So You Want to Be an Engineer? A Career Reflection on Curiosity, Chance, and Choosing a Path

 

As the prospect of retirement begins to appear on the outer edges of my radar, I’ve been reflecting on this engineering career that has occupied a large chunk of my adult life. It’s been a rewarding journey and I have no regrets, but what was it that excited me about engineering in the first place?

I don’t believe it was genetics; my Dad was a Professor of Speech and Drama, and my Mom was a schoolteacher who chose to stay at home once I was born. I don’t recall lying in my crib staring at some dangling toy and thinking “I can do better than that.” It’s safe to conclude that I wasn’t born for this profession. If not nature, it must have been nurture.

Profitap IOTA Review: Simplifying Long-Term Packet Capture and Analysis

"Long term packet capture" and "ease of use" are concepts that rarely go in the same sentence.

Usually, long term packet capture means one of two things. 1) Buy a glitzy, massively expensive, petabyte capture solution that streams a zillion bits per second to disk. 2) Use Wireshark or tshark to do a rolling capture buffer that captures a bunch of files with a dizzying amount of detail.

And then - there was IOTA.

Plug in, power up, press capture. Done.

How to Capture Packets with TShark: Command-Line Wireshark Examples for Consistent, Scriptable Captures

Before I get into the tshark command syntax and other details, I want to chat about why you want to use tshark or any command line tool. Simply put, working from the command line allows a tremendous amount of consistency and flexibility.

Consistency

When you try to have someone perform your capture using the Wireshark GUI, there are many opportunities for errors and its just very time consuming. When you have the command line syntax figured out, you can put it in an email, batch file or document ensuring the client is doing exactly what you wanted. The added bonus is that working from, the command line is usually more responsive that remotely controlling a GUI over possibly slow links.

Diagnosing MTU Black Holes: Using Ping and Wireshark to Find Fragmentation Issues on a WAN (John Modlin)

I was working at a large network heterogeneous environment and started working on a problem of scanners at field offices being unable to transfer documents across the WAN. Working on this problem led me quite down the rabbit hole, a black hole to be more specific.


The field techs had already changed out scanners, but the site continued to be intermittently unable to send documents across the WAN. Some documents transferred, some didn’t. After checking permissions and general settings on the scanner, I started looking at the network path.

Wireshark Tips: How to Hide Unused Network Interfaces and Clear Your Recent File List

 Networkdatapedia.com has been asking for material that focus on knowing your network and/or knowing your tools.

Sounds pretty simple but trust me this is anything but simple or obvious. When you use the same tool and it becomes your ‘favorite’ or ‘go to tool’ you might be resistant to trying new tools.