Everything Has a Cost

Everything comes at a cost: steak dinners & pre-sales engineering has to get paid for somehow. That should be obvious to most. Feature requests also come at a cost, both...

Recruiters: Must Try Harder

Right now, it’s an employee’s market in the Bay Area. Technology firms are growing, and they’re always trying to hire more people. So I regularly receive emails from recruiters. This...

The Difference Between Proper Devs and Me

I spend a lot of time poking around with code, and I can figure out most integration challenges, and simple code fixes. But I do not call myself a developer....

RPM Post-Upgrade Scripts

Something different today: Here’s something I learnt about RPM package management, and post-upgrade scripts. It turns out that they don’t work the way I thought they did. Post-uninstall commands are...

War Stories: Always Check Your Inputs

The extremely irregular War Stories series returns, with an anecdote from 15 years ago, investigating a problem with a web app that only seemed to crash when one particular person...

SREcon, DevOpsDays and Seattle vs Sillicon Valley

I am the Product Manager for StackStorm. This gives me the opportunity to attend several industry events. This year I attended SREcon in San Francisco, and devopsdays Seattle. I found...

Savvius Insight and the use of Elastic

Last week Savvius announced upgraded versions of its Insight network visibility appliances. These have the usual performance and capacity increases you’d expect, and fill a nice gap in the market....

IPv6 Trends, SixXS Sunset and Project Planning

Native IPv6 availability continues to increase, leading to the sunset of SixXS services. But it looks like we don’t like starting any major IPv6 rollouts around Christmas/New Years, but instead...

Website Migration Complete

I have completed migrating my website to GitHub Pages. URLs and RSS feed location should remain the same.

CCIE Renewed Again - Exam 400-101 v5.1

It came around again: CCIE renewal. Last time I renewed, I wasn’t sure if I should do it again. But I gave in, passed the CCIE R&S Written Exam, and...

Formatting Matters

Using proper formatting can make it much easier to read code and log samples. Yet so many people don’t bother putting proper formatting around blocks of text. Take some time...

News at Last: It's Extreme

We have news at last: Extreme Networks is acquiring Brocade’s Data Center Networking business. This includes the SLX, VDX and MLXe routing and switching product lines, Network Visibility and Analytics...