The Wilkes Insurrection by Robbie Bach - a Review

 

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” These words from Abraham Lincoln came at a time when our Nation was at its most divided point in history - a time when differences ran so deep that we were literally at war with one another. The dangerous divisiveness that exists in America today is fertile ground for a riveting story.

A good read is engaging, entertaining, and suspenseful, with vivid scenes populated by fully developed characters and strung together with a compelling story arc. While not breaking new ground for the genre, The Wilkes Insurrection by Robbie Bach mostly checks all the boxes. This is the first novel from author Bach, who previously led the team at Microsoft that developed the Xbox video game business. A self-described “Civic Engineer”, he believes all of us have an essential responsibility to engage productively in public issues. Failure to do so can push us perilously apart.

How Display Filters Affect Wireshark IO Graphs (And Why It Can Trip You Up)

 

Its been over 20 years of installing, troubleshooting, training and writing and I still think the biggest issue in IT is the technician’s working knowledge of their everyday tools. It doesn’t matter if it’s a physical tool like a cable tester or software, you should not only be familiar with it, but with any changes with upgrades.

In this case I chose Wireshark and wanted to show you how display filters affect IO graphs. As I mentioned in the video, this can be ‘bad’ or ‘good’. Which one depends if you know about this new ‘feature’ or not.

I always suggest you ‘use your favorite tools on a regular basis so you can spot some of these changes when they appear so you aren’t caught off guard when you are in the middle of troubleshooting.

Managing the Politics of Network Troubleshooting: Communication, SPOCs, and Post-Incident Reviews

 With your experience and knowledge of technology and your ability to navigate the politics of work, you may find yourself as the main technical resource for troubleshooting. At this point in your career, you may be empowered to pull a troubleshooting team together to resolve a major issue.

There’s no surprise that you have to manage EVERYONE impacted by the issue which may include technical teams, management, clients and everyone that has a vested interest in the current situation.

Troubleshooting NTP With Wireshark

Many of my regular customers refer to me as the ‘Network Janitor’ because I seem to gravitate to ‘cleaning up’ networks.

In some cases, yes physically cleaning up and organizing datacenters, wiring closets, etc – kind a network version of a personal organizer. In most cases though I clean up the network from the packet perspective.

For years I have been preaching concepts such as ‘The pc bootup and login baseline’ as well as “The VLAN or subnet broadcast analysis”. In both cases, I look for unnecessary traffic to make things run smoother and more efficiently.

In my throughput class I explain how quickly things get messy using basic math. For example, assume you have a 7% broadcast rate on switch where everybody has a 1 Gbps connection. 

How to Document Why a Network Is Slow — Stop Guessing and Start Measuring

“It’s slow” has to be one of the most common—and least useful—phrases a network troubleshooter hears. Slow compared with what? When does it happen? Is everything slow, or just one application, server, file, or connection? In this network troubleshooting video, I walk through why documenting the problem before jumping into troubleshooting can make such a huge difference. A vague complaint can send a technician down a troubleshooting rabbit hole, while a measurable problem gives you something you can actually investigate and compare.