Ethan Banks

@ecbanks

All Of Ethan’s Podcasts And Articles For November 2017

| 5 minutes to read

Here’s a catalog of all the media I produced (or helped produce) in November 2017. I’ve included content summaries to motivate you to click. See, that’s coming right at you with how I’m trying to manipulate your behavior. I’m honest like that.

PACKET PUSHERS WEEKLY PODCAST

PRIORITY QUEUE PODCAST

  • Episode 134 – Meet ZeroTier–Open Source Networking. I interview Adam Ierymenko about ZeroTier, his overlay networking baby that connects devices at L2 no matter where they are. Really interesting tech. This could be one of the most discussed shows in the Packet Pushers catalog. Plus, Adam joined the Packet Pushers audience Slack channel and has been interacting with the community.
  • Episode 135 – Master Python Networking–The Book. I interview Eric Chou, author of this book, who is donating all the proceeds to charity. Lots of folks have reacted to this interview, reflecting the strong interest from the networking community in automation.

DATANAUTS PODCAST

  • Episode 108 – Building Service Meshes With Avi Networks (Sponsored). Service meshes are the latest in the evolution of application delivery controllers. The big idea is to put a service anywhere it’s needed and route traffic through it in a dynamic infrastructure environment. Pair “service mesh” with “cloud native,” and you’re starting to get it.
  • Episode 109 – Run VMware Apps In The Cloud With Ravello (Sponsored). Oracle Ravello makes a product that allows you to pick up your data center as-is and run it in the cloud. Lots of use cases–lab, change validation, infrastructure modeling, user acceptance testing, quality assurance, and even production.
  • Episode 110 – The Future Of Storage. We interview Tom Lyon, Sun Microsystems employee number 8, about where storage is headed. He seems to be a good person to ask, as he’s working at DriveScale these days, creating a distributed storage product designed for leading edge compute.
  • Episode 111 – NVMe And Its Network Impact. Cisco’s J Metz makes a repeat Datanauts appearance. We go full nerd discussing how the incredible performance of NVMe drives will impact storage networks. This is a very big deal that not enough people are talking about, IMHO.
  • Episode 112 – Building The Perfect Data Center Beast. We talk through several aspects of building a physical data center including power distribution, hot/cold aisle designs, racks, and cabling plant. A longer-than-average show that’s seen a good bit of feedback on Twitter already, including opening up the question of, “Does anyone build raised floor facilities anymore?”

Briefings In Brief Podcast

PacketPushers.net

  • Understanding Wireshark Capture Filters. I dive deep on a specific Wireshark capture filter, explaining how it works piece by piece, and concluding with a list of resources to find even more information.

ETHANCBANKS.COM

  • Nothing new this month, although I have decided that I am going to focus on personal productivity in this blog. I have felt for a while that I needed a specific topic to write about here, and productivity is an area where I continue to evolve.

NEWSLETTERS

  • Human Infrastructure Magazine 70 – How Do You Learn? I ask for feedback from you about how you learn. We’re working on new styles of content over at Packet Pushers Heavy Industries, and want to come as close as we can to getting it correct out of the gate. Your feedback appreciated.

PARTING THOUGHTS

  • I delivered a QoS Fundamentals webinar over at ipSpace.net this month. That went reasonably well, although I got some feedback that made me question how I should be doing slides, etc. when doing live over-the-Internet presentations. I’ve since bought a Wacom tablet that I need to figure out how to use. My idea is to use the Wacom to do live whiteboarding during webinars.
  • I spent a day with a higher ed institution, acting as facilitator for a devops workshop they ran internally. That was quite intriguing as their issues were far more human than technical. There’s content there somewhere. I need to think it through and decide what to focus on.
  • The devops workshop did leave me with a technical question I don’t have a great answer to yet. That is, can devops practices be applied in the case of shops deploying lots of shrink-wrap software? That’s a different pipeline than an in-house dev shop pushing code through a CI/CD pipeline into prod using microservices over cloud native. And yet…there are many parallels as well as demands of efficiency. Where does devops, as traditionally defined, fit? I have homework to do and perhaps some folks to interview to shine some light on this topic as I have mixed opinions right now.
  • I am knee-deep into the Todoist task management app, working to make it my single source of truth. Post coming.
  • I have completed migration of my home and lab networks to a D-Link L3 switch instead of a Cisco SG-300 that was running, but had taken a lightning hit and lost an ASIC (I think) and therefore several front panel ports. The D-Link is a DGS-1510-52 gigabit Ethernet switch with a ton of capabilities. I have spent time going through the manual, and I’m favorably impressed. I will likely blog about some of the lesser-known features when I get a chance to study them.
  • I have also migrated my home firewall from a VMware instance of pfSense to a bare-metal instance. Now I have a beast-mode firewall at home with a quad-core Xeon CPU and 32GB of RAM. It’s barely ticking over with the load I’m placing on it, but that was the point. I am going to be loading it up with as many features as I think I can take advantage of, and I don’t want hardware to be a question mark. I still have a ways to go on this box, but so far I’ve got it serving forward and reverse DNS locally, which has made some of the auxiliary packages like BandwidthD offer some more interesting statistics. For example, I have Amazon Echo devices sucking down gigabytes of data from the Internet. Fascinating, and vaguely worrying until I have a better idea of what that data is. In any case, I have plans for ZeroTier on this pfSense box, but I need to do more homework to grok how to install the package, as it doesn’t seem to be supported as a core function. Not sure yet on this, as I’ve heard it can be done, but haven’t managed to hit the right support page explaining it.
  • After many hours, I managed to get minikube (virtualized Kubernetes cluster running on a single host) running on my iMac. I was making it harder than it needed to be, wanting to run minikube in a Linux VM. It kept failing miserably until I opted to do the minikube install like the guide suggested, leveraging Fusion as the hypervisor but otherwise running OS X native. I need minikube to support my reading of the Kubernetes Up And Running book sitting on my desk. It’s not a long book, but it won’t mean much without the lab work to reinforce concepts.