Like if you can learn Linux as a network engineer, it's definitely going to pay dividends, I think. Because everybody's got some flavor of Linux running somewhere, right? Yeah. I think Windows AD. That's probably one I would say. And it always depends on your environment, right? I've never touched AD. Oh, yeah.

01:05:18
But for Dayan, he can manage his own AD, right? So yeah, it's going to depend, I guess, on anything. I'd say for me as a professional services deployment engineer, virtualization and knowing that has paid big dividends, because a lot of what I deploy is an appliance. If I'm setting up stuff or pushing out something new or usually deploying an appliance and standing stuff up and just being able to navigate around that really helps.

01:05:47
Everything seems to come as an appliance. It does. And NFV is everything and everywhere. And if it's not where you're at, it will be. Everybody's going. It's much cheaper to do that than the proprietary hardware tied to the software. You could just spin it up in a VM somewhere. Virtualization's huge. I mean, the CSR is an example, or basically a virtual appliance, right? It's a VM sitting somewhere. Right. Yeah. Virtualization's big. Awesome. Well.

01:06:15
I think we did it. I think we got to the end of another episode. If you heard us talking before the episode, you'd know how good we feel about this episode being good. Because I don't know man, it's been a tough week. See how this goes. You know, it happens. Yeah, now we did good. Pull it together. Doing this is the one thing I look forward to doing every week. So I'm glad we hung in there, stuck it out, and we got to the end of another episode.

01:06:45
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01:07:14
Thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next week for another episode of the art of network engineering. Have a great day. 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.

01:07:43
at art of network engineering.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.