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:

Return To Work?

Bernard Lambert September 12, 2021

What are your main concerns with returning to work while the pandemic rages on?

  • Catching a virus?
  • Giving someone a virus?
  • Bad ventilation on-site?
  • Lack of testing offered or on-site?
  • Mandatory vaccination?
  • Non-mandatory vaccination?
  • Lack of remote work?
  • Poorer wages or rates?
  • Unreasonable/unsafe work conditions?
Pick your topmost issue with returning to work during the pandemic.(required)

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??

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

Real Is NOT!

The sacrifices made by everyone repelling the insurrection the ex-president fomented have gone unnoticed. We did get to see Officer Sicknick’s memorial. Many politicos were in attendance. The news tried to give it a solemn treatment. I did not get a feeling in the last weeks that the followers of the insurrectionist have any concern for life, our government, or the citizens of our country.

Nor have I seen any of the most fervent of the followers show remorse for the loss of life, the damage to the capitol, or the damage to the American spirit. The selfish and self-serving rationale that is prevalent among those insurrectionists is that their leader and their way of life has been stolen. The conspiracy theory driving that lust is a complete unrelenting lie provided by and continuously fueled by the ex-president. They are not driven by truth but by suspicion.

The last time we as a country got into killing each other so openly was during the time we worked to shed ourselves of slavery. That too spilled over into the killing of leaders. Abraham Lincoln was killed by the same kind of despot as killed Officer Sicknick. The ex-president’s pursuit of the damn lie is apparently to feed his ego and wallet (campaign funds) while trying to reform power in the Republican party. The Republican party cannot make up its mind to condemn the actions of the former president.

The worse thing in this is the state-level hooliganry being conducted by our errant Republicans like Ward, Biggs, Gosar, and Lesko. They lost, they will not admit it, and they are going about the business of restricting ballot access at every turn now that an election has proven their coward ex-president is unwanted.

Arizona Republican leadership is cowardly, xenophobic, racist, and does not represent moderates in the party. They still believe there will be a Mexican invasion of Arizona. They may be uninformed about the fact that those races and religions were here before the eastern immigrants showed up. They are cowards given their lack of concern for the citizens of Arizona.

Backing the craziness of the previous administration is a testament to our Republican leaders’ ignorance, lack of concern for their constituents, party loyalty beyond reason, damage to the residents of Arizona and the United States, and disregard for the law.

For several decades we in Arizona have taken issues to the ballot in order to get the most fundamental of issues resolved because our legislature is working their personal agendas and the citizen’s needs go for want. Arizona’s legislative process is unamerican as a process. Their legislative product is unwanted by the masses.

So in summary a profoundly ignorant hillbilly from West Virginia runs the Republican party. She is actually an insult to my kin back there in West Virginia. A lottery winner represent a small enclave of religious conservatives, and the rest endorse the errant behavior of the ex-president. All have worked very hard to limit poll access and voter registration.

The methods of party politics has changed in my lifetime in that constituent needs are now secondary to the bent to devolve, diminish, ruin, gut, and change the laws and policies of the state and nation to further their hidden agendas.

One need only follow the money to see what we get is what the lobbyists have paid for by way of “campaign donations” to Senators and Representatives. This is true in state and national elections and campaigns

Forget not what has transpired. We have to wait two years for the next election cleanup.

Bernard Lambert February 3, 2021

Republican 2021

I put this on twitter and facebook: “I saw Barry Goldwater’s ghost walking on the hilltop in Paradise Valley where his radio antennas used to stand.He is PISSED!!”

The extremes met by the Republican party under the present administration have caused moderates in the party great stress. The events of the 2021 Capitol Insurrection have cinched the deal.

A reorganization of aims and agendas within the party is underway. Some leaders of the party have condemned the events and the promotion of the violence by the President. Cooperation with the incoming administration and Democratic party members seems to be in the air.

Party members that work loudly at the extremes of their party now risk disenfranchisement. Moderate, cooperative effort is now de riguere.

What’s your opinion??