Category: Time

Bad Recruiting

The methods used today fail to connect the capable and willing contractor or employment seeker with good jobs.

I have experienced a great increase in job offers; all at 1970’s prices. None have come from the actual consumer of my professional services.

Many of the people that contact me are reading from scripts and have no idea what your expressing in technical jargon. Yet they are your first assessment.

Subsequent contacts in the chain of those contacts prove a further distancing from a firm understanding of the job.

Technical questions cannot be answered.

The automated scanning of resumes to create matches for the solicitors to contact you, miss critical points like REMOTE ONLY.

Could real people contact me after reading the resume and visiting the websites please. Be a check signer; a decision maker with needs.

NANOG > NewNANOG

November 11, 2021 – Bernard Lambert

The North American Network Operators Group originally came out of Merit University as a function of network study and research. I always found it handy to track Internet core transit problems and solutions. It began over thirty years ago. You can join NANOG lists at https://www.nanog.org/resources/nanog-mailing-list/nanog-mailing-lists/

Back in February 2011 – https://www.merit.edu/news/new-agreement-transfers-nanog-trademark-and-resources/

At this seclists.org you can read all the listserve messages that come from them up to today as well as a wealth of other network operating and security lists. They keep all the messages nicely indexed so you can see what is going on or has gone on in the past.

Another resource for you may be the http://readlist.com lists archives.

Bernard Lambert – November 11, 2021

Your Favorite Monitoring Tool

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.

Please rate the tool 1 (poor) to 3 (best)

Select the cost of your favorite tool.

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:

Arizona Republicans Under Attack

The party has been hijacked by a hack from Mohave county and like minded TEA party types that want to do the “less government with less taxes” thing.

Our nation and communities must realize that the fantasy of “living in the modern world without contributing to one’s surround” is a short-sighted view. The typical type of our present Republican leadership wants all the benefits of modern highways, telecoms, broadband to the house, groceries easily picked up or delivered, all the medical benefits possible without paying anything out of pocket, low or nonexistent property taxes, no business taxes, no capital gains taxes, no income taxes…you get the picture.

They want to use the system for their personal benefit and the public at large suffers until they can vote them out. Presently a terribly conceived audit of the last election ballots in an unsecure and often concealed process is going on by the same self-serving types. The election was won by Biden and the vote was very clear about that. The fantasizing bad Republicans are still in denial. They offer nothing but distructive or negating influence on anything they touch. They underfund education while giving Amazon a pass on paying enourmous amounts of revenue to the state.

So what is left for an original Repulican Arizonan to do here. The party meetings have been hijacked and closed to visibility while they position Trump for 2024. There is little truth being spoken by the main party officials. We need a voting list so we can plan the work needed. When will each and every one of these bad people be coming up for reelection?

Bernard Lambert 2021-05-07

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 FilingsAverage Salary
Microsoft32,735$135,535
Vmware4,910$139,299
Apple11,543$139,457
eBay4,635$143,313
Google24,896$144,285
GM Cruise330$145,243
Spotify468$145,800
Twitter1,794$149,188
Bloomberg2,914$149,863
Waymo591$157,591
Facebook13,471$159,597
Doordash274$160,444
Lyft1,174$167,650
Airbnb1,451$168,306
Dice extract of Labor Department Stats

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

The Truth Is …..

Truth should be simple and lasting. Well, I can hope. I can listen. I can think about it. I can seek many sources of information. I can do everything in my power to gain insight into everything I need to survive. It gets complicated in a hurry.

My first concern about truth is time and timeliness. While we cannot get back a minute of time while in the pursuit of truth, we spend it lavishly. Some just wait for it. Some just chase it. All spend a considerable amount of time finding the truth. Learning of it late or when it is no longer relative allows the truth to disappear into the moras of lies in circulation.

My second concern about truth is simplicity. When the only paper document you get with a product or service is a legal agreement in thousands of words, we have successfully evaded the truth. The hate mongers on the Internet build sites just to peddle discord and are successful because of the ease of having such a large audience. None of them offer simple truth.

We have come to a time where civility has been stripped away from public behavior. So far as the individuals who are demonstrating and protesting are concerned, they have been civil. The bad actors amongst them have caused all of the damages. Obviously the truth is being seen by millions of eyes and each of us has a different opinion of what the truth is even then.

While we observe things this political season, let’s try to keep truth lasting and simple….somehow!

Bernard Lambert – September 7, 2020