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 can you tell me how to get how to get to cyber security street hi ho kermit dfrog here today we're going over basic internet hygiene let's start with a popular attack vector email save the princes in need of help to the disney movies kids don't click on random links from people you don't know next as much as i like them bigbird123 is a terrible password consider using a password manager with a randomly generated password don't forget to add two-factor authentication where you can for additional protection all right finally let's go to a website and check its server certificate to make sure it's valid what's this pop-up down here it says to ensure a fantastic experience this website uses cookies son of a cookie monster you scared the lily pad out of me i like cookies be careful big guy these are different cookies you should you could be googling your favorite double chocolate chunks then all of a sudden an ad will pop up for them in your facebook feed well while i try to calm down from the near heart attack cookie monster just gave me let's get into the next segment the art of network engineering oh bravo bravo thank you uh cookie dan and no danny monster danny monster i'm pretty sure i messed that up that was that was fabulous that was fun that was fine job dan all right now i need to figure out if sesame street music if i can get that well i don't know if you've noticed i've got a theme going on up here of like pbs things so it should all be public domain go for it okay all right all right welcome to the art of network engineering thank you tim and dan for that very unique intro uh that one will definitely go up on our youtube into the archive so you can watch it over and over and over again i am aj murray at no blinky blinky and uh he is tim burtino tim how you doing i as well like cookies aj i think we all do i don't i wouldn't trust a person who didn't honestly you know that seems kind of weird to me dan at howdy packet dan how are you doing howdy oh gosh aj how you doing i'm doing well i'm doing well how about you ah i'm making it i'm making it we're gonna get through it we'll make it third all right and last but not least he is andy permit i p andy andy and at permit ipandyandy.com andy how you doing i'm good aj thank you i started studying for encore last night so i'm back i saw that i saw that yeah you're blowing up twitter with that i didn't mean to but yeah i i was exhausted after i put the kids down and i'm like there's no way i'm gonna get up at five tomorrow morning so let me just hunker down and yeah yeah you know the hardest thing is starting right so i got started i spent an hour and 40 minutes on ospf and i feel good about it back back in the saddle yeah nice do you have a test date set yet you want to throw that out into the uh the world and commit to it yeah i do have a test date set i don't know if i'm going to keep it um november something or another i got it written down but you know i'm gonna i wanna i wanna pay us encore before the end of the year that's that's my goal cool can't wait to see it happen thanks man awesome well uh let's get into some wins shall we there it is there it is all right winning this week is rey6221 they passed the nse4 congratulations this this is a nice one i love this greg g a new granddaughter has been born the biggest win of his life so far congratulations that is awesome uh net stackology past the pcnse congratulations m bobo started a new position as a network engineer on 10-2 long journey through certifications and working on the help desk but it was worth it congratulations that's huge nice very nice and zapdos 26 got a promotion at work congratulations yeah good job and we got some new patreons joining us joining us this week congratulations to us for some more patreons and thank you for supporting us at the art of network engineering thank you to joe mai charles and robert thank you so so very much for your support of our show thank you thank you thank you thank you appreciate it means a lot awesome all right andy hit me again with that goat screen yeah i love it i love it hey a1 fans aj here to remind you about nordvpn.com nordvpn will help secure you wherever you go i use nordvpn on all my personal devices whenever i'm out about i just go into the nordvpn app hit quick connect and away i go nice and secure don't have to worry about prying eyes anybody looking at my connection if i choose to go work from a coffee shop locally or you know even while i'm traveling if i bring my personal device devices i will use new vpn to help keep things safe and secure i'm using nordvpn right now and there's no degradation in my signal everything looks good when you guys watch us on the live streams so i can't say enough good things about nordvpn they have some great additional services included with their vpn product they'll scour the dark web for your credentials and see if they've been involved in any sort of hacks or anything and then if they have they'll let you know and you can go change your passwords and do whatever you need to do to help keep yourself safe and secure they also have a mode that will block any websites or ads known to possess malware and they just have general ad blocking anyway because you know who wants ads uh as i record an ad anyway if you want nordvpn and you do go to nordvpn.com t-a-o-n-e for the art of network engineering and you can get a really great deal 73 off two years plus four months free so again that's 73 off two years plus four months free of nordvpn if you forget that url just go to nordvpn.com at checkout you can use the promo code t-a-o-n-e for the art of network engineering and we appreciate your support as well as nordvpn support of the art of network engineering podcast now back to the show awesome all right so uh this week we are talking about um our experience tim and i were both recently on networking field day 26 also one of our fellow patreons and friends gerard was also there and joined us but we wanted to take some time and you know kind of share our thoughts but definitely keep an eye on our youtube channel because tim myself and gerard are going to sit down and have a little fireside chat about what we learned at networking field day and get some more content out there for you but we wanted to take some time to kind of talk about you know what is field day kind of recap that uh and then we'll go over what happened on um you know kind of our experience with networking field day 26 and then we'll we'll kind of go through and touch on each of the presenters and and kind of give our thoughts and i know andy and dan are going to pick our brains and the patrons too are welcome to ask us questions as we go on through this so uh for me this was my second networking field day tim i know this was your first uh what was it like it was incredible aj i obviously i didn't know what to expect and i was definitely nervous about it but i gotta say starting off i was incredibly impressed with the network field day staff for putting this together they haven't been doing this in a virtual environment for very long and they just had it nailed i mean they they queued up the presenters they had them start on time i don't think we started any of them late or really any technical issues it was it was really impressive i will say the event really challenged uh my lack of focus because a big part of its community engagement right these companies are making new advertisements they're coming out with new things and that's a big reason for the delegates is to get that out in front of people so trying to pay attention to content while getting things out on tweets and taking notes and that kind of thing it i finally got a hang of it but it was it was definitely different yeah and i guess we should have started at that point right so networking field day is part of tech field day and the whole you know premise behind tech field day is they want to bring in the the companies and and present a little bit on you know new technologies they're working on new solutions uh and the the real big difference is this really isn't a sales pitch because there's no sale on the line here right like we're not sitting there listening to the pitch we're not going to sign a po or anything like that we're going to ask questions we're going to poke holes and and see you know try to dig deeper understand more about the solution and then like tim said as as content creators bloggers podcasters youtubers we're here to take this all in and bring it back to our audiences and you know share that information with you and get you excited about the new stuff that we've learned about and so um you know primarily the event is live streamed and we can interact with folks on twitter um or or any other like social platform that we occupy and then um all of these sessions are recorded so and i believe at this point they're all up there so if you can go back and watch all the presentations from networking field day 26 they added them up a little bit so if there was any bloopers which i don't think there were any notable bloopers uh you missed out on those but um so yeah so this this was my second one um just as anxious and nervous as the first time around um even though my first one was in person it was still uh you know you're kind of surrounded by all these these titans of tech and people that you see all the time on social media so um there's a little bit of like you know being starstruck or off actor um and so it was really cool it was a lot of fun to to be you know up there with you guys and and the other uh delegates and and so if you're interested in becoming a delegate i think one of the biggest requirements is you know you kind of have to have some sort of audience right and you know tim's got an audience with his blog and the podcast here and i've got an audience with my blog and a podcast as well and um you know gerard's definitely got an audience with his twitter account and his blog so um that's that's kind of the first big step is is having you know being an advocate for technology and having a presence and and a podium if you will to stand on and talk about uh things that you care about in the tech arena so if you've got that and you've got good social profiles you can go to techfieldday.com and they have a link that you can click on up at the top for delegates and under that there's become a field day delegate and it's a google form that you can fill out and kind of justifying you why you think you should become a delegate and i think there might be a spot for referrals if i remember correctly so if you know another field a delegate that kind of referred you to go do this make sure you you put them down on the form but it's a ton of fun i i had a great time tim it looked like you were going to say something yeah i just want to highlight that these are uh technical deep dives like these vendors are instructed to not focus this on sales and that they are technical deep dives because they want the the delegates to see those kind of uh technologies and those those kind of explanations and they don't want to deal with the with the sales on top of it so yeah you don't have to sit through i mean obviously there's going to be some slides uh in some talk at the head usually they'll start with uh the the sales leaders but they get right into the the engineering very quickly in each in each segment i got a question so these the the presentations that they're giving is it for unreleased products and features like are these things that people don't know about yet is that where they present them to the delegates so some of the presentations are our announcements at tech field day of new features to existing solutions or new solutions entirely i believe some of the announcements that we saw this past network field day um they had previously released those um you know new new things like the week prior or earlier in that week but they were just kind of formally making the announcement at tech field day or networking field day so it's it's not always you know super hush-hush the stuff that we're hearing but um it is typically you know some kind of new exciting announcement although there was i think one vendor um you know that they just wanted to get their name out um and we'll get to them in a few minutes but um you know they hadn't really heard of of networking field day or tech field day and and uh somebody recommended to them like oh hey you guys you know get your name out go uh sponsor a network field day presentation slot and um you know present to the delegates and help get your your market going if you will so it's not necessarily a a specific product release that they do there it's more of a conversation with thought leaders it's okay here's who we are here's what we're doing you know what do you think kind of thing exactly yeah they are they are looking for feedback so what was what's really cool about this is that there's the initial presentation which is live streamed and the delegates can ask questions at any point during that presentation after we're done with that presentation we get some one-on-one time with the presenters and other people behind the scenes maybe they're like technical marketing engineers or just you know the engineers that work on the product and we can ask deeper questions you know we don't always want to make any company look bad so i know that there's a lot of delegates that kind of held certain questions until after the live stream was over uh and then we got into those kind of discussions after the fact and then i think there was some more maybe brutally honest feedback that that we waited to give until you know again after after doors were closed if you will so uh yeah it was it's definitely good stuff so this past networking field day uh there was a number of presenters and the first that started us off was juniper and juniper had kind of an exciting announcement i i believe it was it was an announcement and it was their solution to uh you know automated software-defined access if you will i know software-defined access is is kind of like a cisco term but it was it was basically juniper's version of that um and i was really excited for that kind of announcement because i think when more of those solutions come to market it forces the others to you know really start to beef up and get better with those products and refine them a little bit more what did you think about that tim yeah that's exactly what it was so juniper's offering is is basically an automated campus fabric to be able to do uh overlays on the fly and they did they did show us a demo it was it was very quick and very slick um and yeah i would see it as a as a direct competitor to cisco's sd access so it's it's them bringing this to the market right so did they have like you know with uh cisco's sd access you have to have like a dna center did did they have something similar to that or was there so if i remember correctly theirs was all cloud driven um the devices talk to the cloud and then you controlled you know they would check into the cloud you would then claim them um and then you could you know start to build your fabric from there i can't remember if there was like an on-premises version that would support that's what i'm trying to remember as well yeah what was it like uh like an on-premises like um hardware or vm solution that you could deploy and you know you know what it is aj it's all driven by uh the cloud mist ai so they brought mist into it as well to be that cloud controller yeah so the missed ai has been um marvin is what they call it uh and that that's been really big with their wireless products and missed and they're pulling that into you know the wired or uh you know arena and so one of the cool things that they demoed was the ability for like a level one tech help desk network engineer or whatever to be able to go into the marvin and start to chat with marvin basically and do some real basic uh troubleshooting to figure out issues and marvin could pull information provided to the engineer and either help provide more information up to other levels to troubleshoot further or fix it right then and there with that tier one engineer i thought that was really cool yeah so um i i would break something like that do you like cookies and that was another thing they discussed is because uh mist and marvis was was definitely geared toward wireless and this pitch was also them bringing it across the board so they're integrating these solutions across their wired wireless uh sd-wan and data center uh network offerings you can catch it so it's kind of like rocky then would you kind of compare it to them honestly yeah so one of the questions i had for them was um basically how does how does this work how do your uh wire and wireless gear communicate to be managed by missed ai let me get that up here so i asked how do customers enable the different platforms wired wireless when to send data into missed ai is it just a check box into missed ai on each platform and and how does that conversation look and the answer was that their their aps communicate to mist over 443 telemetry to the cloud and the switches communicate over ssh port 2200 so that's how they communicate it's all a big trend that i noticed i don't know if you did as well aj that i noticed throughout the entire network field day was uh analytics i mean a lot of these products are analytics driven so juniper's just trying to get is as much data into customers missed ai clouds as possible so that they can make intelligent decisions and and fix things quickly yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah i think one thing that's a little bit different with that solution that that you don't see with meraki right like you can configure all of the meraki devices from the cloud but you you don't um you know state or place a switch in a roll right like you don't declare that this is a core switch or a distribution switch or an access switch but you do that in the in the juniper solution so you basically you know make all your connections between the the you know core distribution and access and you declare at that point like this is my core switch and this is my distribution and then it will just configure it from there per you know how they do it yeah so like it'll put the l3's where it needs to awesome so uh next on the network field day list was arista and i gotta be honest i'm not an isp guy and uh if i understand what arista was bringing to us it was kind of like that that network automation piece that you know juniper had presented on and we've seen from cisco with sd access but they were bringing it to isp networks so they were going to you know completely automate and provision the the layer 2 layer 3 vpn and pseudo wire and just kind of make it all happen in an automated fashion tim did you kind of pick up the same thing from that presentation yeah i did it was definitely geared toward large data centers and service providers that's kind of what i felt i think it was actually trying to kind of bridge the gap of between companies that aren't necessarily hyperscalers in companies that aren't small mom and pop shops it was kind of trying to find that happy medium of customers that may be enterprise customers but to their sub customers they act as isps essentially right so it was definitely geared toward that one thing that i really appreciated that they took the time to talk about is they talked about data center switching scale so basically the two methodologies are that you can scale your routed data center fabrics either up or out and scaling up was geared toward you know these large chassis switches with with multiple modules and the scale out model is the the wonderful data center phrase we have all come to love and that is uh spine and leaf so spine and leaf is scaling out where if you need bandwidth you add a spine and each leaf connects to each spine so what they were really driving home there is that the the scale out method with spine and leaf is is really the more flexible the easier way to scale versus kind of getting locked into chassis and needing specific potentially specific line cards and if you have some sort of a major failure in the in the back plane then you all of a sudden need to move all of your line cards to a replace chassis so i i really thought that was cool that they took the time to to go through that right so do you think that do you think that's kind of the change that's happening like people like they're kind of getting away from the big chassis models and they're trying to do the more well you're an aci guy dan you tell me well i'm trying to talk about it yeah i you know dan i hadn't really thought about it a whole lot other than knowing some aci but yeah it really does make sense and i i kind of want to say you can correct me but i think cisco even kind of started pushing the spine and leaf topologies even pre-aci uh it's just it makes more sense from the scale factor to be able to just add things laterally and and connect them up versus kind of being bound to that chassis yeah are you guys aware that spine and leaf is not a new architecture how old is it aj it's like from the 70s what i need some more info here yeah so uh it was i if i'm remembering my ccda enough here it was i think it was robert a close that's why they sometimes call it the class network or close depending on how you pronounce it right and um it was originally designed and put in telephone switching networks like pstn because that's how you got the hyper growth and hyperscale from that kind of design from networking and so they've they've taken that architecture and they've applied it to networking as we know it and not the telephone networks it works it works the other thing that i took away from the arista presentation was they were really focusing a lot more on openness with their automation solutions so you know that you could automate their fabric over you know the the aristo devices but if you needed to automate and build pass in your network on non-aristo devices they were using all sorts of open source platforms to enable you to do that so it wasn't such a closed ecosystem it was you know very open uh and so i thought that was cool and they were making some really good use of network automation tools to you know validate configurations before you push them so it it takes your network as as it is today you give it a proposed configuration and it will validate it before you push it you know so that way if you screwed up your bgp or your igp config it would say well no you don't want to push that because you're going to take down you know this kind of section of the network so i thought i thought it was really cool now is that a is that their own tool or how would you get that feature um so it is their platform but they use a collection of open source tools so it's probably something that you could ultimately build yourself because it was literally built off of all open source tools okay but they even provided something i log it was more like a whole c uh cicd workflow than it was just any any one single tool right i got you all right after arista that brought us to the end of day one so to kick us off on day two we heard from netbees and netbiz was completely new to me but i thought they had a pretty cool uh solution and um part of it was was the premise was uh making all of your network devices a sensor in your network you know if we knew everything about the network that our network knew we could make more informed decisions uh and they definitely stuck with the the bees theme uh i i think all the collectors that that took in or aggregated the data were called hives uh and so it was pretty cool yeah this was this was really neat so it was back to what aj was saying about the network being a sensor and it was all facets of it so they had uh wired sensors that you can basically just plug into a switch and they can be a tap they had wireless sensors and they also have a client for the ever-growing uh work from home population so that somebody calls into the service desk and they say hey i'm having all these kinds of problems then you've got an analytics agent on the uh the user's workstation that's basically giving data saying hey this is the rssi this is the snr the this is uh what i'm seeing is user experience for packets going through the network that kind of thing it's it's pushing that analytics to the edge to the actual workstation did they say what kind of like workload that was for the machine like is that a heavy agent no no it was it was super low i i forget what they said but it was like it was practically immeasurable it put such little workload on the end user's machine and they had done lots of testing on i think all the major os is right like mac some form of linux that's common in enterprise and of course windows and um across the board the the impact is very low when when when you know the sales team says oh it's an agent on the user's machine i it kind of sends a shiver down my back because it's like yeah i hear you okay just add it to the list of you know 9 million agents that you have running on that machine and right down i mean i first hadn't seen that right like there's so many agents running on the machine so oh and one thing i missed is um part of the on-premises agents were actual like wired sensors but you can also uh run this platform uh via containers on switch hardware so so cisco is a vendor that is supported to run uh the netbeas agent on as a container right on the switch interesting so would that be like their new catalyst or something like that right yeah i would think any platform that can run a container it can it can handle it and i aj we might have to follow up with them i can't remember i think it was netbees for when we look at doing video content i think it was netbees that offered up a uh a demo environment that we might need to to take a look at yes yep that's right that's right so when you say you plug these things in your switcher do they look like raspberry pi's or that honestly that's exactly what the wired sensor looks like to me dan okay and then the the wi-fi sensor what i'm imagining is it it can just sit on a on a tabletop and it'll run uh synthetic tests and and check rssi and snr and that kind of stuff yeah so so what what did they mention price points at all about any of this stuff because no none of the presentations touched on price points hey dan if you gotta ask you can't afford it yeah probably right yeah yeah and i think the reasoning for that too is like it was a broad audience and you guys know how pricing goes right like there's the msrp but nobody pays the msrp everybody gets some form of discount your discount depends on how much you're buying are you in a vertical like healthcare or education or fedgovs you know something like that uh and so it you know they could have talked about you know list price but that everybody would probably just turn and run away because nobody pays less price but i think everybody in our you know in our field kind of understands that i'm just wondering like a ballpark like hey yeah those wireless devices you know list price it's 800 bucks and then i'm like okay so i probably get 400 if you know after it's all said and done but right right you know i just curious because it sounds like this is something like oh let's plug one in over here let's plug one in over here let's plug one in over here but you know i keep that adds up so i was just curious yeah at least not that they presented they might have something on our website i guess they've got this listed on their roadmap in q3 so i'm not sure if it's quite out yet but they were bringing in uh pc performance monitoring to their to their platform as well so i'm seeing that as is monitoring actual processes and memory and that kind of stuff as well not just the network so like hard drive space right yeah so somebody calls in says hey i'm having all these kinds of problems my my wi-fi sucks right yeah they can look at it and say well your connectivity looks fine but you've got this one process that's eaten up 94 of your cpu let's figure out what that is exactly yeah i i have a virtual uh whiteboard behind my my chair in my office and i have all kinds of tally marks on there because how many times people have been like hey i think it's a network it's super slow every time dan clears his name he gets a check mark yeah i'm the only one keeping up with it somebody has to yeah yeah i i would say like overall i and i know we're going to touch on a few more uh solutions that focused on user experience but that that was definitely a focus was user experience right like your network might look good but from the perspective of the user maybe there's something between them and office 365 that's giving them what what makes them feel like a slow connection so um yeah i i thought that was pretty cool stuff uh because you can monitor your network all day long and if you're your network looks good but you know you've got employees working from home they've got stuff wrong with their home networks because who knows what the hell they're doing at home right um and then you know it's the internet right like the path that i take to get to office 365 is much different than the path that any you guys take so it could be fine for me it could be crappy for you and having that analytics on the end device to understand the end user's experience for that um you know is it something that you can control and fix or is it out of your hands and that that just really helps provide you with that information that's pretty cool what that you call it what did what was this called netbeans that base yep i'll have to do some research on that that sounds yeah after netbeas was i think one of my favorite presentations for the week and it was along the same lines and it was from a company called pass solutions and the presenter was tim titus and i think he's like the lead engineer he he's like a network engineer by trade he's got like years and years and years of network engineering experience so he knows network engineering right and it was their their solution was like network monitoring on absolute steroids i mean their box did so much but it was it wasn't like overkill right like it was like your source to go if you want to know what's going on with your network yeah there was definitely some things in there that that i didn't even expect to see that that was really pleasantly surprising so right the first i want to start off with this is how they do discovery so basically it's a it's a server in your network and you need to be able to find what's on your network right so an option is you can basically just configure uh what subnets you want to scan and it's just going to scan those on an ongoing basis i think it's configurable but i think by default it's basically going to scan each subnet that you have defined at least once a day and you'll just set it up with snmp and you'll set it up with cli creds and it'll be able to go and pull in that information i think if they don't have it yet they were going to add support to have like a seed router so you could basically give creds to a what's called a seed router it would discover that and then it would jump in and look at the route table and try to jump to other devices and discover those as well and once they're discovered it's it's a network monitoring network management solution at that point so this would definitely like compete with stuff like solar winds 100 percent what's up cool that kind of stuff yep okay yeah one thing the the one thing that i didn't expect to see that they ended up having um was voice over ip monitoring so they actually have a built-in solution where you can essentially test phone calls and get the different metrics uh right there from from their platform that was that was really interesting i wasn't expecting to see that yeah i i think like you know just saying generically that it could you know replace or compete with like a solar winds like that that almost pigeon holes it because just everything that that box could do you know like just when you thought like oh hey you know like that that's got to be the last feature he's like and bam like here's more but wait there's more yeah yeah and then then that like in the after talk you know with him when it was just the delegates and the presenter like he was going into stuff he's like oh well i didn't really touch on this because this wasn't like a security field day but there's like all these security features and things that it does too and it's all included in the price it's not like extra stuff you got to unlock it was purely like client based and i i think the base price covers 250 don't quote me on that but i i remember discussions on like the the base price included 250 devices and then you you bought additional chunks of devices you know to cover your network from there and just when you started talking about uh don't pigeonhole it aj i completely left out that it's not just you know servers and and voice monitoring or sorry network and voice monitoring they have server monitoring as well so you can go discover servers windows servers by wmi and be able to pull information on those as well and they also had probably one of the coolest tabs i saw of the entire uh field day is they have a gremlins tab which basically i aj you might have to explain it better than me but it's just basically trying to go show you what the the weirdest things that you might not catch on your network in one tank right yeah but like if it's seeing a weird process run away you know with with memory or something like that or you know just just kind of the anomalies you know there's just a collection of them on this tab called gremlins it's really cool interesting and a couple other features um it it can act as a netflow collector and an ipam solution as well okay now does it does it also work as like a config management yes yes great question yes it will pull configs and show you config differences when it senses changes and so can it also make changes in the config like let's say someone got in there and they changed i don't know something i and it wasn't supposed to be that way can it like let you know and then actually go back and push what's supposed to be in place there i don't know that for sure i don't remember covering that um i would think it could at least do um like snmp give it a read write community and it could do snmp but i think you would be doing that yourself i'm not aware that it had any of that um automated remediation did it so one one feature that i'm thinking it's called live action i don't know if you've heard of that solution or not but they can do like uh qos policies and it'll keep up with all that so like if you if you want a certain qos policy you can build it within their tool and then it'll actually apply to your switches so that's cool i don't know if this had something like that or not but i don't remember covering anything like that yeah yeah so it sounds like it just it will do the config management basically just monitor if it changes or anything like that but not actually uh what's the word remediate yeah any changes or anything like that yeah but i i do want to want to echo what aj started off with is i went into this one um fully thinking this was was your typical network management system pulling logs being able to show you pretty pictures but it kept like michael said in the chat here it just kept the but wait it's more it just kept going for the entire hour and a half two hours we were on with them it was pretty cool yeah yeah it was good stuff uh next was kentick and if i had to summarize kentech i thought that they were along the lines of past solutions it's like they they took the presenters and they paired them up for the day like netbeans past solutions and kentic were all kind of along the same lines um i didn't feel like kentick was as feature rich as past solutions but it may have been a little bit more polished i guess like it maybe had a cleaner ui but again it definitely didn't do everything that go path or pass solutions i said go past solutions because that's our twitter handle so you can follow them at gopass solutions um i think another thing that kentuck focused on was um passed through the network so you could give it you know a source and a destination and it would look at the path through the network that it was taking and you know give you some information back on that like is it a clean path is this the best path to reach your destination kind of thing so um there was a lot of good stuff from the kentic solution as well yeah i think another claim to fame of kentic is they really focus on synthetic testing so basically you being able to go into the platform and say i want these agents software-based agents what have you to test these different applications on-prem outside that kind of thing and to highlight what aj was saying about the the testing the different paths i want to say this was uh and i don't have for some reason i didn't grab a screenshot but they had this this uh really cool picture that showed basically a source and a destination and a bunch of different paths it could take out on the internet and showed all the potential paths and i didn't understand how do you do that how do you get that information and i i believe it was kentic in this presentation that it's basically their probes to do this is is think of it kind of like a trace route where it'll have a ttl of one it'll send it out as far as it can go come back then send it out again ttla2 that kind of thing so it was a really interesting way to build out different paths yeah couldn't you pull out a.s path information too like they they would actually get it yeah yeah i thought that was unique because i i hadn't seen that before so i i guess like if you're an enterprise that does bgp you probably want to know that stuff so let me ask this you were talking about like uh synthetic testing stuff is does that do any like kind of stress test or is it just checking the path and like hey is the jitter good is there any delay or doing that yeah i think it's more back to the performance monitoring what does this look like to the user well after kentick that was the end of day two and that brought us to the last day and first up was cisco and they had a rather lengthy time block uh but they covered they covered quite a bit um they started off with um the secure sd access solution right wait is that right no i feel like there was something else no they started with data center and nexus dashboard that's right that's right nexus dashboard so there were some new features in that nexus dashboard where they were making their single pane of glass pitch right so if you have uh data center spread all all over you can aggregate all of the nexus dashboard feeds into a single dashboard and i thought one of the the kind of cool things about that was is you could use the dashboard to click into other dashboards and if you had um other credentials it would automatically authenticate you using those other credentials uh so that way you didn't have to like keep re-authenticating at every like new tab you know i just want to point out what jordan just said don't do it yeah yeah don't do it he said okay how many single panes of glass can we have so i i will say i i got to give credit where credit's due because a lot of the presenters stayed away from using that phrase because every single time you hear that phrase you cringe because it's never a single pane of glass you have so many single panes of glass uh in your network so it's like you got to put it all together and make a window i was just going to say i think you could call this a pane of glass aggregator but it was just for it was just for data center networking right it didn't you didn't look at data center compute or anything like there's a whole another solution that looks at data center compute so this was just for data center networking yeah i saw this as geared toward customers that manage uh multiple data centers in both on-premises and cloud as well and being able to view all of those segmented data centers um in a one window a single graph trying not to say the first right so so i one thing i kind of struggle with that right like i i suppose if your organization is so large that you have data centers spread all over the place do you really need or want to also monitor your data center compute in the same glass right in the same window or because it's probably a different team that's doing that yeah it is a different team and you don't want it on the same page thank you i'm used to working in in smaller teams and on a smaller team like you did the data center compute you did the networking you did the the lan and the enterprise networking and the wireless so uh i guess having a single pane of glass for for that audience is a bit harder but um i'm going to use that eric thank you yeah yeah yeah so for nexus dashboard i will say i'm kind of intrigued on that because i think that's what we'll be moving to for our aci because we do have a site set up okay and with multi-site you have to have the multi-site orchestrator and i think they've renamed it though i think it's called the nexus dashboard or orchestrator now or something like that um but currently our mso is running on uh it's called a virtual i want to mess this up it's an ase i can't remember if that's like an application services engine i think that's what it is sounds right uh and so we're gonna have to migrate over to this nexus dashboard but it looks like it will probably make things a little bit easier because i can i'm pretty sure you just go to it to make your changes instead of going to the mso so right definitely be looking into that yeah i thought that was cool that you know it it did manage multiple fabrics it wasn't just for orchestrating and managing aci it wasn't just for you know managing non-aci or traditional nx os switches it kind of did the whole gambit and and from that single dashboard you could go to a site and click into aci or you could go to another site and click into you know the the local nexus dashboard and manage the the local nexus which is there so uh it was it was pretty cool overall i enjoyed the solution and nexus dashboard is not something i've gotten a chance to play with so i would love to get my hands on that um so that was like part one of the cisco presentation um after that they had the same presenters come back and present um and i think another add-on to cisco nexus dashboard was it i'm sorry i don't have my notes in front of me tim i'm trying to remember everything that cisco covered that day um i don't remember that they jumped so before they got into secure sd access they got into um basically running compliance and infrastructure as a code for network operations in dna oh yeah yeah that's right that's right network has code in the dna center yeah so one of the big pushes with dna center in software-defined access is basically getting people away from manual configuration in cli and bringing it into a centralized management plane and that centralized management plane is is dna center and it's again moving away from those manual configurations to building templatized that's not a real word configuration so so one of the things that i really like about it in in leveraging these templates in dna center is that you can if if the cli and and the normal show running config is your thing you can basically build a template that is that looks like a running config and if you want to be able to use it for onboarding or to be able to run compliance against other switches you can basically create your own variables within a running config and just say okay when i onboard a switch i want to run this template and it's going to pop up and ask me okay you created a variable for uplink interface what do you want that to be what do you want your loopback zero to be that kind of thing so it it's it's taking the the cli config ssh into devices and bringing it into dna center and managing it there i got you so just like less input essentially and let let it do the backing like hey this is going to be it's ntp server this is going to be it's exactly server like instead of having to go to every single device and do that you're saying you kind of put it in once in this template and that applies it to yeah because what's the alternative right you have a team of four people engineer number one has their cli template engineer number two has theirs number three has theirs number four has theirs they're gonna be fairly similar but they're gonna have differences so it's basically aggregating that template into dna center and just building off of it there so that that wasn't at all tied to the the sd access solution this was just dna center doing this for your network which is new because it would do that if you were doing sd access right like if you were letting dna center fully control your network and build your sd access fabric it would templatize the config and let you put in some variables and stuff like that but now cisco's talking about providing this um you know for you to manage your traditional network through dna center as the hub i got you now did they bring up anything about dna center being cloud facing in the cloud like cloud services so what what they what's continued to be the narrative um is that dna center is still a ucs based on-premises appliance i'm just curious it seems like they're like i don't know like they're dragging their feet on that everybody else's all their solutions are cloud solutions we will see yeah are you talking are you talking smack on cisco's dna center i'm not talking smack i'm just saying that cisco listen cisco if you're out there listening and you've been thinking about a sponsorship on the art of network engineering podcast it's dan who has a problem with your single pane of glass and it's dan who has a problem with dna center if you want to throw enough money around i mean we could talk about what to do with dan that's all i'm saying because dan's got dan's got a lot to say about cisco right now that's all i'm saying i i would hope that our listeners would like my honesty yeah most stuff no you're right dan i mean everybody's going to cloud right why would you leave it why would you leave it on-prem it doesn't make sense i i think the big thing there is is that they already have a cloud solution for managing your network and that's meraki and so if you if you bring dna center to the cloud one like dna centers a big workload like you have to put it on these heavy-duty appliances because every single thing that dna center is doing it's aggregating information from microservices so it's running tons and tons of containerized services like snmp and all the network monitoring and everything else that it's doing and then you know behind the scenes it's taking all of that data in and then doing the analytics and all the other stuff to it the next segment that cisco talked about was the secure sd access fabric they started making connections to the cloud and i thought that this was pretty cool because when you're talking about um profiling devices on your network you know you you see the devices that you see you know the devices that you have in your network but you don't know the mac address and and you don't you got to go into ice you guys say oh well this device is this it's a mac address and so it's trusted kind of thing and so one of the unique things that they're doing is they're pulling all of this information you know the manufacturer the mac address the oui and then you know the general profile like is this a trusted device like can we verify that based on this information this is a trusted device so they're they're pulling all that information out of all their different dna center appliances and they're aggregating it into what they refer to as a data lake and so when you stand up your dna center secure access fabric it will pull that information down from the data lake so that way your dna center doesn't have to learn and profile these devices as if it's never met them it could use the information that's been aggregated from all these other customers to be able to help you verify and like also give like a more solid classification on what is this device actually because sometimes you'll get vendors like you know hp will build a laptop and they'll also provide an oem with a solution so if you just see it as an hp box on your network is it a domain machine is it not a domain machine is it part of an appliance or not part of an appliance so um i think that was one of the cool things that we're doing with that data lake i got you so what you're saying is that if they do dna as a service i'm gonna have to have like a dedicated gig internet pipe just for that just for the information i don't think it was that much information oh okay just curious yeah because i don't think it's not like you pulled down the data lake it just i think between ice and dna center it would it could help quickly send that information and pull down you know a better classification for profiling and that was what aj was just talking about on kind of things getting profiled as just generic like hp or dell devices that that's a challenge that customers are seeing as well is because they want to leverage the power of uh cisco's identity services engine which is the the aaa solution that goes hand in hand with software defined access it's the policy plan for software software-defined access and people want to be able to accurately profile so one of their examples was a in the healthcare field a ct scanner so at its heart a ct scanner may just be a windows 10 workstation but if you're trying to bring these devices in and profile them and then apply policy based on those profiles you want the most specific device information as you can get and what they touted was that they're running uh deep packet inspection in their in their network gear combined with dynamic feeds that they're pulling in from from outside vendors to be able to help categorize these devices so you can build proper policy against them yeah because you know i don't work in healthcare so you know someone correct me if i'm overstepping my boundaries here but i think sometimes when you get those purpose-built solutions um you can't always you know even though it's a windows machine you can't always join it to the domain and manage it through group policy or you know other software assets that you normally push to a workstation right so you have to be able to put it in a place where you can trust it and and i think you know a lot of healthcare and other organizations do that through ice and uh profiling yep they put it in like a remediation subnet or something like that well you know if you can't manage it and secure it and you're you're probably logging into it with an insecure password or you know the default password that they all ship with right so you want to make sure that you're controlling the subnet that it lives in and the traffic that goes into and out of it and by by being able to properly profile it you can put it in that correct place in the network and not get it you know misprofiled and have it live in you know the network with the rest of your your uh and user workstations right right okay yep no trust them not a boy dan trust that's zero trust that was definitely the buzzword yeah um tim am i missing anything else from cisco i think that was it from cisco i think that the sd access the only other thing about sd access that i wanted to bring up was it was a question that i had so cisco's had this security methodology around since i think pre-inception of ice and it's the the trusec model so trusec basically leverages what are called they call them scalable group tags now they used to be security group tags they call them scalable now because you can actually apply a policy that's outside of security so if you want to be able to mess with poe levels on a switch you can do that by a by a tag and and one thing that i was curious about is that when you build these scalable group acls is what they are to be able to say i want this tag to be able to talk to this tag but not this other tag is that enforcement happens on egress so kind of a basic acl a packet will come in the acl will check it and say if it's good or bad with the uh scalable group acls is that they get enforced on egress so the packet actually comes into the network gets a tag based on what uh the policy is from ice and then it traverses it routes as normal traverses to the edge device and then that's where the secure group acl gets looked up and enforced so my question to them was well how do you handle that with when the destination is outside of the software-defined access fabric so let's say it's in the data center and you don't have your um endpoint groups mapped out 100 and are able to enforce that and the answer to that was you can leverage um what's called sxp peering with ice and basically it does a group tag to ip mapping that they can look up and you're basically just building a basic ip acl at that point so that was their their answer to that it's kind of interesting though like why they would do the egress i mean i'm sure there's some reason for it but that that seems kind of like wasted traffic right and that's that's where i was going dan is i'm like i'm used to acls like in the ice world the downloadable acls you profile a device it gets its policy you ice pushes a what's called a downloadable acl which is basically just a dynamic acl you could move that device to another port and the acl will follow it and and that enforcement happens on ingress packet comes into the switch and it gets handled right there and what they're saying is um i'm probably going to botch this but the for the switch to be able to download basically that capacity of an sgacl to be to cover the entire policy of the entire company would be to process intensive to handle on ingress on to be able to basically push that to each uh switch versus on egress it can just do a lookup and say hey this is my source tag this is the destination tag is this allowed that's kind of what i gathered from that but i had that same question so basically they're saying that the amount of traffic that would be wasted if you just sent it on and then blocked it at the end uh is less than what it would probably be trying to load all those uh scalable tags on each device to catch it on ingress is that what you're saying yeah basically the the secure group acl would be could be too cumbersome for the switches to handle if if they had to download it and enforce traffic at ingress i guess yeah that makes sense all right well after the cisco presentation we heard from a brand new company at least it was brand new to me i know i certainly never heard from them and they were called zpe systems have any of you guys ever heard of them zpe so i couldn't tell you what zpe stands for if they told us i certainly don't remember but um they were an out-of-band network solution uh out-of-band management solution but they also kind of did some sd-wan stuff and then they also kind of sort of did some network function virtualization uh they partnered so so they have a device um it it is a router and they they have a bunch of different devices in their portfolio but i remember one of them would they partner with palo alto and you could run their virtual firewalls on that device and then control that using you know palo alto's control plane uh and for policy and stuff like that and then they would do the enforcement local on the box um they did have a big um uh switch and one of the places that they're really popular in is cloud data centers and uh so they produced a 96 port console management device for out-of-band management so you can plug in you know you can put this at the top of the rack and plug in all the devices for probably that rack and in that entire row um yeah 96 ports that's that's two or three rack units right aj no no it was one it was one that was 48 in the front and 48 in the back one racket yeah yeah i was like how in the world they face connections it's a lot of dongles yeah they got that from apple or something like that right right yeah so something i wanted to add about about zpe is that i hadn't really seen um in a platform out there so they have these different sensors that you can tie into uh this out-of-band management device so if you if you're looking at a normal server rack you can have different sensors to make sure that the door got shut to check for humidity and moisture and airflow and all of this ties physically back into that uh zpe out of it i think they even had like water and smoke detectors too right yes yeah so would that also sound like in line with the schneider apc yeah yeah i'd say so okay like i i think it was kind of like a netbox i know netbox is like camera but you could also attach other sensors to it so this was like your out-of-band management platform and you could connect a bunch of sensors to it and i believe one of their models had different blades you could pop in there so if you wanted to virtualize something you could pop in a compute blade or if you wanted to aggregate a bunch of data you could pop in a storage blade or if you wanted to have a bunch of sensors you could add in a blade that all your sensor is connected to so they were really modular and and you could you know build them for whatever purpose you needed to do that okay now let's you were saying uh they also kind of do like out of band management um is it i mean is it kind of like what you've seen with open gear or did they go too deep into that it's not like they talk um yeah yeah i mean i i would say they definitely compete with open gear but what i thought was different with zpe is while they were pitching us the out-of-band management they were also showing us like oh we can kind of do sd-wan too and it's just like well wait a minute like am i putting production traffic over you are we doing sd-wan for the oob network like what's going on here well did was that question asked yeah we we talked to them about that kind of offline and their response was well it's it's something we can do right like and and so it's like okay so we i guess you kind of got to figure out your marketing a little bit but it was really cool because yeah they did have an sd-wan solution and you know they were putting these uh in remote places to do you know the sd-wan function as well as you know managing uh devices at that site and then you know of course they were also deploying um out-of-band management and i think with the oob solution they have a lot of the stuff that we've seen with with open gear as well uh previously right like they have automation solutions built in um i think i i will say from what i recall from opengear and hearing from zpe i feel like zpe went a little bit deeper with some of that stuff as far as um you know the integrations that you could get out of it yeah i think i saw i i don't want to after after last week's episode i don't want to say i feel pretty sure about anything um i i think i saw their little like tool um display or whatever i don't know what you would call it their uh their menu and did it have like jenkins built plugins and stuff like that for it yeah yeah i think you could connect your your ci cd pipeline directly to it and and okay you know automate from there i got you okay interesting but from a from a basic out-of-band management dan it so they have a sas based hosted cloud portal that these devices if you get them brand new they can basically pre-provision them by the serial number uh to your account so you could effectively ship it out to a place if it's got a leveraging lte it can basically phone home and join and get its zero touch provisioning from that cloud portal and that's how you manage it as well i got you so it sounds like a meraki but for out of image yeah yep yeah it was a cool company interesting solution you know one of those things check it out keep keep an eye on it see how they see what they do in the future and especially now that they've presented at networking field day you know maybe more people will will take a better look at them or closer look at them and i gotta give them props they were extremely gutsy with their demo they actually had a small rack of gear that they brought up one of these zpe devices zero touch provisioning over lte and a spotty connection and they went full send on it and got it up and got the devices discovered and were able to basically get to everything in the rack was the uh was the presenter sweating bullets yeah yeah i think he was saying it was taking a little bit longer because he doesn't have like the best lte connection and in fact i i think he was in ireland and he was on gsm or something like it wasn't even like full lte okay interesting so yeah no it was it was a cool demo for sure i i do there there was like a a good split right like there was a lot of presenters that took the risk and did like a live demo on like a live environment but then there was some that just like played the video and honestly like sometimes you couldn't tell until they paused it because somebody asked a question and before it would move on to the next they're like oh hang on and like they had to pause their demo before it went on to the next session and you know we've all seen demos blow up in a live format so i can certainly understand why they would want to pre-record something so that way they know it's going to come off nice and clean but i i appreciate both both angles right like if you're going to take the risk and do a live demo to show how well your product works like okay and and you can do it you know you prayed to the demo gods and did your sacrifices for for the day to pull it off so all right so the last presenter was uh riverbed and and i thought that was cool because um one of the presenters uh you might know him as network phil on twitter he has his own blog um he was a cisco champion and uh he was a field day delegate and now he was on the other side of the table and he was presenting to uh networking field day for the first time and um i i will say at the beginning of riverbed's presentation it was like what is going on here like they were building up this huge huge story yeah aj i have never seen a presentation like this before so as aj said i'm sure a lot of you know network phil he went into this multi-minute i i i gotta say the the build-up was probably almost 10 minutes long yeah and just to step back they they were pitching um multiple facets of of riverbeds monitoring and visibility tools so they set the scene with this completely nationwide fictitious company it was a a rental car company that had kiosks at a bunch of different airports and all of a sudden they were getting calls from from specific airports that they were having issues and yeah like for a second there i i thought this was a real company i mean they put so much into this bit it was it was really interesting i've never seen anything like it right yeah and so and so after they did this like 10 minute long build up and gave us all this like they went into incredible detail like you know we've got app servers that live here clients that live here their thin clients and like the just incredible detail into this whole fictitious company and then you know they started with like okay we've got to help this ticket let's dig into the network and see what's going on and so they of course you know but by the time we get to the end and figure out what the problem is we realize well we probably could have figured that out a lot quicker than we did but they they wanted to take us through this entire suite of different tools and so the the chase started uh by looking at i think it was like utilization on an endpoint and the endpoint had um some mining software some some cryptocurrency mining software running on there and so we're going to send that over to the security guy and the security guy is going to take a look at it and while it was definitely a problem it wasn't the root cause of the issue so we got to go back to the other dashboard and dig a little bit deeper into the issue and see what's going on and that gave them the opportunity to pull in each of their tools and tell that tool story yeah and something else that was really neat is they would show they kind of gave a high level point on the different tools that they were showing kind of what team in an infrastructure or an enterprise would be uh running this tool so the first couple tools were kind of geared and this is this is my opinion they were kind of geared toward the that first level service desk desktop support and then they'd have show a tool that was more geared towards security and then more toward the network team and how you can kind of bounce in between them they actually have links within the app so it's not like this big disaggregated platform it's all connected uh but they wanted to make sure that they showed us um what each platform was so i threw it in the chat does anybody want to guess what the problem was and jordan nailed it it was obviously dns it's classic i like the way phil wrapped up the presentation he showed a haiku of you know it's always dns it can't possibly be dns it was dns yeah yeah it was good everybody likes to blame the network and the network likes to blame dns so that wrapped up network field day 26 uh tim overall your thoughts would you want to be a delegate again based on your experience this time yeah definitely again i was really nervous about it because i didn't know what to expect and plus i i saw the attendee list of of who the other delegates were outside of you of course aj and gerard you guys scare me enough between the two of you but it was crazy i mean we had multiple hosts from different packet pushers podcasts that were on there i mean there were some pretty heavy hitters and i want to tie back to what tom said when when he came on here is that if you want to be part of this take your shot you know go in and and apply for it the link that that we'll put in the show notes um if you have a platform and you have a way of voicing your opinions and thoughts about technologies you have a chance of getting on network field day and i believe it kind of sounds like they're playing it by ear but they want to get back in person early to mid next year yeah i think i remember tom saying they're working on an in-person thing um hopefully soon so that'll be really nice i mean the in-person events are a lot of fun uh i mean you get to meet these people obviously in person um you spend an awful lot of time together because you know you're all staying at the same hotel you're going you're traveling uh you know tech field day kind of pulls out the stops um you know because when i went in 2019 we were out in palo alto and they had us in a limo and they were trucking us around to all these different locations all these different company headquarters for presentations and stuff like that and then we're all going out to dinner together having a good time uh so it was definitely like a good you know professional and personal networking event in addition to you know what what we were actually there for so um i certainly am looking forward to getting back into in-person events and and so to echo what tim said like there's kind of a shortage of delegates because you know after you know you you're in the community you're getting exposure eventually people get hired by oems and then as soon as you're hired on to an oem like a major company your ability to continue to be a delegate goes out the window right because they want you to come to this and be impartial right like if you have skin in the game with a company it's hard for you to be impartial to your competitors so um there have been lots of delegates that have come through the program and you know they've they've you know been hired by cisco by jennifer by you know any other big name that you can think of but basically if you're hired by a company that either is going to sponsor a network field day or has ever sponsored a network field day you're not eligible to be a delegate um because it's just you know it's probably hard for for you and and to just rule that that out you know being impartial to to your competitors presenters so the traffic network says so you're saying that if i become a delegate then i'll be hired by cisco i i'm not quite saying that it's just it's been a theme that you know these delegates you know sometimes these delegates do eventually get hired by companies like cisco and juniper maybe it's on their career path i don't know but as soon as they do get hired they're no longer eligible to participate in these these kind of events and so that makes room for other future delegates to apply and step into the program there's definitely no guarantee you'll be hired by cisco just for being a network field day delegate in fact i guess i think i i might have gotten put on a list to not hire after i got through that so you asked some pretty good questions tim i'm proud i'm definitely proud that you know three members in our community uh we're able to be delegates of this thing and represent our community very well um you know i i didn't get to watch all three days but i got to watch a little bit of the first day there and i and i witnessed gerard asking questions and stuff and it just made me feel really good because you know we talked about this on our episode with tom but the the imposter syndrome when you go into a place like or well i guess you didn't go into a place but got into a meeting with the people that were also in that meeting like you said some of the heavy hitters over at uh packet pushers and whatnot and you know to me like i struggled with imposter syndrome just through the roof right and just thinking that i would be in a room with those people you know trying to ask technical questions about stuff i have no clue about it just it was just awesome seeing you guys there and you know stepping forward and asking those questions so you know big kudos to you guys for doing that yeah and what's nice is yeah um it's definitely a good time um they gave us the the so like you know we asked the questions during the presentations we asked questions post presentation and then they even gave us the contact information for all the presenters so if we came up with any additional questions after the fact we could continue to hit them up and bombard them to get more information out of them so it's definitely a good time uh guys any any thoughts any last-minute thoughts before we wrap this thing up so there was a question at the very beginning of the podcast uh oh did i miss it i'm sorry yeah no it's all good uh but they they were asking which product vendor were you most impressed by in any products that stood out that you can't wait to put in or work with i guess this is to tim and aj because you guys are actually part of it you know i i don't work in you know operations and minutes and stuff anymore but if i did i would definitely be you know looking to check out like go past solutions or netbeans or something like that like those two were really intriguing and you know to have the kind of visibility that both of those products provide into your network would really help you you know understand problems solve problems or just defend the network right like hey it's not the network it's your your stupid application or whatever so um i i thought that those were very insightful products um i i was super excited about juniper's offering because like i said having another competitor into that market is just they're just going to help step each other up and bring more feature feature-rich uh features i guess bring more features to that platform to those platforms yeah yeah yeah i'm always on board with a tool that will argue the management that's not the network yeah i'll say that again i i think a lot of it across the board was based on visibility and analytics and that's going to be what does it for you dan that's going to be your hey look at this it's not just me saying it look at this pretty picture that says i'm right you're wrong kind of thing and that again that was a theme across a lot of the vendors um especially ones that are you know targeting that visibility to the edge and when i say the edge in this case i mean even someone's device i know it's another agent but in a lot of these cases they're they're really lightweight and the kind of visibility it provides to be able to see that level of information and based on maybe just somebody's user id you you may not even have to get their ip address their mac address walk them through how to get that information you can just say hey who are you or what's your device name and be able to find all that and then potentially get a whole bunch of information to help you solve an issue uh without having to feel like you're interrogating uh the person calling having this issue that's huge yeah because a lot of times stu just kind of the point for me there is the person who might be calling about the issue doesn't know they don't know and you're trying to interrogate them and they just get more frustrated right exactly and then it's just kind of a heated thing yeah so yeah i definitely won't go over that sure but the last thing i'll say aj uh is is kind of another reason to to get people to apply to be delegates is you can have actual conversations with with some pretty high level engineers in these vendors that you may not get to have easily outside of a venue like this i mean it was so cool to be able to ask sd access related uh questions to a cisco tme live i mean that that's pretty valuable yeah yeah yeah you don't always get the tme doing the the sales pitch to you it's usually a tsa or an essay or an se but to get the people that you know work either directly on the products or very closely with the people that work on the products that have you know that firsthand knowledge that deep information it's it's it's good stuff it's a lot of fun um i i don't know folks on the discord one of the things that you know myself tim and gerard did is we set up a thread just for activities and we we had our own network field day kind of channel and uh we were interacting with a lot of people in our discord and so that was a lot of fun in addition to everything that we were doing on twitter so i think that we'll look for more of that as members of our community participate in events like this you know be it tech field day cisco live or anything along those lines you know to just keep the conversation going um you know in our community so keep an eye out for that so aj um where if any listeners want to go and watch the presentations do you just go to their site and they've got the link there or so you can go to tech field days website which is techfieldday.com and then the network field day is a recent enough event that you can scroll down to the bottom and they have a whole section of recent links you can also just go to events and they'll show you that they've got like you know here's all of our events here's the different field days and you can just look for network field day and the most recent is 26 and on that page they'll have you know in the exact order that they presented and we'll put a link to network field day 26 in the show notes for this uh episode and that way you can just go to that link scroll down to the bottom and it basically is the schedule that we followed for the event and uh you can click on each presenter and see the past recordings that that they did okay nice yeah and i think they've got it on like a youtube channel too so you can just go to like tech field day's youtube channel and i'm sure it's all there as well but like i said we'll put a link to the show notes that way it's easier for folks to find awesome all right guys i think this puts a cap on another episode thank you so much for our patreons for joining us and chatting with us as we record these if you're interested in being a patreon you can go to patreon.com forward slash art and sign up we do appreciate our patreon support but we appreciate everybody's support whether you're buying merch following us on our social channels leaving feedback for us on your favorite podcatcher all of that mojo really helps us out you know sharing the podcast with a friend and getting another person addicted and binge listening to our content always helps so we thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week for another episode of the art of network engineering i gotta go research my muppets cookies 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 netench that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at artofnetworkengineering.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