this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore kings technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information to expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers welcome to the art of network engineering podcast i am one of your hosts not all of them my name is aaron weiler i am at aaron engineered everywhere books are sold mr andrew lapteff permit ip andy andy the greatest name in acl named acl slash twitter handle history what's up dude hey aaron i'm super pumped for our guest i'm crawling out of my skin here all right easy easy we haven't gotten him yet i'm sorry that leads me to aj how are you sir good evening how are you good evening yes um we're i'm extremely well actually thank you for asking i often gloss over that because like it's such an arbitrary question that i forget that somebody actually genuinely cares how i am so you know what aj i'm doing very well thank you so much of course i care last and certainly not least barry white himself daniel richards greater memphis area or greater nashville area sorry memphis hi howdy howdy he's he's at how do you pack it so if you can't find him um just retype it uh all right probably spelled howdy wrong you probably uh aj do we have any uh uh wins from this past week or i don't think i see anything uh no no i actually haven't seen any this week we started the failure plaques channel this week people people have been dropping their fails and i'm so proud like so many people are just like oh yeah i failed this i failed that and everyone's just chiming in on like you know the the falls they've taken throughout their journey and uh it's i think it's pretty refreshing to see that you know this stuff is hard and and you know people do fail actually i counted them out of 10. 10 fails so far my cisco career i think they they tell the full story and i'm i just got a stroke of genius so bear with me for a second i have an idea i think we should grab like the most extreme fail and talk about it because the most extreme w we have thus far is the dude that got a root canal and then took the cert right after it and passed that sequeezy man that's i mean there's nothing more impressive than that i guess maybe like brain surgery and then taking it right but i i you know what one up in that is a win for this week netsec wheezy started his new job he moved from texas to arizona oh he started his new job on monday cool uh so super cool congrats to him you love to see it you love to see it all right all right all right all right without further ado our illustrious guests i hope i'm not just freaking you out at this point and you're just gonna say hi we have with us um someone in the second you're gonna hear his voice i don't really even need to introduce him but uh you're gonna hear his voice but we have the one and only keith barker with us this evening thank you for joining us keith how are you sir i am doing great you know i've watched a few of your podcasts or listened and uh i'm super tickled to be here it's like who wants to listen to me so i'm grateful to be here and uh we talked about what was off limits i think the the listening audience is in for quite a show tonight yeah so yeah to to tease that a little bit there's not much that's offline very little it's basically like a first date we got going on here um so yeah keith you're in vegas right i am i'm in las vegas and it's interesting that you say that i don't know who would want to listen to me because i think by default if you're listening to this you've probably listened to you at one point it kind of goes without saying so basically what i'm getting at is the data is showing something different and okay it seems that everybody's listening to you whether you like it or not um dude you just been around and i know for a fact that like uh and i say been around in a good way i mean just like uh longevity wise and i can speak for everybody here when i say and also everybody like our discord channel it's like you know you've been a part of our journeys at least at some point so you know we all thank you for that and whether you realize it or not you're in like everybody's living room or office or you know what i mean so like you're at you're at everybody's computer workstation or or cell phone or ipad or whatever like how do you feel about that because there's only like there's only so many people who listen to the art of networking engineering podcast uh thank you for those of you and especially for those who have subscribed in the past um but that number is very pale in comparison here and when i think about myself being in somebody else's area almost like unbeknownst to me you know what i mean like you're two in the morning i'm playing and i'm listening to you like learning something like do you ever think about that uh do i think about where you're at two in the morning okay i'm a bad example nobody i get you i feel ya so i feel like an underdog so part of my secret part of my art of engineering is the fact that when i was really little like 16 i was really little on my first driver's license this is the god's honest truth five feet tall 82 pounds at 16. i got pulled over seven times growing up by police not a ticket because i look like i was like 11 maybe pushing 12 and why are you driving your parents car so that conditioning was built into me and i've never been able to shake it so i i still feel like the underdog and like so that's part of the success though is that i'm i'm willing to work a little harder a lot harder than i than my counterparts at my age or any age for that matter so i have a plaque on my wall it says practice like you've never won and perform like you've never lost and so uh you know i'm at cisco live occasionally i speak there i used to speak there occasionally and i'd be talking in the elevator and somebody say hey you sound just like keith barker yeah do you get a fan working on it no no it's very it's very very nice you know uh i'm very very grateful for people that come up and say you know i just wanted to say hi i've listened to your content when i was you know early in my career or whatever and you made a difference i'm like yes you know at the end of the day we all have like a finite time of time on the on the planet we're all going and my goal is to make a a difference i know that sounds like in my moments of delusion true story i want to impact a billion people's lives yeah then i realized hey well you know you might get a few million and that's a few million more than if you did nothing so uh that's that's my that's what keeps me going and uh every time i it's not like football i don't i never played football but one of my earliest coaches in training that's how i got started in this training business his ted hernandez and they would put me in the pit it was literally called the pit have you heard this story before no no so they put us up it was with uh mastering computers in like late 80s and they put us in the pit and say okay give us your intro and then that sucks stop uh give us your segue and they would just drill us to make sure that we could present on target and one of the coaching things he said was that it's not going to be pleasant right the except in football you have to get used to being hurt it's going to hurt get past the pain and go for it same with learning a new skill like training or any technology and that's what i've had to address in the last decade with my career it's like okay i know what arp is nobody cares uh so i just have to realize though that when new technologies come out like sd-wan or you know cisco security products or firepower that i can't just say well i i used to know the asa and state full filtering and you know inspections because it doesn't i'm just like everybody else who has to get up in the morning study read lab it up and get good at something in my day these days i had to get really good at it for like two months yeah and then teach it to you as an expert sure and then go on to something completely different so um i'm grateful that i'm making a difference i've got a lot of life left in me i'm 56 i was born in 64. holy people are some this does not no no no that's not a bad holy crap you do because just like when you were 16 you do not look 56 dude yeah so i couldn't get a date when i was 16 but now at 56 i look like i'm 40 something i'm not on the dating scene my wife and i are happy so she won't listen anyway anyway it's fun it's fun i like making a difference uh when i train it's just like chatting with you guys right now it's like if in fact that's why people feel like they know me is because i'm having exactly conversations like 24 7 whenever they turn it on so i'm not sure what the original question was but somewhere in there no that was queen that was cool so that that actually made me think like okay so all this new stuff that comes out i mean yeah i think that's one of the challenges with us is that and maybe just this industry i say us but there's just always something you know and i think nick russo the other day on twitter even brought this up and he's like uh three ccies later and here i am still learning about something he just asked like just a really random question about something that seemed like you know somewhat simple so if i i gotta ask what's the most difficult thing that you've ever had to learn because you make look you make everything look super easy and so i want to know what challenged you because if somebody's like listening and they're like oh well if keith found that hard i don't feel so bad now okay that's that's a great question so uh i'm gonna break out my honesty section of my brain ah here we go that's what we want because sometimes sometimes if we have something that's really challenging and then we master it it becomes one of our favorite topics right so yeah that works yeah i think i think you're gonna love this because of your experience the service providers probably the toughest thing for me to learn at the time was mpls layer 3 vpns because there's so many freaking moving parts right there's the vpn label and the transit label and address families and yeah yep and vrf's and the exports and the imports and the carrying in bgp as so i i remember when i first realized i didn't know what that was and then i started studying it and i don't know if you've noticed but there's not a lot of great training everywhere at least there wasn't 15 years ago for mpls layer 3 vpns and i had to sort that out so i started off with the basics and then labbing it up and that probably took me a good two to three weeks just to get my header and then when i got my head around i was like oh oh and then i taught it at cisco live for a few years i did a course for ine on it that was like 11 years ago and that was that reminds myself of a tough topic that was took several weeks to get my brain around that's it's funny has anybody else here uh besides myself have you guys ever tried to either configure or even just like wrap your head around like how that works at all no i've done a little bit of mpls but not not mpls look the command is simple it's mplsip like it's that that's just it right and then you put it on the interface however the dependencies are like out of control right so like on the surface it's really cool it just makes sense um everything that we've like learned in the past this is what's always so cool to me everything that we've learned in the past is like it was alleviating a problem right like okay complex router lookups or oh sd-wan it's like uh we pay for all this bandwidth we're not using it you know just as an example it it's so cool to see how that stuff like just weasels its way into our everyday life yet like most of us have never encountered you know an mpls config or you know seen what that looks like or even like a layer two like tunneling protocol or something like like a layer two vpn over a service provider network uh just all that stuff like it you're right there's no training because i can vouch for that and what training there is out there is very difficult to understand because i there's a big difference between someone that could teach and someone that can understand something and if that disconnect exists then you lost me immediately and i was just looking up on youtube i i'm gonna paraphrase the number i did a video back in like 2010 on mpls layer 3 vpns has like three hundred thousand views wow and it's it's terrible it's technically accurate but it's like what is this guy doing here i don't know if you've seen the before and after keith pictures like for me ten years ago or five years ago yeah yeah yeah embarrassing oh my gosh so i was like 30 pounds heavier yes i had man boobs i had uh i had a wake-up call okay 2007 and i just thought you know what i got to change some things so i changed several things i changed my body by exercising and eating better i uh i also i don't know what's uh nothing's off limits except for those two things we talked about right that's it man yeah go for it yeah i had an honest hard look at my life i had a marriage of 30 years uh and the problem was we had 25 wonderful years of marriage but the problem is it was 30-year marriage so we'll do the math there uh i'm guessing it was the last five not the first year yeah yeah so that was that was a life-changing event that uh so i've got really a fond memories and a good relationship with my ex but i have a i remarried in 2017. and uh yeah so may the fourth how do i not forget this anniversary yeah may the fourth be with you so i married this beautiful woman she's she's a singer at cirque du soleil or she was for 10 years yeah i know if you've seen this dare in the last 14 years she was there and then she sung at oh a few times and she was oh right before the pandemic but uh yeah so my so as far as what changed i had a wake-up call and i had to take stock in myself and say i'll tell you here's the here's the thing that broke it for me i had somebody that i admired who sat with me and we had a beverage and he said my daughter is 17. i was going to wait a couple years a few years for her to get older and then we'll clear a break and he said yeah just wait till you're 70 or 80. it'll be fine and that that day i feel at home you're like i said i i yeah so how does that apply to networking let's bring it back uh you know i have when i was at paramount pictures in 90 like four wait hold on hold on a second yeah i'm actually gonna get you to tell your story here in a second so but no no but but tell the story now but okay somebody here remind me to get back to that because i i've completely glossed over that for some stupid reason but anyway go ahead so i i had a team that i worked with there as a manager of the network network stuff at paramount pictures in 94ish 95 and i remember like 10 years later one of the technicians reaching out to me saying oh what do i need to do to get ccna certified and i thought to myself what have you been what have you been doing for 10 years you got to do something now that's the key that's the divorce story now tied to networking do something now yeah nobody's nobody's born knowing anything about networking and the protocol stacks and how they work and uh if you just start set a goal mike my thing is don't don't make a big fanfare don't like oh i'm going to do this you know commit to people see her accountable but then just shut up i know it sounds harsh shut up and do it just do it like yeah spend an hour every day or whatever you commit to and just study and measure it out right it's so people ask me keith how did you get a couple cci's i said one day at a time i had four or five kids off the count based on the year i had four or five kids when i got my first ccie i studied for eight months three or four days a week about four hours per day just on the ccie and i passed the first time because because i studied my butt off and uh you did the work anyway anybody can do it it's just a matter of you know cutting out something lame like everybody has something lame in their life usually yep figure out what that is cut it out and then put it to use and then just keep on marching i that sounds hard no it's hard no no no no no i'm the tough love guy here so you're gonna get nothing but high fives for me when you start talking like that it sounds familiar aaron yells at me and it's very helpful i was just gonna say the person that's got his ears perked up the most right now is andy because he's the one that needs to hear this the most because the thing i like about andy is that he plans everything but the thing i hate about andy is that he plans because he gets in his own way and i yelled at him earlier in this week this is why this is so relevant i yelled at him earlier this week because i kind of went off this i tend to do this i go on these like tangents where i'm like gosh just do it right now kind of like how you just said it's like come on man do anything else yeah just delete delete uh an app off your one app off your phone i don't even care what it is just delete it off and replace it with something educational or productive that you could use uh a perfect example on key flash cards right we all know how space repetition and interleaving help you learn they solidify knowledge so i was like andy put some put some put an anki deck together as you're going through like ocgs in fact don't even think of anything just copy the ditka questions into the note cards but make them very difficult make the cards very difficult so that you can't just go yep i know what that is that's easy make it hard so you have to explain it and all this other stuff right so it's like this this is all me just ranting you know on tuesday so the following day andy bless his heart he's like so got a question because he's trying to implement right he's like i started my flash cards and then i started my flash cards i got the app he's that's that's already good enough for me i'm you can call it quest for for today because because that was that was a lot i mean if you think about it if you did something i'm cool with that if you want to go beyond that that's you but as long as you change one little thing you're good to go and so he's like hey question should i put these in different decks if they're different subjects or how should i like put this up and i said andy shut up and just build the cards stop getting in your own way i was like just build the freaking note card you know and he he was mad do you like i took it well i i he at first he was mad and then he came back this is the best part he came back hours later and he said i needed to hear that thanks for doing that like no context just like i was a little mad earlier but thanks thanks dude i appreciate it but i could not agree more all you have to do is one little thing like yeah four hours a day some people don't have that but to your point you could find it somewhere you had five kids maybe four kids let's say uh but i can tell you that most people have one two right maybe at most three so if that's your excuse you just heard it here you can have five and get away with it i have to ask i have to ask my question i ask everybody because you have you had four kids so when did you study i mean i have a total of seven so i have seven kids just full disclosure okay okay seven kids my oldest was born in uh 87 the youngest is now 17 so do the math on that so your question is when did i study like would you wait till they all went to bed and just study all night kind of thing it was usually seven or eight o'clock at night so i had a fairly normal job come back have dinner with the family some family time and then start seven seven thirty ish for three to four hours and then i was back then i didn't have social media to distract and so forth so it was important though i was you know i was raised fairly poorly not poorly my parents were great but they were modest income earners single income family my dad was a teacher and i just you know here i am with the responsibility of being a parent like there's so or parents are outnumbered right you have three kids there's only two parents it's over so i just i was desperate and that was a motivator for me to stick with it and then um i do have one uh shout out two weeks before my my first exam in 2001 uh i wasn't i was done studying i don't know if you've ever experienced that have you actually done studying i'm gonna let andy answer that have you ever just been done studying andy like you've been just over it yeah a lot yup well that happened to me and so i was done i was like i can't study one more week the exams in two weeks i'm done and my friend and eddiness who is six cci six seven eight four i'm cci six seven eight three this is back in 2001. he said keith you gotta study this i said i read it you guys know you gotta lab it up there's plar private line automatic ring down you pick up one phone with fxs sports and the other one rings like the bat phone and so i laughed it up uh got it working it took about three or four hours you know what that saved my bacon on the day of the back there was two day labs uh it saved my bacon so anyway it's worth it it's worth it to do the studies do the labs and just keep on going and if you want to hear about the failures which i imagine is coming up in this interview absolutely i've got plenty of those too okay cool cool okay so let's start let's start then so you were um like let's say you just graduated high school give us the plan here was did you go to college were you gonna go to college walk us start us there okay it was a cold day in 1982 in siberia in camarillo california oh okay yeah uh so out of high school i'm gonna skip a couple years okay uh but were you 100 pounds by this time i didn't i grew i'm six feet tall now i weigh about 165. but hold on what's your s what's your secret like how did you do that don't tell that to aj because he's gonna he's gonna say okay first of all how dare you wear a medium shirt you must look stupid this is what he told me he told me yeah i'm sick it's true i'm 16. i'm 62 185 and he was like you were i mean how is that even possible so there you go dude of us hey hey there you go anyway so you're you're a hundred pounds by now yeah a couple years after high school so yeah how to eat booze probably uh so i didn't drink as a young person as i didn't drink till i was 40. um anyway i i made it for after then so so i was i went into sales i wanted to make money i and i didn't my all my brothers and sisters went to college they're all college graduates i'm the only one who has one semester of junior college and i i stopped i didn't like school so i sold cars i sold insurance and then i realized now that if we think education is expensive i'm borrowing this quote you got to see what the price is for not having an education it's a hard school out there if you don't have some kind of training so i did insurance i did sales i i sucked at all that stuff i couldn't sell i wasn't making money i was married and so i i was at cashier at this where like a it's like a home depot but one that doesn't exist anymore it was back in 1986 or 80. what was it called 84. grossman's in ventura county california i know i know what grossman's is really is this guy no it was still around or is it gone so i was at grossman's and they had these commercials for control data institute like you can be a technician welcome to the world of electronics and wow and then there's this guy who came in uh to repair the registers which were electronic and he had this like silver briefcase oh here we go was it handcuffed to his wrist no but he had it was he had a car that didn't have rust and stuff on it it was nice i thought i don't that guy does but i bet i could do it so i got a i went down to the control data institute to their office i got a loan for i is somewhere between four and six thousand i forget what it was but that was 1984. a lot of money a lot of money i had to get a loan went to school is one year school and they just introduced the microcomputer uh platform before it was like tapes and mini computers and mainframes and stuff right so i was breadboarding with resistors i can tell you about eli the iceman and i can read the resistor the resistor codes which we don't use anymore um and then it was a one-year course and eight months in they said hey keith eds is interviewing when you go interview and i said oh i'm not ready to interview i haven't graduated from you know control data institute yet and they said you don't get it the only reason you're here is to get enough skills and bootstrap your butt to get a job and then you're gonna start learning what's really going on yeah so i took the interview uh anita martinez was the interview interviewed me and this is like an old person let me tell you about people you don't know yeah well no i think it's the most impressive thing that this is the 1984 you said yes it's 84. so she interviewed me and you remember yeah she was amazing uh and everything and so she said uh they had a lot of interview people they were interviewing and i said what is it that i can do right now before my next interview that would help me prepare so i could hit the ground running should you decide to hire me yes so and i learned that from somebody who was wiser than i told me so i she gave me this book this huge manual on something brand new called an hp laserjet printer and it's just state of the art back then so i took it and i started reading and fuser rollers and the corona wires and the the voltages involved and so forth and how it melts it and then when i came back for the second interval she she tested me on what do you know about hp laserjet shoulder and she hired me right there because this this kid will actually do more than what he's asked to do he's wants to find out and so that got me my entry level job starting working with pcs and then uh blue cross of california and then i can go into my history there if you want but uh yeah that's how i started yeah please do because so so you got the job uh she gave you the job for the whole like was it printers the only thing you were doing or they just kind of using that swiss army knife uh so it was electronic data systems we had uh support contracts for gm and so huge aircraft uh general motors plants uh all that stuff and so part of that i was exposed to something called networking again this was brand new for local area networks it was ethernet with 10 base 2 coax cable and novell was on the the new kid on the block for networking and so dave nelson oh my gosh this is like 25 years ago dave nelson was the network engineer and i i just kind of made friends with him and he taught me about it i learned it and i got good at it and i started my current networking with uh novell back in 1980 i guess it was 87 at that point and then i just kept on moving up went to paramount pictures after that and then uh then beyond so you were this whole time you were in the los angeles metro area yep yep so eds first and then blue cross and then paramount pictures gotcha so apparently that's a cool how what what do you do at paramount pictures i mean obviously it's networking but i mean like like this is this is the worst pun i'm ever going to make in my life guys so just mute if you need to i don't know you've made some pretty bad words yeah tell us about behind the scenes at paramount pictures please okay well i was okay you want me to answer that yeah okay so the coolest thing about working at paramount pictures is that if you're friends with the security officer you can go on any clothes that you want whoa all right what's the coolest one you went to star trek star trek nice i was there when they were filming the transition between picard and uh janeway uh uh deep space not deep sign that's uh uh what's after what's happening what's after next generation and d space nine right yeah but there's one there's a bigger one with um holy with picard what's that one so picard is next generation star trek the next generation okay there so when they were filming that generations movie from the transition from star trek to generations and at the same time deep space nine was also in production there as a series but uh that's the coolest thing is to be able to go behind the scenes you have to turn off your page back in the day of pager um i had to go it was a cool pager with text and everything but i was in charge of the network team there that did all the you know roll outs of new equipment repairs maintenance that kind of stuff that's pretty great job that's pretty sweet it was only an hour and a half commute it's only an hour and a half commute each way from simi valley yeah did you say only yeah that's terrible the los angeles joke besides they're in 94 and i think i left in about 97 so maybe maybe 96 a year and a half two years at paramount pictures okay that's a sweet job i like i like hearing stuff like that because you know there's so many cool industries out there and what's really neat about being like a network engineer or a network admin is that you can work in any vertical or any industry and that included like you could work for a movie company or you know a tv production company yeah so sky's the limit so i love that um because you want to be a networking that's completely different that was my first exposure to some of the cool tech too like tape robot for backups what the heck is this oh yeah yeah what the heck is that i don't know what that is it's like a big it's like a big machine and it has like in the middle of it it's got this little arm that goes down and it'll go grab a tape and then it takes it back over to the mainframe so that it can read it see that's aaron you really have never seen a tape robot before no oh my gosh they go like 35 40 miles an hour so these arms yeah and they're just whipping around uh yeah a lot of fun it's fun so that that was my first exposure to uh you know pretty significant data center on-prem where you go down log in go through the service desk area key card again to the tapes in the back and the and they had money too paramount had tons of money so my office was on the fifth floor of the zucker building 55-55 milros looking over the bee lot and the b lot is a like a seven foot parking lot that when they need to film a water scene they remove all the cars they repaint it and they fill it in so so congo was filmed in there um the water world the water world scene waterworld ran out of money so paramount bought before forked over some cash they filmed a huge scene at the end when the the jet skis are all jumping off the boat that's all filmed right outside my office with sandra bullock was filmed right outside my office and that like they'd have you know notices okay after 6 p.m all offices lights have to be off because they didn't want any reflection off the office buildings yeah well they so the movie was the net so what they really didn't want was someone who actually knew what they were doing to be looking over into what they were doing because i don't know if you guys remember this but uh that movie had a lot of this going on and you were supposed to think that they were actually doing something and this is the noise you heard and then like the screen was just the green screen like she was she was hacking so they're doing a trace near the end and one of the octets of the ipv4 address was higher than 255. where's the qual where's the quality control in hollywood well i'll tell you where they were they made you go home with their own networking team no somebody that explained to me that they didn't want to have to pay somebody rights or buy something out if they used a publicly addressable ip they were they're avoiding that was it 10.555.55 it wasn't rfc 1918 it was uh the first octet that was valid i guess that's what you did there with the phone number right yeah oh i'm so sorry that was more of like an isis net id it depends on what the meaning of is is is all right i can't do a clinton impression um so all right so you paramount pictures somehow at some point you migrated from southern california to vegas i did yes when was that i i think that was like 2009 hmm oh okay so quite some years later then yep and it was just to buy a house i couldn't afford i had several kids and i couldn't afford a a house in southern california i'm not sure why so about a house in vegas primarily for that and then i also changed my career at that time i got a training job here in las vegas it was my first full-time training gig sweet who was that with that was a little i can as little teeny company called the learning center and just a little teeny i would say it's a mom and pop shop but it's really more like a little ma shop just really teeny and it was great i taught novell and microsoft and oh wait wait wait yeah yeah yeah yeah i just i thought i got my times so i i was at paramount and i left there to go to vegas sorry i thought i got the backwards video all right so you were paramount for a long time then uh i was at paramount so when you have a span of 30 years to cover there's a lot of stuff that goes on so yeah you know some at some point i left paramount and i went to work for knowledge mastering computers which uh then led to i worked for ine for a while i worked for another ie training company for a while and then i started with cbt in 2012. yeah that's weird because i didn't i actually maybe i'm alone here i did not know that you worked for ine so that's interesting to hear yeah some of my videos some of my videos still on youtube they still have the irony like i tried to trim out the beginning of those because i don't know if they'd like those or not but uh i had a good time i i've you know the brian's is before they were bought out by a venture capital company but uh you know brian dennis and brian mcgann it was interesting when i worked there with scott morris anthony sigura i never met brian mcgann in almost two years of working there why i think they were taking a little sabbatical you know they've been worked so hard for so long they just they hired some more trainers and yeah i never i spoke with him once but i i never met the first time meeting brian mcgann was after i wasn't working there for a couple years at cisco live so okay but he's a great guy great trainer super smart and uh brian dennis i dealt quite a bit with but yeah i i need i think is a great company yeah no no i do too and and like we were talking about um service provider stuff earlier that's one of the places you can go to get stuff for service providers actually uh so that's pretty cool certainly not a book your left your own devices there so yeah that you get to vegas you're you know basically moving to vegas and starting training at the same time it sounds like you know you were kind of like already a trainer type of person right before that like what made you want to go into training other than changing people's lives uh so many years ago in fact when i was at paramount pictures i went to these workshops on how to manage teams and improve and so forth and there was a there's a tr there's no names i haven't thought about for at least 15 20 years there's a a trainer named darby checkets well well i don't know how you'd forget that name yeah yeah really and i thought he was just owning this audience meaning he was making a difference he was getting his points across i was just moved and i thought wow and it was at that moment at paramount pictures when i decided you know what i want to make a career out of training i think i could do that and so when i when i changed my job from paramount going to vegas and starting training full-time my salary was cut by five zero fifty percent so but that's okay because it was a strategic move and i wanted to do it and uh then i was able to get back up but fifty percent cut people were like what yes i cut but the the crux of that that situation though is not necessarily the fifty percent it's how late in your career you did take the 50 cut right because i think if you were if you were gonna suggest because i did the same thing except that my 50 cut was going from 18 an hour to nine dollars an hour so i was like oh you know i got some years to catch up basically um but it's the long view as we'll call it these are binoculars by the way because and i can't put them on over my glasses the long view is that creepy for the for the listening audience aaron looks amazing doing that yes well we'll put this on youtube okay okay so yeah yeah i it's not well it's always risky it's less risky younger in your career which is what i'm always trying to preach it's like hey if you got to do it and you got to pivot pivot now kind of like what you were saying earlier just do it right but yeah keep keep your eyes on the prize just pivot if you have to so you took a 50 cut eventually you're finding someone to pay you whether it was in e or cbt or whoever right but it doesn't matter because 50 cut for like wanting to go to work every day and showing up like having a good time actually like yeah you know we we toss these words around very fluidly around here and terms such as total compensation that's part of it your time your health your like mental health things you can't quantify with a dollar amount so that that's huge you it sounds like you've reset like you've done a hard reset i just a couple of times this is keith 3. though no doubt i don't i don't i don't categorize those but uh it definitely is version 3. yeah there may be a version four too who knows did you quit did you quit your engineering job when you went into teaching no so what i did was i i did a lot of consulting on the side so i somewhere i'm just gonna blend all the years together here so i had a top secret clearance for a while from a company i was working with and so i did some really amazing things with that including consulting after the fact like the top secret clearance was good for like five years i thought i'm gonna leverage this so yeah um i want to tell everybody though it's a need to know basis with the top secret clearance and if i guess apparently i don't need to know anything so i worked on firewalls and systems but i can't tell you you know they said we need these rule sets and we need to verify them and you go to these facilities that are you know now secure facilities they wouldn't even let me bring my car fob in i had to leave it nothing electronic so they they would let me bring in like a cd so i'd have all these scripts written i'd put them on cd burn it bring it in and then they could destroy it once it's there and they would run on a separate computer which wouldn't uh you know affect or be able to compromise other systems but uh anyway uh yeah so i did some consulting lightly i say lightly like maybe four or five times a year just to kind of keep my fingers in it because i love it and then i don't for the last eight years at cbt well maybe last five years i really haven't done any significant consulting anymore because i i i don't time i lab it all up so if it's web story security appliance or email security clients or something that's near and dear to their racehearts sd-wan i'll just laugh it up so i've got behind me a rack of gear that's all virtual you know esx and vsphere that i can lab almost anything up on it's amazing i wish i had these tools back 20 years ago oh hold on a second because i you might get steam coming out of andy's ears here so so you don't i just want to be clear about that yeah don't to this day like i'm not saying you never have but right now you don't have a physical lab well let me yeah so this could be on youtube or is it gonna be visual or just audio or both both both but i can commentary if you're gonna show us something well right outside that door yeah i've got a stack about six feet tall of physical gear okay okay that's fair that's fair so if i want if i want to spend the uh i don't know 40 or 50 watts a piece on that and the heat and the noise that's a big one it's a party you know i can turn all on so uh i do have the physical gear but it's just so much easier with that i'm sorry where's the rack here i'll give you a view there it is there it is i turn them off for this interview but i've got four esi xi he'll save like 128 gigs of ram each running vsphere and i can just do a whole sd-wan deployment hundreds of routers anything i need to uh with the current images that are available and it's so much better than having to have the physical gear every time so sometimes like i've got a 3750 at top of rack there because you can't sometimes you need the hardware right right yeah yeah like if you want to plug in an access point that's powered with power ethernet you need to have something delivering that power so i've got that for demos and practice that need it but but that's true i haven't probably turned on anything except for that 37.50 in many many months so is the 3750 uh is it shared by your virtual environment yeah so oh yeah that's my favorite no one would know it's like no which one's the physical which one it's all it's all blended but from the interface it's all it all is bro i love this the the part where you had to to leave your key fob uh cause like you know don't don't take this the wrong way you're not james bond so but they treat everybody the same way you know they're like i don't think so buddy as if like we work for the kremlin i just love that though like the physical security sometimes just always just kills me like they had a guy there was a guy in the colo in st louis they always had an armed guard out front he had like an ar-15 and i'm like who the hell is he gonna shoot like first of all he's by himself like as if the guy like the bad actor that's coming into the to the colo is like all right i'm going to announce myself outside first oh where's the guard at hey listen buddy i'm breaking into this building what are you going to do to stop me and he's like oh it's funny you should say that he just owns you but no i think a lot of it is uh you know defense and depth includes physical deterrence and uh that would definitely be one like when i was at pearl harbor i did a class there for a group and i had to leave i couldn't bring my phone even because anything that has a camera in that case wouldn't couldn't bring it in so okay um you know it's important to have apparent you know fences visibility sure ultimate aspects yeah well deterrents of many kinds just that people will make sure that you're a hard target to get to yeah there's so many data centers out there too it's like you couldn't possibly defend all of those that's scary thought too because like i always think about that there was always one in particular it was a digital relative building that i used to drive by all the time actually i just like ride by because i was on public transit at the time and i would just see it as a little four story building and i always felt like back in the day that they would hide the building like at least not put anything on it but man nowadays they're like digital reality check us out we're right here here's our phone number on our website you know like here's what we do in case you didn't know so if you wanted to attack us that's what it is and it's just in a really rough area of of oakland like it's in the weirdest place just not a place you would think like it's in a very uh industrial area that's like just cut off from the world which i guess that makes sense but it's very visible nonetheless so so we have we have switch communications here which is you dude yeah but it's it's great because we don't have a lot of earthquakes here we don't have a lot of tornadoes here uh we don't have a lot of water here that's a joke for nevada um but it's pretty safe and and they they don't make any bones about you know advertising who they are right you drive by on warm springs it's like right you know you can see it from space yeah the guys at the space shuttle are like what in the hell is that in las vegas like that's going to be the world's biggest hotel no sir that is the super nap yeah that thing's freaking huge man i love seeing that when i fly in i was actually there like two months ago oddly enough but um during the pandemic so that was an interesting thing but i was i'm like pointing to my wife out the window or flying i'm like check it out check it out what the hell is that dumb dork she's like dude there's like cirque du soleil like your wife cirque du soleil there's all this cool stuff look at that ferris wheel over there i'm like check out supernav it's so big all right i i got a question oh here we go wait hold on how long has it been it's 47 minutes i had to wait for you to tire out so i did so i want to circle back to your first teaching gig keith so were you a natural teacher from the beginning is it a skill you had to develop i was scared spitless so i don't think it was natural now when i was raised i was raised in a an organization where they encouraged a lot of public speaking as part of their their faith-based faith-based organization so i had some experience with teaching but it was nerve i was nervous so i i have a confession that i've never told anybody you're like you all want to hear it yeah yeah so when i was applying for this job at this mom shop called the learning center in las vegas which was really really small i never had a full-time teaching gig before and so i she asked me if i could send her some emails from classes i had taught because i maybe i gave the impression that i taught i don't know so i got my staff to get on my team together i was managing a i.t team about seven or eight people and i said hey i want you to sit down for a minute i'm going to teach you about something and uh if you wouldn't mind would you fill these emails for me no i'm their manager this is not a fair situation so it was short i don't remember the topic they filled it out for me i scanned those or maybe i faxed them it was 19 it was way back so i scanned them or faxed them over to her and uh got the job but i was scared oh my gosh i gotta tell you when i had that first the first class i taught was novelle and uh i you know i've been working with novell back in those days like version 4.x with directory services and i i remember being scared spitless how many people were in the classroom less than less than five five or six maybe very small okay i thought i was scared that's a penalty amount though i feel like to get started with like six people yeah and then yep scary yeah so to answer your question uh scared to death when i first started teaching so and then it it's always more natural is that a is that a form of fake it till you make it or like what was well i i'd quit my job right and so i was there i had the family to support it was really uh make it or make it was really the scenario i got you i like that yeah yeah you know there's something i read something a while ago actually a couple of different times with different contacts behind it but it's that if you have a plan b you're less likely to carry through with plan a right like if you have a backup or in your so in your scenario like make it or make it that's my only option that's a better motivator than well but if i don't right even just but if i don't having that a fallback plan it's like no no don't think like that because the future thank goodness none of us have any idea what's going to happen so if you're going to choose how you're going to think about the future you can therefore choose to think about it positively right no one says you have to be pessimistic and and also don't disguise that under that that guise of you know what i'm just being a realist like no don't no that's not what that is you're being pessimistic like you you could choose no one knows choose to be optimistic anyway and rant and andy sorry go ahead no well i wasn't actually i clearly wasn't tired so there you go we were talking about commitment right i mean keith had to make this work he had a family he left his job he was pivoting and you know yeah you're 110 in when that's how you're gonna put you know food on the table did you did your teaching skills kind of just develop with time and experience did you have to like did somebody have to help you i mean i know you said your dad was a teacher like is it just in your blood yep um i don't know about being in the blood but uh so i i know how my timeline straight we moved to vegas in 2005 that was the teaching opportunity there and i was pretty much on my own as far as improving my skills just to experience like hey that really sucks don't do that again that kind of thing but when i went to uh it was mastering computers which is what training job i had right after the learning center where we traveled we did like uh state not stadiums but like four to five hundred people at a time uh stadium teaching uh my coach was ted hernandez and that's the time when they put us in the pit and just grilled us and that's when i learned how to teach that's when i learned how to hook people do you know how to keep a really smart person um waiting or anticipating or engaged do you know how to do that no i don't i'll tell you guys later so like segways you know and here's my here's my secret so when we onboard new trainers at cbt nuggets i have the opportunity to to work with them very closely for the first few weeks and uh a part of that i i just take everything that trainer brings to the table we don't hire by the way anybody who's not great to start with so we bring their greatness and i just kind of give them some feedback on how to maintain that greatness and the enthusiasm and the anticipation when one of the secrets of training is never never teach somebody something unless there's a reason so if i'm going to talk about active directory here's what i'm here's how i'm not going to start it in microsoft there's something called active directory it's active it's a directory sorry hit the mic um instead we'd say you know in a large organization one of the challenges is keeping track of all our users and central management we need some kind of tool to help you know manage and get that all together the solution is and then we finish up with a punchline then we go in so it's really here's my secret to the world the keith barker secret sauce oh god always problem solution that's it always like if you hear me say something in a class or training it always has started with let's imagine it's tuesday morning and we just showed up and our boss says you know what i need blah there's the problem and then i go into the topic and i just reverse engineer it and i spend like maybe 15 to 30 seconds because nobody likes a four minute i mean if they're listening to podcasts maybe they like a four minute something but nobody wants a a four minute lead up to a two minute training session and that's my secret of uh so in answer to your question thank you for the question it was ted hernandez in the pit just beating the sh the crap out of me and uh and helping me to realize how important it is to be an influencer of any type as a trainer you need their attention i need to give them a reason for listening so right after the break here's what we're going to cover what what is it that's the kind of stuff we'd use okay that's genius hold on so there's one thing i want to touch on before i forget too i'm doing a really good job of remembering stuff today so this is weird all right give us the failures man all right which one give me a topic and i'll give you a failure all right uh let's start with uh we know you passed the ccie on the first try uh let's just start with microsoft well can i go back to cci can i sure yeah sure because i have two ccis right you hear about the first one but nobody hears about the second one so it was two thousand three-ish and i was going for my second cci it was security and i was like oh yeah i passed the two-day you know the two-day is brutal it's so brutal have you all heard about that before yeah like here and there um okay it's just brutal do you go in for the first day and then you have to stay the night and send or wherever you're testing then the next morning when you come in uh if you go to your desk and if there's a book there that means you get to continue you have to keep going god it's yeah there's no book you have to basically wait for the proctor to come over and say i'm so sorry so kathy cecentas was my proctor i went in the second day as my 2001 i sat down and there's no book i'm like oh oh so you know so sad and then somebody came up to me on my left uh leaned over and said hey buddy you're in my spot oh they're in the wrong seat so i got up found my right seat had a book there i was like i got this oh my gosh so then i you have to configure something for that morning based on the tasks then they let you have lunch again and then as you come back in for the second day half of the second day it's troubleshooting they've injected problems yep and so i came in and they started picking people off and it was ed yanez myself and one other person out of 12 who started who are finally allowed to continue and uh it was uh it was tough also the in my rack it was back in the day when they had a physical rack right there next to you and you had to cable it two patch panels and so they had imp put problems in on the previous day like moving stuff around on the back end and they hadn't corrected it for my rack so on the first day at noon i was talking to ed at lunch how you doing ed you know because you can't talk about details he goes yeah i just finished bgp and i'm thinking oh i'm so much in trouble because nothing was working so i went back in after lunch and i told the proctor hey i have no connectivity on this fast ethernet port i needed a trunk on it and she said i'll just go ahead and use uh ethernet zero instead of fast ethernet zero i sat down and thought see back in the day you could not trunk on a ethernet port it had to be fast ethernet or better yeah back in the essays and uh so i knew she was just brushing me off like go away you know i only have to see you for four more hours and you're gone and uh she's a sweetheart though nice lady so she said you can go back there and check but i'm not giving you any more time so i went back there was three cables that were they're wrong well they were yeah cross-connected wrong so i fixed those then i was just flying for the rest of that first day so uh you fixed a problem that wasn't even supposed to be there they should just give you like a third ccie just because it's like right this is like it was it was rigged against you on accident oh there's a moral to the story the moral is if i sat there and because i i had the thoughts like this isn't fair right yeah but i thought that's not going to get me my ccie i just need to attack this with every i can so that was successful now let's go to the ccie security i i scheduled it i went you know i studied with the asas vpns all the stuff ipsec uh some back in the days it was uh not ice it was acs the acs server anyway ice used to be called acs uh with tack action radius and i was ready i took the lab and i failed it and what killed me was bgp because i thought oh it's security i'm focusing on security and half of it back then was still bgp with prefix list and you know making it work correctly and i i hadn't prepared so i failed the ccia for security twice before the third time when i finally passed it i i was i was done i'd given up and i said to the proctor at cisco live yeah i'm not going to do that again did you do the lab at cisco live no no no but i saw the proctor and i was like get out the world's tiniest violin for keith freaking barker right because uh because you pass it the the the third but the route switch you got the first time which probably you were like all right all right i thought i had it so man he said this very kind proctor told me uh listen if you take it again i will personally grade it for you wow i thought because i still playing the violin right since then i realized you know what life is not fair for anybody nobody i so i took it again i studied here's the key i studied again really hard i took it third time and before i got back to the airport in san jose i was online and i got an email it said your results are in i checked it and he had done what he said he was going to do he he probably hit a button by manually verified it and uh got my second cci so that trophy uh it's right there it's the uh that was right there oh it's not in camera sorry yeah can't see it i keep it on my shelf we see the other one though so so how long in those three tries how how how much time went by between those you have to wait you have to wait at least a month and so as i recall there's at least two to three months between each try okay why did you go for a second yeah glutton for punishment why would you want a second one you know that's a great that's a great question you still can't it was just all eyes forward do it do it do it do it how many how many kids did you have at this time uh so uh see hannah i think it was six at that time my youngest is two thousand is lacy seventeen so i think she was born in 2003. so i got it in 2000 so i guess it would be seven with a newborn yeah because this is in 2013. wow see keith is blowing my cover because i've been complaining about my two kids at home with covenant and why i don't know my mp yet but you're just getting ies with 16 kids over there it's it's a team play though my wife the mother of my children she was fantastic i she recognized my commitment she was willing to support i had a team okay and eddie you know for the first one with eddie nez he was also right there alongside me and uh you know the first gear i bought was like 4 thousand about four thousand series routers not the current four thousands yeah four thousand from two thousand yeah 4k yeah and they were i think i bought three of them i think they're like five grand for the three routers and then i got them and they didn't have any ethernet ports i didn't know that i thought you were gonna say they didn't have uh an ios image on it they're like oh you gotta pay for that now they had ios but they didn't have any ethernet ports so i had to buy ethernet ports and then figure out how to connect to them and i had a really cool rack back those is token ring switching also in addition to ethernet and uh atm and uh data link switching uh we didn't have x25 that i recall but we had something i know that you want to hear what frame frame relay oh my god we actually nicknamed it uh lame relay yeah yeah you know i can't care about pictures when i start there prime really was the shizzle they had that oh it was state of the art because we had lease lines i mean it really was amazing at least lines and frame relay and then that ospf point to multipoint nobody appreciates that now no back in the day that has so many benefits for a frame rate point to multi-point including the routing that works there is fantastic yeah so nobody nobody cares yeah well i i remember i remember the the because right around the time this was this was interesting because cable modems had just come out and the fastest tier at that time was like 99-ish it was about 768k uh so it was doxus 1.1 768 by i want to say 128 up and that that was the big deal the 128 up was the big deal because otherwise you had to have a partial t1 and that was gonna that was going to cost you thousands but it was that was 800k symmetrical right so the gaming center i used to go to because i was a professional gamer for a little bit of time there a couple of years that i wasted and i was really good so i was sponsored by a gaming center and the back of that gaming center we had a partial t1 the only reason i would go there is because we had a partial t1 so guess what i went on new egg and bought the biggest hard drive i possibly could and i downloaded the whole internet that's what you do like i was on i was on ir when you could download the whole internet yeah i was on irc chat rooms you know in the bots just requesting stuff through these bots and i was on icq news groups i was in all that stuff man if it was on the internet i had it and i was selling it to somebody if you if you peered into my hard drive at 2001 you found some really weird stuff like i'm talking like movies that you would think that an adult male should not have right like uh and and not like that i mean like like the notebook stuff like the notebook or coyote ugly i remember i had coyote ugly like what was i doing with coyote ugly we can either confirm nor deny any of these statements by aaron what's up everybody it's aaron engineered and you know how it goes around these parts sometimes these episodes get a little carried away and we end up doing a two-part episode but that's okay because it's keith barker i'm sure you're fine with that tune in next week to catch part two of keith's episode where we're interviewing him about more cool stuff his personal life and he even gives us a little bit of a challenge at the end so tune in next week see ya hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of net eng that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at art of network networkengineering.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