The Telepresence myth
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Mon, 02/23/09 - 11:11pm.I picked up this Dilbert from the Cisco CTO's twitter feed. It is a humorous take on video conferencing which Cisco has renamed Telepresence. Video conferencing failed to become a saturation technology and was limited to a niche market. Telepresence will be no different as it is video conferencing in a different and more expensive guise and it is a myth to expect it to replace the jet plane. Read more
Cisco Live! Africa podcast with Willie Oosthuysen
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Sun, 12/07/08 - 5:53am.Busting IT Myths - Redibusters Supersized (Series #1)
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Sat, 11/22/08 - 12:15am.In the age of bulk convenience and instant gratification here is the first supersized series of Redibusters. The Redibuster methodology is a way to gauge opinion about common IT myths.
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The Redibuster wrap
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Wed, 10/29/08 - 10:41am.The Redibuster wrap (and a bollocking myth)
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Wed, 10/15/08 - 12:20am.The Redibusters series started as an experiment to show that although IT was technical, it is overwhelmed with subjectivity. We have reached a dozen Redibusters and still going strong...
Please leave comments on the blog if you have an IT myth that needs to be confirmed or busted. (Nothing is sacred!) Read more
Blogs that rock - October 2008
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Tue, 10/14/08 - 12:25am.Assisted by my trusty clan of Meerkats, who use unscientific measures like the attitude of the cobras and the presence of edible bugs, here is the
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Busting IT myths
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Thu, 10/09/08 - 12:13pm.Over at the Thinking problem management! blog, a new series of polls has been started, which focuses on IT myths.
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Seeking to eliminate the "techie curse"
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Sat, 09/27/08 - 10:28am.I wrote about the "techie curse" some time ago. Techies don't create documentation and most environments are a SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) desert. In every job in which I have started, no-one has ever given me a SOP of the services being provided. I would have to "sink or swim." Most techie managers who were treated in this manner, reinforce the behaviour by treating their subordinates in a similar manner. Imagine if a new hire was given a SOP over the service they are responsible for delivering on day one of their tenure. Alas, most techies spend the first three weeks of their job being unproductive.
I have been meaning to update the orginal SOP template ever since it became a reference in Wikipedia's entry for callcentres. Here is the updated SOP template!
The Internet in Mozambique
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Fri, 09/26/08 - 5:12pm.Is there a relationship between vulnerabilities and major incidents?
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Fri, 09/26/08 - 12:00pm.The JSE still hasn't said what in the Cisco IOS crashed the stock exchange. One unsubstantiated report was that it was a change to a firewall rule. However, I saw this released by Cisco:
"Multiple Multicast Vulnerabilities in Cisco IOS Software - Two crafted Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) packet vulnerabilities exist in Cisco IOS software that may lead to a denial of service (DoS) condition. Cisco has released free software updates that address these vulnerabilities. Workarounds that mitigate these vulnerabilities are available. " It made me wonder if the crash was related to a vulnerability. We still don't know!
In the bigger scheme I always wonder what major incidents have resulted from these vulnerabilities. If the infrastructure were aircraft and not routers we would know. Why aren't these incidents and vulnerabilities subjected to similar rules to those that govern the FAA? Has a networking device even been a contributing cause to a human fatality?
The Leaky VLANs myth?
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Fri, 08/08/08 - 12:32pm.I have often encountered the myth that VLANs are insecure and should not be used. People who state this proceed to buy a separate switch for each LAN that they deploy. Great commission for the salesman, but bad for the business paying the premium for the extra tin!
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Obituary: The Cow and lamb are dead
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Wed, 07/16/08 - 1:16am.Over at Denver, this week, the IEEE finally closed the book on 802.5, a.k.a. token-ring. The standards have been withdrawn. Token-ring is well and truly dead.
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Please hold your call is being transferred to a phreak...(the insecurity of voice)
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Sat, 07/05/08 - 9:45am.Information security largely focuses on data communications, and voice is often ignored. Every successful hack or extortion has a phone involved somewhere in the process, but in most cases the phone is a silent and overlooked component in the forensics. Read more
An Andabatae Phone
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Wed, 04/30/08 - 11:45am.The Nokia N82 does more than being just a phone. It is better than the iPhone or any competitive device. This is a mobile phone that does a great job for the ordinary person but does a greater job for the unsighted. The phone was developed with the NFB and Kurzweil Technologies.
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A proud Archie Bunker!
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Wed, 04/16/08 - 1:17am.I felt proud about being backward and simple, after reading an article in Network World. As stated by Dennis Drogseth in CMDB in the NOC? Is it time yet?, I belong to a collective group called the Archie Bunkers. ('hold outs for a past era when things were presumably “simpler."') I join that great luminary, Albert Einstein, who said: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.""
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Auralization - short wave radio for network management
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Sat, 04/05/08 - 1:28am.I was reading Terry’s blog where he posted about auralization which reminded me about my own experiments in using voice for monitoring a network.
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Expanded Incident Bike
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Fri, 03/14/08 - 2:11pm.The most important step in the major incident process is what I call the Harrison step with relates to the timelines. Read more
Major incident - Florida blackouts
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Wed, 02/27/08 - 3:57am.This morning I saw on Reuters (via Moneyweb) a major incident of the tsunami class had occurred.
I am certain that there are numerous triggered and cascaded incidents that have happened. Any first-hand accounts or stories?
When is an incident a tsunami, and when does it only rattle the crockery?
Submitted by ronaldxbartels on Tue, 02/26/08 - 1:24pm.When an earthquake occurs we all know it's severity because its size is reported using the Richter scale. However, when an Information Technology major incident occurs, there is no scale and the size of the incident is subjective. Was the Internet outage in the Middle East really big? Now wouldn't it be a good idea if a scale existed that measured the major incidents and classified them appropriately. We could then state that this one was a tsunami while another one might only have rattled the crockery.
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- About Andabatae
- Ronald is an IT firefighter who enjoys the thrill of solving and analyzing problems. He was painted into a corner to become an IT firefighter because as a network engineer he quickly learned that everyone blamed the network, when there was a problem. He now works in the field of infrastructure architecture and service management.
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