Network and system gurus I am searching for your favorite tools. Please indicate the most used tool you use in your networked enterprise to do things like monitor addresses, desktops, virtual systems, physical nodes, or network performance.
Category: Technology
Is the nation standing still?
Inquiries for the low end positions are abundant. Offerings of solid work seem elusive.
Have you a similar experience?
The Job I Want
With the decades of experience that I have, it is hard to find a contract to perform network or systems work that commands $85 an hour. Please consider these things prior to contacting me:
- No third party recruiters.
- All work is contracted either W2 or 1099.
- Remote work is the only type desired.
- Equipment can be provided, leased, or sold to customer.
- All monitoring activities available:
- zabbix, SolarWinds, Netscout, SOC, NOC, ISE, pandora
- Firewalls and Load Balancers
- Palo Alto, F5, Cisco, Checkpoint
- Scripting bash, powershell, python, ansible, chef, puppet, etc.
- Orchestration Salt, Ansible, Kubernetes
- Cloud, hybrid, and captive enterprise systems and networking capable.
Please send your inquiries to System Wrights:
Radio Blog
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Bernard Lambert October 16,2021
In the old days of broadcast radio we were entertained by the spoken word and sound effects. The human voice and sound was the only mass media.
In the spirit of the “voice and sound effects only” I have many commentaries and opinions found here.
Code Monkeys?
Bernard Lambert September 12, 2021
I was approached by an organization to utilize their talented people from elsewhere in the world. Coders were being quoted at eight dollars an hour. It is described as using talent from a place in the world where costs and wages are considerably lower than here in the US.
Every venture entrepreneur wants low development costs. Sometimes this can be overshadowed by low quality. Adjustments are made. Costs rise but eventually fix.
In the meantime I charge eighty-five dollars for every hour I spend on a project. Still, the low-cost seekers call. What happened to stating what you expect to pay somewhere near the beginning of the conversation?
The Forces of Insecurity
Bernard Lambert September 13, 2021
IT security is in a revolution via the present-day challenges and how they are overcome. Some idea of the future is the speculation that follows.
We are presently countering invasions of the communications systems, the destinations along their routes, the systems at any of those destinations, and theft of the information in those systems. It is a vigil. The most often mistake made toward guarding against these things is to “bolt-on” some device or system and let it do the work. The vigil is left to the robots to alert you when things go awry. A most recent hack even invaded the very systems used to do such monitoring.
We are reacting to such things and not being proactive. High grade, high paid help is not employed here. A NOC or SOC is set up where the labor is cheap and fingers crossed; things won’t go wrong. Because of specialization in applications, systems, and networking individuals seldom have the combined talents necessary and are willing to work for much less compensation. The worst I have seen it is for the 150 monitoring systems in a global enterprise dropping from sight without anyone knowing for a long time.
workThat instance was easily remedied with robots to watch the robots along with continuous visual feeds to the NOC and enterprise management personnel. The vigil was reintroduced and easily used. What can stump everyone after such systems begin a cascade of information coming your way, is the sheer volume of the info stream and the adverse effect it has upon the operators of the NOC or SOC. One cannot keep up with the avalanche of data. This is a self-induced attack.
In all cases, the staffing headcount requirement has been woefully inadequate once problems arose. The “averaging” done on personnel cost neglects the real need in a real crisis. Because these happen in an instant an organization cannot react in a timely fashion with such short staffing. Problems are not “headed off”. Some are postponed to a future project. The response is thus untimely.
My recommendation is to establish a broad-based knowledge team to install and operate this vigil in a distributed fashion. You can use a cloud, do a hybrid, or build a data center. The team you hire to do the systems, application, networking, virtualization, cloud security, and compliance issues must have integration experience and integration skills. Yes, pay the man or woman more than fifty-five an hour.
What is your experience??
About H1B
The email brought me this chart from Dice.Com. It is meant to show what H1B visa workers are making in big American corporations. Take a look:
| Company | # of H-1B Filings | Average Salary |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft | 32,735 | $135,535 |
| Vmware | 4,910 | $139,299 |
| Apple | 11,543 | $139,457 |
| eBay | 4,635 | $143,313 |
| 24,896 | $144,285 | |
| GM Cruise | 330 | $145,243 |
| Spotify | 468 | $145,800 |
| 1,794 | $149,188 | |
| Bloomberg | 2,914 | $149,863 |
| Waymo | 591 | $157,591 |
| 13,471 | $159,597 | |
| Doordash | 274 | $160,444 |
| Lyft | 1,174 | $167,650 |
| Airbnb | 1,451 | $168,306 |
Demand for code producers is high. The methods are myriad. Individuals that make timely, solid code are richly rewarded. The individuals that keep up with the ever-changing platforms for that code are also in high demand. They too reap rich rewards.
I’ll take you back to a time when Digital Equipment was in market favor and the language folks at Maynard were in high spirits. A young fellow from Redmond came and hired everyone at salaries unimagined up to that time. App and OS development stopped at Digital. The fellow from Redmond got the first iteration of Windows NT from the effort.
Paying performers in this IT business is de rigueur. It is also not as common as this chart indicates. Let’s dissect these stats a bit. Small and medium businesses cannot come close to this rate. The organizations hiring these workers charge the entire cost off as employee pay expense. That is the number you see above.
In the case of many H1B workers they actually get paid from the agency that brings them into the country as their sponsoring employer. Their employer bills the hiring corporation. Of course there is an employer’s/sponsor’s cut taken from that total billing. The aim of the sponsoring employer is to bring individuals that produce income for them. They also aim to just undercut what the “running cost” the client corporation is experiencing trying to acquire the same talent. It also allows for the quick “fire and hire” scenario when an individual does not pan out. That total cost is the big corporate “employment” cost shown above.
So does an imported worker enjoy those numbers shown above? No.
Your thoughts please???
Intel Optane in HP Desktop
I was using an HP Pavilion Desktop that had the Intel Optane SSD synched with a Toshiba SATA drive. The customer just bought it 4 weeks earlier and had gone through the Office 365 add and other data recovery jobs to get all the working files and Outlook going. The move was from an older slower Win 10 machine to this faster one.
It stopped booting and displayed the HP messages to try different function keys for Recovery, Setup and the like. Once HP was contacted and the standard tests done, the RMA was made to ship it back to them to fix. Great service, but what about the data.
The Optane SSD and the Toshiba HD normally synch so that often used data is cached in the much faster solid-state memory. There are complex software algorithms to keep the data safely on the disk or SSD. Then the power blinks.
At that point, the data on the spinning disk and the data in the SSD cache cannot release each other from a fatal embrace made by the synch keys no longer matching.
The faux RAID feature of the Optane is used to pipeline the data to each volume; be it spinning or SSD. Its driver must already be in the Windows 10 install media used to recover the machine. But there is one last impossible problem.
Your data cannot be accessed until Windows installs on the drive. It refuses to do so when the install process runs. It will also destroy the drive contents as it installs.
The machine must have a healthy Windows 10 environment running before the RSTSetup resetting software, which brings the drive back into volume and data synchronization, can be run.
There is no tool to do this prior to Windows 10 installation attempts. Failure is due to the Optane and hard disk refusal to be altered until their volumes are synchronized.
Data is lost. That is bad. The inability to save it somehow is even worse.
Bernard Lambert – November 25, 2020
Lab Notes
The idea came to me to list the lab projects, their progress, and data.
You arrive here from the main page when you selected “Do It Yourself” .
Below will are links to read up on the details of any project journal.
At a Bad Time ….
The phrase “at a bad time” seems to be the sweeping assesment of where we are in time and place right now. Many are the troubles of the ordinary people of America. Job loss, no healthcare, no money, no shelter, brutality, all seem to press hard against the American dream.
I would suggest that we begin all assesment with:”Is this at a bad time?”