Hey, you guys are doing great work. I saw your channel for the first time today, and I love it.

My 49 year old life has been a long mental health struggle, including undiagnosed ADHD, and have had those moments with similar thoughts as the one you Andy. Thank you for sharing. I only discovered the podcast in September this last year and happy you decided to keep it going. I'm only 3 weeks into my IT career, having previously worked and studied in social care for the past 10 years and many other jobs prior to that, and I can genuinely say that for the first time in my life I found the job I wish I had done all along.

Mac is UNIX under the hood. Not Linux. Same family, completely different kernel. But unlike Windows, they are compatible (Windows isn’t really compatible with anything, they reinvented the wheel and homebrewed their own shit).

Please keep this show going, Andy! It moved me when you were speaking about wanting to just end things. A few times, I've felt like a stain on society, someone who doesn't deserve to exist. For a very long time, I struggled to find my place in the world. Once I got into IT, I truly feel that I found my calling. It's been a struggle finding time to push forward with my CCNA studies, but I've been stuck in a hole for a long time, and want out. I know there's better things for me, I just have to get over that hill (CCNA). So keep on keepin' on, my brother. You are my spirit animal.

I just want to say I really appreciate you keeping the show going. Your insights and dedication to sharing knowledge in network engineering have been invaluable to me as an aspiring network engineer. It’s not easy to continue solo, but you’re doing great. Keep pushing forward-your work is making a difference! And thanks for sharing the personal harsh story!

Love the podcast!

This podcast has been helpful for me, introducing me to the discord, and probably most importantly it's been a good place of guidance on dealing with some of the stresses and insecurities of this job. I'm glad it's still around.

Great talk guys !

ECMP alone doesn't help completely. Introducing some kind of dynamic load balancing (DLB) where port quality is checked before adding the flow in the network would increase the performance depending on the vendor/os used.

Thanks for this video. Love hearing from the author himself.

If you guys weren’t such big, fat bags of water, we’d have much better signals in this office 😂😂😂😂 great segment, fellas! 🛜

This is so good. My path is almost identical to Andy. Did the cable guy thing for year, knew it all backwards and forwards, started at a NOCC eand ended in network engineering.

I worked in a data center for 10 years, cant tell you how many times I was under that raised floor...lol

It’s a tunnel based ARP table. Nothing complex

We're doing this at my work, both in catalyst for our campus and on nexus for our datacenter. No ACI, no DNA, all by hand and its not a big deal. We back that up by using ISE to profile the mac and deliver the VLAN tag based on that mac profile. Users expect a network to be like the power sockets in their home. In their home they can take one lamp and move it across the house and plug it in and it work just like it did in the old location. Now the network can work like that also.

Walk through that? Like your hair walked through your head and ended up on your back? 🤢

The intro needs to go methinks 😅

Listening during PTO, so paying attention to the full episode :)

Great podcast, thank you.

Sorry but Lexie so so depressing and boring to listen to.

really enjoyed this one. Since he does not have any networking certifications how did he learn networking? Just from shadowing the IT department? He did mentiond videos , was there anything specific he used?

Hi, can you please share the blog post mentioned in the video?

✍️

I recently got my CCNP Enterprise and I’m looking to get started in network administration. I appreciate these kinds of podcasts because I get to hear what professionals are thinking and hear their language/terminology. Good show

I think we're a LONG way from AI flying planes. Hell, most airlines are still controlling their flight systems using floppy disks.

Professor Calcutti was my professor for one of my SysAdmin classes at Florida State. Man is a stud!

I love these ! I am a 24 year old network engineer contracted with Microsoft. Not many people understand my job, especially people my age

You know you've got a serious lab when it has a SCIF 🥰

Not any more. LLNL's El Capitan is now the leading supercomputer.

When Kevin said "You sold me ... m sold ..." ... I felt it because I was too after that speech !!!

..."the types of problems" they are targeted to solve is the real answer. The problem dictates the architecture. It's still built on geometries and silicon, "Same - Same" but targeted differently. Tools for science not tools for enterprise etc.

Cool

The is way better because before it was very old and stagnant feeling

💯

Kind of agree with some of the information here about the speed of technological advancement. And the concept that your education/knowledge *SHOULD* be additive. I started in the mainframe world, went to the unix world, then then the networking world, then network security world which I've been in that for the last 25 years. But being in an outsourcing environment the other skills were still in use weekly if not daily. That being said I've seen over the decades the continual decline of the base knowledge levels, and willingness to learn the historical basis (i.e. how we got to where we are) of newer employees. This kind of dovetails with the conversation of the 'push button' or similar automation tools where people are not 'needing' to know the how, why, what in the daily jobs (which is NOT new, this also happened 40 years ago with mainframe programing for example). I call this the George Jetson syndrome (i.e. pushing the button from the cartoon) but has zero knowledge of what to do when things go wrong. This has caused more issues than I can count and usually comes to my desk when we acquire a new client. I.e. have to 'clean up' years/decades of thoughtless processes or lack of understanding. This is, unfortunately, 'unpaid' work in that the client does not really /pay/ to clean this up (they just have their environment degrade to the point where it's near collapse and then outsource it). But when we take over an environment unless it's cleaned up the FTE count to run/maintain said environment would be a loss leader. The problem is that even in outsourcing the same mindset applies and affects teams there the same way. The same eroding of talent to replace people with the 'lowest cost' option (i.e. usually going toward countries where wages are suppressed like India, Poland, etc) and management only really looks at the cost of the body not the competency of the work. In regards to network security specifically, I've found that generally people coming to it from a unix or programing (traditional like C/c++, fortran, perl/python, etc) generally have a better time in understanding the complexities. I.e. Yes, network skills are *VERY* useful and yes, you need to know how to analyze packet captures and understand at least the major network & routing protocols (IP, ICMP, TCP, UDP, BGP, OSPF, IS-IS, etc). But that normally applies to network security DESIGN not operational threat analysis and mitigation which goes more towards application and user behavior. So it's more like you allow say SSH through a firewall. Ok, well that's a tunneling protocol, what can be tunneled through that? How can you determine if it's bulk data or interactive? How to limit what channel type it is and the flow of information? Or if you have X access to a system, how can that access be subverted to do something unwanted and how to prevent that? Usually it's a mindset (in the security space at least) that needs to be inculcated. I try to send people to the PoC||GTFO or similar. It does not need to be about networking or security per se but the mindset of 'how can I use X in a way not anticipated' and then you have to then figure out a way to mitigate that potential exposure.

The military network engineers arent going anywhere lol

I’m also salty. Cable guys were considered essential during the pandemic but didn’t get the essential pay rate. SMH 🤦🏾‍♂️. There are people that been here when it all started and I decided this is not how I’m going to end my career. To Cisco, I’m on my way.

Thankyou for uploading this video, His books are very useful to my entire network journey, fulfilled my knowledge . Greetings from India

What happened to packetlife site? Is it gone forever or moved to a new site?

Nice to have you here Dan

Damn, you guys are amazing. Both of you. It's like both of you are inside my head. As a topic comes up, you touch on all the things I notice about a particular role, who it's more geared toward, challenges in our industry, challenges in particular roles and why you think these challenges exist, etc. Love listening to you guys.

Really enjoyed this episode. Thanks gents!

Thanks for sharing this video, very informative!

OT = Outside Technology good one

Beowulf Cluster of Doom!

But can it run Minecraft? 😂

1,2 ❤😂

Epic

Enjoyed it!

Weird. But I somehow never considered that Wendell Odom was an actual person with a voice, personality, etc. I've read so much of his work and subconsciously thought he was some sort of AI chatbot. Really appreciated this episode.