Thinking problem management!

We decided to make available existing antenna installation manuals which are somewhat out of date but still relevant. We are happy that anyone use it freely as long as they acknowledge the source as Poynting Antennas and if they make it available electronically provide a link to the original. Users may also edit, improve and add to these provided we are informed and allowed to publish it and use it ("joint copyright"). Access the free book and presentation over at LinkedIn here .

You get to decide what type of content is allowed in your home or network. Parents can protect their kids from adult content, schools can be CIPA compliant and businesses can block malicious domains and gain visibility into their network. All it takes is 5 minutes. Find out more about Clean Browsing here .

So many firewalls and, of course, each one is ‘the best’ one, so how do you choose? This 37-page downloadable report features reviews from hundreds of network security pros who have actually used the products in real-world situations. Read the article and download the report over at Network World here . 

Following the pressure and need to effectively manage the ever scare water and energy resources, Apex Innovation – a South African company recently embarked on an Internet of Things (IoT) initiative primed to accurately measure usage of utility services in Cape Town. Read the article over at CIO here .

Gain deeper visibility, stronger controls and enhance security for your cloud applications with Microsoft Cloud App Security. In this episode, you'll see how to discover all the SaaS Apps your org uses and receive a risk assessment for each. We'll also go over policy violations and how to take actions on a file level. Finally, you'll find out how you can detect anomalies and mitigate threats.

Snapt is the load balancer , web accelerator and WAF that's going to supercharge your network.   Snapt offers an ADC that's radically different . We keep ADC functions out of the way of the modern engineer – everything should just work!  We add real value by focusing on what you need : performance metrics, pro-active monitoring, alerting, profiling and more Find out more about the product here .

SD-WAN Harvester tool was created to automatically enumerate and fingerprint SD-WAN nodes on the Internet. It uses Shodan search engine for discovering, NMAP NSE scripts for fingerprinting, and masscan to implement some specific checks.   Downloads https://github.com/sdnewhop/sdwan-harvester

WebTitan Cloud for Service Providers is a cloud solution allowing providers of WiFi and Internet services to offer Web content controls to their customers. This multi-tenant cloud solution can be hosted by TitanHQ or you and offers multiple policy options for accessing Web sites. Policies can be created per location, preventing users from accessing inappropriate content and blocking malicious Web sites. WebTitan is a DNS-based solution requiring a simple DNS redirect to the WebTitan cloud servers, thus being very easy to set up and manage, and avoiding any latency effects. Find out more about this solution here .

Video #1 explains how we gather link information about a link's latency and throughput limits before it becomes part of a bond. In this video we show how easy it is in our system to activate a bond. We take our three network access links and aggregate them using our Bonded Internet user interface. We then perform a speed test to show you how all three links come together as one. In this video we demonstrate our same-IP failover technology. We begin a large file transfer over the bonded connection and remove the cable connection, simulating a network failure. The file continues to transfer without interruption. In this video we turn on our powerful compression/acceleration engine to show you how much increased performance we can get out of our bond. In this video we show how our system is able to adjust itself to avoid poor bandwidth regions of a given connection. We use Quality of Service to virtually eliminate the effects of jitter and latency on the transm

Find out about this entry level SD-WAN device here .

 Speeds of up to 1.9Gbps over concurrent dual band 802.11ac Wi-Fi with MIMO and TurboQAM technologies  Airtime Fairness, Beamforming, and Band Steering Technologies guarantee optimal RF performance for business-level applications  Link aggregation joins two gigabit Ethernet ports to break the bottleneck in network backhaul capacity  Free EAP Controller Software lets administrators easily manage hundreds of EAPs  Captive portal provides a convenient method for guest authentication  Power over Ethernet (802.3at) support and simple mounting design allow for flexible deployment and convenient installation Find out more about the product here .

The Vault is a small form factor PC built for use as a firewall / router.  The FW1 is based on a 4 network port design that leverages a low power (10Watts at idle CPU, 15Watts under moderate load), but versatile Intel Celeron J1900 CPU.  The Vault uses standard Intel components (including Intel network ports) which results in compatibility with a variety of operating systems, including a number of open source firewall projects.  The Vault is fanless so it has no moving parts, which results in an incredibly durable platform that can be used in less than ideal environments.  Its all aluminum enclosure (no plastic here) is a giant heat sink, keeping the CPU cool.  The enclosure also comes with pre-drilled holes for an available wireless kit ( available here ).   The FW1 can accommodate up to 8GB of DDR3L RAM and any available size mSATA storage drive.  For more information on tested OS compatibility with the Vault, please see this link . Find out more about the product here

The September 2018 Azure data centre outage leaves more questions than answers. Microsoft generically sums it up as a cooling issue triggered by lightning storms. In this neck of the savannah we have lightning storms that are the trademark signature weather of the Highveld. We live at an elevation of 1.5 km. My house is the highest one in our burrow and the advertising sign on William Nicol Drive about 200m from my house is regularly klapped by lightning. We are basically immune to the earth shattering sound of thunder and lightning . Read the article over at LinkedIn here .

SevOne added support for Versa Networks’  SD-WAN on its SD-WAN monitoring tool. The monitoring tool already supports both VMware’s NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud platform and Cisco’s SD-WAN service based on Viptela technology .   While SevOne can make its SD-WAN monitoring service work for any SD-WAN vendor, the partnerships with Versa, Cisco, and VMware are out-of-box offerings. SevOne’s monitoring service is built into the each of the vendor’s SD-WAN product fabric to offer network services over the multi-tenant SD-WANs. Read the article over at sdxcentral here .

Development on Cake was orignally sponsored by IIS and is now sponsored by NLnet We appreciate their support… and could always use more help from others that care about speeding up the internet.   Cake is the rollup of 3 years of deployment experience of the htb + fq_codel based sqm-scripts SQM for aqm/fq/qos inbound and outbound bufferbloat management. For input into the design and implementation, please join the cake mailing list . For an alternative approach to inbound traffic management, see Bobbie .   Slides from a recent talk on Cake, at Battlemesh v8: attachment: cake-battlemesh-v8.pdf Find out more about Cake here .

Here is a blues version of Waltzing Matilda performed on Lap slide guitar and harmonica. Location is at beautiful Caloundra. Filmed by Elijah Cavanagh. If you would like to purchase this song it is available on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/au/album/tak... Thanks for taking the time out to watch this clip.

Filtering online content on a large network is a difficult task, especially for networks within major companies or those managed by ISPs, Managed Service Providers (MSPs), and Value Add Resellers (VARs).   Whether you are attempting to prevent access to inappropriate content within a corporate environment or block access to illegal content on your network, content filtering can be difficult. Read the article over at MyBroadband here . 

Memories of my youth and watching this every time we went to the movies.

I think that SD-WAN could totally change the carrier market, in a destructive way, that is good for customers. MPLS revenue for Private WAN is already declining  SD-WAN disrupts the router vendors who have cosy arrangements with carriers (their best customers) by producing devices that don't damage carriers revenue. Is that why startups developed SD-WAN and not Cisco or Juniper ?  Multi-carrier networks create arbitrage opportunities that reduce cost of bandwidth by more than 50%. Now that is a "disruptive" technology!  Why are we stuck with dumb routers on dumb bandwidth paying dumb prices ?  Carriers are hopeless at customer service. Do you really believe that they could manage your firewalls, proxies, QOS etc ? Pfffftttt. Thats why I think carrier NFV is dumb.  Customers hate carriers. It could be time for customers to get even.  You can find more like this at Packet Pushers website : http://packetpushers.net We are well know for your podcasts

Digital transformation is happening now, and fast. It includes cloud, services, mobile. It’s hybrid, it’s the Internet, it’s the user. Most importantly, it’s the seamless orchestration of all these things together.  True digital transformation is the ability to orchestrate apps, networks, and devices to provide seamless access to digital services for end users.  Read the white paper over at Riverbed here .

Despite its rising importance in the tech market, the full potential of the Internet of Things has yet to be unleashed. In the next few years, we will see an explosion of IoT products and applications, not only for the retail market but also in the manufacturing, health, transport and security sectors.   Here are five infographics that give us a preview of what the burgeoning IoT market has in store for companies and their customers. 

Where is the free cooling?

To define an IoT “Thing,” I’m going to employ Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — that well-known human psychology paradigm typically displayed in the shape of a pyramid, with the most fundamental human needs (physiological needs like air, food and water) at the bottom and rising to the most esoteric needs (self-actualization or expression of full potential) at the apex.  I’ve sketched out a derivative needs pyramid for IoT “Things,” charting their ascent to Thing-actualization. Read the article over at TechCrunch here .

The thing about MPLS is that it’s a technique, not a service — so it can deliver anything from IP VPNs to metro Ethernet. It's expensive, so with the advent of SD-WAN enterprises are trying to figure how to optimize its use vs. less expensive connections like the internet. Read the article over at Network World here .

It all started with an interesting weird MLAG bugs discussion during our last Building Next-Generation Data Center online course. The discussion almost devolved into “when in doubt reload” yammering when Mark Horsfield stepped in saying “while that may be true, make sure to check and collect these things before reloading”.   I loved what he wrote so much that I asked him to turn it into a blog post… and he made it even better by expanding it into generic network troubleshooting guidelines. Enjoy! This is a guest blog post by Mark Horsfield , CCIE#52702, Technical Support Engineer at Cumulus Networks.

Inside the chintz-filled living room of the Badir family's neat and modest home, a feast of freshly roasted chicken, saffron rice, and seasoned vegetable stew perfumes the air. Friends and relatives pour through the front door to congratulate 27-year-old Munther "Ramy" Badir. He's just been released from prison after serving 47 months for computer-related crimes. Outside, Islamic prayers resonate from speakers on a truck moving slowly down the dusty streets of Kafr Kassem. Everyone in this Israeli village - populated mostly by Arabs - appears ecstatic to have Ramy back. Read the article over at Wired here .

Azure Virtual WAN is a networking service that provides optimized and automated branch-to-branch connectivity through Azure. Virtual WAN lets you connect and configure branch devices to communicate with Azure. This can be done either manually, or by using preferred partner devices through a Virtual WAN partner. See the Preferred partners article for details. Using preferred partner devices allows you ease of use, simplification of connectivity, and configuration management. The Azure WAN built-in dashboard provides instant troubleshooting insights that can help save you time, and gives you an easy way to view large-scale connectivity. Read the article over at Microsoft here .

The most important thing about a brainstorming session is what happens after it ends. What good is it to find 100 great ideas if they go absolutely nowhere? Read the article over at Scott Berkun here .

How often have you used brainstorming to solve a problem? Chances are, you've used it at least once, even if you didn't realize it.   For decades, people have used brainstorming to generate ideas, and to come up with creative solutions to problems. However, you need to use brainstorming correctly for it to be fully effective. Read the article over at Mindtools here .

Brainstorming is a group creativity technique by which efforts are made to find a conclusion for a specific problem by gathering a list of ideas spontaneously contributed by its members.  In other words, brainstorming is a situation where a group of people meet to generate new ideas and solutions around a specific domain of interest by removing inhibitions. People are able to think more freely and they suggest many spontaneous new ideas as possible. All the ideas are noted down and are not criticized and after brainstorming session the ideas are evaluated. The term was popularized by Alex Faickney Osborn in the 1953 book Applied Imagination . Read the detailed description over at Wikipedia here .  

Micromanagement: Everyone knows the term. Some fear and even avoid any company that’s associated with the word. But what is it, really? By definition, micromanagement is a management style whereby a manager closely observes or controls the work of subordinates or employees. Micromanagement generally has a negative connotation.  In reality, most of us see it as management’s attempt at digging its fingers deep into the pie of those actually doing the work. It’s a way for management to ensure that tasks are performed in a very precise manner – in other words, management’s way. Problem is, this isn’t always the right – or most productive – way of doing things. And that’s just one of the issues with micromanagement. Let’s take a look at some of the other dangers that come along with this style of management and why you should avoid it over at PluralSIght here .

I was inspired to write this post after watching the latest Network Chuck YouTube video where he interviewed me regarding AWS at the 2018 Cisco Live conference. What struck me was the excitement surrounding the video as evidenced by the comments on all the major social media channels. There are so many students excited to start these various certification tracks!  In that regard – I wanted to break down what cloud really is. For this definition, we turn to the NIST. They identify 5 common characteristics of cloud solutions. Here they are for you in plain English. Keep in mind that I turned to the NIST as these specific charactersitics they point out are frequently tested across all the various cloud vendors. Read the article over at AJS Networking here .