Train Signal - CCNP CBT Review

November 29th, 2007 neteng

I’ve now had a chance to go through Train Signal’s CCNP discs (specifically for the BSCI & BCMSN exams). The user interface and extras (test exams and lab workbooks) remain the same from their CCNA series. The topic coverage is very broad but Chris managed to tackle each one with a good level of detail. I think CCIE-wannabes like myself will also find parts of this useful as a refresher. A nice addition that I found was the inclusion of the slides used by the instructor, in PDF format. These contained a space to write notes in next to each slide; a good idea for capturing those key terms and gotchas that will be helpful, come review time.

Overall, I’m quite impressed with Train Signal’s product. I’d say they’re a good investment as you work your way towards Cisco certification.

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Train Signal - CCNA CBT Review

November 28th, 2007 neteng

Some time ago, Scott Skinger from Train Signal was generous enough to send me copies of their CCNA and CCNP training material. I appreciate his patience as it’s taken me a long time to finally post a review! I’ll cover the CCNP products in another post, but I had a moment to sit down and go through the CCNA goods.

Overall, I found the presentation and material coverage to be quite impressive. I never used CBT material for any of my tests, but after going through the lessons, I realized it would have saved me some time and headaches! Chris Bryant (CCIE #12933) is the instructor for both the CCNA and CCNP series’ and he does a great job of covering important fundamentals for the CCNA aspirant. I especially enjoyed his coverage of binary/decimal conversion. As anyone involved in networking can tell you, knowing this information will help you maintain your sanity when it comes to subnetting, CIDR and wildcard masks. Another highlight was the segment on putting together your own lab and rack rentals. Included with each CBT video is a testing application and a PDF document for lab work. I thought the lab workbook was a fantastic addition as it allows the student to get their hands dirty and apply what they’ve learned from the videos.

Unfortunately, the copy I received was geared towards the previous CCNA exam, so some of the older topics like ISDN were still covered. Useful if you work with ISDN, but not so much for the test. Also, there were some topics missing, like wireless, that appear in the the new CCNA blueprint. But, I’m sure the material has been updated since the changes were made official.

If you’re studying for your CCNA and looking for informative visual and hands-on lessons, you will definitely want to give Train Signal’s product a look.

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CCNA/CCNP Training

July 5th, 2007 neteng

Scott Skinger at TrainSignal has been kind enough to send me copies of his CCNA and CCNP CBT-based training videos. I will be posting reviews on these in the near future.

Many thanks to Scott for the opportunity to review his product.

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Time Management for System Administrators - Chapter Eleven

May 4th, 2006 neteng

Eliminating Time Wasters

Thomas states:

I define a time waster as any activity that has a low ratio of benefit to time spent.

If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly finding yourself entrenched in time wasters and it takes an interruption of some sort to break you out of the trance and realize you’ve just been playing Minesweeper for the past 45 minutes. The funny thing is, a lot of time wasters aren’t as obvious and I can recall company meeting after company meeting that ended with no real progress or resolution.

Thomas has come up with the idea to set rules for himself that he must follow. I can even envision some sort of reward and punishment system, but this takes a lot of self-discipline. I really like his suggestion of using a mechanical timer that requires exceptional physical action (as opposed to simply clicking Dismiss on that Outlook reminder) to turn off. It often takes something unique like that to help free you from the tunnel-vision induced by whatever you’re focused on.

Some of the things Thomas recommends keeping an eye on are office socializing, wasteful meetings and housecleaning (my own personal bane). I also am a current events/news junkie and often spend my time inefficiently surfing the web for the latest news. I even discovered RSS about a year-and-a-half ago and this has made things even worse.

Once again, self-discipline is key and there is no way around this unless you want someone lording over you and doing the job for you. You have to make a genuine effort to become more efficient, and in order to make that effort, you have to want it. It’s never easy to break a habit, but you’ll find that as with most things, you just need to stick out the rough parts. It always gets worse before it gets better, but it does indeed get better and you’ll be a happier person for it.

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Time Management for System Administrators - Chapter Ten

April 25th, 2006 neteng

Email Management

This is another one of my favorite chapters because it has helped me deal with the huge influx of email hitting my inbox daily. In general, I’m a bit obsessive-compulsive when it comes to cleaning house (I can’t stand to have a flashing voicemail light on my phone) and Thomas definitely has some great tips on keeping things in order.

Some of the concepts I apply include:

Filters - I love filters. Without the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff, you’re bound to miss a few important items and get bogged down in nonsense. I create separate filters for mailing lists, device alerts, distribution group emails, etc.

Folders - When using filters, I have them store the filtered items into appropriate folders. I also like to create a Holding Pattern folder where I keep items I’m worried I might need in the near future and empty it every 3 months (similar to the paperwork method described by Thomas in an earlier chapter). This way, I can keep a clean inbox and not worry about deletor’s remorse.

Sent Items - I’ve found that even if I have deleted an important email thread, I can find most of the pieces in my Sent Items folder. I never delete anything from here so I’m sure to find what I need a majority of the time.

So what’s your email tip?

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Time Management for System Administrators - Chapter Nine

April 18th, 2006 neteng

Stress Management

A systems administrator without any stress is hardly a sysadmin at all. It just comes with the territory and if you’re not stressed out at some point during your career, you don’t have enough to do!

The most interesting bit that I got out of this chapter was the separation of good stress from bad stress. To quote Thomas:

Positive stress adds anticipation and excitement to our lives, helps us be creative, helps us win a race or an election, or pushes us beyond what we previously thought were our limits. Negative stress is destructive. It causes heart disease, depression and gray hairs. Managing stress is a big part of maintaining good mental health.

I can definitely remember times that I’ve been stressed out while working on a project that required my undivided attention and new skills, but I was driven to learn some new things and have had many positive outcomes as a result.

Concerning negative stress, Thomas cites overload and conflicting directions from management as two of the biggest sources of stress. I would also add coworker conflicts and management expectations to this list as well. The best way to alleviate some of these issues is to ask for help. It’s natural among most sysadmins to want to solve a problem on their own and not require assistance from another, but this is a sure road to disaster and increased stress.

Also - and I agree with Thomas 100% on this - use your vacation time! You might think that ending the year with 2 weeks of surplus vacation will win you Employee of the Year, but it’s more likely to win you Overworked Jerk of the Year. Take your earned breaks and really take them - no Blackberries, no laptops, etc. From personal experience, you should stress to your coworkers that you will be available at your cell phone only in the case of an actual emergency that requires your time. Now emergencies vary from company to company, but you should have a good feeling for what should actually constitute an unwelcome phone call while you’re lounging on the beach.

Another excellent point made by Thomas is that being away from the office allows you to see just how well your documentation and coverage is put together. The stronger that these problem areas are, the less you’ll be bothered.

I also find that physical exercise is a fantastic outlet for built up stress and it also has the benefit of just being a damn good idea for your health. I like to lift weights, run, jump rode, ride a bike, etc. All of these things are good for your muscles and cardiovascular system and you’d be a smart person to take up a regular exercise regimen as soon as possible. I’ve found some great insights on the misc.fitness.weights newsgroup, so I recommend you stop by and read a little bit when you have time.

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Hunter S. Thompson - Hell’s Angels

April 14th, 2006 neteng

Going off the beaten track for a minute, I thought I’d talk a bit about a book I recently finished. Work has been crazy on top of moving into a new office, so I’m looking to avoid anything work-related for the moment! I promise to return back to the regularly scheduled program soon.

So I’ve recently finished reading this book and it was the first of anything I’ve ever read that was written by Thompson as well as anything based on motorcycle gangs. I’m not the biggest fan of journalistic writing but Thompson’s style really held my interest throughout the whole book. The book takes the reader through the origins of the gang (good ol’ Berdoo (San Bernardino), California; pretty close to my hometown), it’s affable leader in Sonny Barger and various stories. You don’t hear much these days about the going-ons of motorcycle gangs - though it’s a topic for one of my favorite 90s action-cheez flicks - but they appeared to be quite the phenomenon back in the 50s and 60s. The largest chunk of the book focuses on a run they took up at Bass Lake, nestled against the Sierra Mountains. Alarms were surrounded all across California for an otherwise uneventful party. It really emphasized the level of fear that had taken hold of much of law enforcement and local townsfolk. Other parts that I found interesting discussed how they were tied in with some of the other American subculture heroes of the time, notably Alan Ginsberg and Ken Kessey. The Angels were actually highly revered by these Beatnik superstars until the romanticism wore off and the Berkley crowd saw the true colors of the Hell’s Angels; via punches and kicks at their Vietnam protest rallies.

Thompson does a fantastic job of laying down the different shades of what it meant to be a Hell’s Angel and he made a noble attempt to set the story straight on what the Hell’s Angels were really like. He let it be known that they were neither saints nor the murderous horde that the media oftentimes made them out to be.

At the end of the book, Thompson talks about how he took a bit of a beating from the boys during his final contact with them. Later interviews with Sonny Barger paint a bit of a different picture as to what really happened, so it’s hard to say what the truth of the matter was. I wouldn’t put it past a journalist such as Thompson to knowingly push certain buttons and instigate something so he could add some flair to his story, and admittedly, it did.

I don’t know if any of my readers have an interest at all in this topic, and my initial interest was simply a passing “…could be good”, but I’m glad I read the book.

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Time Management for System Administrators - Chapter Eight

April 4th, 2006 neteng

Prioritization

Some days, I have no problem deciding what tasks can wait and what needs to be done with the utmost urgency. I’ve slowly discovered those days are few and far between. Most of the time I am left scratching my head, erasing a ‘B’ when it should really be an ‘A’ and so on. What’s a sysadmin to do? The amount of time spent worrying over the priority of certain tasks could be better spent actually doing said tasks.

One of my favorite bits of advice from this chapter (and Thomas’ book in general) is about ordering your to-do items by customer expectations and perceptions. You may be working on the cure for cancer, but if a customer just wants his email problems fixed, you’re going to find yourself in hot water for not paying him due attention.

Also be sure to get advice from your manager on what he perceives to be pressing issues. This can go a long way towards making him, and therefore yourself, look like a star employee in upper management’s eyes. Be sure to keep checking in with your boss too. I’ve found myself spearheading efforts towards a certain project only to speak with my manager and find out that it’s been reprioritized and a new problem has taken precedence.

Here’s a great little matrix in Thomas’ book that has really helped me out:

This should enable you to step back and look at the bigger picture. You’ll be surprised at just how much you find yourself focusing on tasks that have minimal professional rewards.

Does anyone else have a system of they use to assist them in prioritizing?

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Time Management for System Administrators - Chapter Seven

March 21st, 2006 neteng

Life Goals

Day-to-day tasks are important, but what good is living life if it’s all you can do to make it through the workweek and never achieve those dreams that always seem so far away. You need to set goals and work towards them, step-by-step.

The key to tackling the big-picture items is to define just what your goals are, give them the proper priority and divide them into achievable steps that can be easily transformed into to-do list tasks.

Here’s an example of a couple of my professional goals and the steps that I’ve broken it down into:

Complete VPN Backup Project (1 to 3 Month Completion)

- Troubleshoot network equipment to determine why packets are not making it back to client when failover is active

- Check Firewall
- Check Switches
- Check Routers
- Check VPN Concentrator/End-User VPN Device
- Check customer network

- Make sure that all Frame Relay clients have VPN devices that are accessible and fully configured

- Determine who does and does not have a completely configured device
- For those who have one but it is not configured, contact to fix the problem
- For those who do not have one, contact to determine configuration information and ship them a device

- After a successful failover test, verify with another client

- After verification is complete, run quarterly tests with all customers

Score Well on Employee Evaluation (1 year to Completion)

- Meet with my manager to discuss how I can best achieve this

- Take opportunites to volunteer on certain projects within the company

- Volunteer for technical projects
- Volunteer for non-technical projects (assist with move to new building, participate in customer forums, etc.)

- Maintain good job performance and documentation

- Keep up with networking technology
- Read trade magazines
- Attend conferences

- Maintain fresh documentation on all activities I perform

I’m sure these can be expanded upon, but you get the idea. The most important fact is that I can measure these goals and know what I’ve achieved.

On the first day of each month, it’s a good idea to pull out your goals list and make sure that priorities haven’t changed and that targets haven’t been eliminated altogether. It’s important for you to also see if any goals are slipping away while others are monopolizing more time than they should be.

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Time Management for System Administrators - Chapter Six

March 16th, 2006 neteng

Calendar Management

It’s time to focus on the contribution that calendars make to the cycle system. The daily and weekly calendars are great for scheduling your to-do list items while the monthly and yearly calendars force us to look at the bigger picture and make sure we don’t lose focus of our long-term goals.

As Thomas points out, the key to to a useful calendar system is making sure you record everything and that it guide’s your day. Don’t leave things off that you feel are unimportant or ’small’. It’s those items that will suffer because you forgot about them. Of course, you will rarely - if ever - follow your schedule to the letter. Tasks will often take longer than you first suspected or you will sometimes complete them early. If it’s a repeating item, you can adjust the necessary time for completion in the future and you will find that your schedule becomes more efficient.

Items to enter in your calendar include appointments, milestones and future to-do items. I also like to keep a record of birthdays and important dates to remember within the same datebook. Also, make sure that you now reference your calendar before commiting to future appointments. If you keep personal and professional items together, you will vastly improve your chances of not missing your kid’s soccer game because you promised to perform server maintenance on a Saturday morning. One of the tasks that I also give myself at the beginning of each month is to fill in recurring items on future dates.

For those of us using a paper-based organizer, one great tip from Thomas’ book was to set alarms on your watch or cell phone for important events. This helps avoid the need to check your schedule every hour on the hour for fear of forgetting a meeting.

One of the great notions that Thomas hits on is that of rhythms. He discusses the need to understand your personal as well as company rhythms. Know when your brain is in top form and ready to tackle a difficult task. Also know when your company is in it’s busy season and you’ll be able to coordinate vacations without having a major effect on your company’s profitability. It’s a good idea to perform the menial, brainless tasks when you’re hitting that energy slump and save the mentally taxing stuff for better times.

Does anyone out there have other tips for calendar usage?

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