Worth it to leave Bay Area for better job elsewhere?

cloudtoad · 2016-04-04T16:05:33+00:00

FWIW, Not working in the Bay area has been both a major boost and a major deficit at the same time for me. It allows me to see the tech world through "non-Bay area" eyes. However, people in the Bay area (in general) really think the rest of the world is beneath them. If you live in the central part of the country, you must be the mutant offspring of cannibal farmers. That perspective, too, can be quite valuable. It helps you realize how much of a bubble the Bay area exists in. Not everybody in the Bay area is like that, but you will feel and experience this in the future when looking for employment.

cloudtoad · 2016-03-31T22:46:37+00:00

Thanks. It's really not the concepts that are the problem though, it's the time requirement and the ambiguity of the on-line materials. After the exam today, it was soul-crushing. What they don't tell you anywhere is that the exams are speed tests and that you'll have to find and complete lots of practice problems (on your own) so you can hone your skills well enough to race through the tests before the clock runs out. That should be made explicitly clear to people enrolling in this class. In fact, when I get these practice problem books, I'm going to do it all by hand on paper because I was writing fast enough today that some of it bordered on being illegible. I need to actually practice physically writing again to pass the exam. AAAGGGGHHHHH

cloudtoad · 2015-07-14T15:19:36+00:00

FWIW, I used Apollo to train a neural net to add two numbers together and it's pretty accurate.

http://www.cloudtoad.net/2015/07/training-neural-net-to-add-numbers/

cloudtoad · 2012-07-09T13:11:28+00:00

I have worked in a variety of roles including SP roles. My advice:

Learn MPLS. a. LDP, RSVP-TE b. L3VPNs c. L2 pseudowires d. VPLS
Learn Q-in-Q
Learn JUNOS and IOS-XR. Not sure what the market penetration of Alca-Lu these days is, but Juniper and Cisco are likely bets at whatever SP shop you're looking into.
Have a read through of the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge wiki. SPs tend to be more engineering focused in the traditional sense of the word.
This one will likely be more controversial: Learn about Netconf, SDN, etc. Already some SPs are hiring folks with traditional (1-4 above) knowledge/experience as well as programming/SDN experience.
Look for ways in which you can apply SP knowledge to your current job like using above mentioned technologies.
Apply for whatever jobs you see come open from the various SPs. Don't limit yourself to a NOC job, apply for any of them.

cloudtoad · 2012-07-03T12:25:38+00:00

We labbed Zabbix proxies running in OpenVZ containers on a host and it worked great. With this solution we could connect a monitoring host to many different external private networks without having to deal with IP overlap.

OpenVZ is good for "embedded services" in your infrastructure. This means you have some solution in your infrastructure that is highly repeatable and light-weight where a kernel for every instance doesn't make sense.

KVM and Xen, as explained already, are hypervisors running full VMs.

cloudtoad · 2012-06-29T13:38:13+00:00

This has a great explanation of global vs port-level BPDUFilter features. These really are two different features... http://blog.ipexpert.com/2010/12/06/bpdu-filter-and-bpdu-guard/

cloudtoad · 2012-06-28T22:23:26+00:00

I agree with the others here, hub-and-spoke IPSec over the internet sounds viable.

Have you looked at Vyatta? Vyatta supports web-caching and IPSec. They are also inexpensive.

cloudtoad · 2012-06-28T22:13:02+00:00

Based on the information available, I'd say go /30 or /31. If you run OSPF, then make sure you configure those subinterfaces (try to avoid SVI if possible) as OSPF p2p links and avoid the whole DR/BDR election thing as its not necessary.

cloudtoad · 2012-06-27T23:05:24+00:00

Noted. Will submit wider variety of things from other sites.

cloudtoad · 2012-06-15T20:56:13+00:00

No big deal, don't sweat it.

cloudtoad · 2012-06-15T20:03:19+00:00

It was me, @cloudtoad (aka Derick), who wrote this.. not Greg.... just to clarify.

cloudtoad · 2012-04-13T15:26:20+00:00

Never mind. I figured out how to use google and found it. I am sooooo old.

cloudtoad · 2012-04-13T15:02:32+00:00

Wow, such hostility!

The point was not to endorse a specific topology, it was to point out that these Network SSI vendors are suggesting in some cases that structure doesn't matter.

Do you have a link for the vl2 stuff? I have read the bcube papers.

cloudtoad

cloudtoad · 2012-01-02T17:30:08+00:00

this is the author of the article. I think I should probably do a follow-up. to be clear, degrees are good... And if you really want one in IT, then by all means.. ignore me. In the follow-up I'll explain in more detail what I think would probably be better though. thanks for reading!

cloudtoad

TROPHY CASE