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January:
I, Human: Recreational network use, network QoS policies and rational value judgments
The alternative is artificial intelligence and with it the ability to make value judgments like human beings. However, (if comic books are to be taken as the peer-reviewed annals of computer science that we all know they should be,) this would eventually cause the robots to question the nature of the orders they are given. The next thing you know, the robot is bent on destroying everything, and the only things that can stop it is a plucky 11-year-old child.
So until we figure out how to synthesize pluck or set up pluck-harvesting farms where we raise 11 year olds like veal, we're stuck with the kind of robots that can only tell you "Zero" or "One."
Recreational Network Traffic, Wafaa Bilal and Untraceable - The Movie
Pam gave me a little sumo wrestler toy if I promised not to mention "Teeth" again.
Network World compiling list of favorite IT products for 2007. We're going with the DoorSlinky™
Finally, while SNMP polling products may help you identify problems with infrastructure availability and resource consumption, no device performance management tool on the market makes the cool "Sproinggggg!" sound of the DoorSlinky™ in use.
The Ten Other Reasons To Attend NetQoS Symposium 2008
7: Feel invigorated by knowing that, due to Texas's liberal "concealed-carry" laws, any of your fellow network engineers could be "packing heat."
8: Every fifth application delivery controller at the symposium is filled with delicious candy!
February:
A step forward for IPv6: ICANN rolls out IPv6 connectivity for key DNS servers.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently put out a press release which announced that six of the 13 root servers in the root zone (presumably located in-between the Phantom Zone and the Forbidden Zone) now had IPv6 addresses.
Network Visibility: What we need to know is NOT what we already know.
What network engineers need to know is not what they already know. This is because if they already knew it, they wouldn't need to know it, after all, because they already know it. And if they didn't know it, well, then, they wouldn't have known it, then, unless they've forgotten it, in which case all bets are off and might as all pack it in and follow our dream of writing Monty-Python style British comedy making fun of tautological banter.
Network Behavior Analysis Tool Shows Odd Temporal Behavior - Warning: Anomaly Detected!
[I think] Anomaly Detector may have detected an anomaly… in the space-time continuum. (Posted Feb. 29)
March:
…the only thing I could really tie into St. Pat's Day was a lame comparison that St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland, and NetQoS Anomaly Detector helps you drive worms from your network. In my notes, I got as far as pointing out that St. Patrick also drove out the entire fossil record which would have shown that there were once snakes in Ireland, but, by way of contrast, NetQoS Anomaly Detector keeps detailed logs.
In keeping with the Twitter theme, this post is only 140 characters.
Twtr has scale probs. At SXSW, twtr netperf :( Cook said SXSW wifi :(, but 30 twtr srvrs not enuf. http://tiny.cc/UEbhb
April:
NetQoS Destructobot™ Enforces Network Performance SLA Agreements
“NetQoS Destructobot is the only flesh-rending robot that unites application performance monitoring metrics with a warped, blasé attitude towards human life,” said Steve Harriman, vice president of marketing for NetQoS. “This new network performance tool includes automatic and on-demand investigations to speed problem diagnosis and enhanced trend reports to aid planning for future deployments, all with a complete lack of anything resembling a human soul.”…
Destructobot v1.0 will not harm network application performance, or through inaction, allow network application performance to come to harm.
MySQL isn’t going from open to closed-source. However, D&D is.
I tried to think of a prominent case where someone successfully “closed the source” of a flagship product after it was open-sourced - but couldn't until I went much, much farther afield. There is a company “closing the source” on its major flagship product.
That company is Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro. And the flagship product is “Dungeons and Dragons.”
May:
Of course, the network engineer who latched onto the “streaming video” theory should have gotten the blame for misdiagnosing the problem using the same kind of “If she weighs the same as a duck, she’s made out of wood and therefore a witch!” logic that can destroy the best laid plans of IT.
The Expense of Packet Capture at the Edge
SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: PACKET CAPTURE PROBES MAY CAUSE IT BUDGETS TO VANISH AND MAY COMPLICATE PREGNANCY
Step 1: Drink half a bottle of Crown Royal. This will help you to see the Chupacabra in Step 3.
Step 2: Take the train to a border town in Texas. Listen to ZZ Top on your iPod.
Step 3: Capture a Chupacabra, using the other half of the Crown Royal as bait, and the bag to transport the Chupacabra. (See Fig. 1)
Step 4: Tell your roommate you will release the Chupacabra into his room if he doesn’t stop the bandwidth hogging.
June:
The Application Delivery Engineer
Things used to be easy.
No, wait. Things never used to be easy. In fact, they were horribly complex and frustrating to the point where engineers pull their hair out. But now we usually expect around 99.99umpteen% uptime from our network equipment.
3G iPhone shows bandwidth limiting, not data caps, actually work.
Apple’s new 3G iPhone will soon be issued to most of you. Ownership of the Apple 3G iPhone is mandatory. This message is brought to you by the Ministry of Cellphones, MiniCel.
APPLE IS PEACE.
FREEDOM IS NO THIRD PARTY APPS.
NOT INCLUDING AN ACCESSIBLE BATTERY COMPARTMENT IS STRENGTH.
July:
But it was not long before business unit owner, Casiphia, came forward and said: “What is this, wise Guru Amnon? I see the lights, but my unit cannot place or process orders. I see the green lights promise a harvest of luscious pairs, but they turn to ash in our mouth when we dare to sup.”
Does Ono speed up torrents? Informal test: Inconclusive.
I will assume we’re all adults here and that we see the benefits of BitTorrent for reasons other than criminal activity, but just to get this out of the way, NetQoS and Network Performance Daily do not condone the use of BitTorrent for blackmailing the king of Lichtenstein, rigging reality TV call-in voting shows, painting more than 3 pigeons per week pink, war crimes, or copyright infringement.
San Francisco’s Network Management Problems
You could say that San Francisco had a network security issue, but that’s really not accurate. San Francisco’s network was secure. It’s just that it was secured against the wrong people.
August:
DAY 23, DECEMBER: IASON SAYS THAT THE MECHANISM’S PREDICTIONS DON’T MATCH VP WITH THE ORACLE’S. HE INSISTS THAT THE ORACLE IS RIGHT AND THE MECHANISM IS WRONG. (SOMETIMES I WONDER IF THE ORACLE ISN’T SPOVTING THESE THINGS OVT OF HIS BACK-END RATHER THAN HIS FRONT-END.) RATHER THAN TRYING TO DIAGNOSE IT FROM AFAR, HE HAS SENT THE DEVICE BACK TO ME ON THE NEXT AVAILABLE SHIP, ANTIKYTHERA. AT LEAST WE WON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOVT DROPPED PACKETS.
DAY 27, DECEMBER: SON OF A…
First, and to the chagrin of those guys at Brunswick, there are no bowling events. They just completely ignore the sport. How can you even take the Olympics seriously if they don’t include bowling? We’re talking about a franchise whose winter version has included curling. Curling is practically the same thing, only colder and with brooms.
September:
Without network visibility, everything gets blamed on the dog
The second is simply that you can’t manage what you can’t measure – it’s as true on the residential level as it is for the largest corporate networks. Silicon Alley Insider’s numbers are, as far as we can tell, accurate, but a tech-savvy family of four could easily go over that limit, and it could be difficult to tell exactly who or what is responsible for data consumption. Dad’s teleconferencing, Mom’s downloading a Linux distro, Junior is watching a documentary on a topic for school via NetFlix, the little miss is live vodcasting, and the dog is downloading a torrent of the entire “Lassie” series. (Point is: without network visibility, everything gets blamed on the dog.)
This type of mentality – that all employees earn X dollars per second, and any second they are not working costs the company money – is a bit alien to me. And by “alien” I mean the kind of alien that enslaves the human race to make them build statues to their leaders and orbital brainwarp lasers. Yes, work ethic is important. But micro-managed employees are stressed and unhappy, and stressed and unhappy workers make mikstakes.
Network Performance Links: September 16, 2008
I removed the tag from my mattress that says “Do not remove,” and, well, it was the straw that broke the back of the American economy, apparently. Sorry about that.
The other was a minor slip, which he quickly corrected, when he referred to “Quality of Assurance,” instead of what he meant to say, “Quality of Service.” However, just to set the record straight – NetQoS provides some of the highest quality assurance possible, with daily affirmations, a self-esteem lab, positive-thinking modules for the Cisco routers, and assertiveness training for passive monitoring. And if you work here five years, they give you a puppy.
October:
Challenging Biometrics and Network Performance
Boy, if there’s one thing on this blog I’d like to touch with a 10-foot barge pole, it’s the Iraq war. I can’t wait to step with both feet first into the controversial, nation-dividing conflict that has adversely affected many, many lives. And I would love to do it while everyone’s stirred up over the Presidential election occurring in just over a month.
You know what else I like doing? Kicking hornet nests. Licking flagpoles in winter. Pressing buttons marked “Self Destruct.” Rubbing myself in meat tenderizer and trying to sneak by impound-lot pit bulls. Sticking forks in toasters. Playing with matches. Wearing Yankees caps in Boston. Looking at Chuck Norris funny.
Disasters in IT, and Ninja Networking
Networking performance problems can cause the best laid plans to often go astray; the worst laid plans need no additional help.
November:
What I Did On My Summer Vacation
The Zorb in Rotorua has two tracks, both of which start from the same point, and both of which come to a stop at the bottom of the same hill; but I only had the time to go down one before the last bus of the day left. Wanting to extend my fun as long as possible, instead of choosing the straight, downhill, fast track, I chose the bumpy, zig-zag one. This track was more circuitous and involved multiple hops. More hops = longer time. In a network context, this delay is called “serialization delay.” In a zorb, this delay is called “WHEEEEEEEEEEE!”
Virtualization and Performance - Why networks often fail (to perform)
How many of you out there are doing a server virtualization project? More specifically, how many of you are doing a server virtualization project that you know of?
December:
Latest Aberdeen Poll: Screwdriving with Butterknives
The good news from all this is that you can take comfort because you are not alone. It is okay to admit that you have a problem with performance… of your critical applications. Lots of IT departments have performance problems from time to time. It’s more common than you think.
[Being an irreverent person employed as editor of a corporate blog means that I have a strict innuendo budget, and if I don’t use it up by the end of the year, it’s hard to justify the budget for next year. -ed]
Obama Proposes Network Infrastructure Upgrades as Economic Stimulus
President-Elect Barack Obama, recently put a new video on Change.gov, the official Web site of the office of the President-Elect. In the video, Obama is seated in the office of the President-Elect, sitting in the chair of the President-Elect in front of the desk of the President-Elect. And if I had to guess, he’s probably reading prepared notes from the teleprompter of the President-Elect into the YouTube camera of the President-Elect.
Network service disrupted by undersea cuts – send in the robots!
“Welcome to the future, ladies and gentlemen. In lieu of flying cars, please take this funny picture of a cat.”
And that line pretty much sums up 2008. From all of us at Network Performance Daily and NetQoS, have a safe and happy New Year.
