Ep 48 – Out-of-Band Management

In this episode, we talk to Dan Baxter, SE Manager, with OpenGear. We discuss Dan’s break into tech from Art Teacher to SE. We then answer the question “What is Out-Of-Band Management?” Then we touch on the OpenGear advantage! If you’re considering an Out-of-Band Management solution please take a look at OpenGear.

Dan Baxter
Email: dan.baxter@opengear.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-baxter-5b18721/

OpenGear
website: https://opengear.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Opengear

This episode has been sponsored by Meter. 

Go to meter.com/aone to book a demo now! 

Opengear


Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore keys technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information to expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers alright so here's the scenario you've been preparing for this night for weeks your change plan peer reviewed your maintenance window approved and you've labbed up the scenario no less than 47 times being successful in every attempt now here we are it's a dark and stormy night and ding change time you get logged into that remote router navigate to the uplink interface when boom goes a clap of thunder your puppy stirs awake just in time to see your cat drinking from the pups water bowl well clearly them's is fighting words so the dog up and bounds for the cat your cat seems to give a slight smirk and darts for your office jumps on your desk and ever so gracefully as if the cat cheekily knew exactly what it was doing pawed on the keys s-h-u-t enter suddenly your darkness befalls your soul because that is your only uplink on this router the site is 50 miles away and you're already in your stretchy pants for the evening what do you do stay tuned to find out that answer and more on this episode of the art of network engineering welcome to the art of network engineering thank you tim for that episode or for that intro this episode is sponsored by opengear providing secure remote management of your critical network infrastructure and we thank opengear so much for their sponsorship of the art of network engineering podcast i am aj murray at no blinky blinky and i am joined tonight by dan richards howdy how you doing dan oh i'm doing good yourself mr how do you pack it i'm doing well yes how do you pack it he's working on a little branding maybe can't wait to see it andy how are you doing that's what's going on over there just for the people listening andy has open gear socks on his hands he's like making them like puppets that is worth uh going to our youtube channel yeah for sure to watch that that is a great use of sponsored socks tim how you doing i am well aj thanks for asking i'm excited to get going here how are you sir i am uh so much better after hearing your intro the the feedback on your intros is stellar the fans love it i hope you can keep that up so no pressure yeah no pressure at all gotta bring the goofy and you do it well uh our guest tonight is dan baxter he's sc manager with opengear dan how are you doing this evening and thanks for joining us i'm awesome i'm doing well thanks i'm really happy to be here we are super excited to have you and in just a few minutes we will jump into all things dan baxter and open gear but before we do that we got to go over the winds andy can i get a goat screen please after what you said last week i didn't want to take it away from you thank you aj i will let you do the goat scream exclusively unless uh unless you're not here then i'll do it you're a good man this week winning is uh qeatriot our buddy quietriat from the discord he finished his associate's degree in i.t and networking also from devry a lot of talk of uh devry in the discord uh the past few weeks so okay congratulations so he got his degree at devray yes okay gotcha yes uh big promotion for river oh yeah everybody knows river and the discord he is being promoted to senior network engineer congratulations good job congrats very nice that dude deserves it i believe if he's anything at work as he is in the discord man that guy is thorough yeah so absolutely uh subs or perhaps it's sub z i'm gonna say subs uh he passed his jncia junos congratulations subs oh yeah very nice subs coral carl do they still say carl like that is or is like the walking dead like just not a thing anymore no i i always i still say it yeah okay okay every time i hear carl that's all i can think carl coral so uh way back when i want to say it was like last fall he passed the cloud plus beta exam and that finally became like a thing through comptia and uh because he has other comptia certifications not only did he earn officially the cloud plus certification uh but he was also given secure cloud pro and uh cloud admin pro so he got like three certifications for like the price of one uh so more for the wall in carl's office awesome carl the machine yeah yeah he is a machine i mean there are not many people that get that many certifications so you know you know you know they work hard oh yeah yeah for sure adil khan passed his az 900 and i believe they also said they were going to get straight to work on their encore so okay congratulations very nice and our favorite butcher turned network engineer chris deadman rowlet has completed his intro to networking uh cis class with us and he passed it with a solid a nice which uh based on how hard he studies and works towards his ccna that's i think we just need to give him a permanent spot in the winning section right yeah he's dropping tons of cool wins in there it's at least every other week if not every week yeah lots of good stuff going on so congratulations everybody andy can i get another goat screen please love that sound love that song the winning goat hey what's that ghost's name though hbu hb that's right that's right the so the poll the twitter poll closed and the fans have uh voted the official name of our screaming goat is hot buttery udders after our one and only aaron who unfortunately cannot join us this evening but uh our our very own hot buttery udder is the winning goat oh boy mr baxter we're not gonna get into that i take umbrage with i'm calling the community out the winning goat one of the options was winston i mean come on you went with hot buttery udders because ha ha but winston for the winning goat i mean that was the obvious choice i gotta say i'm with andy on this one come on people i definitely am with andy but i also think andy's a little salty too salty what i'm not salty i'm not salty anymore dude i got up this morning i wrote 10 miles on my bike i meditated this is the new zen andy since my vacation in the outer banks man i'm chill no more saltiness can we call you sandy he sent your vacation and after you got the pool finished yeah yeah yes yes that's an important caveat all right excellent well congratulations everybody and congratulations to our goat for getting a name i'm sure you know we are working quietly in the background to get some exciting goat-related merch out there i'ma let you know as soon as that drops but i digress i want to talk to mr baxter a lot more about his background because i'm really curious how do you become an sc manager for an out-of-band management company ah good question i can tell you it's not a deliberate or it's kind of an accidental position that you fall into i guess and i'm not sure i know of any sc managers who kind of that was my eye in the prize direction i was going all along right yeah i would say like until i knew that sc was like a job i it's not something that like i aspired to be but but after like understanding what that role does and you know it's like oh cool i could see myself doing that kind of thing so yeah definitely want to want to hear how you got there yeah i can tell you how i kind of got to be an sc and then it's almost a similar story becoming an sc manager but they're they're very related so you know i i kind of listened to some of the the stories and of the the origin stories of some of your you know your community and it seems like either i had my eyes on the prize eci i'm going to become tcna i'm on the track and i'm going to go work and be a network engineer or i was something else and kind of moved into it and i think all along my career it's kind of been both originally i started out to be an art teacher you know an artist i loved art wanted to be an art teacher eyes on the prize graduate go out and be an art teacher and then you know that time came got out i couldn't find work in the area i was in so i decided you know go take a job with you know doing something i could do with technology i've always loved technology and started working um as like a service technician for a reseller and so you know at that point i just kind of said well i'm going to learn everything i can you know i know how to research i love technology so i just had a new you know new prize eyes on the prize and i kind of uh started looking at being the best technician i could learn printers learn pcs i went to work for a reseller and they were doing a lot of these early days novel networks which was a lot about getting pcs and servers on a network and just over time really um built up a real affinity for networking kind of like i got into servers and i didn't like it so much um i really liked networking and so i immediately started doing courses tried you know going for my ccna taking the test and then threw my hat out in the ring and eventually landed a job with a big bank in new york city and it's kind of funny in hindsight my first gig was gonna be maintaining routers and switches on the trading floor of new york city wow oh wow no pressure yeah no pressure there right but you know again uh i'm on i'm heading towards that path i got a call from an sd manager i'd worked with and as you know when i was working at a partner and he said you want to come work for us and and be one of my sales engineers and i you know first i'm like hey i'm i really want to be a network engineer you know but he kind of gave me he gave me a very convincing you know argument and uh you know i really thought about it and you know again a detailer i just shifted gears i never really thought i would be in sales but suddenly found myself as a sales engineer hey dan was so can i guess what they told you did they say well there's no nights there's no weekends there's no maintenance windows and you'll make more money is that sold yeah like because because we've talked to a couple sales engineers recently like aj said earlier i didn't even know what an se was and once i talked to one they're like well you can work over here there are no maintenance windows you'll make more i'm like wait a minute what there's no one call like why why aren't i doing this job is that the pitch they gave you he he may have added some of that may have done that um you know that would have been my first real gig as a partner you didn't do a lot of late nights you didn't do a lot of maintenance windows a lot of what you did was during the day um and so i was probably not aware of of what i know today in the life of a network engineer it's a lot of hours it's a lot of after hours maintenance doesn't happen during the day so uh yeah it it was certainly a different path than um you know than what i was heading into it's it's been a great run i love being in sc uh i still like working with networking but um you know i just like being an sc it really changed my focus all right the thing was like suddenly i'm in sales okay how do you prepare somebody to be a sales engineer you're not not necessarily a sales rep you've got you've got to be technical you've got to know your your body of knowledge you got to become an sme but i just said you know i i had these skills becoming a network engineer i knew how to train i knew how to focus and um i knew how to research um community was big so i reached out to the other people in my org the other ses you know it must have been like that new kid asking a million questions right and uh i just don't remember those guys and they were pretty patient with me but i i really kind of approached it with the same approach i took to learning networking um you know there's not a there's not testing and manuals for you out there but there you know there's knowledge base out there so i looked to mentors and you know just got my mind around the technology and just started becoming the best essay i could can we take a step back i gotta say something here so given what we just learned dan about uh your earliest career path coupled with you getting into what you got into uh in technology we've got living proof here now folks that there is an art to network engineering all right tim no i don't even make that tie like how perfect is that like thank you tim that was fantastic i i do like that i kind of agree with that i i often talk you know with my team you know sales for us is like a craft in some ways you know it's a craftsmanship it's something we want to be really good at it doesn't matter whether i'm going to be in you know my medium doing an artist or you know musicians going to be doing something but you know there's you can just do it but you know sometimes when you're really in your groove and you're loving it you know that's a craft that's an art yeah yeah i i have two questions so was that first desk a help desk position basically you said you were doing like printers and i didn't recognize the job title but would it be akin to what help desk would be the reason i'm asking is a lot of our audience are people who are trying to get their foot in the door right and you went from like you know uh educated art teacher guy who couldn't get a job and then got this job in tech how did you get your first job in tech it was it was all baby steps i had worked as an instructional designer because i had a degree in education so i worked for an as an instructional designer doing computer-based training and it was just the tiniest little thing i latched on to now at this time you guys probably we had xt's and 286 and we had to repair them ourselves so you're writing you know i'm writing the the script for the the training and the computer would die or i'd have to do an upgrade i'd have to go out and do that upgrade myself and so i just started self teaching myself okay okay pc upgrades and so i went into a partner and i started with pcs then i learned hp printers and then i learned the novell you know that's why i learned networking i just one little step i i was really great you know um what i was doing was going after technology i realized that technology was really really important if you knew it and you were good at it that could get you solid it could get you advancement um and so i just grabbed every technology i could and learned it and i worked my way up from pc technician to you know novel network installer to installing servers and then suddenly i'm cabling i'm doing switches and now i'm learning vlans and you know that you know just one step after another is how i got into it i just kind of worked my way through off each of the positions it's a smart insight too you had like oh wait there's tech is everywhere this is important maybe i should focus on this and i guess you enjoyed it right because you wouldn't have pursued it if you couldn't stand it i i did i i really liked tech i had always been you know that kid always taking apart toys and pulling out the motors and and and just working on things i was one of the first kids with you know the computer lab working on my uh working on my radio shack i think it was and we had cassette recorders for hard drives and and we just any technology get my hand on and it wasn't until later i realized i can make a career out of this and i can be good at it and i will say in those days it wasn't as much there wasn't really the internet when i started out in all this it was manuals and there was that information but you know today there's so much information there's so much ability for you to research you know if you're trying to get in there just show that interest learn those technologies and just you got to start it's not going to happen overnight you got to really do your time right yeah now dan as you moved up in your career did you just kind of set yourself up by working hard and learning new things did the opportunities come to you or did you still feel like you had to put yourself out there and go to them i think the detours came to me but everything else i was i was really driven uh to to get i really wanted to advance for a lot of reasons not yet i liked it i liked technology but i also had a career you know motivation my son was one year old and i really i wanted to get something that was going to be solid and uh and i realized you know technology was a way to get me there um but i really worked hard at it was very deliberate some people um you know i worked with people who just you know maybe they were naturally good they just did it um you know i'm in a band on the weekends and this page you know this is my daytime job but you know one of the guys i worked with you know he he would have quit and done his band but he was good at servers so he did that and paid his bills but you know i was always i want to learn this i want to become an expert and it's going to take me to that next step i probably wasn't ever the kind of person who said this is what i'm going to do for the rest of my life you know i'm kind of that wandering you know i don't want to say spirit that's hokey but i'm i'm kind of going out and you know i gotta i gotta have change i gotta have advancement and progress you know that's kind of just my dna i'm not saying there's nothing wrong with just you know doing your job and doing it well and contributing you know that's that's a kind of a if you can do that man great you know there's a lot of strike not strike but it's it's challenged to continue to advance right it takes it takes a lot of things so i was definitely deliberate did you get that did you get that network engineering job on the stock exchange or you were getting you got you saw that job you were getting ready for that and then you got talked into yes two weeks away i was already living outside i was in red bank new jersey they were going to bring me in and start training me up and uh and i got that call and i just you know i i made that change i was so close was that somebody you knew like who reached out to you he was a sales engineering manager yeah yeah and he was i worked with him um when i was at a a reseller and we were we were um the company was zyplex a long time ago we were selling their terminal servers i was up in northern michigan and he he would come in and do training and i would just suck and drive every bit of information what's the difference between a hub and a switch you know and so he remembered that i was that kid who just asked a million questions and you know we would drive to a customer together i'd probably talk to xero off the whole wave so um don't be shy to ask questions right oh yeah and that passion's infectious too right when you get somebody who's hungry and asking a lot of questions i that that excites me you know when i get somebody who wants to wants to know stuff so so how much how much sales is in sales engineering and so you know when we used to when we had architects on the show i thought i wanted to be an architect so i kept asking them like ooh how do you do this well now that i know what an se is i want to be one and i do have a sales background so some of the ses you talk to they say well you know there's dedicated sales folks right and i just come in i'm the nerd that talks to their nerds and i don't really have to sell is that your experience or do you kind of need some you know sales acumen how much sales is in the sales engineer job because it's tech and it's sales right like it's kind of both it is but i think sales engineers sit a little in between we do work with sales reps and they're you know 100 sales i think the the skills that are essential for an sc are are part soft skills and part technical uh the soft skills are less about you know sales and selling something but more about advising the customer and and gaining trust and credibility and and you know how we understand our customers by the time they come to us today and they're like 90 of the way on their journey so they're looking to us to to answer some questions that they just can't get answered and they want us to kind of guide them through the process of owning the technology so that's we got to be that that source of knowledge for them we don't we don't really sell to them we can you know i i will talk about a competitor's products with them and and help them understand the differences and make you know it's theirs choice at the end of the day so if i were i could bring in somebody without sales skills and make them a good se but if they you know they they don't have any technology capability they're just never going to be able to be an sc and that's what was behind that question because people inherently don't trust sales people right what well listen what well listen so i used to be a used car salesman right so you got to figure where i'm coming from what's that where's the goat oh yeah but well you know so it's just an economics thing i mean sales people make their living by convincing you to buy their thing right so you said trust you have to build trust with those folks and it's that's hard as a salesperson to get you know like hey i'm here to sell you my stuff but you also have to develop that relationship so i'm just kind of fascinated at this se role and how you're kind of in between sales but not you kind of have to you know you have to earn their trust and let them know you're on their team but at the same time you're not there just to jam them with the new shiny box and then you know leave so it's it's an interesting role to me it is um and i'll just say this in defense of our sales reps they're not salesies you know they're not hard they number one they sell to network engineers right they all have a net they have like a new york minute to get what they need to get done um we usually hack through as many slides like okay i'm not going to show those slides we're just going to get to your needs you know the role of our sales guys are to be trusted advisors you know they just they just need to help the customer move forward they're not trying to convince them into any position at all but um you know for an sc you know you you it's not so much sales as you just need to know how to help the customer really yeah so dan i wanted to ask you you know your original i guess like aspirations were to be like an instructor an artist and is is there anything that you can link to your your current position that kind of like scratches that edge for you like you still you know fill feel as fulfilled in your current role today as you know maybe what you set out to be an art teacher yeah that's an excellent question because you know everybody has something they're interested in doing and you can bring those things to what you're doing in your career in you know i try to always bring art to what i was doing and number one it's like an art of sales it's an art of being an sc right you know that's my craft i'm trying to do but i'm also trying to be very creative you know i i like to think outside of the box i like to create new things you know that's why open gear was so exciting we were always creating new things and uh even down to little things like powerpoints and diagrams and videos you know there's always some outlet for that really desire to do that expression i can i can find it in a lot of stuff i do all throughout the day even my comments when i comment out things i'm thinking how does it look in the document for the end user there you go so we've talked about out of band briefly and then we got into your journey and how you became a sales engineer then what a sales engineer and all that stuff i'm i'm guessing because i'm thinking of myself when i was starting out in my career even before like hey i gotta get my ccna and get my first job i'm guessing there's a good amount of people that don't know what out of band is right yeah so should we kind of start there maybe like what is this out of band and then kind of go into the history of you know where where it came from because yeah then can't believe i say it like the new generation of network right now right no so the new i've i've been around you know enough to see a new generation of network engineers come in and uh they're not necessarily aware of of out of band i i so we do talk to customers and they may be new to network engineering and like what is that out-of-band thing and some of them may have network out-of-band management in their network and not even know about it so it's probably yeah we can outline it out of band you know so what is out of band it really kind of refers to managing something in a way that's not you know directly through the production interface it can also mean managing something through an alternate path like a dial up modem or lte now for a windows person autobahn used to be kvm now it's ilo for a vm person you're gonna get on a vm console that's that's out of band of sorts and for a network engineer out of band really means getting access to their local console ports um so whenever that dark knight and cat and puppy thing happens yeah you know you you don't get locked out so what what people should know is that you know you out of band can give you an anytime anywhere access to that piece of equipment regardless of the state of the network whatever the puppy can't do whatever you do whatever that bad day is you'll always be able to get to that device so at the heart of it is what today are called console servers so if you guys probably heard terminal servers you hear the term back and forth so uh when i started in with terminal servers they were literally terminal servers there was a dumb terminal it was uh someone typing away with a screen with two colors you know a light gray a dark gray and they uh they were accessing a mid a mainframe or a vm of a v8 you know like a vac system or a unix system so it was the serial thing getting out to a host and that continued for a while all 10 base t but right there that was when bay networks and cisco were going at it the network was booming things were going on around the world the internet was growing and networking just went crazy and and suddenly people got off that technology got onto ip the internet went crazy this is right around when aol was around you guys know aol and that started coming up and uh that terminal server got repurposed into being an access server so you'd hang modems off it everybody at home would screechy dial up into it and uh they would get access so if you're an isp you know if dan's going to say hey i'm going to do dan's isp i don't want to buy a big you know cisco as5200 i can get a terminal server put modems on it and people dial into that through ppp and they get on the network and so that was great right so i went from terminal server to an access server well the the internet went crazy broadband came in and somebody said what if we take this terminal server and we switch it around and instead of a serial device trying to get out to the something on the ip network what if it's people trying to get to a serial device you know that could have been a sun server that could have been a router switch you know the thing to know is almost everything in the networking world almost everything today still has a local console port it's an rs232 and you know if you're right next to it yeah that's great you hook up to it and you can connect to it but i mean guys how often are you guys right next to your equipment when you're you know you're setting it up it's cold in there i don't want to be right next to it yeah so so to you know at that point it all really changed and that and this is when out of band really started maturing um the the the internet was going crazy a lot of growth in in the networking world and it really out of band really matured it started off with modems um if the network was down it was a really bad day you would try to dial in and you'd get on you'd have a you'd have your cli access to that device uh pretty much you know the carriers came out comcast and others and they all had cable modems and so someone said hey i'm not going to take that pots line on there i'm going to put a cable modem right onto my access server and then i'm going to use that to get to my out-of-band device and then from there i can get to my routers and switches so yeah go ahead dan from an enterprise customer standpoint do you see out-of-band console servers more in data centers or more at remote branch locations or is it a pretty even split where do you see the application distribution of uh out-of-band console servers we we still see both um because somebody somewhere has a router or switch running anything if it's the cloud you know maybe it's the cloud provider who owns it so we we see we see a bit a combination historically i'm a customer i call them up we do a call with them uh we've got three data centers i've got a dr site and i have 20 remote locations and for maybe 10 years that was the mo and then it started changing you know people started moving to colos and you know out of band became really important for them for different reasons because they're separated from it and then things started virtualizing and then of course sd-wan came in and the edge started going crazy so today in 2021 it's really the far edge the near edge the branch sites we're seeing a huge amount of activity there but we still see a lot of stuff at the enterprise core in the data centers whether it's your core right but or somebody else's today how many customers actually are building you know new data centers it's it's mostly you know i'm going to a cola or i'm going to go to a cloud and what what does the form factor look like if if i want remote access to a device is my out of band console is it a one-to-one thing can i have a one-to-many connection what does that form factor look like yeah the the console servers they'll come in four ports all the way up we've got a 96 port units front and back yeah and so we have customers who gobble those up and you know that's hyper scale it depends on your rack some customers will put you typically it'd be a 32 or 48 port in a rack and that rack may serve left and right the whole row or it may some customers have enough density that they'll put a console server in every rack yeah they're they're 1u appliances it's you really want that one-to-many relationship i just want to get to that one ip or i go through my central management and it gets me to that that group of serial ports all around my my network but it is definitely a one to midi i just want to go on record as saying i love me some out of band my my first experience with it was in my home lab i was um i had my cnn i got a job at the knock and then all these big dogs that had all this experience around me was like you need to build a lab and go after your ccmp i'm like all right and they told me one of the things i needed was a was a console server and the reason being is you know i had whatever it was like you know a bunch of routers and switches like hey you could just go from you know one to one to one right instead of yeah they're standing on the video instead of moving the console the blue cable from device to device and i was configuring it it was nice i would just log into my console server and then i you know seven thousand one seven like you know the port assignments you could just put them in secure crt and get right to them so so that was pretty sweet i could get to all my devices in my lab you know through that my lab wasn't next to me it was you know in a basement somewhere yeah but but then years later at work you know like i'm now managing data centers all over the world and i i can't go to them like dan works in a data center and a lot of times he can run down with a console cable right but then i know you have like other locations too so yeah i mean i have a me i was mentioning to you before the show i have a maintenance tonight in salt lake city i'm in philadelphia and i shipped a router out there and i got to get it up and i you know it's not going to come up on this circuit we're having problems with the circuit i got to get hands out there was a problem getting hands because it's a colo i love out of band because typically if it's our data center it's you know it's plugged into our management zone and then it's also plugged into a console server so i i can always get to the thing right and there have been times when we have a problem with our management zone you know oh you know can't get the stuff get to that console server you're right in i mean we have to be able to get to our devices right we have a lot of people depending on this infrastructure and i love that the out of band gives me that parachute that i i can always get in you know for me it's a it's a warm and fuzzy kind of feeling like because things break right things things go down things break and there's a lot of reason so i don't know that's just my little personal story of how i came to you know be introduced out of band and what it's done for me i wish i had a console server at this location tonight that i got to try to turn up because the circuit is not coming up and it's going to be a problem yeah and i think like you know one thing too is you know we we've all i don't know if you guys have sit there like when you're about to push a config to a router or switch or whatever and uh you're going through your notepad because you know we're still copy and pasting over here and you're like okay if i paste this first i'm going to lose connection at that point right and then now so many times triple a yeah and so you're so it's like you i've locked myself out of so many devices playing with triple a and and so you you start from the furthest point right and then you work your way back as you open up the port or open up the interface or you know add trunks to vlans uh or adv lance trunks and and uh you walk yourself back you have to sit there and think about that without a ban you wouldn't have to you wouldn't have to do that right it you wouldn't have to worry about okay i need to make sure i put this first before i break my connection so that when i bring the connection up on the closer side now i've got connection back to the you know the further side but uh or let's say who's who's ever done this you put an acl on the on the far end device and you locked yourself out and then there you go now you've got to send somebody on site uh if you can get somebody on site you might have to go there yourself you know depending on where it's at or what your situation is uh and then you have to either if they if the person knows how to console into something or you get them to uh turn off the router and turn it back on and let it wipe that config and that's another thing too is like i don't know if you guys have done this i'm sure you guys have but there's been times where i have uh you know i get it config ready and i'm like this might break this and so i will do a um reboot uh in a certain amount of time so let's say that again reloading yeah reloading five do my command and just you know pray it didn't break it and if it did you know i'll give it i'll go get me a cup of coffee or something and wait for that sucker to reload that moment you drop the config and everything freezes you're like oh son of a bitch yeah you don't get you don't get your little cursor quits blinking you know it's like oh no it's a rite of passage it's already passed yeah we got ourselves out of a device and so so i i think it's important you know since we we feel like and i think very very accurately that probably not a lot of our listeners know what out of band is um let's let's just i guess throw it out there what the opposite of out of band is to to kind of further state why it's so important and that would be in-band management and that is when you use the same production network to access so you know you're sitting at your desk and you're using your enterprise network to ssh to all your devices you know that's that's when you can really cut your arm off and when you cut your arm off from in-band management that's when you have the out-of-band management to to save you you know to be able to yeah according to himself so i am them the inband is what basically what i was describing earlier right it's it's like if you have a router and on your gig one slash one interface you put an ip address right and then you now ssh to that router on that interface's ip address that's in band right there whereas what out of band provides is if you were actually plugged in straight into the console port on the back of that router just to kind of give a high level of the console always there yeah it's a friendly hand it might be slow but it's there and it will help you it really is that lifeline to be able to get to that from anywhere yeah because you're so good i can just go unmute i mean some war stories you know and and dan i don't know if you've heard any of my war stories in the past on uh some of the other episodes but like one of my first experiences where dan brought down the network was i was sitting at my desk and i was adding uh vlans to a trunk and i forgot to put the add command the ad word at the very end of it and so all i did was i added the single vlan uh that i was adding to the other vlans i only added that single vlan and so boom i dropped out the entire floor drop connection and uh i grabbed we didn't have out-of-band and i grabbed my laptop and my console cable and i booked it to the data center so that i could undo what i just did and uh yeah so that i've i have personal uh scars about not having out a band whereas if i had out a band if i would have made that mistake if i was using out a band and i and i made that mistake i could have easily just copied and paste back in my entire config and it would have been a blimp right rather than an outage like that you could have gone back and reviewed logs so the the console servers they'll know exactly what you typed in exactly they'll they'll know that dan you know he messed it up they'll tell on me well until you delete the law yeah yeah right so so think about someone new to a position you're going to turn up a site here go ahead do this you know they don't want to get anything wrong right it's it's nice to have that that that security knowing that you have a rollback model a lot of our customers say you can't do your maintenance window until you verify that you've got your out-of-band connection it's live and you know make sure you can connect to it in case you know you get that compelling event yeah you said something just there dan where you said that you need to make sure you could have that check that make sure the out of band is there you see people deploying uh out of band with redundancy and what i mean by that is do you see people that have maybe direct internet access into it and then maybe cellular as well or do people just typically have one entry point into uh and out of band system oh hopefully they've got two or three okay yeah they should at least have an a b on their ethernet ports they should have most you know today pots lines are you know it's hard to get expensive and so lte is really the way to go in a data center it might be one lte device is a gateway to others at the branch site you definitely want to get on there make sure that lte modem is active i mean that that is a ip interface and uh it's certainly the one you want to know like when you know andy or someone's going to go do an install you can send out that console server with lte enabled he can put it on his desk with lte enabled wrap it up ship it to the site someone unboxes it and plugs it in same as it's powered up you know he's on on that device yeah i we should have done that so since since we're talking about access to out of band i kind of wanted to bring up the the security aspect to it so if you're logging into a console server that it's essentially on the internet right if you're connecting via lte or via the internet so from an open gear standpoint is there some sort of cloud portal that you can log into that maybe has multi-factor authentication what are the access methods yeah the biggest the biggest security threat with the lte interface you know what hardened against is that public static ip they're just everybody in all the bad countries doing malicious things they're just hitting those ranges all the time and so the the best alternative is to take an ip that is private nat so it's only outbound and so we do have a thing we have a thing called lighthouse and the nodes call into it so when there's a bad day or there's an outage they know about that they say hey i cannot get to the you know i can't get to the weigh-in i can't get whatever i'm down so then it turns on it's cell modem and then it connects back and and it does that all over openvpn so it's x509 it's really secure it's only on when you need it and when there's an outage and it's um only you know upstream to the the central portal so so you're saying you're seeing your your devices have a automate out they automate failover that's right we ping a certain address we call failover it's part of our smart out-of-band solution where we'll ping two addresses if they turn up as failed we'll assume there's an outage at that branch or that location or that cage and then we'll turn on the modem it'll connect to the carrier get its ip and then it'll the call home tunnel will redirect it's always on it's always there connected but it'll redirect itself out through the the lte and connect so by the time there's an outage you'd get back on the central management and it would have already reconnected and figured out how to get home okay very cool that's pretty that's pretty sweet so you said smart out of band so that everything you just described is what smart out of band's doing right like i guess the opposite of that would just be none of that like it's just down that dumb out of band without a lot of it just be serial over ip you know with yeah the idea with smart out of band is we're taking we've been doing this long enough and listening well enough that it's not just what we have lt embedded we have really smart lte i mean we'll fail over we can keep it dormant you can text it some customers text it and wake it up because they want to have a stack okay that's kind of cool yeah well that's interesting some devices will say andy uh i just i'm turned on i'm here at site and here's my ip address if you want to get to me or uh hey you know you can say i just had an alert i saw this condition happen and it'll use that cell modem to text you so we kind of say these are all kind of smart smart ways of putting the pieces together so first text in my router lab if you're really lonely you can have conversations we have started communicating with them i've heard you mention once or twice about how you guys listen right and then i guess work on solutions so like what how how does opengear work with the networking community and how do you guys develop things i mean i think we've set the stage right like who you are how you got there and then we've talked a lot about autobahn what it does how it does it i'm i'm kind of interested in you know your company right like why you're here you're educating us about open or about out of band but also how does opengear help what problems are you solving what are people telling you you sound like you're listening to people and creating solutions i mean what have you seen since you've been at opengear you know what what have you guys done to to you know fire up the space to make out a band better to make it smart you know what what do people want right and that's exactly right we we've constantly listened we do demos we asked them i think one of the things that cracked me up for for a lot of years was we would show them everything and say so what did we miss here guys what are we not having here tell me about something okay and for a long time people like that's it right you know open gear nailed it um but you know we did cisco live we you know and get ourselves involved and then uh and a lot of other different events and we just uh we do tech field day we listen to network engineers um we don't we don't just go out and build the best smart you know it's the the best mouse trap it's if you look at our if you look at our feature set those are all things customers asked for you know hey i'm doing this do you guys have support for that we said no but you know we were able to really fast prototype and get things into production for customers so we really listened well today you know we started hearing things like do you have support for python i want to do python on box okay why does a network engineer want to do python on a box uh do you you know i've got my boxes every i got ur console servers everywhere i got central management to them i just realized i have proximity to every single point in my network can my automation group drop something in there so these you know we heard these kind of trends coming for the last four years trickling up and more and more um and so we just started putting them in there i mean the real the real secret sauce is uh that we have this really well-built hardware that was custom built for cut for network engineers and then we just kept over time with 10 years of listening and adding to the feature set if if you're a network engineer coming in you say well i need this list the chances are we got them covered and if we don't we have the flexibility to get those those put in there it's pretty amazing like do you guys have like a res like an r d department i mean i mean how do you how do you take a feature that doesn't exist figure it out spin it up engineer it and then put it in your boxes that's that's that's pretty amazing to me yeah the founders did a really good job right out of the gate they you know oh this the name open gear is not you know by accident it's it's open source um we we engineered manufacture our own hardware and got really good at it and i have a lot of control over that and we have a lot of dev teams that we can we can create features i mean it was really one of the reasons we succeeded against a lot of the other vendors in the arena because we were nimble and we could listen you know first it was just you got linux and i can get to the shell and i can put a bash script you know that was this kind of hybrid ccne linux guy that really got us to our cult following and then we started going after the more mainstream ccies and they're like well i need this um you know i need failover i'd like it to be able to do this and we really listened to those things and uh the the the kind of development teams we had in place were able to really crank that i mean it was there were some years there it was pretty fast and furious um and but we did enter into a more mature phase but we still we still kind of have that startup hunger and that's kind of the excitement of the job so so you're talking about these features like uh do you mind like going over some of that like what what are some of these automation python features that your your products offer yeah so that some of the big challenges especially in the last year was this idea of i'm going to ship my unit i got to ship a router to that remote site or that new data center and then i you know i got to figure out how i'm going to to to configure it and the problem was you're like on just in time shipping so it's going to go straight from disney to that location it's not coming to andy first for him to pre-configure it make sure everything's beautifully configured and then being shipped it's going to go there straight so we we created this idea of a mars lander the thing lands at the at the site it's got a tpm chip in there so you know it's gonna ship safe it calls home to the central management piece over lte and you say okay you're there now i'm gonna be booting up an aristo or a cisco cat 9200 here's the config for it um all you have to do is get somebody there who can just plug into the ethernet and plug into the serial and we're going to provision that device for you so it's like it's secure provisioning and out of band together so we provision it too so so you're saying like you store like let's say i'm the i'm the network engineer and i'm i know i have a site over in arizona that's gonna be turning up and i've got my config ready and everything like that i can go ahead and like are you saying i can upload this config into into this device already like and it ships out and it knows hey i have an arrest of plugging in you know whatever port and i'm gonna push this config to that as soon as i as soon as i see that come on to the network or how how does that work it you can choose when and where you push that config you may want to ship the device without any configs on i mean it's got a tpm no one's going to get in there but it you may not even have that config until it gets there and so either way you can pre-configure it with the image and the config of the file and what happens is the device will boot up and we will say oh i recognize you you're an aristo with this mac address ah okay i'm gonna push this config for you it's at this it's at my https server you'll find your config at me and by the way i got an ios image we want you to be at 15.xp whatever is your certified firmware it'll either downgrade or upgrade itself to that and then it'll apply its config and you can watch it all you can use the out-of-band piece and just watch the whole process happen you'll see dhcp requests going across and files getting download i mean you just it's really plug and play it's pretty cool wow this is insane yeah that that's wild you're crackling you didn't need to yeah who knew what are you doing andy obviously i have no idea what i'm doing we've established that we started hearing that request around 2017 okay meaning we started cranking up the engines and getting the platform ready because smart out-of-band console servers were they just weren't ready to do that they didn't have the cpu they didn't have all that today when you get some of our advanced console servers about 50 of the resources are just waiting for that kind of stuff for you to enable it you know out-of-band takes 50 the other is is for you or secure provisioning yeah so what what you're describing is like a lot of a senior or a deployment engineer you know like i work for a partner and and a lot of guys on my team that work for professional services like this is the kind of stuff we do customer buys a new router switch whatever it is they're sending it to a data center that you know nobody works near because it's like far far away from everything else that they do so hey they hire us to go out there and set it up for them and be their remote hands and and so you're you're kind of talking about my job you make this be part of your services yes yeah no abs absolutely yeah you can do the job but make it easier for you to do your yeah that way you can kick your feet up on the desk and let this little box do the trick that's that is awesome yeah yeah the it's it's it's exciting to see um a lot of the changes when sd-wan and cloud and everything started changing we started seeing a lot of net ops i don't know if you guys have seen that happening um but we really started seeing a new guy a new person in the in the meetings or a new person on the call we've got you know helen from automation is here and the next thing we saw was you know my guy frank was suddenly saying i have to go home at night i'm going to be learning python tonight right we had network engineers starting to learn devops i don't know if you guys have seen that starting to come to town yet oh yeah oh yeah look at that face on here it's great i failed out of coding in college and here i am learning code i i'm i'm thrilled you spend your entire career avoiding it like i did and then also you find yourself yeah because i i took coding in college and i was just like this is cool but i wouldn't want to do this for a living and now i wish i may be paid a little closer wait let me backtrack that important people at my company are listening yes i love net devops and python and ansible are everything i'm about it is easy and it's great put the socks back on your hand so the goodman a lot of customers so right now we asked them where are you at this journey most of them are i'm not there yet and they all have a computer or an automation team so they work together so don't worry you're good handy those guys will do the coding and you know you'll do the networking you just sit over there and look pretty andy okay that's all i got he's having a hard time doing that i'm just kidding i love you andy you see that though i mean that is fresh i know i'm jealous of that haircut i did it myself yeah i trimmed this bit no i didn't i i should do that i grew it myself so i'm like i can't believe that there's a box i could have shipped with this router and i could just the ltd the lte i think is what's blowing my mind because like in our managed data centers not the colos we have to get a console server out we got to plug it into our management network you got a you know https to it from a web browser get in do the configuration like if i'm understanding you correctly this damn thing just you plug it in somewhere it grabs an lte connection and just conf and configures itself like that's that's unbelievable so i could have shipped it to this colo they could have plugged it in and then plugged the console cable from that device the four port guy into my router and and i'm in that that's uh yeah that that's amazing now it really is like i didn't even know it existed that's the lte is blowing my mind i think well so we like i'm sorry we like to bootstrap the network we're not going to do everything right yeah we're going to get in there what we're going to do is ship that router and it'll say hey andy i'm here and then you'll get in and do your magic right yeah we're just going to get the bare essence to get the bear config to get it bootstrapped yeah get me in yeah that's that's fantastic so let's talk a little bit about how do i access this box like andy kind of hit on it a little bit earlier is it is it a is it a dashboard that i log into or or how do i connect to this out-of-band management uh box that you're talking about it's really up to you and at the scale you're at you can go to the appliances themselves you can go to their gui that's what your preference is or you can go to the cli and everything you do in the gui you can do in the cli you can it's going to be an ip access or you can connect to it you know locally with your laptop if you were there but it's you know it's almost always a remote ip access to the appliance once you get to about 20 or 40 uh or certain number of devices or if you have a lot of cellular you're going to use our central management piece it's called lighthouse and you'll just go to that portal and you'll just type i want to go to cleveland arista four and it'll take you to that console port and if someone's attached it you know you'll go there now can you do like you're talking about the bootstrapping portion of you know hey i need this iso to be pushed to you know any cisco router that i that connects over you know whatever um is do you put that in the lighthouse is that something that's pushed up there and then that's pushed to the the out-of-band management or how does that how does that work i guess how does how walk me through that yeah you hit it on the head that is exactly what happens the the central management piece orchestrates it okay so you go in there and you say it's it's all visual orchestration it's really nice you don't have to become uh an ansible playbook expert you don't have to become a dhcp setup you know configuration expert yeah there so there are 58 steps that are done if you watch the ansible playbook there's 58 steps that we're doing behind the scenes for you to make that happen or more what happens is though you just go in you say i'm turning up a site it's got these five devices here's their mac addresses i'm going to click browse and load in my configs you know my cut and paste configs i'm going to load those in as a config dot whatever and and here's the image you load that in and you say push and it'll it'll push them out to whatever console servers or all console servers that you want it does the it does the setup it does the distribution for you okay so so that lighthouse server is that is that like a multi-tenant thing hosted by by open gear is that something that i can you know host myself in the cloud uh you know what what does that look like that's a virtual appliance so you can install it in your own vm infrastructure or you could host it up in aws or as your or whatever you know your cloud environment we're not necessarily a 100 of a cloud you know we are a hosted appliance but yeah you host it it can be it can be um redundant we have primary and secondary so you could have secondaries in dr and all the units call home you could have one in tokyo and one in new york and all the units call home you know to those those one devices so you don't ever have a single point of failure but it yeah it's a it's a it's a device it's a hosted appliance yeah nice is it a virtual appliance or is it like a physical box yes it's a virtual appliance it looks it's like a linux it's so all of our appliances are embedded linux and this is just a virtual embedded linux device and you you don't you don't um bring up a linux host and then you know host linux vm and then drop the software in it is everything self-contained yeah so what's the scale there how many remote console servers can i have to one instance of lighthouse there seems to be like a golden threshold anybody's getting close to 2000 they start to get to a scale where they're like we're going to take over this and we're going to have our own tools team at this kind of scale we just tend to you know we we grow our own we we create our own software and they'll take over so they kind of get up to around 2000 it's kind of where we see them saying from here on out we're gonna we're gonna um take it over into our own automated systems they might start doing things with you know ansible and apis it's just you know creating their own portals okay it's pretty big you know if you're if you're a remote you know that's a lot of remote branches yeah and we have customers close to that with just the roman remote branch part wow speaking of scale and we've said cloud a couple times so like i'm thinking like azure aws right like they have a bajillion devices in their data centers do they approach like an open gear i mean they must have console servers in there right like is that i mean you probably can't tell us who your clients are but are are there console servers sitting in these azure aws super duper data centers with the bajillion devices like do you guys have i hope so well right i mean you would have to right and and that's what got me thinking the scale like just the scale of those places is probably my numbing yeah we have hyperscale customers right uh you know these are the customers who are at this kind of scale where they don't need our central management they put things in racks their automation systems grab it configure it if there's a problem with it they pull it out they put a new device in and um yeah the the thing is hardware and software sales are not they're not slowing down as things move to the cloud and the obvious reason for that is you know if if you're going to go to a cloud vendor and run your network in a virtualized network they need to create the gear so yeah these there is still a lot of network equipment out there and and we are very certain important to hyperscale now some customers are so big those they build their own silicon yeah i figured that was the case yeah they build their own switches they build their own servers they drop their own cpus and those those those those ones are like you know they don't they would not use anybody's console server but we're we're pretty much everywhere wow where there's a network we're probably there yeah hyperscale on down to tiny little you know an unmanned station somewhere out in topeka but uh yeah yeah it's it's um it's pretty amazing especially the hyperscale they have different requirements than the small site um but we kind of have appeased them all somehow it's it's pretty cool so what's that so you're flexible then we're fast friendly and flexible yeah okay i like that right there nice alliteration the marketing department yeah we it's that platform and it's just uh we do like i can't give you the exact number we do a lot of demos the sds do a lot of demos every day all week long we talk to so many network groups and um they're all different i don't know if you guys have ever kind of picked up on this but there's no network engineers the same there's no network group there's a lot of similarities but they're all just a little different and we just listen to that and we go back to the product managers we've we've flown in our engineering solutions team we just spent a whole day telling them what we learned about customers over the last year you know they went home with this kind of scrolls the golden scrolls under their arms so you know that's kind of what we're always trying to do is make this this relevant solution so let me let me kind of ask a let's hit on the sales side just a little bit we'll see how good the the sales side of your your time what's that smirk for there mr richard uh so i can i can attest you know from personal experience i feel like out of band trying to sell out-of-band management to your company's management um sometimes that's kind of a hard sell right like so so do you have any like like what are what are some cases where you've ran into that and do you have any like tips on how to make management understand our pain you know what i'm saying like how can how can dan richards finally get some consoles network engineer or anybody listen to this like it's it's a no-brainer right like if you didn't know what an ib was before now you do and you're like why don't i have this but then now you got to go to management and make that sell so that's a great question and you can't go to your manager and say look yeah we either put these in the projects or you know or you're going to have a compelling event that you're going to be really angry about i don't want to say i told you so right i told you so it's not a good you know management incentive threatening usually doesn't work yeah and it's scaring like ooh there's a lot of yeah there's a lot but what we can do is we we do help our customers articulate that during the poc process we definitely know that the time will come that that champion of the poc they have to go do a management presentation you have to show your team you have to socialize it and you gotta say to the management why why is this important to us um and you know what we do is we we help you articulate that to your management it's going to be different some people it's about we need always-on access some need some we have to have low risk we have to deploy services fast this is going to help us do the services faster some people um they're just by the nature of their business uh errors are really bad right one screw up uh and somebody doesn't get to stream the super bowl right there's there's a it really depends on the the customer application and what we do is we tailor it but i i would say um you got to articulate it in the terms that the management understands this is going to help us do our service better it's going to help us have less risk it's going to make the team happier um tim isn't gonna have to stay up so late at night and and he won't be cranky in the morning right it's it's you gotta be cranky okay yeah i mean really we sometimes we put in rois we talk about the cost of outages but that's i like to you know i like to articulate more about what it means to the team and the business objectives yeah really i mean really at the end of the day i need to make your life better i need to make an engine you need to say i need this because this will make my life i got 99 problems and this won't be one of them no that that's good uh because i know me personally i know andy says he's got a sales background but i don't and i feel like i have i struggle with trying to um and this kind of goes back to we had an episode talking about like soft skills and whatnot like how do you how do you translate you know what you're dealing with to management to be like how this would be a good fit for me or or you know that kind of thing and i have i struggle with that personally and and so it i i'm always curious like how can i translate how important this can be you know and with that without like you know like kind of what you were saying like without threatening them right without coming up to him and being like well remember that time i told you we should have bought this one thing because it would save us from this and you know we just went through that and it was very painful and and all that uh that i don't want to be that guy you know and uh so i've just i've just always been curious like a network engineers aren't built to you know they're built to network you know management works it's not like did they ever realize at some point they're gonna have to stand up in front of the group and articulate value of this thing that they've been looking into i about three weeks ago i worked with a network engineer first job right just right out he's a contractor he's not even in the fold just yet and they gave him the out of band to to look at and he had to he had to get it stood up had to look at the value statement he had to make a presentation and i just like just relax i'm going to get you through this i'm going to send you powerpoint i'm going to give you you know value statements i'm going to give you here's where you click to show the network engineers and give them that aha moment right and so you know we we actually you know in our arsenal of secret uh tool kit the scs and on my team we all have we're ready to advise our customers in that step we're not just like an answer question and get out of there you know it ends when you get past the field test for us and and you've survived that whole process and everybody's happy gotcha well that's good to have a contractor is never going to forget you yeah and they're providing that value right you'll be in charge or something or not i don't you know i just like helping them that's um and i've been there i've been that new guy right i think back um as someone you know you grow up uh in the position in the career you gotta look back and say wow that guy really helped me out more i i really appreciate him being that patient i must have just pestered him with a million questions and you know you when you get that person doing that with you you're like it really makes you be more patient with them i mean we're not meant to be mentors right we're not like i'm going to be a network engineer ccie whatever it is it's like it's not easy to be a mentor it's it's not a natural skill but i always try to think about when i was that person those people are saints yeah you see how busy everybody is in their job when you have somebody take the time out to to work with you that's there's no way i would have been able to succeed without those people taking me under their wing you know like all right new guy with all the questions come on over you know because i had a lot of questions i still do how much linux do i need to know on these open gear and the reason i'm asking is when i got my first console server you you had to get in there and bang around in linux and that's how i learned linux is getting my home lab console server set up but it sounds like what you have it's like self provision right like reaches out to lte magic happens and poof there you just like are they really that smart that i ship it out it connects to lte and then somebody just has to connect the console port to my right like boop it sounds wonderful yeah there is two or three commands you would have to get to the box at some point somewhere because uh unless you have us pre-configured for you you you got to put in an apn you have to you're going to get a sim card from your carrier you don't want us to know your apn or anybody to know your apn so there's just some things that have to be put on the appliance but the you know the answer to the linux question is really you only need to know as much as you want to know need the linux component to make this thing be an amazing out-of-band box for you but if you if you really want to leverage the power of of linux it's there for you but you know it's really very easy all the devices are going to have a cli it's not going to be a cisco cli but it's very easy to understand it's got help you can get in very easily get it get it going on the network it's got the contextual help which is which is nice what's an apn there's been a couple acronyms thrown around that i don't know so an apn is uh the code that a carrier will tell you if you work for whatever organization when you guys buy a carrier plan all of your all they will all have their own apn it's an identifier and it's a unique name for your cell plan and you put that in so when you show up you gotta have the right you gotta have the right that's called an imei you gotta have the right agent yeah and the right side card they all come together and yeah everybody there are some public commonly used apns but most organizations for security-wise they might they'll have their own apms it's like the keys to the cellular kingdom kind of is that how you grip the code yeah yeah you said did you say tpm earlier or am i getting them mixed up is that a thing i'm sorry to throw around a lot of that's okay an acronym it's called a trusted platform module and this is common in the industry servers router switches and and now we've got it in out-of-band devices it's just a way to number one have a a signed key on your os so you put part of the key in the tpm chip that no one can ever get to only the manufacturer has access to that area you have a key in the another side of the key in your os and when it boots up you know is that the correct os or did some bad guy grab my my device and ups open it up put a bad os on there and then tape it up and ship it to back to my site so yeah and if someone gets it and they get that key and they start pushing in it and you've got your you know you've got your your arista config on there um you don't want them to get that config off of them okay so it's like a private key kind of authentication yeah like yeah it's a trusted vault of for your for your os and for your uh your computer so how does the nsa get around that when they uh get the yeah when they when they break into just kidding when they break into the trucks and put in their spy chips no i'm just kidding i do have a real i don't real so what i i'm a you know i'm a network engineer so in my mind only routers and switches connect to these things but you mentioned like ilo earlier which got me thinking i mean are there all there's more than just routers and switches that can connect to to these things is that an accurate statement like are servers ilo ports connected to these they could be yeah network engineers are more likely to need a management interface like a palo alto for some reason a lot of network engineers that's the one of the few times they'll go into a gui um it has a cli i don't know why they don't go to it but some of them say i have just purchased a new device and it only has an https management interface what do i do like this is especially true in sd-wan it's a great little box you just plug it in boom it connects back to the mother ship um where's the cli you know you'll move it around there's no there's no counsel port on that thing so the network engineer says what do i do now and what we've done is in our central management we discover those targets we allow you to get access to it we can also so what happens is there's this whole vpn network infrastructure between the central management and all the console appliance the console servers so a lot of customers realize wait i have my own management network so you can use that to get yourself to a remote site right on that local land and browse to that thing during an outage so yeah not everything is serial right so some of it is changing there are devices now that are only uh ip based access yeah and and that's a big area of growth for us um if i've got an automation gateway where there's actually a suddenly now i have an https link in lighthouse for a device that it doesn't have a serial port on it and for us that's really kind of weird but it's awesome too because we would talk to customers and they'd say i got 90 of my stuff in in open gear and this other 10 is just i can't because it doesn't have a serial port and now there's just no exception it's like all of it for the network here okay so so it'll work with like uh imm and idrac and that kind of stuff is that what you're getting at like it you can open up a uh web page to that yeah yeah yeah it'll open up a webpage for you and uh it gets you there awesome dan well we've uh we've covered an awful lot about out-of-band management and opengear is there anything that we we didn't cover that you'd like to touch on before we wrap this up no just i appreciate the chance to talk with you guys in your community um i love the fact that we can talk and share stories with new engineers and and maybe senior engineers looking to maybe move into management i could we could probably do a whole episode on that uh uh the unvoluntary managers but i think so you guys know what i'm talking about therefore you are you're one of those so i i do appreciate the chance to talk with you guys it's always a blast to listen to you it's fun to be on with you talking and i do appreciate the chance i really want to thank you dan man this has been you know the fact that you and your company i want to thank you and i want to thank our community right so we haven't been doing this that long and the fact that we've grown to a point where a vendor has approached us and says hey we like what you're doing we want to contribute yeah i want to thank the community for that because if nobody was listening you guys you know wouldn't bother me and then the fact that you and your company have you know approached us and it's just been such a nice partnership so far we i was nervous about how we were going to do this and this has been such an educational uh you know session for for me personally and i know our fans too it's just uh you've been a pleasure so thank you to you and your team and your folks at opengear this has really been great yeah you're certainly welcome thanks for letting us do this in this format because i don't want to speak for the rest of the guys but i feel like this was just a normal show right um we've learned a lot but we didn't we didn't have to really change the format so we really appreciate that dan thank you yeah you're welcome i'm surprised the time's too fast it always does we didn't have to go to puppets very often let me use a puppet to explain this yeah thanks i appreciate that we'll get socks all around for everybody hey yeah there you go uh thank you for your time dude oh my gosh for those listening uh andy is now doing a sock puppet show have a drink okay okay all right well dan thank you so much uh big thank you to opengear our sponsor for this episode um you always remember your first and opengear is our very first sponsor truly appreciate it this has been as the others have said a fantastic partnership uh thank you so much and uh i'm sure we will talk to you again uh you've been a great guest and you certainly brought a wealth of knowledge and there's certainly more in there that i'm interested in tapping into so i i'd be more than happy to welcome you back for another episode so we can get the rest of that out of there and and to our listeners maybe if we do like a demo that'd be kind of cool i look forward to that yeah demo rack here yeah i would absolutely look forward to that excellent and i know that we've been talking to sarah from the marketing team at open gear and we are definitely working on some fun giveaways uh she's got some mock-ups coming our way that we can look at and approve and as soon as we get those uh in her hands ready to ship we will do some giveaways uh via our social media accounts so keep an eye out for those yeah that's another great part of the sponsorship right in partnership as opengear wanted to help our community members like what they asked us what they need and so we got some giveaways coming sponsored by opengl which is great yep got some great stuff got some books coming you got some good swag it's going to be i'm excited yeah i feel like i say that at the end of almost every episode i'm just pumped this is so fun i'm just having fun man it's awesome awesome well thank you very much again dan and to open gear if you're thinking about an out-of-band solution please give open gear a shot and uh and have a chat with uh have a time to have a chat with dan yeah and to that uh dan do you are you on social media are you on linkedin do you email like what do you what do you got i'm on linkedin you can just send a note to sales at opengear and i'll see that but yeah i'm on linkedin you can grab me there and connect with me i love connecting with network engineers got a lot of connections over the years and a good community of my ongoing so anybody feel free to reach out to me that way awesome we'll definitely put uh links to opengear of course and and your linkedin into our show notes so people can find that easily yeah thank you appreciate that maybe i need a discord handle open gear dan i've been geared in i like it all right well thank you very much to dan and open gear and uh thanks for joining us have a great night don't let those darn cats ruin your network see ya hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of netench that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at art of network engineering dot com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you