Bill Alderson

Because people do not fully understand, spanning tree, because they don’t know how to design the tree to optimize the best fastest path, they sometimes think they can turn it off and manage to create a loop free environment without spinning tree. I have found whole data centers of the top tier with so many spanning tree loops, that performance crawled for five years. Many of the top-tier engineers in the world running huge data centers do not understand spanning tree.

When a $B company with “network” in its name called me to diagnose and resolve their global network outage, I popped in my Bonanza B36TC and flew to SJC, got in a taxi and arrived within 90 minutes. Upon arrival they were fruitlessly rebooting their switches in a different order. I put my sniffer on the wire and 15 minutes told them to put a spanning tree setting on all ports of all switches. They objected saying OSPF would stop working if they did. I said, “looks like nothing is working now”. They finally complied and their network came back up immediately. Radia Perlman, creator of the spanning tree algorithm says “no network protocol should be without a hop count to stop loops”, and “Ethernet is not a network.”

QUIC is a new Transport Protocol that is near 50% of Internet traffic. It encrypts the packet headers making middle boxes such as firewalls and load balancers blind. Microsoft is rolling it out in all their server products to dominate the enterprise as well as the Internet. How much do you know about QUIC? Follow me, I am a 44 year career protocol analyst. I already have a 60 minute session on Security Institute that gets you a rapid update on QUIC. Your network and career will thank you!

IT professionals often show signs of over-focus by lack of empathy for themselves or others, inability to enjoy or participate in humorous conversations. Be caring and available without direct confrontation, exercise concern while being careful not to gossip about the person. Pray for them privately or think positive thoughts.

Having responded to many of the world’s greatest IT disasters such as the Pentagon at 9/11, the ability to make rapid decisions is prepared for many years prior by developing skills and checklists to use during disasters. Just as a pilot prepares by flight simulator exercises, so do managing technologists during periods requiring rapid decision-making. During cyber incidents or time such as we have experienced recently with Crowdstrike, bringing down millions of computers, It is the work that has gone on five or 10 years prior that brings us through disasters with better outcomes.

In most everything I do I find a mentor. Someone that I admire that I can learn from because they have relevant experience in a particular area. In addition, I have found that the best way to learn is to teach. And that I also try to mentor whenever I can on topics that I have mastered or that I am continuing to learn. Regardless, as to whether you are a mentor or a mentee, it creates a learning experience for everyone, and it’s fun to get to meet new people.