I've suffered from this problem. I would have a hard time coding a solution at work, something that really plumbed the depths of my understanding--which probably isn't too difficult a feat. Then, I'd go home and sleep. During the night, I would dream myself coding the solution--read the code, then wake up. I would then pseudocode the solution and go back to sleep. Next day, *poof* coding was a breeze.
I almost quit a job because of this. I wrote a screen-scraper application that interacted with a TN3270 session to pull information out of an archaic database, process the information and then make new entries in the database. I was staring at the TN3270 session so many hours a day that I would dream about the screens every night. Every time I closed my eyes I saw a black background with purple and green lettering and lines. But, I always knew exactly what my application needed to do. I had already watched it run the yet undeveloped code in my head for a couple of hours the night before.
Friends: Even though I find the MSVC search tool very usefull, one of the first things I do when setting up a development box at work is to download a windows version of grep.
If you haven't seen this project, check out http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/. These tools end up on every windows machine I use. Make sure to grab the updates. Especially helpful on windows are the pclip and gclip utilities. Copy any text to the windows clipboard and the pclip utility will output the clipboard contents to STDOUT while glcip will take STDIN and put it into the clipboard. It's very useful.
and I see it at least daily during construction season. just because you have two carriers doesn't mean their fibers don't run in the same duct, everybody cross-leases dark fiber to everybody else.
you need protection from backhoe fade, you have to do the interagency engineering for separate feeds on separate systems from separate directions. will at least triple your cost to bring it up.
I worked with this one vendor that went on and on about having dual paths that went out separate ends of the buildings to separate POPs and that a fiber cut would never be a problem for them. So one afternoon their service quits working and I go look. Their routers were off the map. So I call the tech and ask what happened. Turns out that when they ran the fiber out of the building they did in fact run it out of opposite ends of the building. The problem was that one of those paths went half-way around the building and ended up in the same trench as the other run. The cut was after the "redundant" paths came back together.
Are you Scientists or Special Effects Builders?
on
Ask The Mythbusters
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· Score: 5, Interesting
When watching the show, the introduction emphasizes your experience in the special effects industry but I think I recall you referring to yourselves as scientists on occasion. The reason I ask for clarification is that you routinely ignore good scientific methods. The best example I can think of off the top of my head was the windows down vs. air conditioning myth. I know you revisited the myth, but your initial tests were poor science at best. Couldn't you have some sort of science advisor to at least make sure that there is some sort of logical sense to your experiments?
Even with my harsh comments, I'm not disrespecting your show. I have it setup to record on my DVR every week. I mostly enjoy the shows but occasionally your lack of scientific method is maddening. I realize you are probably cutting a lot out for the sake of TV, but could you at least point out that there are some possibilities you aren't testing?
I think I'll continue to outsource to India. They tend to speak better English than Alabamans.
I still don't get why everyone in the country makes fun of the way southerners speak when there are so many screwed up dialects in this country. When you look at Massachusetts, New York, Wisconsin, Louisiana (in the south, but a different accent near New Orleans) how come the southern drawl is the only one that is worthy of ridicule? And on the point of intelligence, consider this situation:
If I were to ask, "Why can't the black man from Georgia read?" and you were to say, "I don't know, why?" examine your reaction the following explanations. If I reply "duh, I told you he was from Georgia" everyone thinks it's funny and laughs. If I reply "duh, I told you he was black" I am a horrible racist and should be shunned.
Why is making fun of someone for their place of birth any different from making fun of someone for their race? Neither can be controlled by that person.
I say go ahead and tear down the special aura that has classically surrounded network admins. Secretive, not fully understood, a human black box... much like the Google entity of today. Timse have changed. Coming out to be part of the work community has benefits -- don't just look at the bad side and be scared of it. Can anybody tell me why network admins stereotypically want to be treated specially? I mean everybody wants to be special, but you know what I mean about network admins. If anybody replies and says "No, I don't, give me a example", I will assume you are a network admin and cannot see the forest for the trees so likely I won't respond.;)
I think that most positions described as network administrators are not worthy of special privacy treatment. However, one scenario in which a network admin might need privacy would be IT related firings (e.g. proof of improper browsing, email abuse). If your network admin is constantly having to go through URL logs and email archives for HR or legal purposes, he or she probably needs to work in private. Any conversations about those types of activities probably need to be in private as well.
That's about the only "network admin" function that needs privacy that can't be countered by the suggestions in this thread. Privacy filters on screens work during the research, but when you need to show the evidence to others (HR, management, legal) it helps to be in an area where there is privacy. If one is the network administrator in a really screwed up place where firings like this happen two to three times a month, a private space helps matters greatly. Not that I'd know. Or did that for about six months before I got sick of getting people fired and left for a different position.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a network/security person and I have had an office, a cube and a desk (in an open floor plan). Most of my tasks don't require the privacy of an office, but there are some things (like the above) that need to be done in private. Sometimes the job doesn't require those tasks very often, sometimes the job does. Office needs should be determined accordingly.
You may want to experiment with your food intake
on
Programming and Dieting?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I started on the Hacker's Diet earlier this year. I went from 205 to 185 in about two and a half months. While I didn't notice the mental fade you are talking about, I did notice that some days my workouts went really well and other days I could barely make it 20 minutes before I wanted to quit and go home. I started tracking those days inside my weight and workout spreadsheet and I found that the good days correlated with the days I had yogurt and fruit for breakfast. My total calorie consumption was always roughly the same (1800 - 2000), but the difference on yogurt and non-yogurt days was astonishing.
I'm not saying that yogurt and fruit is a magic combination that will work for everyone, but it worked for me. Try different foods and different mixes of the big three (protein, carbs and fat) and see how you feel. If you're already doing the hacker's diet, it shouldn't be too hard to track the additional information.
Good luck and keep at it. It's been about nine months since I started and I'm down to 175 pounds. I lost my workout routine (new job doesn't have a gym like the old one), but I have been able to keep my food intake under control thanks to what I learned using the Hacker's Diet.
You need to take a look at the infrastructure and see where the single points of failure are. After you have come up with a list of single points of failure, you can then analyze the cost vs. risk of each one. Here's a list of things I would look at (off the top of my head):
Access provider - Do you have more than 1? If you only have one, do they have multiple uplinks? Do you have multiple connections to your provider? If so, do they terminate into different pieces of equipment? Also, if these are data circuits (straight network connections), do they take different paths to the provider?
Networks - Is every piece of equipment dual homed? For each network segment, are there two physical devices? When you dual homed the equipment, did you plug the connections into different physical devices?
Power - Do you have redundant power connections? Are the power connections fed from different circuits? Are the circuits fed from different UPSes? Are there generators to back up the UPS(es)?
Cooling - Do you have redundant cooling systems? How long can your servers last if a single cooling system fails? What about complete loss of cooling?
After examining those things, you'll need to look at load balancing multiple servers. I personally prefer F5 for my load balancing, but they come with a hefty price tag (mid five figures). I've used Cisco, Foundry and F5 so far and I love the F5s. They're extremely extensible but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to get the basic functionality out of them. Dual methods of configuration (web and CLI) make it nice for the newbies and the seasoned professionals. It also helps that the CLI is a full Linux system, so you can write shell scripts to do all of your basic maintenance tasks.
My installation was a bit older than yours (7.0.4). The first magic bullet was sticky sessions on the non-Resonate load balancers. When I orginally set up the virtual servers, Siebel told me not to turn on sticky sessions. Over and over again they repeated that the application didn't require sticky sessions and to not use them. Performance was horrible sending me into my first huge Siebel troubleshooting session. Finally, I just turned on sticky sessions and it got better.
My second problem sounds more like yours. I think it ended up being some patch (but may have been a DLL or mysterious Siebel setting). I don't really know as I divorced myself from Siebel at that point.
Just like you, I know better than to expect a pat on the back, but I figured that someone from Siebel would have maybe apologized or taken blame at some point. For all of the Siebel ProServ people we had on site we were probably paying $2000/hr for them to be there. After weeks of comments both to my face and behind my back attacking me, my network, my troubleshooting skills and whether or not my parents were married when I was born, I would have expected someone to be a decent enough human to make ammends. They just pretended it didn't happen. That's why I quit working on Siebel the first time and I won't work on it again.
Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been on a two week long troubleshoot call for Siebel problems, and today starts the third week. 8-12 hours a day, 100's of different _sets_ of sniffer traces, and no solution. The problem is in the application, not on the network
I feel for you. I was in the same spot about 3 years ago. Does Siebel still reset all their TCP sessions? I have never seen (RST,FIN) so many times in my life. You are most likely (99.9995%) right that it's the application. When I went through my issue, after sending them multiple Gigs of traffic a day, some magic setting was found that fixed the issue. Also, no one ever apologized for personally attacking me for the network. So, when you are right in the end, don't expect a pat on the back. Your problem isn't with load balancing is it?
Look at most job postings, how many both require an advanced degree and are willing to pay enough to hire someone? Most companies aren't interested.
Or they just don't get it. I sat down with one of the VP's at my old job (as the company was starting to head down the toilet) to talk about their hiring practices. The company policy was "we pay in the 60th percentile." For every job, they used some salary survey to determine what it was worth. They literally looked at the salary range and picked a number based on the 60th percentile. Here's a summary of the conversation we had:
Me: What kind of organization are you trying to build?
VP: World Class.
Me: So, if you were going to hire someone to administer your databases (a component so critical that even a VP knew that the business did not run without them), what kind of person would you want?
VP: Someone at the top of their field.
Me: So if you had to rate them, say on a scale of 1 to 100, what are you looking for?
VP: I wouldn't even consider someone who isn't in the top five percent of candidates.
Me:So what your looking for is someone whose skills are in the 95th percentile but is willing to work for pay in the 60th percentile?
I never got a reply. For what it's worth, I wasn't an employee, I was a contractor.
The box is a sniffer with a huge array of disks. It records all traffic that you send it. I have used the product before, but not for VoIP. Here is what the Network General site says about the VoIP option for the InfiniStream:
The Voice Option is a value-added package that integrates with InfiniStream Network Management to provide additional insights into voice- and video-over-IP converged traffic. Voice-over-IP (VoIP) Experts automatically detect and help resolve key problems seen on VoIP networks--jitter, packet loss, packet-sequencing errors, and latency. These VoIP Experts and call-tracking capabilities, along with the traditional Expert system, help ensure successful VoIP network rollouts while maintaining "toll-quality" voice and high-quality data for all users.
They make a couple of versions. The last time I looked, the 1 TB version was around 25K and the 4 TB version was around 95K. I didn't buy one, but it was a fun toy to play with.
This project on source forge has native ports of many GNU utilities for windows. It includes a Z-shell. I have created many small automation projects with it and have had good results. I'm guessing you could use ZSH scripts as a manangement tool around the VBS or JS code.
If your problem is inbound TCP ports, the Tandberg Border Controller is a solution. From what I understand it is designed to sit outside the firewall. All parties "register" with the border controller by opening a TCP connection to it (i.e. an outbound connection from the point of view of the firewall admins). The border controller then does all of the call negotiation. None of the clients have to accept TCP connections. Here is a link to the border controller.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Tandberg and I have never used this product. I looked into it when researching a project. It is not cheap. Take my comments with a grain of salt and do your own research.
Hire someone to set up your infrastruce. Programmers are Not Sysadmins and Sysadmins are not programmers. They are very different jobs with overlapping but different skill sets.
This is the best advice you will find here. I do infrastructure design and operations for a living, so I get asked to "take a look" at small-company networks from friends all the time. There are always things that seem obvious to me that non-sysadmin/infrastructure people just don't do right. Someone that knows what he or she is doing will get your office setup as well as possible for the amount of money you can spend with little effort. As a developer who knows nothing about system adminsitration, networking, etc. there are things you just won't get right the first time without tons of effort(weeks at a minimum, most likely months).
At a minimum, please, please buy your cables ready made and have a professional run any structured cabling. When you grow to the point that you have to have a network infrastructure instead of just one switch, the person in charge of that will thank you. I've had the joy of working in one office where the founder ran all the cable himself in order to save money. You can actually hear a 60 Hz tone on some of the cables when you hold a toner to it.
Consider mentioning multiple servers and networks as part of the complexity. I find one thing the developers in my group overlook is how a site will behave after all the pieces move to their proper place in a production environment.
In a complex site, you may end up with something like this:
User -> Load Balancer -> Web Server -> Gateway Server -> Application Server -> Database Server
Where there may be multiple branches past the load balancer for any one request. This chaining can lead to a poor user experience, but it generally isn't seen until it's much too late. I speak from experience from a large install of a popular CRM package that had hundreds of users begging for their old systems back.
You can throw all the hardware you want at a system like the above, but it still ends up being a web-based app that has to make a lot of back end calls. No one really thought about how well a user could talk on the phone and use the system at the same time. Management loves the system because it has a lot of data on screen and gives the user more options when interacting with the customer. The users hate it because the system takes so much time to move from function to function that they can't have a decent call flow.
I've worked with the Cisco CSS, Foundry ServerIron and F5 solutions and I fell in love when I got the F5s. I haven't given the other two another chance since I switched.
But before I switched, I got demos from all three players and put them in a head-to-head contest. I would suggest doing the same. In a lab setting, we couldn't hit the devices hard enough to pick a clear winner based on performance. When I looked at administration and features, the F5 pulled to the front.
The GUI is clear and concise for those who like GUI's. The OS in the old version (4.X) was BSD, while the new version (9.X) is Linux based. You get full root access to the box, so you can write scripts in the shell language of your choice. The last time I worked with the CSS it had a proprietary scripting language; it may be different now.
The power for me as a network guy is the scripting. I can rebuild our entire site in about 30 seconds thanks to the scripts. I've also been able to move some of the administration to admins that normally wouldn't be qualified to work with a load balancer because I can give them scripts and restrict their access so that they can only run the scripts I specify.
SSL proxies are a cool feature as well. It's not documented, but there is an easy process to convert IIS certificates to apache-style certificates for use on the F5. It helps a lot when you are adding/removing servers on a regular basis.
Our site takes enough hits to keep 4 servers loaded all day long. The load average on the F5 never hits 1.0. This is with about 40 Mbps of traffic running through the F5.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I haven't written anything longhand since 1998.
<OT Rant>
I went for an interview at company whose primary business was IT services. Before I was allowed to interview with the hiring manager, I had to fill out an application, longhand. On this application I had to list my high school in three separate places. Two of those places were on the same document. After not taking the job, I told my friend that recommended me:
For an IT services organization to ask me to fill out documents longhand is ass-backwards.
I've been in the industry for 10 years and have a Master's degree. Does it really matter where I went to high school?
If it does matter where I went to high school, why do I need to fill it out THREE TIMES?
It just pisses me off to no end when I have to fill out a form only for some admin to mis-type it into a computer. If HR is really worried about Larry the retarded janitor not being able to fill out an application on the computer print a copy for him. But for God's sake, don't make me write something that's going to be typed into a computer anyway.
If you've ever read "The Hot Zone", you'll remember a chapter describing how a lab using monkeys sent one that had died under unknown conditions, in a totally unprotected container. Turned out the monkey had died from an airborne strain of Ebola. The researchers were VERY VERY lucky it wasn't a strain humans could catch, or about 90% of America would be dead by now.
One small nitpick. While humans don't become ill from Ebola Reston (that's the strain from the primate lab here in the states), eight individuals have developed antibodies to Ebola Reston. This document has a list of all the Ebola outbreaks. There are five listed for Ebola Reston, with no cases of humans becoming ill. If I recall correctly, Preston had two of the workers from the Reston facility going to the hospital with a high fever and soreness, but otherwise no effect from Ebola Reston.
Ted Stroehmann: That's right. That's -- that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?
Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
Ted Stroehmann: That -- good point.
Hitchhiker: 7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 doors. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.
There's definitely a place for Community Colleges in science and engineering. You just need a program designed around it. Maybe your state has something similar....
Truly words of wisdom. I met some professors in the UC public school system that setup a program to do just this. The program was so successful that they presented its design at a conference I attended.
Here's some advice if you don't have such a program available.
Find out the degree requirements for the program you intend to transfer into. Just because there aren't any CS courses that will transfer doesn't mean that you can't get your degree requirements out of the way. Completing all your math requirements in a CC setting will probably be one of the biggest helps you can get. I finished Cal 1-4 at the local college while in high school, but still had to take linear algebra and DiffEQs once I went off to college. Neither class was very hard, but the learning environment made them more difficult than to which I was accustomed.
Save some electives. I highly recommend getting any transferable requirements out of the way, but one mistake I made was getting my electives out of the way. I had taken 108 quarter hours of college classes by the time I graduated high school. When I got to "college" I basically had nothing but major classes left to take. It is a huge transition from taking a mix of classes (1 hard science, 1 soft science, 1 liberal arts) to taking nothing but classes in your major.
Plan out your major requirements. If you are thinking far enough ahead to consider getting a BS degree, you should probably consider what courses you'll have to complete after you transfer. Check for dependencies, pre-requisites, scheduling and any other road blocks. Someone in the CS department of the school to which you transfer should be able to help, but don't plan on it. I made a matrix of all the courses I needed to complete and it was very helpful.
He's critical of the SANS course as too bit-addled. I can see what he means - you do spend 2 days (of 6) on tcpdump, vs. just one on Snort per se, but that gives you a great background to use tons of other tools. Once you have that, the other tools are easy.
I took the IDIC course a while back (i.e. my analyst number is less than 100) and noticed the same thing. The layout was a bit different then, but I caught myself thinking "why are we spending a day and a half reviewing TCP/IP?" After listening to the questions that some people asked, I realized that no matter how much you warn them, people just aren't prepared for the class. Having realized this themselves, the instructors adjusted the curriculum so they can drag as many people through to some level of competency.
I did enjoy my SANS training and I wish I could find another employer that would pay for it. But if you are the kind of student that already knows the first three days of material, you may want to stay away from the track-based courses and do a mix-and-match if possible. Finally, taking a SANS course should be the beginning of your studies in an area, not the end. I see the training as a good broad base in a particular area. You must become an expert on your own.
Slashdot Mirror
I almost quit a job because of this. I wrote a screen-scraper application that interacted with a TN3270 session to pull information out of an archaic database, process the information and then make new entries in the database. I was staring at the TN3270 session so many hours a day that I would dream about the screens every night. Every time I closed my eyes I saw a black background with purple and green lettering and lines. But, I always knew exactly what my application needed to do. I had already watched it run the yet undeveloped code in my head for a couple of hours the night before.
If you haven't seen this project, check out http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/. These tools end up on every windows machine I use. Make sure to grab the updates. Especially helpful on windows are the pclip and gclip utilities. Copy any text to the windows clipboard and the pclip utility will output the clipboard contents to STDOUT while glcip will take STDIN and put it into the clipboard. It's very useful.
you need protection from backhoe fade, you have to do the interagency engineering for separate feeds on separate systems from separate directions. will at least triple your cost to bring it up.
I worked with this one vendor that went on and on about having dual paths that went out separate ends of the buildings to separate POPs and that a fiber cut would never be a problem for them. So one afternoon their service quits working and I go look. Their routers were off the map. So I call the tech and ask what happened. Turns out that when they ran the fiber out of the building they did in fact run it out of opposite ends of the building. The problem was that one of those paths went half-way around the building and ended up in the same trench as the other run. The cut was after the "redundant" paths came back together.
Even with my harsh comments, I'm not disrespecting your show. I have it setup to record on my DVR every week. I mostly enjoy the shows but occasionally your lack of scientific method is maddening. I realize you are probably cutting a lot out for the sake of TV, but could you at least point out that there are some possibilities you aren't testing?
I still don't get why everyone in the country makes fun of the way southerners speak when there are so many screwed up dialects in this country. When you look at Massachusetts, New York, Wisconsin, Louisiana (in the south, but a different accent near New Orleans) how come the southern drawl is the only one that is worthy of ridicule? And on the point of intelligence, consider this situation:
If I were to ask, "Why can't the black man from Georgia read?" and you were to say, "I don't know, why?" examine your reaction the following explanations. If I reply "duh, I told you he was from Georgia" everyone thinks it's funny and laughs. If I reply "duh, I told you he was black" I am a horrible racist and should be shunned.
Why is making fun of someone for their place of birth any different from making fun of someone for their race? Neither can be controlled by that person.
Did you go to GHP in Georgia? I was there in 94.
I think that most positions described as network administrators are not worthy of special privacy treatment. However, one scenario in which a network admin might need privacy would be IT related firings (e.g. proof of improper browsing, email abuse). If your network admin is constantly having to go through URL logs and email archives for HR or legal purposes, he or she probably needs to work in private. Any conversations about those types of activities probably need to be in private as well.
That's about the only "network admin" function that needs privacy that can't be countered by the suggestions in this thread. Privacy filters on screens work during the research, but when you need to show the evidence to others (HR, management, legal) it helps to be in an area where there is privacy. If one is the network administrator in a really screwed up place where firings like this happen two to three times a month, a private space helps matters greatly. Not that I'd know. Or did that for about six months before I got sick of getting people fired and left for a different position.
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a network/security person and I have had an office, a cube and a desk (in an open floor plan). Most of my tasks don't require the privacy of an office, but there are some things (like the above) that need to be done in private. Sometimes the job doesn't require those tasks very often, sometimes the job does. Office needs should be determined accordingly.
I'm not saying that yogurt and fruit is a magic combination that will work for everyone, but it worked for me. Try different foods and different mixes of the big three (protein, carbs and fat) and see how you feel. If you're already doing the hacker's diet, it shouldn't be too hard to track the additional information.
Good luck and keep at it. It's been about nine months since I started and I'm down to 175 pounds. I lost my workout routine (new job doesn't have a gym like the old one), but I have been able to keep my food intake under control thanks to what I learned using the Hacker's Diet.
After examining those things, you'll need to look at load balancing multiple servers. I personally prefer F5 for my load balancing, but they come with a hefty price tag (mid five figures). I've used Cisco, Foundry and F5 so far and I love the F5s. They're extremely extensible but you don't have to be a rocket scientist to get the basic functionality out of them. Dual methods of configuration (web and CLI) make it nice for the newbies and the seasoned professionals. It also helps that the CLI is a full Linux system, so you can write shell scripts to do all of your basic maintenance tasks.
If you have more questions, please reply.
My second problem sounds more like yours. I think it ended up being some patch (but may have been a DLL or mysterious Siebel setting). I don't really know as I divorced myself from Siebel at that point.
Just like you, I know better than to expect a pat on the back, but I figured that someone from Siebel would have maybe apologized or taken blame at some point. For all of the Siebel ProServ people we had on site we were probably paying $2000/hr for them to be there. After weeks of comments both to my face and behind my back attacking me, my network, my troubleshooting skills and whether or not my parents were married when I was born, I would have expected someone to be a decent enough human to make ammends. They just pretended it didn't happen. That's why I quit working on Siebel the first time and I won't work on it again.
I feel for you. I was in the same spot about 3 years ago. Does Siebel still reset all their TCP sessions? I have never seen (RST,FIN) so many times in my life. You are most likely (99.9995%) right that it's the application. When I went through my issue, after sending them multiple Gigs of traffic a day, some magic setting was found that fixed the issue. Also, no one ever apologized for personally attacking me for the network. So, when you are right in the end, don't expect a pat on the back. Your problem isn't with load balancing is it?
Or they just don't get it. I sat down with one of the VP's at my old job (as the company was starting to head down the toilet) to talk about their hiring practices. The company policy was "we pay in the 60th percentile." For every job, they used some salary survey to determine what it was worth. They literally looked at the salary range and picked a number based on the 60th percentile. Here's a summary of the conversation we had:
Me: What kind of organization are you trying to build?
VP: World Class.
Me: So, if you were going to hire someone to administer your databases (a component so critical that even a VP knew that the business did not run without them), what kind of person would you want?
VP: Someone at the top of their field.
Me: So if you had to rate them, say on a scale of 1 to 100, what are you looking for?
VP: I wouldn't even consider someone who isn't in the top five percent of candidates.
Me:So what your looking for is someone whose skills are in the 95th percentile but is willing to work for pay in the 60th percentile?
I never got a reply. For what it's worth, I wasn't an employee, I was a contractor.
The Voice Option is a value-added package that integrates with InfiniStream Network Management to provide additional insights into voice- and video-over-IP converged traffic. Voice-over-IP (VoIP) Experts automatically detect and help resolve key problems seen on VoIP networks--jitter, packet loss, packet-sequencing errors, and latency. These VoIP Experts and call-tracking capabilities, along with the traditional Expert system, help ensure successful VoIP network rollouts while maintaining "toll-quality" voice and high-quality data for all users.
The product URL is here
They make a couple of versions. The last time I looked, the 1 TB version was around 25K and the 4 TB version was around 95K. I didn't buy one, but it was a fun toy to play with.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Tandberg and I have never used this product. I looked into it when researching a project. It is not cheap. Take my comments with a grain of salt and do your own research.
This is the best advice you will find here. I do infrastructure design and operations for a living, so I get asked to "take a look" at small-company networks from friends all the time. There are always things that seem obvious to me that non-sysadmin/infrastructure people just don't do right. Someone that knows what he or she is doing will get your office setup as well as possible for the amount of money you can spend with little effort. As a developer who knows nothing about system adminsitration, networking, etc. there are things you just won't get right the first time without tons of effort(weeks at a minimum, most likely months).
At a minimum, please, please buy your cables ready made and have a professional run any structured cabling. When you grow to the point that you have to have a network infrastructure instead of just one switch, the person in charge of that will thank you. I've had the joy of working in one office where the founder ran all the cable himself in order to save money. You can actually hear a 60 Hz tone on some of the cables when you hold a toner to it.
In a complex site, you may end up with something like this:
User -> Load Balancer -> Web Server -> Gateway Server -> Application Server -> Database Server
Where there may be multiple branches past the load balancer for any one request. This chaining can lead to a poor user experience, but it generally isn't seen until it's much too late. I speak from experience from a large install of a popular CRM package that had hundreds of users begging for their old systems back.
You can throw all the hardware you want at a system like the above, but it still ends up being a web-based app that has to make a lot of back end calls. No one really thought about how well a user could talk on the phone and use the system at the same time. Management loves the system because it has a lot of data on screen and gives the user more options when interacting with the customer. The users hate it because the system takes so much time to move from function to function that they can't have a decent call flow.
LiquidCoooled is currently in the middle of the Kessel run. You'll have to wait at least twelve.
But before I switched, I got demos from all three players and put them in a head-to-head contest. I would suggest doing the same. In a lab setting, we couldn't hit the devices hard enough to pick a clear winner based on performance. When I looked at administration and features, the F5 pulled to the front.
The GUI is clear and concise for those who like GUI's. The OS in the old version (4.X) was BSD, while the new version (9.X) is Linux based. You get full root access to the box, so you can write scripts in the shell language of your choice. The last time I worked with the CSS it had a proprietary scripting language; it may be different now.
The power for me as a network guy is the scripting. I can rebuild our entire site in about 30 seconds thanks to the scripts. I've also been able to move some of the administration to admins that normally wouldn't be qualified to work with a load balancer because I can give them scripts and restrict their access so that they can only run the scripts I specify.
SSL proxies are a cool feature as well. It's not documented, but there is an easy process to convert IIS certificates to apache-style certificates for use on the F5. It helps a lot when you are adding/removing servers on a regular basis.
Our site takes enough hits to keep 4 servers loaded all day long. The load average on the F5 never hits 1.0. This is with about 40 Mbps of traffic running through the F5.
I went for an interview at company whose primary business was IT services. Before I was allowed to interview with the hiring manager, I had to fill out an application, longhand. On this application I had to list my high school in three separate places. Two of those places were on the same document. After not taking the job, I told my friend that recommended me:
It just pisses me off to no end when I have to fill out a form only for some admin to mis-type it into a computer. If HR is really worried about Larry the retarded janitor not being able to fill out an application on the computer print a copy for him. But for God's sake, don't make me write something that's going to be typed into a computer anyway.
One small nitpick. While humans don't become ill from Ebola Reston (that's the strain from the primate lab here in the states), eight individuals have developed antibodies to Ebola Reston. This document has a list of all the Ebola outbreaks. There are five listed for Ebola Reston, with no cases of humans becoming ill. If I recall correctly, Preston had two of the workers from the Reston facility going to the hospital with a high fever and soreness, but otherwise no effect from Ebola Reston.
Oh, and if you think "The Hot Zone" is a chilling tale, read Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It by Ken Alibek. I would also recommend "The Demon in the Freezer" by Preston.
Ted Stroehmann: That's right. That's -- that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?
Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
Ted Stroehmann: That -- good point.
Hitchhiker: 7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 doors. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.
Ted Stroehmann: Why?
Hitchhiker: 'Cause you're fuckin' fired!
Truly words of wisdom. I met some professors in the UC public school system that setup a program to do just this. The program was so successful that they presented its design at a conference I attended.
Here's some advice if you don't have such a program available.
All I can add is good luck.
I took the IDIC course a while back (i.e. my analyst number is less than 100) and noticed the same thing. The layout was a bit different then, but I caught myself thinking "why are we spending a day and a half reviewing TCP/IP?" After listening to the questions that some people asked, I realized that no matter how much you warn them, people just aren't prepared for the class. Having realized this themselves, the instructors adjusted the curriculum so they can drag as many people through to some level of competency.
I did enjoy my SANS training and I wish I could find another employer that would pay for it. But if you are the kind of student that already knows the first three days of material, you may want to stay away from the track-based courses and do a mix-and-match if possible. Finally, taking a SANS course should be the beginning of your studies in an area, not the end. I see the training as a good broad base in a particular area. You must become an expert on your own.
They say money can't buy happiness and it's true. Money can't buy happiness. But it sure can rent it for an hour or two.