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This is the Art of Network Engineering podcast.

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In this podcast, we'll explore tools, technologies, and talented people. We aim to bring you information to expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers.

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Welcome to another episode of the Art of Network Engineering. I am AJ Murray at NoBlinkyBlinky. This evening, Aaron is on vacation, so he is not with us. But I do have the one, the only, Andy Lapdaf. Wow, that was really nice. Hi, AJ. The nicest intro I've ever had. How you doing, buddy?

00:54
Yes. And we also have DJ Dan. Howdy. Howdy. Howdy, Dan. How are you doing? I feel like this is my catchphrase, you know. At howdy underscore Dan. Yeah. We're still coming up with howdy pouty. Howdy packet. Oh, instead of the hello packet, it's a howdy packet. Yeah, there you go. I like it. OSPF.

01:21
the same we're just seeing we're just building up like different options so that the fans can choose which one they think would be the best I think you should run all of them run all of them yeah yeah yeah you're gonna have any different accounts to like 10 Twitter accounts and you got to keep all active I don't know I want a signature greeting now

01:43
Hey, hey, yawn. No, no, John. John. It's a silent J, yawn. I did the same thing. Not the silent J. No silent J. Alright, so, what I wanted to do is kind of take an episode, we've done a lot of interview episodes, and so I just wanted to take one, kind of reel it back in, and kind of digest everything that we've talked about over the past...

02:06
Let's see, this is gonna be episode 10, so like over the past 5-6 episodes, because we've done an awful lot. We've talked to a lot of interesting people, we've talked about a lot of great things. I think that a lot of great advice has come out of this, and as I have gone back and listened to these episodes over again, you know, I don't know about you guys, but a few other things have come to mind, like, oh yeah, you know, we should probably, like, tack this piece of information on too, so... I think a good place to start is... What's...

02:35
What's been your favorite episode so far? Andy, what do you say? You know.

02:43
It is hard to how do you pick a favorite because then you know you heard everybody else's feelings Right now they're all great. They're all great. You know Taylor comes to mind. I mean, that's just who hits me right away And and I'm not you know I don't want to sound like hung up on his age But the fact that he's 24 and he's accomplished as much as he has you know in his career so far Just blew me away. You know Taylor was a rock star. He's also humble Which I love you know a really smart

03:12
person who's humble is awesome. But you know, Taylor, Taylor really blew me away. Um, and I actually pulled up his blog a couple of weeks ago cause I had to do something on a VPC and I couldn't remember how and now I went over to his blog cause it was just a great write up on, on VPC. So, um, you know, I was a big fan of Taylor and then, um, the, the architects that we had on, um, you know, Danny and also Joe, just the fact that they,

03:41
To me, it really made an impression when they said that they sometimes get hit with imposter syndrome because I figure once you reach that level, you're at the epitome or you're the king and the fact that they still get hit with that helps me a lot because I seem to be filled with a lot of imposter syndrome lately and it's nice to hear that people way ahead of me down the road experience that too. So quick update on Taylor.

04:11
In the weeks since the recording of his episode he has been promoted at work to a senior deployment engineer Nice which is you know obviously after listening to him which is you know well deserved right like he's got multiple professional level certifications He's definitely Fast become a go-to guy for other engineers you know they need a question answered on something given topic, you know, they just kind of go to him and

04:38
ask his opinion about, you know, how to route traffic through a network or whatever the case may be. And so that's really cool to see him get promoted to that position. But yeah, quick update. Yeah, way to go, Taylor. Quick update on the on team money as he is called at work. Would you like to talk about your update? I mean, we can. Yeah, sure. You're gonna put me on the spot like that. I guess I don't know what to do. You know.

05:06
I think it's worth mentioning. Yeah. So, I too was promoted to a senior network engineer and team lead for the Northeast Enterprise Infrastructure team. I will have five to six engineers reporting to me. One of them is Taylor, which is really cool to be his manager again. So I'm pretty excited about that. But I really liked the approach that Red River is taking for this. It's

05:34
It's not just like, okay, you're promoted, here you go, good luck. It's going to be like a walk or a crawl walk run kind of scenario, right? Like there's definitely a lot of internal processes that I'm not familiar with. And, you know, just kind of how leadership takes on different forms there. And so it's going to be this kind of gradual rollout where, you know, by the time January 1 comes around, I'll be doing all of those things. So.

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I'll get to approve statements of work and assign work to guys and approve time cards and all that good stuff. And then plus, like Taylor, also be a resource to other engineers that need help with stuff. And I'll get pulled into some pre-sales conversations, which I've already kind of been doing anyway, but now the process is more formalized. So pretty excited. So yeah. Congrats, man. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you very much. Let's see. Was that after you got your NP?

06:25
Yeah. So, um, I was told explicitly, it was like, Hey, look, this, this is not happening because you've got your NP, but it helps, right? Like if you're going to be in a senior position, it definitely helps that you have professional level certifications. Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying, clarifying on that. And, and I, I've always had like, I've always wondered how those kind of promotions work. Like, were you doing the job?

06:52
I guess it depends on the company and the culture, but sometimes you're doing that job before you get the promotion and then they finally give you the position and the money. So were you in that position or not really? This is going to be kind of a different kind of role for you. Yeah, this is definitely a little bit different. So I've been in that position that you're talking about and I can get to that in a second how that worked. But in my situation here, you know, the...

07:18
my boss came to me and said, hey, we're experiencing some kind of unplanned growth and this is kind of how we want to move forward. Would you be interested in being a team lead? And I was like, well, yeah, absolutely. So that was really cool to be thought of for an opportunity like that. But the scenario that you're talking about, I definitely worked at a place where I was hired

07:46
And there was no formalized IT department, but there was definitely people that did IT-like things. And since I was the newest one there, in order to kind of like help me out, I started to pull them together and we would have meetings and talk about like, okay, what are you working on and how can I help you? And, you know, we would just kind of start to share that knowledge with one another and it became super helpful. And

08:09
It got recognized that like, hey, you're kind of already doing this, so why don't we just kind of like formalize that process and give you the title and increase your pay and, you know, make this a formal thing. So it's interesting how it plays out differently, you know, in different situations and cultures. Yep. Congrats, man. Awesome. Yeah. Super exciting. Very, very exciting. Dan, what was your favorite episode so far?

08:36
Well, I'm kind of like Andy. I've had several that I've liked a lot of, like talking to the architects and kind of like when Andy, I'm just going to copy Andy on this. It was nice hearing them say that though, for real. It was nice hearing people who are, have that architect title say that they still feel imposter syndrome. Like it's good to hear that. I think it may be because we just did it, but Eugene's, I liked his story so far about how

09:05
And it's like, you know, a lot of people start in the help desk, right? And, and that's not what was special about Eugene for me. It was more because he started in the mail room, technically, and he showed his interest in getting into the IT world and getting into the help desk. He also made personal relationships with the people. And I think that's what's what helped him get his foot in the door into the IT role. So I think it's part of the drive that he had to make that happen. I like that. I like hearing that.

09:34
Yeah. Yeah, I liked his approach. You know, like he was in one very unrelated area of the business and he just really kept on, you know, communicating with the IT department, really making it clear that he had an interest and, you know, they kind of fed into that. And when an opportunity came up, you know, they they thought of him and they pulled him into the team and that that saved him. You know, that he said that he was due to be downsized had he not made that move. And so.

10:04
It was really smart on his behalf to establish that rapport and kind of create that opportunity for himself. Right, yeah. Plus the dude's motivational, so... Totally.

10:17
Yeah, I don't know if you guys have kept up, but he's still going. Oh yeah. He's still doing it. Every day they got those motivational tweets. I've started to look for him. Like, the first thing I do when I kind of get to work, I... Me too. I'm now looking for Micheline's and Eugene's tweets now. I'm searching them out just to get a nice dose of positivity. So there's an episode I am completely jealous that I missed. Micheline's episode. I love Micheline. Yeah.

10:44
She's such a wonderful soul, she's so knowledgeable. She's helped me out professionally. You know, like I had some questions about ACI and she was like the first person I thought of. You know, last summer they assigned me to an ACI project, my first Cisco ACI project, and I was like, there is no better person in the world to talk to about where do I start on my ACI journey than Micheline Murphy. And I'll never forget it. I went to her and I was just like, hey, you know, I'm gonna start learning Cisco ACI.

11:12
She's like, my congratulations and my condolences on you starting your ACI journey. Yeah. And I kind of get why she said that now. But. Yeah. That's pretty funny. But no, it was super fun. I've worked with her. Like I said, she kind of taught me a few things. She gave me some advice. We were both.

11:37
delegates for Tech Field Day on Networking Field Day 21. And it was an opportunity. We both got flown out to San Jose and along with all the other delegates. And we got to meet and hang out. And she's super cool, so much fun. But you bring up imposter syndrome. And one of the things that happened at Network Field Day 21 was there was another guy there, also an architect. His name's Bruno Wollman. I hope to get him on the show sometime. Super cool, very nice guy.

12:05
So he owns his own business, consulting business up in Canada, and he's an architect, consultant, and he also does the work. Which I think is really cool because I don't think you find a lot of people that, you know, get to that level and still are the ones that are installing the gear from, you know, A to B. Right. And so he has all this experience, and the last night we were there, we were having this dinner.

12:32
And I kind of mentioned to him like, oh man, I had like such serious imposter syndrome. Like I find it hard to kind of get that first question out. But once I did, I felt a whole lot better. But, and he's just like, oh man, you're not kidding. Like I still have that too. And I'm just like, what? Like, you still have that? Like you're a CCIE, you got your CCDE, you do all this stuff day in and day out and you still feel that way? And he's just like, oh yeah, totally. Like, because it's your reputation that's on the line. If you say, you know, one wrong thing or...

13:01
you know, whatever, it can, it can definitely bruise your reputation. And in his case, it could hurt his life, uh, livelihood, right? Like, you know, cause that's how he makes his money. So, um, I, I found that very refreshing and comforting to hear when people in those kinds of positions still kind of get that angsty imposter syndrome feeling. That's an interesting perspective. Cause I guess, yeah, the, the higher up the ladder you climb, people expected to know everything.

13:26
You know, and like you said, you're one misstep or one, you know, wrong piece of information away from like, oh, he doesn't know what he's talking about. That's a whole different kind of problem to have, yeah. Right.

13:39
Yeah, I think it's hard to pick like one favorite episode. There's definitely things about every single one of these that I love. And what I do absolutely love is the feedback that we're getting. I know I continue to bring this up every time I run an episode, but I'm not going to stop because we are getting just so much love from our newfound fan base. People tweeting about us. It completely unprompted, right? Like I'm not paying people. I'm not asking people to...

14:09
to go out and do this stuff for us. You know, I just log on to Twitter one day and I see somebody's tagged our Twitter account and just saying, oh man, I just found this podcast. It's great, I listened to it well. You know, I'm cleaning my car or whatever. And it's just so cool. It is so very cool that people are finding us and sharing us out. Oh yeah, definitely. Even me who doesn't have much of a social media presence, you know, I had that Josh guy reach out to me

14:39
as as kind of cool because it's like a sister company right um it's we don't we don't really have any ties but they're the same company just in a different state there's a federation between them right um and so that was it was kind of neat reaching out and we talked a little bit about like what what our different networks looked like and stuff and it was just kind of neat hearing other people's stories about that i forget who said it if it was nox or whoever but

15:07
I thought the nicest compliment I've heard so far is just calling it authentic. That it's, you know, it's genuine. People are vulnerable. They're sharing their stories, words and all failure plaques, you know, et cetera, et cetera. I just thought that was, you know, it's great that people are enjoying it and getting something out of it. And we are, too, you know, but the fact that was a Knox. I think, yeah, you know, he's he's a heavy hitter from my perspective. People know who he is. He's you know, he's he's got a lot of people.

15:34
that he trains and is following him. And for him to throw an unsolicited compliment out there and just say that he thought it was so authentic, just really, I don't know, that stuck with me. When we started this, it's not like we had a written down mission statement or like, this is what we're going to accomplish and this is how we're going to do it and here's our master plan. It was a great idea you had and you invited us and we were on board. So it's kind of been, I don't want to say like,

16:03
loosey goosey because there's been a lot of work that's gone into it, but it's, you know, there's not a grand plan of, you know, what are, what we're going to accomplish here. And the fact that, the fact that it's people like it, you know, and, and, and that, you know, and that somebody says it's genuine. You know, I, we're not on here trying to pretend we're like something we're not, or like, Oh, look what I did and look how smart I am. I mean, there's some technical, you know, programs you'll listen to that I just date myself saying program. That certainly did. The program.

16:33
You know, like some technical podcast you listen to and like, I don't know, five minutes in, I'm just like, I don't want to say bored to tears, but you know, we work in technical stuff all day, like in reading white papers and protocols. And like, I don't necessarily want to listen to an hour of that. You know what I mean? I guess it has its place. And for some people, maybe they love that. I don't know. I really, the feedback has just been phenomenal, AJ. It's been great. Yeah.

17:01
It has. And like I said, I love it. And yeah, Knox, Knox is boy, man, when I, when I signed into Twitter that day and I saw him, you know, giving us a huge shout out like he did, that was shocking. And then to even kick it up a notch, he even went so far as to say like, I don't even like podcasts, but I love these guys. How many people have said that? Like, I don't like podcasts. I don't even listen to them. But.

17:28
You gotta check this one out. It sounds like a paid advertisement. It's not, I swear. I know, we don't have anybody to give anybody, but it's like, you know, it's funny. Yeah. That was very neat seeing that. Yeah, and I guess for anybody listening who doesn't know exactly who we're talking about, Knox Hutchinson, CBT trainer, he is at

17:57
pretty close to 10,000 subscribers. And he puts out some really cool videos about, you know, one for me that I really like watching is his CCIE Journey. So, you know, he's going through all this training, he's putting together all this stuff for like CCNP Encore, the SD-WAN exam, he did some stuff on SD-Access, you know, so he's doing all of this stuff, producing all this training for CBT Nuggets. Like, that's obviously like the next logical step, right? It's like, if you're doing all of this work, why not just go for it? Go for the CCIE.

18:26
And it sounds like while he's studying he's just kind of waiting for The test center in Texas to open up so he can go ahead and schedule that CCIe lab So I guess you can't do the CCIe lab Remote right from home. That's got to be the center. That's a on-site at the center kind of thing And it's still an eight-hour thing. Yeah. Yeah, and I think the first three hours are design and then the last five hours are broken up across deploy and

18:56
T-shirt in there and then I think there's a little bit of like, you know manage lifecycle stuff So why I wonder why that's like so special that you have to be I mean you're just basically at a computer, right? It's not like the old-school exams where they'd go and the labs or they go and like pull wires on you while you were gone and I mean It sounds like something you could do from home, but maybe there's Reasons is it a sim though, or is it physical?

19:20
It's all virtualized. I'm honestly not sure. Yeah, I gotta imagine it's all virtualized at this point. But it's probably a very controlled lab. Yeah, maybe just the level of that cert, they want to be in the room keeping their eye on you. Yeah. No funny business. Was that the $1,500 lunch I've heard it called? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting when you see some of the guys, like Keith Barker and Jeremy.

19:50
I'm going to butchers name is it your your char char that's it yeah. When because when was it 2002 or 2001 2003 somewhere in there when they first released the CCA. I think it was like the nineties like mid nineties. Oh really. Okay. I'm way off. I thought I thought a bunch of them got certified around that time though. Oh yeah. No doubt. I'm sure a bunch of them did. I didn't like it. I don't, I don't think a bunch of people.

20:20
like jumped on the CCIE when it first rolled out. I think it took time to, you know, build the name for itself. But yeah, there's definitely a surge in the early 2000s. But I think originally it came out in like, you know, 95, 96. We'll have to do a fact check. Gotcha. Yeah. Good luck to Mr. Knox. I hope they open the Center for him soon. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

20:43
So what I'd like to do is kind of walk back through some of these, you know, provide some updates, maybe some additional thoughts. And one of the ones that I wanted to jump back to, because a lot of people have commented like how good they thought some of that advice was, was the personal branding episode. And there was actually a technical recruiter that hires for Network Engineering positions. And she has raved about the podcast, which, you know, I just want to thank her very much because she has promoted it.

21:11
She binged to listen to all of our episodes in a single afternoon. And she hit me up on LinkedIn and said, we gave some really solid advice. And, you know, the whole platform where we're just kind of supporting each other is, has been, I think, according to her, she thinks extremely beneficial. So, but in that episode, personal branding, you know, we touched on, um, keeping a clean record, right? Like being a referrable person.

21:41
and being somebody that you can get a clean refer from, you don't really burn bridges or have a bad rap or anything like that. And I know you've brought it up Andy in conversations with you, but I'm going through an extensive background check we'll call it for work. And they want years and years and years worth of stuff, references, old bosses, places I've worked. And they're going to call all of them.

22:11
You know, who else knows AJ? Who else can I call that I didn't tell you might be getting a call from someone about me? So I think it kind of for me drives that whole point of like, you know, keeping a clean record and, and not just like, you know, criminal record, like just keeping a clean work record and, you know, keeping it cool with everybody that you kind of work with throughout your career. Cause I would hate to have like some silly issue bite me.

22:40
you know, and make me miss out on an opportunity that I'm potentially looking at right now. Right, yeah. Don't burn any bridges is kind of what you're getting at. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm going through the same kind of check as well, AJ, and, you know, I do feel that over the years I have cultivated, you know, a reputation of, you know, not being a jerk and being curious and wanting to learn and helping people where I can. And yeah, as they go back and start talking to people, I'm not worried, you know.

23:09
Um, you know, maybe in my younger years, way back in the day, they would get different feedback. You know, I might have been a little more fired up about things back then, but, uh, you know, this was pre network engineer, but yeah, um, you know, whether you call it your personal brand or whatever, but that reputation is, you know, it's, it's everything. Um, and we've heard it from guests, you know, how the reputation like, uh, what was it? Like Eugene.

23:38
He had a good reputation there. He was reaching out to technical people and the CIO liked him and he was a hustler. And, you know, like, come on, mail room to network engineer. That's like the American dream there. I doubt he would have been able to do that if he had a solid reputation, if he was the guy that people avoided. Right. I think that that's really been sometimes prominent, but sometimes underlying theme throughout a lot of these.

24:07
career stories that we've heard, right? It's like having a good reputation and being a go-getter. I mean, again, like going back to Micheline, she went from a lawyer, a trial lawyer, to a data center architect. And she, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, she did that by building a reputation for herself. You know, she had all these opportunities to write articles and, you know, to be published. And she jumped in and helped out the community on the Learning Network, on

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lear very active in the forums. And when she couldn't find the information she wanted or needed, she sought it. And, you know, squeaky wheel got the grease in that particular scenario. She just kept asking and asking and asking because she wanted the knowledge. She really wanted the knowledge. Uh, and she made that very clear. And now that she has the knowledge and the career she's been working for, she's very involved in the community, you know, trying to give back. Yeah, absolutely. I think that just further, you know, it keeps kind of.

25:05
I don't know what the word is, but you know, reinforcing that reputation you have, you know, it's not like you're real nice and you get somewhere and then you just, you know, forget where you came from, you know? Right. Pay it forward.

25:18
Definitely. So this recruit recruiter that you're talking to, are you planning on trying to get her on here or what's the plan with that? Yes, so I have had conversations with her and I asked her, I'm like, hey, would you be able, willing, whatever, to come on an episode and kind of like give your point of view, what do you look for when you're trying to match somebody up for a position? What's a crucial thing? Talk about resumes, talk about LinkedIn.

25:48
It seems like LinkedIn is like where she finds most of her people. Gotcha. Yeah. And so having a really good LinkedIn profile that really illustrates what you're capable of, I think, is is what helps her find good candidates. Yeah, that'd be interesting to kind of chat her up, see what what she's looking for and stuff. Yeah, absolutely. We can definitely look forward to having her on here for a future episode. And I'll be honest with you.

26:15
A lot of the recruiters I see, you know, they're just posting job descriptions and, you know, and then email blasting everybody saying, hey, I looked at your resume or I looked at your profile. Very impressive. You're a perfect fit. And, you know, you look at it and you have nothing, you know, like, did you really look at my stuff, man? But you know, she, she

26:35
She puts, like she has a post on there about like that free Kirk Byers Python video. You know, she's, I mean, she's really, again, trying to help the community. She's not like just, I don't know, I, I, I'm impressed by her. She's again, her reputation, like she's, she's trying to help. Cause it, it reminded me, I've been trying to take Kirk's class for, you know, forever and I sign up and then I don't get to it for whatever reason. And I saw it in her feed and LinkedIn. I'm like, oh yeah, I got to get on this next round. So I.

27:02
I'd like to talk to her. She seems like somebody who's, you know, not just trying to place people, but you know, trying to help people. Yeah. Yeah. I think she, you know, from her vantage point, she has a really good vision of where this industry is going. So I think she's just trying to help equip the rest of us with, you know, the skills that we're going to need to fill those positions that she's looking to fill.

27:25
She's gonna listen to this and be going crazy that we're not mentioning her name. Should we give her a plug? Should we tell everybody Britney Musa, M-U-S-S-E-T-T? She's gonna die if we don't mention her name. And I'll check with her and make sure that she's okay if we put a link to her profile in the show notes. And if she approves it, you can go to the show notes, look her up and connect with her on LinkedIn if you're looking for a new career.

27:55
Yeah, definitely seek her out because I really get the impression she will do her best to help direct you or find a position that matches you.

28:06
Awesome.

28:09
So what else is new guys? Dan, I know you haven't been around for some episodes because you've been busy doing some site cutovers. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So currently we are going through a network upgrade on a lot of our branch offices. We had a Cisco stack router switch and then a cellular router, kind of like a cradle point.

28:39
and for fell over. And we are now migrating to Cisco, Meraki, and we're doing the full stack on that. We're doing the MX, the M S and the M R's. And in the MX is actually have cellular capabilities. So we just use those for we're trying to cut down on equipment. And we use those as the cellular for backup and then.

29:09
their regular ISP for, you know, broadband. But, um, yeah, so it's, it's been a fun project. One thing I like about Meraki, um, is the dashboard and being able to create a template and then apply a network to that template. And then you don't have to actually configure the devices anymore, which is really nice when you have over 200 sites. Oh man. I guess.

29:38
Yeah, because in the past when you had to troubleshoot or anything like that, you had to log into each every single device, right? Not every network, but like if you're in a select network, you know, now you don't do that. It's much nicer. And I actually got to do a little bit with Python. Now I have to admit I did not write this code or anything, but one of the Meraki engineers, he's a CCIE.

30:07
him and one of his coworkers, they had a similar situation as us. And that is, well, let me back up just a little bit. So with Meraki, there's a lot of little caveats, right? I mean, I think any cloud provider, cloud anything that you go to, you're going to have some caveats. But one of the caveats is when you create these templates for these networks and whatnot,

30:34
you cannot say which network gets which IP address range, right? You can go in there and say, hey, I want to take a slash 24 and make a bunch of slash 30s in it, or whatever the case may be, right? But you can't say which network gets which one of those ranges. Now, the way you can do it is if you run a Python script and you can actually

31:03
create like a spreadsheet and put what network you want it, which network you want the subnet for. And so they showed, they shared that with me. So basically all I had to do, I had to modify the script just a little bit, but again, I worked with one of our developers to do this. I didn't, I'm not a Python guru by any means, so I just, I can kind of read it. But so I created that.

31:31
that spreadsheet. And then I had one of my other engineers help me with that. And he did a really good job with that. He's, he's kind of a, a more junior engineer, but he's done really good on this project. Um, so I commend him on that, but, uh, we ran that script and we were able to get all of the sites to, to keep their IP addresses essentially. So yeah. Yay. Python. Cool. Yeah. Hey, it's nice, man. It, it really saved our bacon. That's for sure.

32:02
Don't you just love marraki? Yeah? Yeah, I mean I really do like marraki It I tell you what man the having a single dashboard. I'm not gonna say the one word The single put But having the dashboard is super nice because if I need to troubleshoot wireless if I need troubleshoot You know switch if I need troubleshoot firewall. It's all within the dashboard. I like that in its

32:31
So much easier than having to go in and log into every single device. So much better. So does the dashboard tell you I'm a Meraki challenged? All I know is from what you guys talk about, does the dashboard tell you where the problem is like, so you don't have to log in all those devices? Like, is it, it's really easier to troubleshoot. I think it is because so Meraki also has this product called insight and insight is really nice because you have web app health.

33:00
And so what you can do is like, if you have a custom application within your company, you can put that applications URL or whatever, if it's a web base, right? You can put that URL in that insight app, and what it will do is it will actually kind of monitor the performance of that. Like, so if you have a bunch of users in an office that use that application, it like monitors their usage essentially, and it will let you know like if, is it the network?

33:29
Is it the WAN? Is it something outside of the network that you can't really control? That kind of stuff. Is it that user's machine? That's really nice. It'll almost notify you before the phone starts ringing. Yeah, it's a pretty good feature. And then also we have... I think a lot of people have VoIP in their networks now. And these branch offices are no different, right? And one thing it will do is it'll do a voice...

33:58
health or I'm probably saying that wrong, but basically what it, what you put in there is your VoIP servers. And in this case, we have a third party contractor that does that. And you put in their voice servers and it basically does like a WAN health check on like what your performance to those servers would be. So because they, they love blaming us that whenever, whenever there's phone issues, they, they love blaming us.

34:27
Yeah, so now I have like ammo I can come back with like, uh, no, it's doing just fine. Take a screenshot of that dashboard email at all. No, not the network. Dashboard said so. Yeah. I've done a few Meraki projects this summer. And in fact, I have to remotely support a deployment tomorrow. Um, a Meraki. So we, we got a, a junior engineer going on site with a customer and he's going to set up the boxes and stuff. Um.

34:56
And you know should he run into any issues so he'll give me a jingle and I can just jump in the dashboard and you know Help him with the configure or whatever the case may be But yeah, I like working on that stuff. It's pretty fun. I I want to get more savvy with the API I haven't done a whole lot yet Yeah, that Python script is the only thing I've done with API so far on the Meraki side

35:20
Now it definitely, another reason why I like it is because our network team is like really small and I'd rather us not have to worry about, you know, the branch because there's like 200 plus of these offices, I'd rather not have to worry about them as much, right? And with Meraki, it's a lot easier just to like troubleshoot and all that stuff you can do. Here's another nice thing is I don't know if you guys ever have to do like packet captures whenever you're doing, you know, troubleshooting or anything like that. But

35:49
There's been, and it's not like something I do weekly, but there's been several times where we've had just really odd gremlins or something, whatever you wanna call them. And if I have to packet capture something, I have to get a remote tech on that location. I have to get Wireshark on the machine. I have to get the span port set up so that I can mirror that session over there. And it's just a pain in the rear end. And with Meraki, now I don't know if all of their devices do it, but.

36:17
From what I've seen so far everything that we have I can do a packet capture right there on the device and that You know mind blown. I love that. Yeah So you said you got the MX the MR. Do you have the MS as well? Yeah, we have MS Yeah, well full stack. Yes. Mm-hmm. I Been trying to throw the idea out on getting some of those What is it the MV is that the camera? Oh, yeah. Yep, rocky vision. Yeah

36:46
I see if we like if because we're basically like an MSP to these branch offices, right? And so it's like if they want security systems, we could set up something like that. And I don't know. Has anyone have any of you had any experience with the Meraki phones? Not directly. Taylor actually, when we worked together at that that other job, the manufacturing company, he actually got a couple of Meraki phones and and we tried them out for a little bit.

37:15
Are they any good? The phones themselves were really sleek and sexy. Really nice hardware. But it doesn't matter if they worked or not. They looked cool, right? Right. I honestly don't remember. You know, we had an on premises Cisco VoIP phone system. And I want to say that he was trying to integrate him with that, but it wasn't it'd be quite working the way that, you know, we expected it to or whatever. I can't remember.

37:44
Yeah, what challenges we may have had if any or what the case was but it was definitely nice hard work Yeah, I'll have to reach out to my my rep and see if she'll give me some just to play around with. Oh, yeah Yeah, the cameras are pretty cool. You can do all kinds of searches and stuff Like I've seen demos where like, you know, one of the common talking points was like Oh, like if you have a problem with like theft or something like that, like, you know if you're a store and somebody says oh, hey, you know the whatever was stolen like

38:14
You can find an image where, you know, that's like the last time that object was seen and then it'll, you can have it fast forward to just before that object disappears and you can see exactly like, oh hey somebody carried it and moved it to a different part of the screen, sent it down somewhere else, or they picked it up and walked off with it and so you at least you have somebody to talk to. That's like, oh hey we saw that you picked up this thing and moved it, you know, where would you go with it from there? Kind of thing. So it was just really cool like

38:43
You know, you can just search for when pixels change inside a certain part of the frame. It was really cool what you could do with it. That's almost scary. Right? Wow, that's awesome. Yeah. Y'all have to reach out there and- That's a lot better than some of those other DVR systems that you get. It just straight up records video, and then you've got to do the guesswork on when maybe something happened or whatever. But the search that you could do, it was pretty powerful. That is pretty neat, yeah.

39:12
I'll have to reach out and see if I can get a couple. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Even if you just get one to put on your network gear, right? Just keep an eye on your stuff. Yeah, so I was actually wanting to do that. Get one for like, so we have a couple data centers. I'd like to get one just to put in there and see how well it does on a room monitor type thing. You know if they have like, thermometers or anything like that on them? Any kind of sensors? Not off the top of my head, I'm not sure. Gotcha. I'll have to check it out.

39:41
Yeah, that's that's kind of been what I that's not down for me because we did our initial rollout and so that died down. Yeah.

39:53
Now it's moving and grooving. Excellent. Glad to hear it's going well. Rocking the Meraki.

40:00
Andy, what's keeping you busy, man? Ah, uh, um... Well, I got two little kids at home keeping me busy. Hahaha. That, uh, virtual learning? Yeah, uh, virtual kindergarten started today for my five-year-old, and virtual preschool started today for my three-year-old, and it went swimmingly with no issues at all. Hahaha. Um...

40:27
Yeah, I talked to your kids and they said their teachers are real jerks. Yeah, yeah, maybe. No, it's, you know, they're still home, you know, one hundred and seventy something days into Covid. My state, you know, isn't the numbers aren't all that great. So all the schools started with, you know, whatever this is called, virtual learning, I guess, and then.

40:54
down the line, there's some choices you can make with, if you wanna send them part-time, a-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa. So I don't know that COVID still, you know, our lives here, my wife and I and the kids, are different than they were six months ago. So I'm still contending with that, trying to do the best we can with that. But, you know, you know, work is busy. I'm getting pulled into some kind of, you know, cool stuff that

41:24
I didn't know before I got pulled into some Azure stuff. I had to kind of reverse engineer our Azure build to create some documentation. So I got to learn. It's kind of like a week or two of just fully ensconced in Azure. And that was really cool. Standing up some servers for the first time in my career or helping get them stood up. Doing some NFV stuff, some network.

41:53
You know function virtualization. There's going to be some IP sec head ends that were standing up You know on an appliance on some servers, so that's pretty cool I'm shortly getting pulled into Junos for some other project. We got going on, but um you know work is busy kids are home Trying to navigate that the best I can You know besides work and home I'm

42:23
you know, has been surprisingly, it's done much better than I thought it would. So it's something I wanted to do for a while when the podcast kind of kicked up, I thought, oh yeah, let me, you know, let me finally get my, you know, we're talking branding and this and that, and I guess it'd be a good opportunity. Let me try to get some content out. Again, just with the thought of, you know, how can I give back? How can I help the community? I originally intended to do technical stuff. Like I would run into things at work or studying.

42:50
and like, oh, that would be a good thing. Let me write that down. I'll do a quick video. And kind of more what it turned out was more just, I don't want to say I ripped off the podcast, but more like conversation, more like conversation or really where it's like, how did I go from network engineer to, or cable got a network engineer, or just different things, the power of the study group, but just more conversational stuff. And I'm really surprised. I did an interview with a guy I used to work for or work with.

43:20
You know, in like two months, I think I got like 14 or 1500 views, which I mean, that might not be like, you know, rock star territory. But again, I was just doing it because I, I like to create content. It's, it's fun. Um, you know, if it helps somebody great. And I got a lot of, I mean, that how I went from cable got a network engineer. I had at least a dozen, if not more people reach out to me like, yo, thank you so much. This has given me hope. This is incredible. I'm right there. That's what I want to do. Or so.

43:48
It's just like, you know, real feel good stuff like we've been talking about here. So, you know, that's been fun. The personal branding thing, you know, I'm still trying to chip away at. I registered my domain and I'm gonna get some help from you and Aaron on building out a website. Cause I'd like to just be able to point people to like, you know, perm instead of, you know, here's my name on Twitter and here's this thing and there's my blog and the, you know, here's the front door, come on in, you know, check it out.

44:17
One central location for all your permit IP Andy Andy needs. Yeah, you know, and I got some some stuff in the works. They want to do on YouTube. I got some more interviews coming down the pike. I got a giveaway I want to do. I just haven't figured out exactly how to do it yet. I have a limited resource that I want to give away and. I want to put some thought into it so that the right person gets it.

44:44
Yep. Got some technical sessions in the works. I'm supposed to get together with Danny and do a Python session when we can make that work. So I'm excited. Nice. Yeah. He's going to, he's going to show me, you know, Python for dummies kind of, you know, I know nothing about Python show me how to do something. I think we're going to have a card game or something, but I'm excited for that. Yeah. What else? Oh, and I'm, I'm, I'm going to get back into my encore studies. I think I'm going to take your advice, AJ, and just, you know,

45:14
book the exam maybe like two months out. I've done that in the past where I book a date and then it creates that sense of urgency. Because I took all three of the previous CCMP exams multiple times and I took so long. I was part of the reason I didn't get the MP with the old exam. So they're gonna book it and go for it. Yeah, I think that's.

45:41
I think that's a lot to keep me busy. That's what I've been up to. But I'm loving the podcast. It's been really fulfilling and it feels really good. How do you like Azure? I'm a baby. Dan, the very simplest stuff. I had to create. Super whiny. I got you. I mean, it's amazing. It's magical. It's somebody else's data center, I guess. But it's...

46:11
It's cool that you can just. Cloud guys won't like that. Huh? I said cloud guys won't like that. Well, you know, there's infrastructure. Somebody's. It's someone else's computer. Yeah, you know what I mean? The cloud is somebody else's data center. I hate to break it to the world, right? But I mean, it's cool. I like I like what I've learned so far. I want to sit through the there's an Azure fundamentals class. I want to sit there. It's about 10 hours because I really need the fundamentals. I mean, this this was kind of like a fire drill thing. I just had to get some documentation created that.

46:41
that wasn't created. And we had to hand something over to operations and they were like, no, we need documentation. So, but you know, it's cool. All this stuff I'm getting to touch is cool. You know, cloud and, you know, virtualizing network functions on server appliances. And I don't know, I'm circling back earlier to like, I'm really feeling like an imposter a lot lately. It just, you know, there's a lot of heavy stuff happening.

47:09
in my career and I'm surrounded by a lot of bright people. And not even at work, I mean, even just in the Discord server, it's all about the journey. I feel like everybody is working on all this stuff and all these certs and all, it's great. Like it's amazing, there's so much hard work happening and I'm just sitting there like, whew. I need 10 more hours in my day to. You know what I mean? Sometimes it just.

47:36
I feel like I'm standing still, but I think scheduling that encore exam will be really helpful and carving out some dedicated time every week to start knocking it out. I think I have a good plan. I have a poor track record, kind of like you were saying before, AJ, of failing these exams, even though you prepare like crazy. I've been dabbling in that Coursera course, how to learn or whatever it's called, because I'm trying to kind of tweak how I study too, because I'm tired of failing these exams. You know what I mean? I want to...

48:06
I want to be like Taylor and get seven professional certs or four professional certs and you know, maybe that's a young man's game, but I'm going to try. I'm coming after Taylor. Nice. And it sounds like you're doing anything but standing still. Yeah. I mean, you've got a lot going on between work and then trying to balance, you know, kids at home all the time and now they're starting school. You know, before you could probably just entertain them a little bit and then, you know, they can probably entertain themselves for a little while and let you work.

48:35
Or you and the wife can take turns watching the kids and get some work done trade-off But that's a little bit harder to do when they're they're in school Yeah, yeah It's it's been Life has been different and it's been you know difficult But you know I try to look at the positive and I have a lot more time with them And you know it's it's made certain things in my life more difficult. You know like productivity

49:01
in all aspects of my life, be it career certifications or creating content or whatever. But I don't know, I'm trying to develop a new philosophy of just, I'm just going to do my best each day. You know what I mean? Sometimes it, I'm kind of hard on myself and I expect a lot of myself and I think sometimes I push myself maybe harder than I should and there's usually side effects of that. So you know.

49:29
I'm just going to do the best I can and try not to set the world on fire every day. Because even though I've done that for a lot of my career, in my COVID world here, you know, I don't know, something's got to give. You know what I mean? I can't run a school out of the house with two little kids and be as productive as I was. So I'm just basically having conversations with, you know,

49:57
all the important people in my life. Like here's where I still am and I'm, you know, having a tough time being as productive as I was before. So hopefully we can all work something out, you know, even with the podcast, we were talking about, you know, I'm going to carve some study time and that might take a little time from that for me, but 24 hours in the day. And you know what I mean? I did sacrifice sleep for a while. And again, there were negative effects of that. Yeah, it did. I was staying up, you know.

50:24
9 30 to 12 30 every night trying to study or create content or write stuff or just. Yeah, tired, Andy, no, no bueno. Not long term, I can do it a night or two, but a couple of weeks of not sleeping right. So yeah, man, busy. It's good. How about you? What's what's keeping you busy? What are you up to? You know, I I can't help but feel a little bit guilty about the whole situation because things up here in Vermont.

50:53
are really good. I mean, honestly, like, the cases are low. We're like one of the lowest in the country, if not the lowest in the country. We have like very few, like, daily cases. I can't remember the last time we had a death, honestly. And everything's functioning, right? Like we've gone out to dinner a few times. We have a functioning daycare. My son started kindergarten today. And you know, it's...

51:22
My wife and I, we got really connected to the idea of like, sending him to a traditional school and having that, you know, first day of kindergarten where we put him on the bus and all that stuff. Because of COVID, it didn't shake out that way. And we were really kind of like, you know, upset about that because that's not a memory that, you know, he'll get to have or we'll get to have. And we were just kind of so attached to that because it was like, quote unquote, traditional. And our daycare came up with, at the last minute, they kind of threw out this, hey, you know, what if...

51:51
What if we did a private school thing for kindergarten through third grade? Would anybody be interested in that? And a bunch of families, you know, kind of jumped on it. And so that's, that's the avenue we went and, um, we think it's going to be a great option for our little boy. He gets to hang with the same teachers, some of the same friends. He still gets to go to kindergarten. Uh, and you know, sure. It's not hop on a bus and go to school like everybody else, but, um, you know, he still gets to do it and he'll still be in first grade next year and everything still happens, you know?

52:21
somewhat according to plan. But yeah, things have been pretty good as far as COVID going. Hopefully it stays that way. A bunch of colleges fired back up this past weekend. Everybody's back in session. A lot of them are doing the hybrid thing. Some on campus, some online. Students can opt to do the whole thing online if they want to. Some of them have opted to come back and hopefully that doesn't bring COVID in from the outside.

52:49
and skyrocket our numbers. So far, the signs have been pretty good. I think most of them had been back for a couple of weeks. I think they were kind of required to move back up in quarantine before they they went out and to the public and started attending classes and stuff like that. So so far, so good that it stays that way. I think they deserve a shout out. These school systems having to get virtual learning and. Oh, man. No joke. Because I think they kind of pulled that the last minute, didn't they? Yeah. Yeah.

53:19
A buddy of mine, very good friend of mine, he's a help desk manager for a very large, well it's probably nowhere near as large as some of the school districts around you guys, but it's probably one of the largest school districts in the state of Vermont. He's a help desk manager there and one of his responsibilities is rolling out the one-to-one program on the laptops and everything and when that stuff gets damaged he's got to work with the manufacturer to get repairs because they buy the warranties on all that stuff though they have a bunch of iPads, a bunch of MacBooks, a bunch of laptops.

53:47
And he said that he was trying to get a new order, a new shipment of laptops for devices this year and the OEMs are just out straight. He normally gets them in in like July or August, so he has plenty of time to build them before the first day of school. He couldn't go with his normal choice. They're normally at Dell shop. Dell just could not get them. They couldn't even say like, hey, we can have them by this time. They just had no lead times for them.

54:15
And so he had to go to HP and he said that HP is not going to have them until like December. So there's a bunch of kids starting in COVID times and they're getting like, you know, five, six year old laptops that they would normally have retired this year. They got to recycle them and put it back in a service. So it's, yeah. That's been another kind of amazing side effect of all this is just how the supply chain is just kind of, I don't want to say crumbled, but like, you know, you can't buy a laptop.

54:43
You know what I mean? It's just amazing to me. You know? Yep. I guess the world wasn't built for, you know, everybody buying computers at the same time. You know what I mean? Like, oh school's starting and we're all home. We need, you know, 7 billion computers now. Like it just, you know, they don't have that capacity, I guess. They can't spin off extra capacity in the cloud, right? They, you know, they gotta build these things. And I'm fascinated. I know we're not scientists and stuff, but I'd love to know like how, you know,

55:11
Vermont had one case Saturday and my state had a thousand. Like, you know what I mean? Like what's, what are the, I think you guys should be the, you know, the barometer. Like do what they did, you know, or, you know, is it rural or you guys are all far apart from each other? Like, you know what I mean? What's the sequence of all that? I think we have a lot of things, a lot of things going for us, right? Like in the entire state of Vermont, there's give or take 650,000 people. You might get that in like a square mile in New York city, right? Like that's,

55:40
That's a lot of people. That helps, I guess. To be- You're not on top of each other. Yeah, we're, totally, totally. We're not on top of each other. We don't have public transportation to speak of. It's not like we have a subway system or anything like that. We do have buses that kind of go around, but they're not jam packed like you would find some trains or subways or whatever. So I think we have a lot of things going for us that it's probably close to impossible for other places to kind of replicate. And then-

56:10
by and large, like people are following the masks and the social distancing rules. So not only is there already kind of this inherent built in social distancing just because of lack of population, but when people are forced to go into places where they have to be close to one another, they, they follow the guidelines. And I think it's kind of proven that, you know, that kind of stuff, the masks and the social distancing are keeping the numbers down at least, at least for us up here. Yeah, definitely. And I guess the population, I just Googled it. So you said, look, what, 600,000?

56:39
Population of her mother 50,000 give it Drake. Yeah, I just looked up PA for the heck of it 13 million. So I guess You know just the sheer numbers I guess, you know people are gonna be more close to each other and possibly but now I mean, that's that's great I'm my wife even said today like, you know He was doing his distance learning thing and you know They all had to stand up and do a dance and you know She's like it made her sad that he's like standing in front of his computer, you know dancing by himself Like he should be in a class or they you know, there's just all these little

57:09
kind of heartbreaking things if you look at it that way. I'm gratefully safe and we're just gonna wait it out and hopefully maybe he can be in person in January or something, but no, definitely a different world than we grew up in, you know what I mean? And fortunately, all these digital tools we have, he can do that, he can get an education at home, which is pretty cool. Yep. Life still moves on. Yeah, it does.

57:38
Well, speaking of moving on, I think now's a good time to put a bow on this thing, man. Any parting thoughts, guys? We can't end on COVID. We got to tell a joke or something. You guys have any jokes? I can't tell a joke. It was such a good episode. We can't end on COVID. Right? Dan, tell me a joke. I don't know, man. No Tennessee jokes.

58:04
No dad gum jokes from Dan? I had no dad gum John jokes. I don't know if I had a closing thought. It's just that I'm, you know, thank you AJ for inviting me into this thing. You know, I'm not trying to be cheesy or whatever, but this has been kind of a shining light for me, you know, in some weird times in the world and just at home and the added stress. I really look forward to doing this and talking to you guys and meeting the people we've been meeting.

58:34
You know, this has just been really nice. I think you starting up, you failing that exam and you starting up the Discord server and it's all about a journey and it's just funny when you look back all the things that had to happen for us to even meet to get to this point. And then, you know, it was a ton of work that you did getting it off the ground. And, you know, I don't know if people, I didn't realize prior to being involved how much work, you know, is involved. I just figured, you know, you make a recording, you upload it to somewhere and it's...

59:03
It's magical and people listen, but you know. That's the abridged version. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I just I just been having a blast with this. It's really I really enjoy it. Thanks for, you know, making me a part of it. And I'm really glad that that people are getting, you know, something out of it. All the positive feedback we've been getting. It's feels really nice. Yeah, absolutely. We'll save the full story on how this whole thing started, but I'm I'm very grateful.

59:28
You know, when I came to you guys, the three of you, you know, Aaron, Andy and Dan, and asked you guys like, hey, what do you think is starting a podcast? There was like zero hesitation. And like, yeah, yeah, we're there. And, you know, I kind of thought I was crazy for, you know, approaching you, but you had no hesitations and here we are. I think this is going to be episode 10 and we have some more guests lined up. We have some great topics to discuss.

59:56
somewhere down the line here, I think by episode 20. So in another 10 episodes, we want to start doing a video version of this, where we're recording these conversations. You can see us talk, our hand gestures. You can see Andy's awesome John t-shirt that he's wearing right now. And we're going to post that on YouTube, our YouTube channel, and see what else comes of this. And we just want to continue to keep putting out great content. We have a lot of awesome contributing

01:00:26
There's a number of people in the Discord channel that have mentioned they want to do or host the session on a given topic. So we're going to record those and we're going to also put those in our YouTube channel. Just really want to make this a resource for network engineers. So whether you need to learn about a technical topic or, you know, find some people to study with or, you know, just take in more network engineering information. You know, somebody actually wrote a review for us on iTunes. And one of the things they said, like, you know, I'm.

01:00:56
I'm just exposed to my place of business and where I work and listening to the podcast lets me be exposed to other places of work and how they do networking. And so it's kind of giving me some more experience. And that was something I never even thought of. And I definitely want to bring more of that. One of my favorite sayings that I've heard along the way is high tides make all boats float. So if we can...

01:01:22
share all of our information with one another and help each other grow a little bit, then I think that's a success right there, man. Yeah, for sure. Definitely.

01:01:33
All right. That sounds like a note that we can end on. Yeah, that's better. Good job. Yeah. Good save. All right. Awesome. So if you want more, go to our website, arto Make sure you click on the link, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Like I said, we've got more video content on the way. Make sure you subscribe to us in your favorite podcatcher and make sure you hit that bell icon, get notified every time we drop a new episode.

01:02:02
and follow us on Twitter at Art of NetEng. Art of N-E-T-E-N-G. Thank you everybody. Have a good night, good morning, wherever you are.

01:02:18
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 NETENG. You can also find us on the web at art of network engineering.com where we post all of our show notes. You can read blog articles from the co hosts and guests.

01:02:44
and also a lot more news and info from the networking world. Thanks for listening.