Category: Learning

In Defense of MonoTech

I’m typing this on a device called an AlphaSmart.  It’s a very basic word processor – five lines of text, 47 letters wide.  That’s all this thing does, process words.  I carry the newest phone, have a smart watch, my house is smarter than me, and I upgrade my computers way too often.  I must have the latest HD shininess. This thing, in contrast, looks just as low tech as it is: a keyboard and an LCD screen.  Why would a technophile such as myself use an antiquated single purpose device you ask?  Simple, it keeps me focussed.

Here’s the thing.  If I’m on my computer I tend to have 5-7 browser tabs open, my Outlook is open usually, MightyText, Twitter, and at least 4 terminal windows.  I want to be a monotasker but sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.  I’m easily distracted, so I try to focus on the thing I’m mainly doing.  My line of work isn’t conducive to this work style, but I try.  I don’t text when I’m talking to people, I don’t email during customer meetings, and I will politely ask to find a stopping point in whatever I’m working on if you walk up and need my attention.  Facilitating connectedness my entire career has caused some pretty bad habits though, and this thing is a nice break.  I can get the words out of my head, while my head is quiet, and edit it later.

When I’m just getting thoughts on paper, having a device that can only get thoughts on paper (or rather a calculator looking screen) is perfect.  It lasts a year on 3 AA batteries and it stores a few hundred pages of text that I can then transfer to my computer by connecting a USB cable- it emulates a keyboard, then it “types” everything into Word.  Quaint, right? It doesn’t chime when I get an email, I can’t decide to check Twitter, play Trivia Crack, or Google whether Tecumseh fought on the American or British side of the War of 1812.  I can only write.

I’ve said before that I want everything in my bag to do two things.  Is the fact that it keeps me focussed and allows me to process words two things, or is that cheating?  Probably the latter, but I’ll take the trade-off.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve to got to see what emails, texts, IMs, and Tweets I have been ruthlessly ignoring for this 15 whole minutes of monotasking goodness.

WLAN Pi Battery Testing

Man, I love this little guy.  I have mentioned it before, I will do it again…and again….and again.  It is so incredibly easy to drop on a network, see the IP pop up on the OLED and start iPerf3 to check network speeds, get speeds from ePerf in your  Ekahau site survey,  use a graphical speed test, use HORST to grab packets, launch Kismet to see the WLANs around, have an endpoint for WiFi Explorer Pro, or add anything else a Raspberry Pi can run to customize it.  I’ll follow up with the junk I have added to mine at a later date.

One shortcoming of the current crop of Single Board Computers, including the one used in the WLAN Pi, is the lack of real PoE.  Some can use the phony bologna “passive PoE”  a certain prosumer WiFi vendor uses, but who has time for such nonsense?   You end up having to either use a USB PoE splitter or add a hat to the device.  Bummer.  The nice thing is that they draw very little power.  One great way to pop one up quickly is to just use a USB battery pack.  Rather than dealing with the splitters or finding wall power, I’ve found the battery pack to be a quick and easy solution.  I carry one anyway, and my bag is pretty full, so why not use it?  I like everything possible in my backpack to have at least two uses.  I don’t have any other reason to carry a USB PoE splitter.

I have amassed many of these battery packs over the years as charging technologies have changed.  I harbor a mild obsession with using the fastest possible charging technology for my current phone.  Most recently that is the Pixel 2 XL, which uses USB Power Delivery as does my Macbook.  The battery packs I used are specifically because I am most likely to have one of them in my bag (I also obsessively re-organize my bag so it can change depending on the day).  I hope to test with some others if I can pull them from my son’s hands.

First the setup – I used a WLAN Pi running  WLAN Pi v1.3 (Released 06-03-2018).  I had the Comfast CF-912AC in it, plugged into one of my Aruba switches.  I booted it and immediately started Kismet to make sure the WLAN adapter was being used.  I then started a ping from one of my servers with a timestamp (used this on Windows) and let it sit and cook.

The first battery I tested was my light and quick one.  It’s an Auckley (not to be confused with Auckey) 10,000 mAh pack that is actually pretty slim.  Now that I have a phone with a decent battery I carry it with me most of the time.  It’s just a little oomph if I am in a single meeting and need to make sure I have enough juice.  It is USB-PD and works fairly well for a generic. It was one of the only PD packs on the market for quite a while, so I went with the generic.  Most that do PD are gigantuon (like the second one I tested).

So, the Auckley actual gave me 14 hours 22 minutes of use!  If you need to be running this thing for THAT long straight, you’ve got big issues.  REALLY impressive.  These things sip power through a Capri Sun straw.

The second battery was my big daddy (he loves it when you call him Big Papa).  The RavPower 26,800 mAh is a BEAST.  This is the one I carry on planes or when I am going to be in meetings all day.  As one would expect, it lasted an amazingly long time.  I got 32 hours and 13 minutes out of it, using the same testing!

Mathing out the draw vs the capacity of the battery is one thing.  As you can see testing with all the variables is quite another.  I hope this helps give a feel for how long you can run these amazing little devices on the battery pack you probably already have with you!

Why I Review Customer’s Site Surveys With Them

Jealousy is an ugly trait

I don’t do site surveys anymore. My back thanks me for it. My airline status doesn’t.  As a manufacturer SE though, I see them every day. Why?  I ask for them!  I don’t step and click and click and step anymore.  Been there, done that (do people still say that?).  It’s just not part of my job anymore.  That said, I miss the hell out of them and try to see as many as possible.

Best in the biz

My employer’s partner community is top notch.  Best of the best.  They have engineers I would hire in a New York minute if I was an IT Director again.  They have the tools (I’m coveting your Ekahau SideKick….you know who you are).  They have the services teams.  They have the person-hours to justifiably bill a customer to do a thorough survey.  In my patch especially, I have some absolutely rock solid partner engineers to work with.  I trust that they are going to be extremely high-quality and thorough surveys.

My customers are all enterprise level WiFi commandos.  They have teams that breathe wireless, drink L2, and see radio waves.  They can tell when a warp core is misaligned by the hum of the nacelles.  They have the certs, the experience, and the feel for their environment to be able to provide enterprise service levels.

you get it, they rock, SO why do I review surveys?

Surveying is a skill and muscle that you need to work in order to keep strong.  Building and walking through reports is as well.  It’s a constantly changing science and a subjective art.  If you gave three WiFi surveyors a CAD, you could get seven designs.  There is not (as yet) an industry standard survey methodology.  There are best practices, there are individual methodologies and there are amazing training opportunities from CWNP, the survey software creators, and even the manufacturers.  There is no A-Z survey standard that a governing body prescribes though.  So the variety is incredible. Seeing as many surveys as possible, done by as many people as possible, just keeps filling my bag of tricks with more ideas.  I didn’t walk and click, but I get to see those walks and clicks.

it’s all about the community

Those are the selfish reasons.  Now let’s talk about the business reasons and how the selfish reasons help everyone.

If you take all of the above and you whip it together you get cream of the crop surveys.  I get a fantastic view into the minds of my betters.  I then get to add that cream to my customer’s and partner’s coffee.  With such a wide view, I get to share all those lessons and philosophies and be a clearinghouse of data.  I get to say “you know my buddy at XYZ partner found that there is a new lead lined sheetrock product on the market that eats signal” or “this is great, but my customer at the Widget Factory found that those same handhelds have crap antennas and super low power, so we want to scrunch the APs in a bit tighter than we  may have thought”.

So, we sit down and go through them together.  The customer, the partner, and me.  In the end, it helps the products I hawk work better.  It helps my customers achieve their business objectives.  It helps me hone skills.  Most importantly though, it allows me to spread knowledge that may not otherwise have a conduit, helping to better everyone’s designs.

Why I Buy Tools Out Of Pocket

Mechanics buy their own tools, plumbers do too, a lot of trades do. Most of us in technology are given a fair set of tools to do the job not long after signing the offer letter, and most of us take it for granted.

My employer is gracious enough to provide the current tech we have on offer.  They supply a lab server.  They provide a pretty beefy and regularly updated laptop.  I’ve got APs out the wazoo.  They even supply a car and the occasional polo shirt.  They provide the basics for me to get my job done.  They provide what I honestly think is a fair toolbox.  Could it be updated more often?  Sure, I’m a gearhound, who doesn’t want new and shiny stuff?

What they don’t provide is the incredible selection of fun wireless hardware that can help me to better understand my craft and ply my trade.  I didn’t get issued a WiFi Pineapple, but I wanted to see how well its Captive Portal could pass for an Aruba or Cisco one.  I wanted to be able to show my customers and to be able to talk about the threats these cute little devices can pose.  I wasn’t shipped a Hacker Arsenal WiMonitor and Winx and but I wanted to show my customers an inexpensive tool that can get some packets quick in a hurry.  I didn’t receive a WLAN Pi when it came out, but I wanted to be able to demonstrate to my customers that having a quick a solution for ePerf/iPerf, grabbing packets, and pulling speed tests is important and doesn’t have to mean buying expensive tools, requisitioning a MacBook or standing up a VM.

I got a desktop machine to use as a server when I started five years ago.  I got a Shuttle a few years later.  I wanted to be able to run multiple versions of all of our software, plus sundry stuff a customer may have in their environment.  Those boxes were out of gas as more and more of my company’s solutions are virtualized.  So I dug around on Craigslist and found a couple DL360s.  I wanted to be able to bounce gear out in the lab in my shop from my office in the house, so I went on eBay and picked up some IP PDUs.  I lock myself out, so I got an AirConsole.

Can I do my job without the kit above?  Yes.  Can I do it more easily with the above?  Hells yes.  When I mentor folks coming up in the trade I tell them that I’m willing to empower them, but that I don’t invest without return.  They have to put as much time into themselves as I do – and as much as I put into myself when my mentors helped me.  I expect them to fill their toolbox, and I expect to help them fill it.

So what’s the meat of this philosophical sandwich?  Easy: How can I expect someone to invest in me if I don’t invest in myself?

Also, I need the tax write-offs.

 

Why I’m Finally Taking A Coding Class

Like most people my age, I’m 43. Unlike most people my age in my profession, I’ve never taken an actual programming class. Writing Color Basic programs on my TRS-80 is what got me into my beloved trade. Tirelessly copying programs line by line from Hot Coco magazine and tweaking them while working my way through the books that came with the computer until I could write my own programs was all I could think of as a lad. When Batman wasn’t on. I can hack together a little python, munge some perl, and used to write the hell out of DOS scripts, but it’s all self taught, as opposed to hundreds of hours of classes I’ve taken for networking, servers, wireless and security.

To be honest, I loathe it now.  I don’t know the precise moment when I lost the taste. Probably the first time I heard the siren song of a modem squeal. I’ve spent a career avoiding programming and dba work.  Software engineering takes a such a focused linear mindset.  Don’t get me wrong, you do have to be methodical as a bit jockey, you have to have processes, and I do know some amazing linear thinking network folk, but that linearity is at a whole different level for programming. I admire it as a quality. That’s not me though. I am thinking about every component of a system all at once. It fits my scatter brain.  I’ll be honest as well that I just find it tedious. I’m methodical and all about process and procedure, I’m a single tasker, but my mind is working on flipping bits all the way from the antenna to the cat video all at once.

So, why the change of heart? A couple reasons, in reverse order of importance (see, I need more linearity):

A) I don’t want to jump up the stack and become a code poet and I know enough to cobble together a script, but the lines between software and networking are blurring. My friend George Stefanick (go see his blog if you have ANYTHING to do with WiFi), during a vendor presentation on SDN at Wireless Field Day asked “at what point am I no longer a network guy and become a software guy” or words to that effect. As usual, he made a very valid point.  It’s time to invest in some career future proofing.  I’m wrapping up on the certs I’ve been after for many many years and I’d go nuts if I wasn’t learning. It’s time to codify my understanding in an instructed rather than ad-hoc fashion.  It’s also a challenge and a step away from my comfort zone.

2) The best part is that one of my best friends, who also happens to be my son, is taking the class with me (I’m the lucky dad who is close friends with all three if his adult children)!  We did Lego Mindstorms when he was a kid, played with Arduino a few years ago, and he has a knack and the mind for it. He sees the routines in his head and they appear on the screen. We got to talking and decided it would be fun to do it together. We can be competitive, and this is a way to be with fewer welts than our paintball outings. He just got out of high school and a little instructor-led online 12-week class is a good way to explore it as a career possibility or just take it up as a hobby. Or he could drop it flat, whatever, he’s at the age where it’s good to try things on and see if they fit.  We can drop the whole experience off at Goodwill if it’s not his size.

So, Python 3 via Portland Community College, (who are also one of my clients) it is! If/then we like it, we keep going, else, it will have been a bonding experience, and I dig the hell out of those.