Like many others, I’ve been watching the ESPN / Netflix documentary “The Last Dance” about Michael Jordan’s time with the Chicago Bulls. I was expecting to see some great basketball footage and to hear about MJ’s dedication to his craft. What surprised me was how many useful insights Phil Jackson shared about how to coach… Continue Reading
Network Ops
Sherlock Holmes, his brother Mycroft and network redundancy
This past weekend my family watched the new Netflix movie Enola Holmes, which was a thoroughly entertaining story that cared little that its characters bore minimal resemblance to the “real” Holmes family. Mycroft diminished The biggest departure from the original stories was Mycroft. For those less nerdy than me, Mycroft Holmes is Sherlock’s older brother,… Continue Reading
When CenturyLink has an outage, do you follow?
On the morning of Sunday August 30, CenturyLink’s IP network was reported to be down for about 4.5 hours – probably focused on the part of the network that came with their acquisition of Level 3. From what I’ve read (simplifying greatly), a CenturyLink customer had requested that they block a certain IP address from… Continue Reading
Why we all need red telephones
There’s a popular myth that there’s a red telephone on the US President’s desk that connects him directly to the Russian President in Moscow. While that’s a nice idea for the movies, that’s not literally true – but since 1963 the Washington-Moscow Direct Communications Link between the Pentagon and the Kremlin has existed to allow… Continue Reading
A 40 hour outage… and counting
If you’ve worked in telecoms for any length of time you’ll likely have some kind of psychological scars from dealing with an outage. Everyone tries to build a redundant network that is resilient to any problem, but even with the best of intentions outages happen. I’ve heard stories of human error – that time someone… Continue Reading
How is COVID-19 impacting network operations?
The changes we’ve implemented as a society in response to the coronavirus have caused a massive shift in data and voice usage patterns. While we might normally expect changes to take place in slow motion over years, these changes have been near instantaneous. What does this mean for your network? I wrote recently about the… Continue Reading