Older blog entries for jpalme2000 (starting at number 12)

Things are about the same as yesterday

Things are ok

VMWare rocks, I can't wait to get a license for it. That way, the ugly fat laptop I have to drag around with me can be used as a REAL system.

Things are surprisingly good.

Been terribly busy with life since 9/11. It's interesting to read of my postings of 9/10, it shows the innocence of the age of Internet. A time we may look back on and wonder how we could become so relaxed.

My life was "Shaken, not stirred" since 9/11. Busier than a little bee, working on piles of activities. At least I dont' have marketing folks to make happy. Work keeps rolling in.

Been thinking about FastNMS again, I think it's something that I need to get out. I was thinking that a combination of many of the projects out there would help get things started. I really like how Playin' in the LAN approached the design. Perhaps that's a good starting point.

Be well citizen.

Things are very sad

I'm very sad for those thousands of dead people in New York and Washington. I'm sorry to see all this.

Things are: Strangely content

Snored my way across the country, enjoyed a nice day of napping on the plane and dreaming about Fast NMS. Feel the design beinging to gel in my head. Feels like the right thing to do.

Maybe I need more sleep, and the lack of sleep is making me depressed? I feel surprisingly good after the naps on the plane today.

Why does everyone like short diary entries?

West Nile Virus? What's up with that? Hope it's not bad.

Have a great day.

Things are: Angst ridden

Here I am, 12:30 in the AM with a 4:30am wakeup for a 8:00am flight to DC. I oh so don't want to go, I wish I was just a happy techie guy again. Nothing better than troubleshooting a T-1 outage at 2:30am, cold pizza and warm coke at your side.

Now, I sit and worry if I can communicate a revolutionary concept to an audience of marketeers, who are much more interested in getting a couple rounds of golf. They'll be sitting impatiently in an dark air conditioned room trying to stay awake for my inept babbling and confusing charts.

So many very cool ideas that will be reality soon, just not my version of them. Unfortunately, I'm 12-24 months ahead of the IT industry, and trying to sell tomorrow's ideas to marketing folks selling to yesterday's clients is both a disheartening and frustrating job.

I only hope that they don't "eat the seed corn" and wack me off the team. We've got some cool stuff, stuff people are going to be screaming for and MS is going to be charging Big Bucks for. Stuff that will change network management as it's known today.

But... that doesn't help me sell it to yesterday's clients. Oh well...

Anyone need a really forward thinking engineer? I'm cheap and carry a wellspring of ability and knowledge.

Hah.

Things are: Worse

Thanks for writing everyone, it was really cool to get your notes. And I did totally freak out. ;) (EEK! PEOPLE ACTUALLY READ THIS!) The Things are getting tag was a request from a young man who asked for me to do it.

As for me, thunk up a new/old idea on how to approach network management. Why not make it simple and fast? Use shell scripts and simple command line ping, snmpget, and admin commands to create text files of what is up and what is down. Use a simple gui text reader to read the text files on a periodic basis. Use shell scripts to page you when a device changes status.

By itself, it's not particularly interesting. But if you cut the number of systems you are trying to manage down, and increase the total number of active management shells, you could scale up very nicely. So, let's say taking 254 (a class C for you old guys, a 24bit mask for you VLSM folks) nodes that are being checked and managed. It's called a Management Unit (MU), and a single cron job to run the scripts associated with the MU.

Now, go ahead and have 50 or 100 MUs and run them at the same time on the same machine. Should work just fine. If something changes, write a entry to the Syslog file. Have a nice browser window for checking the Syslog file visually, and a cron job with a script that pages you when something critical happens. (node down, web server offline, coffee break during meeting, whatever).

With this, you could easily mimic the functionality of HP, CA, Netview, or even OpenNMS, and NO JAVA involved. (I like OpenNMS, but I hate the fact they wrote it in Java. Java libraries are buggy and no matter how many times they tell me I suck, I'm not going to change my opinion about how terrible the libraries are.)

So, a Fast, Simple, easy to implement NMS system that any Junior System Admin can figure out and actually run.

YOu might wonder about the discovery portion. That's pretty easy too, many tools exist to do this. For example; Use NMAP to discover the network and identify the OS, the services running on it (SNMP, Web, DMI, whatever). Then take the output of this and pipe it into a script that calls other scripts to configure the proper management tools for it.

So, let's say that nmap gives you a really good return on a machine. It would look something like this... Starting nmap V. 2.54BETA7 ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) Host localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1) appears to be up ... good.

Interesting ports on localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1): (The 1523 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)

Port State Service

21/tcp open ftp

22/tcp open ssh

25/tcp open smtp

80/tcp open http

111/tcp open sunrpc

199/tcp open smux

443/tcp open https

1024/tcp open kdm

3306/tcp open mysql

6000/tcp open X11

8080/tcp open http-proxy

Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 3 seconds

From this, we would know that we could run SNMP tools like RRDTOOL to managed services such as ftp, sntp, http, https, mysql, X11, etc.... Other scripts could automatically configure the proper templates to start the management of these devices.

The best part, it's all VERY EASY to ready and there are no dumb databases, Java, SQL, or other crap in the way. Just you, your shell, and your script files.

Since everything would be text file based, it would be easy to integrate other tools into the set making a really cool set of thingies to manage anything that can be reached via a command line.

What more can you ask???

--<Edit from the future>-- Doubleplus good citizen.

Write me if you read these journals. It will totally freak me out! jpalme2000[NO]@[SPAM]yahoo.com.

Note: Umm.. note to self from the future... people really do read this stuff and um... be careful what you write, never know who might read it. (Duh!)

I bought my laptop last night, a nice one. Refurbed Lattitude C600 with 256MB, 10GB drive, 14 inch screen, DVD CDRW (I think, otherwise I hope it's just a DVD, cdrw are cool but the one next to my computer works just fine.), PCI Ether/Modem. Linux looks like it runs on it just fine, and I'm so excited.

The thing is that it makes me feel better, because no matter what happens, I can still work. It might be free open source programming, but no matter, I can still work. Without a laptop, a network engineer is worthless. I'm not really a network engineer anymore, though I have many characteristics associated with it. I'm more of a generalist, doing integration of everything to build a system. Requires a larger set of skills, and higher levels of understanding than straight SA, NE, or DBA.

I wish my sister-in-law would take care of my wife's parents. She is a pharmacist and her fiancee is a doctor, yet they can't seem to help out with her parents. They only make like 3 times what I do, and most likely 4 or 5 times after the Baby Doctor gets out of his last year of residency. What do I expect? It would be nice if the would just take care of the parents, just like I have HAD to do for the last 3 years.

I'm so excited about the laptop.

Work today. Phew. Hard. Not fun. I'm no good at talking to real people, and it really showed today. I wish I was a marketing guy or something, my job is mostly marketing. All I want to do is tech out, but I'm needed to do marketing. I know how to market, but I can't speak in laymans terms anymore. I speak computerize, not business.

Funny though, business folks say I speak Computereze, while computer nerds think I speak business. The worst of both words, not technical enough for the super techies, not business enough for the marketing weenies. What do you guys want both? I really do try hard.

I've been updating the resume, and watching the job boards, but nothing is out there. Nothing at all. Oh crap. So, what do I do? Buy a laptop, why not.

Otherwise, what a day. Foot still hurts, tingles and throbs.

jp

OpenNMS in C and make it less dependent on Java, start a corporation that does NSF research, and figure out a way to lose weight while sleeping that actualy works. Oh, fantasy

Oh Fantasy.