Ep 12 – The Packet Pilot!

In this week's episode we meet Matt. Matt shares his journey from the Ez-Desk to the Help Desk, and beyond! Make sure you seat belt is fastened, your tray table is in the upright and locked position, and get ready to take a ride with Matt! 

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Transcript

this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore tools technologies and talented people we aim to bring you information to expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers welcome to the art of network engineering i am aj murray at no blinky blinky got another exciting episode planned for you all this evening so i'm super excited to jump in but first dan dan the mountain man how you doing howdy how's it going i called dan the mountain man because i was on a video chat with him this past week and he has a gigantic beard it's it's getting there it's it's like the kind you think a bird's gonna fly out of i think there is a burden wouldn't you know that by now or is it like a yeah i don't know we're still hunting for your twitter name i think it yeah i think uh what is not so stubby dan oh my gosh well i guess i have to go with it then i'm gonna people i'm gonna redo the twitter poll because a lot of great suggestions came up in the comments of that tweet and so i'm just gonna have to redo it because uh i wanna make sure they all get voted on but quite a number of people spoke up and said that not so stubby dan might have to be it that hey i'm good with that i like it i think that's uh well so do all of them know the force gump reference then they must i mean yeah anyway andy how's your meat it's warm and moist this took a weird turn so the reason you're asking me obviously is because i was smoking a brisket all day on my smoker and my meat is good it is now resting in a cooler and it will be delicious it's my first brisket i'm sure it'll be just fine i'm i'm looking forward to hearing how it turned out because we live too far away for me to sample i'll send you peace all right and our guest this evening is matt matt how you doing oh i'm doing all right how about you guys doing well matt is a fellow cisco champion i hung out with matt last year at cisco live had a great time and i'm super excited to have him on the show with us this evening so let's get right down to it matt uh what do you do well i i work for a cisco partner of r um i primarily focus on internet and wan edge including our new adventure of sd-wan with the occasional switch replacement and core campus lan type of adventure so other than that personally i as some of you may know i have a dog that is kind of an unofficial face of some things uh and i play drums in hockey that's about it gotta love wolf arora well somebody has to and uh and so what uh what flavor of sd-wan do you focus on is it primarily cisco or is it just sd-wan yeah so most of my deployments are primarily the cisco sd-wan so the viptela acquisition um i have seen and dabbled with a little bit of silver peak and i've touched a little bit of velocloud um the market is certainly interesting no doubt about it what's your favorite if you had to pick one is yes an appropriate answer all right all right i i think i think there's there's places for just about all the vendors yeah really interesting watching some of the acquisitions um some are more complex and that complexity gives you quite a bit more flexibility some are super simple and make a lot of sense for some small business so uh i mean it's i i don't know that i can pick one that fits the bill for that particular situation right yeah i agree okay so uh obviously you you uh probably didn't start there how did you get started well that's quite the long story um i i grew up in a very small town in northern lower michigan yes that's a thing northern lower michigan um it's south of the bridge they call us trolls i was not very far from the bridge um some some people have called me honorary canadian uh because i'm sure you'll hear it in this podcast you'll hear me say a boot um but my uh my my father grew up uh around the area and ended up living his entire career in the telephone office um i can specifically remember trips out to go fishing and whatnot and we'd stop by the office and yeah there was empty punch down blocks he'd just give me wire and a punch down tool and he's like here go play kid um so i've i've always been around the technology standpoint um and that came with early internet access in early computer access so i mean i grew up probably like most of us breaking old computers just because we had them around to do it and uh from there i ended up you know doing the typical staples easy tech type of job and ended up in healthcare which was a help desk position forced me to learn networking just due to the role and it flew from there so nice so you you started out uh working at staples at the the easy desk um was was there anything about that that kind of either you know drew you more into tech more into it were there things about that that you know made you maybe reconsider a career in i.t yeah i mean i kind of fell into that uh you know i was i was trying to be the rock star drummer back in the day and i went to school at my local community college they had a networking degree as an associate degree and honestly it was it was more windows networking so i kind of fell into that windows troubleshooting side of the house and that kind of really landed me into staples and then i moved five hours away from my hometown um and at some point got tired of retail and started looking for for jobs and ended up at a healthcare company that really was the sprout to my dick my my career um that kind of that broke me into seeing cisco for the first time oh okay yeah it really went from from retail just kind of let's add some ram to your computer do a little virus scan to work in a help desk where ultimately i ended up running the voice the vmware and the cisco environment wow in in help desk uh yeah it was it was a small little 500 person company uh physician owned and there was two people on the help desk the the network guy got promoted to a manager so kind of laid off on doing network tickets and i kept getting called as the help desk i'm like send me to a class let's do it so that's kind of where i picked up cisco interesting that's very different from our help desk yeah you know i find that a lot too like help desk at one place means something completely different at another place so my first job was help desk but within three weeks you know getting comfortable with the team they gave me god rights to the network i could do anything anywhere didn't matter and then i work at a different place i was on the help desk and i was so restricted as to what i could and could not do uh and in the premise of them hiring me on was you know they had a team of network or not not just network but you know systems engineers and their claim was they were getting too bogged down with the help desk stuff to keep up with their projects so they started a help desk they hired me but two-thirds of my tickets i had to escalate because i didn't have proper permissions on the network uh so it's just really weird how help desk can can mean two very vastly different things yeah and it was interesting for us because it was again just a small little 500 person it was a physician group so you know you had uh rns and and whatnot and different positions um i think our entire it team was six people and that included a manager and a director so it was it was quite small and you know ultimately it ended up getting purchased by uh a rather large healthcare institution around where i live um three hospitals three different counties up to 8 000 employees and that kind of that moved me into a network team position where my main focus was half voice half half network and that really gave me the drive to keep learning new things and kind of push myself forward so did you say while you were in the help desk that's when you started getting training though yeah uh again the the old uh network admin was promoted to a manager and kind of started dropping that role a little bit and i just said hey you know i'm taking the phone calls for both voice and you know simple d land changes let's uh let's get me trained on cisco and they agreed and sent me to a week one class and i went and took my ccna and went from there so was that your first training that you got right there in in cisco world yes yep and you asked for it like it sounds like you were going after it they weren't like hey matt we want to make you the network guy you said hey can i get some training on this right it was one of those situations where you know the the network admin was promoted so he was trying to relieve his role and i was on help desk so i was continuously taking the tickets about the network to begin with just to just to log him and send him his way and he wanted to move his career and i just said hey you know if we're gonna do this let's do it and teach it to me you know somehow whether it's you just teach me or send me to a training class and they agreed so yeah but you were the catalyst management didn't come to you i think it's an important point to make you got to ask no correct no yeah no i agree with that 100 i've talked to quite a few people and they they always ask how you how you get started my my answer is always even if you're on the help desk if you got a lunch break you know go talk to if you're interested in networking go talk to the network admin and say hey can you show me a couple things and how long are you in that position for the help desk position uh that was probably three to four years before the acquisition um and then the the hospital system that picked us up kind of put me into basically a level one network position so i was just running around doing cabling switching vlans um and it kind of grew from there they they started to learn what i what i had learned uh and what i knew and started letting me kind of spread my wings a little bit if that makes sense did you like it were you kind of interested in it when you started to get more into the network did it grab your attention like oh wow this is better than you know installing ram or helping somebody with a broken laptop is it more challenging for sure i mean more challenging i don't know some of those desktop guys are pretty darn good um but uh i oh yeah i said i grew up around the phone company so i i know it's kind of a stretch but the telephony network uh as it was on a pair of copper wires is very it's not too distant from the networking challenge right um and as i i gained experience at the hospital system with you know three different counties 8 000 employees i like the challenge i can specifically remember during college my instructor asked everybody around the room he went around he's like would you ever want to run you know a corporate network and i remember you know a little shaky voice back then being like no that's that's a lot of responsibility and then all of a sudden it happened and i'm like no this is kind of cool you know and then you know i i had the opportunity after that to uh thanks to a friend he he put my resume into the bar i'm working for they called me and i took that opportunity because i started to enjoy that challenge of new things and things i might not necessarily do day to day so you went from healthcare to the bar correct yeah wow so so staples healthcare bar that is the path so i you know i'm sure that's not uncommon but i i personally have hopped around to a number of different places throughout my career so um yeah if aaron was on here he'd be like you've been at 25 which is not true it's not that many um it's only 24. so at the var uh versus versus healthcare what you know what's uh what's the major difference working for avar versus working for you know just one company uh trying to keep track of 18 different networks at the same time um i mean i mean honestly people people have asked me before if it's much different or ask me how how stressful it is working at a hospital my my opinion has always been it's networking it's layer two it's layer three uh you know hospitals just have more stringent downtime regulations but at this end of the day it's spanning tree it's ospf i mean at the end of the day it's the same technology you know it's i i had a co-worker at the hospital that one of the first days i worked there after the acquisition we had a voice router go down due to somebody doing a debug all um really fun right kind of one of those horror stories but you know i just went down to the the mdf at the time counseled in started looking at it and he he looked at me and it's you know my first month and he goes why are you so relaxed i went routing it's a router there's no reason to stress about it you know and i i that's that's been my view um to your question the the biggest difference in the var is just managing multiple projects with multiple networks and everybody uses network 10. you'll get you'll get asked once in a while by a customer like oh don't you remember that server address i'm like no no it's it's 10 dot something oh yeah it is i'm like yeah so is my house it's ten dot something as well i don't remember yeah yeah you don't see too many of the 192s or 172s or anything else it's all 10 10. 10. that yep yeah so you were a month into a job at a hospital the building was burning down around you figuratively and you were calm well that's what my co-worker said i like to think i was are you are you calm by nature because that would stress that would stress me out i get spun up when the building's burning and everybody's looking at me it's something i'm working on you know i'd like to be calmer it's one of those things somebody issued a command and it was broke and you know i can get stressed about it but the fact is it's broke it's already broke i i can't make it not broke unless i just sit there and work on it so did you walk in knowing what the problem was or they were all like hey something awful is happening we don't know what more or less i was doing something on it and all of a sudden i can't access it anymore and our pri's are going down i was like oh oh okay well yes i'm taking a hike half a mile through a tunnel because it was it was a connected campus and take the laptop in the console cable i don't know i i've i've learned over the years just not to stress about things that you can't control you know it's yeah absolutely i'm always impressed with the calm people who are you know just they have a list of things they go through they know what to check and they're just they're chill about it i don't know if that comes with experience or if it's maybe personality or both but i'd argue a little both i mean you know you're running into a bug you can't predict that you know so so why stress about the fact that it's down just start working on fixing it you know you know what should be there you know how it should work so just do your thing yep yep yeah i think that's some great advice you know but when stuff starts breaking uh when you get into troubleshooting mode try not to stress out because that only cloud the choices and decisions you make as far as like which is the most kind of logical thing to check next or whatever i had a similar issue when uh i was working for a small msp was on site and the it was a vmware issue and they had one domain controller and their vcenter server and a few other servers go down because one of their vm hosts locked up completely and you know that i'm standing there with the i.t manager and he's just like uh you know he he's got directors calling him like what's going on you know this and that and and so it's just like all right well let's let's take a step through this and figure it out and um we tried to reboot the server see if we could unlock it or whatever and it was taking a really really long time because it was an older dell server uh and so we we just went to the data store and pulled the vms uh up and and started them on a different server and got things going again before the other server was able to finish booting and then once it did get booted up we load balanced every everything back out but um you know just being able to to you know be calm think through the process like what are the different issues what are my options uh if you're not getting the response you want or expect okay let's let's go to the different option uh so yeah keeping keeping a calm head is is really cool i developed that skill uh working and volunteering in emergency services over the years uh it's really easy to get worked up when you get somebody you know upset for lack of any other term but uh if if you remain calm other people around you also tend to remain calm too you know it's it's funny you bring that up i actually had uh i'm not a voice guy but i know enough to be dangerous and i had a project where i was replacing um upgrading routers to to new hardware and they were also upgrading some people are going to cringe at this atas and i know enough about them that it didn't make sense for us to put both myself and our voice engineer in the truck and you know go go drive it so i was like i know enough let's let's install them and i i ran into an issue with one that would not upgrade or the life of it it would not upgrade and i had the customer literally i go up to him and be like okay i'm still working on it here's what i'm coming up and she goes oh that's okay i mean you seem like you're you're comfortable with what you're working on so i'm not really worried about it and that actually hit me pretty good i'm like okay so i i'm comfortable with what's going on and can relay the fact that yes there's an issue but i'm working on it i know the resources to get in in touch with to fix it and that calmed them down and they never stressed about it they never they didn't sit over my shoulder or anything it was one of those okay he's working on it he that's why we brought him in and you stay calm if you don't stress out i i think to your point that helps a lot in and that's not just from a var perspective i mean yeah you know treat the term customer as your internal customers at wherever you work you know and that would that was the same thing at the hospital you know i i'd work in a clinic upgrading a switch or two and i'd have an issue and they're just like okay yeah well we'll just stand by and let us know what's going on you know as long as you don't you don't kind of get that little that shock and freak out a little bit most of the time people will respect you because that's what you're there for yeah exactly the second somebody starts to pick up that like oh you're worried you're scared you're freaking out and you're you're supposed to be the hired expert you know if if you think things are breaking then they're going to be really worried about the decisions they made in you know bringing your company in or whatever the case may be and and to your point about customer i a lot of people say they're like oh well i'm customer facing or i'm not customer facing guess what you're always customer facing whether you work at an enterprise or even at home my wife is my customer my kids are my customers you know like uh you're always dealing with customers it just depends on you know who the customer is you know you might not be it might not be customers of your business or the business you work for but they're always your customer yeah we always joke the the biggest change management uh issue is the house network upgrade right the kids start screaming the waves start spreading yeah yeah you gotta schedule that real good yeah and you can't do nighttime outages because that's like netflix time right so you gotta do even later or early morning uh change windows at home uh but welcome welcome to the 3am home data center uh before we stray too far from it i want to go back to ata real quick for anybody listening that doesn't know what an ata is macajit could you let him know yeah so you're gonna make me stretch my voice uh voice terms here so an ata is essentially an analog it takes an analog phone and ties it into a digital telephony network i don't recall exactly what ata stands for so you're really putting me on the point here um but basically it lets you take your old analog phone and tie it into a modern voip network yep yeah that's exactly i i couldn't tell you what ata stands for either but you hit the money that's that's exactly what it does so i think that's good enough for our listeners we can fact check and and throw that in the show notes uh as to what exactly ata stands for excellent um i love the point you made earlier about pushing yourself forward so um what are what are some examples that you could encourage others um maybe in a similar position how did you push yourself forward to make progress in your career well you know it's funny you asked that um at the hospital we had an intern program and we would take a couple interns from one of the local colleges here in michigan and i ended up to the point where there was one intern that would literally walk into my office and ask me if he could just sit there and watch what i'm doing and i started asking him why and his purpose was to figure out what he wanted to do and what he would like to do as a career um and he he was hesitant to ask questions and i started just going ask away man i'm here let's let's do it i'm doing this day to day anyways if you have a question i'd love to walk you through it and i think that's one of the best things you can do to push yourself is if you think you're interested in it ask the people that do it around you i think our networking community as a whole is a super super great community in terms of sharing knowledge um and people ask me about that every once in a while and i always go well yeah if i can teach you how to do this task that frees me up to learn how to do the next new task and then we can keep that cascading you know and you know it it's one of those it's it's like picking up uh an instrument right it's a yeah it's gonna take some work but if you're having fun doing it keep at it you know there's gonna be struggles along the way yeah i'm sure all of us on this on this podcast here have failed a couple tests here and there but we all finished him we kept going right it's because you enjoy enjoy doing what you do so i i think if you're intrigued by it and having fun with it just tackle it like anything it's like anything else go for it what do you have to lose you know yeah take take the time you know somebody gave you assistance along the way so now i know why not you know pay that forward return the favor you know as you're climbing the ladder reach down and help somebody else up uh there's a number of different sayings for it but i think that's really great advice you know it's it's great advice on both sides if you're you're the guy in the position doing the work and somebody's asking you questions take the time you know if you don't have it right then in there tell them that be cool uh but save some time for them later and pull them aside and show them what you were doing and you know never want to turn away a curious mind i think that's like something that you can do that might you know damage damage the name damage the brand of you know what you do in your position and you personally no absolutely i i think that's probably one of my favorite things about working for a bar is i'm brought in to do something most of the time that they don't know how to do you know it's a it's a weird thing you know let's take multicast most people don't deploy multicast they inherit a network that already has it deployed um so every once in a while i get to i get to spin it up and they're always curious about it and i go okay well let's walk through it you know let's you gotta you gotta manage the network afterwards so let me help you know what you're doing and i don't see that as ever a problem i i it helps everybody you know i i think one of the the best things you can do is try and teach somebody else something you know because that helps you validate how well you know it you know i'm not gonna sit here and try and teach you trigonometry because i have no clue you know it's just not going to happen right when you know a topic to the point where you feel like you can explain it to somebody else accurately then then you probably know it a lot better than you think you do right um and and so i think to that point um let's uh let's talk about your blog i love the name too man i love that love that name so that name yeah i need to blog more you guys need to uh get on me about that don't worry we will but uh right it's okay i haven't blogged in three years you're a good company but you're making youtube videos now oh yeah yeah so pack it pilot snail um there's a little bit of story behind that i uh growing up i always wanted to honestly actually be uh in the air force there was an air base near my hometown and uh my dad and i would always go out they had a little viewing area and we'd always watch the f-14s and f-15s take off uh naturally my eyesight uh requires some correction um so that wasn't going to happen back in the day and uh so i always thought the idea of the packet pilot because really what i do is with my switching and routing in my my wan edge i am steering packets and i just thought packets are in flight right so i thought packet pilot kind of sounded cool uh so i i went with it but um yeah i mean i i occasionally drop some stuff on there um typically only when i run into something that irritates me such as back when the uh sd-wan code came out for the isrs that was uh quite the adventure to figure out how to get working so i posted a couple about that i think that's my most recent um ironically i think my most viewed is how to uh do structured cabling between a patch panel and a switch i actually know a couple guys that have shared it with their colleagues before um kind of it's all over the place i hate to say that but i i just run into things and that it's more more or less something so i can remember what i ran into before but it helps other people so i i would recommend everybody uh either do a blog or a video log you know let's do some youtube whatever uh share what you know because people come across it you know i think i remember those of you that are listening that know who she is i think i remember a tweet that fish found her own blog how to do something that she forgot how to do at one point yeah that's great it's there i i i surely need to write a little more but you do i will say that because your articles are good i when i was doing um some sd-wan stuff last year we were trying to set up our own lab uh at work and uh i was running into some issues i did some googling happened upon your blog and uh i think your your article definitely saved the day and it helped me get me through uh the issues that i was having uh so it's good stuff for sure definitely want to check that out i i mean that that's part of why we do it right is yeah to me it feels good to hear that that somebody found use out of it you know it's it's a sharing knowledge thing again help each other out absolutely i mean like there's no there's no two problems that are like any like that are solved the same way right like a bunch of people can have the same problem and you're gonna have a bunch of different solutions for and so if if everybody blogged everybody wrote articles on their experiences then we would just have this massive catalog of you know how to actually solve issues and not just the crappy error messages we get right what error message was that again does you love that when somebody comes at you with a code hey i got code a3142 what does that mean oh i don't know let me let me let me check that let me let me pull that out of the depths of my brain and tell you from off the top of my head uh it's broken stuff doesn't work i love it when i'm doing something and it's like contact your system administrator and it's like crap i i am i got nowhere to go that that's me now who do i call go to google you right i didn't realize matt you had a uh you had a blog and i like that story about how you got the name too i i wanted to be a pilot my grandfather was a world war ii you know guy up in a plane and uh got me all hyped about it and i went to sign up for the air force and same thing eyesight they were like yo kid i'm not gonna let you fly a fail you know billion dollar fighter get out of here so that was it was a short stint yes i gotta be a pilot someday no you're not no i mean is before lasik it stems from i which die hard was it one or two where they blew up the plane on the runway i think it was two ah that was actually filmed in my hometown and my hometown is all was uh the last resort landing for the space shuttle because we had a lot of runway for the seven for the 747 and there was an international air base up there so my dad and i would go out there all the time and just watch him take off and land and it bit into me you know it's got back did your dad work at a central office he said he was in telco and yeah yeah so once he graduated uh college he pretty much started at what was gte uh how many years was he 37 years in so he went through the verizon acquisition and then the frontier acquisition so uh he started climbing poles and then ended up being the senior guy in michigan uh doing central office work you think his kind of technology career had anything to do with your interest or not like i said we'd go you know get in the car to go fishing and he'd stop by the office to do something and i saw you know all the telco racks and all the gear and the punch down like i said they had empty punch down panels and wire and he just gave me the tools and he's like hey i'm gonna go work on this and i'm just sitting there punching wire down because what else am i gonna do uh you know my my first tinkering with technology on my own was an old family computer he's like here you go and i put it in my room and kept breaking it you keep fixing it and showing me how so yeah absolutely that's really cool my first job in tech was a central office tech for you know it was like a summer hire and i was just amazed you know like look at all this and wait these all go to places and this big switch and well and they did their wiring really good compared to the rest of us these days yeah yeah and i was thinking back to like taylor's episode where his dad had worked in tech and seemed to kind of be the spark you know that the taylor kind of ran with so it's just that's why i wanted to ask if your dad's had anything to do with it it kind of reminded me of taylor a little bit and you know and i got little kids and i'm i mean i love tech it's been a great career it's a lot of fun and not that i want to push my kids in one direction or another but you know i think it's i came from a family like carpenters and cops you know what i mean so i looked at them and i'm like okay but i i would hope someday maybe my kids could look at you know what what i do in my career and maybe it's something they'd be into i like hearing that you know your dad had maybe a little something to do with pushing you down the path yeah sure i mean the the beauty of the technology industry is it's endless and i'm sure all of us have we've migrated our skill set throughout the years because you know if you have the interest in it you can pick up a couple books do a couple of labs and learn it and move on to the next thing i mean look at look at cloud computing look at um you know your your devnet from cisco and all the pro the programmatic networking like if you want to do it you just learn it and you can migrate to whatever you want and you know that that's kind of one of the nice things if i want to be a route switch engineer today and tomorrow i think security is really cool i just start picking up security stuff it's we have i i think the people in technology have the mindset to keep learning and that really pushes people to be able to do whatever they want and it makes it a very flexible career that's a good point too that there is kind of like well i don't know what to be called lateral mobility and you know yeah if you are doing one thing you're like you know what i want to be a cloud guy now like you can do that i don't know if a medical doctor can you know like all right i'm a i'm an ear nose and throat guy and i want to work on feet you know i don't know if you could just pick up a book and take a certification exam and go do that so it's it's it's kind of cool yeah in our fields it's fun if you want the challenge it's there and it's yours to grasp so you got the ccna well um have you pursued any additional certifications beyond that so for me my story started with again i had them send me to training at that healthcare provider and i got my ccna and then i ended up taking over the voice network so i got my ccna voice shh nobody on the internet tell anybody i do voice at that point we were actually working on virtualizing our servers and we had a partner come in and help do that and i said i'm going to take over that went and got my vcp that has since expired because i just don't touch it anymore and from there i just i kept on the networking train and i ended up getting uh ccnp ccdp ccna security just because that was the stuff i was working on um and then since i've been at the partner i started focusing a little bit on sd-wan so i just recently took uh the sd-wan exam for cisco's ccnp specialist and to that point like you can just kind of bounce around and have some fun you know if you want to learn it go learn it and that that's kind of my my focus right now is just renewing a couple certs that i have um where it goes from there i i can't tell you you know i i've looked at a little bit of azure and aws stuff because i touch that every once in a while and it makes sense to go study it and learn it if you're going to do it study it learn it and go past that exam i mean it's not going to hurt you gives you a goal and a focus point so did you like ccdp did you like the design stuff i did um i'm more of a hands-on guy i like making things work so i'm kind of more you know touch the keyboard um type of dude but uh yeah i mean the the design aspect makes you think different you know it's it's one thing just to say oh yeah a spanning tree we'll just do this but it's a second thing to think about the entire network and how you actually want to put that together um so i i think they're both absolutely valuable yeah i'm trying to figure out my specialization after i you know pass encore i know aj and iron they're big design guys and so i just my ears perk up when i hear that i you know i don't know if design is design sounds easier to me than like advanced routing you know what i mean it's not like i want to take the easy route i mean i'm a data center guy and i'm taking enterprise so don't even ask me why i'm doing that but um just because i'm so far down the line i guess studying for the old ccmp track but uh yeah i often wondered if design helped kind of you know just understand how all the pieces kind of are coming together more i like to make stuff work too but sometimes with the design like when we have to get something i've where i come from architects basically hand me designs and i feel a little kind of handicap with that like i'd like to be able to be a little more involved and all right this is the solution this is how we're going to put it together i don't really understand design i mean i think it it plays well to know both sides of it um i think knowing the technical side helps you design better and i think knowing the design side helps you do the technical part better i mean they they kind of go hand in hand really um having the overall picture of what you're trying to accomplish in the design can definitely steer what you're going to do in the technical aspect so i i'm game for both be honest i think they're both great yeah yeah i agree um when i when i did my ccda it was after my ccna and the da went into some of the routing protocols a bit deeper than the na did it definitely went into bgp a lot deeper and there was is to is was actually on that exam as well so i just covered you know a little bit of the same but also a whole lot more uh and it was just really interesting to to get into that and you you know not only do you understand like how does it work but it you get a little bit of the theory in the background you know behind where it came from and and all that stuff is just like really interesting like a little mini history lesson within there sure i mean i i had in what was it server 2008 r2 i actually got my uh what was it mcsa back then and to be fair as a network engineer understanding what windows was trying to do from a server standpoint helped me work with the network better for those servers you know i i think if you're interested it and the knowledge makes sense do it it's not going to hurt you to gain more knowledge about you know the network as a whole you know fro from a network standpoint if you want to think about it it's good to know what voice is trying to do what video is trying to do you know because ultimately it ends up running over the wire that you're controlling uh just to be familiar with all those different things you know linux windows voice vmware you know don't don't think for a second that like oh well i want to do this so i got to go get the certification no no no you don't have to get the certification i mean if there's some job requirement asking you to okay sure fine go for it but just just play with it just learn it get comfortable with it i mean you know i i also work at avar and so i'm in many different customer environments and one day i'm working on a windows server helping a customer do radius the next day it's you know maybe a linux environment or working on you know cisco ice or something like that which is also like a linux based kind of appliance so having a little bit of all of that different knowledge is great i don't need to go get certifications and all that stuff it's just knowing my way around and understanding you know how some of that stuff works right the 30 000 foot view goes a long way absolutely and like you said matt asking questions to the right people you know what i mean um i i have a couple guys at work the firewall guys that i hit up all the time because i i don't i can't see the firewalls they're not any drawings i have i can't log into them but they're in the path you know and they sometimes create issues and you know so i it's nice i hit them up a lot and they take time to show me like oh yeah there's you know there's panorama and there's apollo and here's how rules look in zones and like because i'm curious i'm really grateful for people that spend the time with me and you know hey you got 30 minutes you know can we just kick around and show me what you do because it seems kind of silly to be a network guy managing a data center but there's these devices in my path that i can't see i can't touch you know they're they're knocking traffic down sometimes creating issues so it's i i really like yeah and you know i know my wife calls me the annoying question guy i like asking i i like to learn and i'm curious and you know it annoys her sometimes but i think it it served me well so far in this field well to both you and aj's point you know it yeah you don't have to go get certified but the linux concept nowadays everything's sitting on top of linux you know there's there's base knowledge that will be helpful in my opinion add it to my list i gotta learn linux now i learned just enough to get my avocent terminal server stood up in my home lab a couple years ago but i keep hearing more and more how important linux is i'm reading edelman's book on network automation and he's like you know linux and everybody keeps telling me linux so put it on my list you won't regret it you won't regret it andy i know one more thing my favorite emails are when people say hey did you make a change on the firewall with no contact like no no it's dns that's that's the answer it's always standard andy was talking about like you know he had firewalls in his path but he had he can't see him so i just love getting those emails yeah something breaks did you make a change on the network i'm trying to print this word document and it's not printing do you know if you made a change in the file sure oh your your printer's usb connected oh okay yeah are you trying to print to a remote site no uh so matt it sounds like you you've been uh certified for a while so i i would love to get your opinion feedback on what you feel the new changes to the cisco certification program have done to it i think it's interesting um truthfully uh there's been a lot of shift in in what's where in the certification program but i think from as we were just talking you know the the overall knowledge of the network i think the ccnp track thrown in some wireless throwing in the the sda thrown in some of the automation i think that helped very much push people to be well-rounded um i think that's a really cool idea and then the specialization exams that lets you after you get kind of that well-rounded you know kind of viewpoint of the network to focus on what you want to um you know personally i'm not a wireless guy so looking at the encore exam um that gives me something new to study you know it gives me something to focus on and that's gonna help you know it's good to know what that wireless is doing on the network uh like sda you know it's coming it's it's picking up traction um it's good to know how that's actually going to interact with with our networks so i i think the path the change is good i think it was a shock to a lot of people um but i i think it's going to push people to kind of expand their mind a little bit yeah i agree i like that it's it's got like this touch of choose your own adventure kind of thing you know you can you can customize your plan like there's a there's a ccna for for everybody and then from there you can go security data center collab enterprise and then even when you get to that level you can then choose your specialization you know before uh say the route switch track you had to do ccna route switch then you had to do to get the ccnp route switch you had to do route switch and t-shoot there was no other options like that's what you had to do um but but now there's there's so much more to it you know you can take your encore you can do automation you can do sd-wan you can do the wireless design advanced routing there's just you know so many different choices and possibilities it kind of can speak to anybody and then you know if you want to specialize in something else if you want to go data center you don't have to step back and take a ccna data center first you can just go right to the professional level data center core exam and then choose your specialization yeah for sure i mean that that's a good point you can you can kind of just get your base knowledge and then pick where you want to go the backtracking is a true it's a true fact you know i mean uh i remember when i got my original ccnp i looked at it and it was what route switch and troubleshoot right and then your ccdp was route switch and architect i think was the exam name well i already passed two of those so i went and took the architect exam while i couldn't get my ccdp because i didn't have the ccda so i actually backtracked and took the exam that would should have been taken first to get back so i could actually get my ccdp it was kind it was kind of weird but you know to your point yeah you just kind of you get started you pick your path and you can kind of bounce around and focus on what you want it's kind of it's kind of a cool concept so i i was going to go for the ccdp and i was you know last year but the plan was you know ccna ccda ccnp ccdp and i was looking at the prerequisites for the ccdp and i saw that you had to do the ccda or get your ccie route switch it's like well that's that's kind of weird but uh and so i i i know somebody who's also cisco champion kevin blackburn he got a ccie last year and i you know on his linkedin it posted he got his ccie and his ccdp like almost at the same time i'm like are you a maniac did you go and take like two exams in the same week like how did that happen and you know he he reminded me that that's how that worked yeah well i have to i have to give kevin a a shout out because in san diego i couldn't check into my hotel and he let me uh check my bags at his hotel yeah nice it's it's a lot better than carrying them around for four hours yeah yeah right especially in san diego right that's that community right it is absolutely gotta love nerd summer camp man i missed it this year i really did i mean you know the virtual cisco live experience was fantastic i i enjoyed myself i had a great time but i'm looking forward to getting back to nerd summer camp yeah i miss seeing everybody for sure yeah i love it i've never been to nerd so much so much fun man it's so much fun sounds like fun you know i i've been to a few of the the different industry conferences i've been to vmworld i went to dell technologies world like the first year was like dell technologies where they merged uh dell and uh the other one that they acquired there emc that's right that's right when they they merged the two um and then you know i've been to cisco i haven't been to microsoft ignite but there's just something about cisco live man it's it's just a little bit different than all the rest i love the social engagement the social media team at cisco live does a fantastic job and i really think that that makes the event that much better because you could be anywhere on the cisco live campus but if you're following along on twitter and there's something cool going on you know somewhere else you can go jump in there or you know you can go find another activity or people are tweeting about oh i'm having a great time you know learning something in the devnet zone uh it's just a lot of fun yeah i i agree i mean in the community um i remember my first one in vegas uh i think the only person i really knew fairly well from twitter was sylvia and i was so afraid to go up and talk to her and it was at the old tom's corner and i just finally walked up and talked and now it's like there's people i know every time i show up you know i i showed up at the conference center in san diego and the first thing i hear is is that matt and somebody comes running up to me and it's like the coolest group of people and it's the nicest group of people um yeah you can't you can't have a bad time if you go to cisco live no impossible hopefully they'll have it next year i'm gonna cross everything i can they're planning for it in vegas old las vegas that's good that's good so do employers pay for that is it like uh is it just something you pay out of pocket because it's so much fun i actually usually pay out of pocket and just do the explorer pass because i i get so much more out of just talking to to people like you guys um sure what's the explorer pass uh you you can't do any of the sessions um you can just kind of watch there solutions and just be there yeah that's a good way to put it um how much how much is that i think it's like five or six hundred bucks yeah i thought that yeah it's a lot less than the full the full pass yeah i mean yeah because like the full thing is like what four grand it's like 2500 i think it depends on when you get it like the earlier you buy in there's early bird rates and they're significant too they're not chump change so the earlier you register the better off you are it's worth it however you can get there um again i i've had so many great conversations over dinner um just hanging out with people in technical conversations i mean like like you said it's it's nerd summer camp right we we hang out and you know yeah you'll talk whatever and find commonalities with other people but you're still gonna talk technology too because that's that's all around you so it's just a really cool experience now if we get out there next year uh there there's a couple of things planned i'm hoping that we can get all of the co-hosts together uh and maybe try to do some sort of live recorded show uh cisco live edition of the podcast and we'll you know release that episode later on and then we definitely have to do a meet up for anybody from the discord that's also going out to cisco live and if we have any way of doing it i would love to fund and give away some sort of uh ticket to cisco live right be an explorer pass or if we can come up with the funds do like a full pass so that way somebody can somebody who's never been can go enjoy hit the sessions meet the people learn some new stuff uh that's that's definitely on the to-do list for the discord in the podcast for me anyway very cool and sounds a great idea awesome goals can i be a part of that of course i don't know as a co-host there might be some rules and then after that i think it'll go back to orlando i think so yeah well it's just las vegas orlando and san diego i think are the three locations they rotate through so you may have touched on this already but what would you tell you know somebody new trying to get in or somebody working on the ccna or somebody who's like yeah i really i really want to get into tech i mean i think you touched on a couple of them already but i i mean like was it hard to get your first help desk position like you know it seems like okay i want to work in tech i'm looking back to my own past okay i want to be a network engineer once i learned it was a thing that sounds cool alright great what do i got to do somebody said ccna but getting that first job is kind of tough right so like was it hard to get help desk you know what would you tell somebody who's like hey matt wow i heard your podcast you know i'd like to do what you guys do like how do i do that because it's most of our guests seem to have different stories of how they did it and yours you know helpdesk was part of it which is a commonality and some other guests but you know any advice for the new guy you know what i mean or girl what what can they do to break in get in yeah sure i mean i i think the the biggest thing is if you want to start studying for networking i started with network buffs uh i mean i i started with a plus first but then i went to network buzz and get that foundational network knowledge um you know i i know i hear some people every once in a while kind of bash the the comptia certs but i think they're a great foundation and that can absolutely help you get into that help desk role and i think the help desk role is a great place to kind of start cutting your teeth you know you start to see network issues application issues you kind of start to understand how this environment works uh and that also gets your foot into the door of you know if you're on a help desk that means you also have a network team somewhere or a storage team or a security or a data center team and you can find that that passion that you you are intrigued by and you can my best advice is always ask them to shadow shadowing costs nothing when you're in the door right you know i got my lunch break okay let me sit with the network engineer i'm curious about it if if if he or she is willing to sit there and let me ask questions and just kind of show me what they're doing that kind of starts building that um and again to my point earlier of if i can teach you this task i can learn a new task in that cascade once you start talking to them that's kind of what i did really is started asking questions and saying hey can you show me how to do that that let them pass that off to me and i could start building my network career while they were building their career i i think it's a again the community tends to be very good at helping other people learn knowledge that they have uh and that kind of lets you just step into it and slowly build up your skill set and then you know a position pops up hey we needed you know uh entry-level network engineer just to change vlans and you can raise your hand and go okay i can do that i know how to do that i've been shown how to do that i know the environment and you can just keep progressing yourself um outside of the work side if you're interested in it the internet has so much great content you know if you want to learn it it's out there you just got to pick it up you know we we have so many different labbing tools nowadays different ways to get your hands on equipment and and gear and just virtual images that you want to learn it balls in your court pick it up go do it i was going to ask about lapping next so were you we did you start out like packet tracer gns that kind of stuff when you were studying yeah so again i was lucky enough to take a a week-long course um so i had some hands-on there and i was already working in an environment um but for my ccnp i had purchased physical gear at the time a little bit of gns3 here and there um packet tracer back when i took my ccnp was lacking a few commands i know it's gotten better i haven't touched since honestly but yeah i mean the means are out there it's just the will and if you want to do it did you feel like the physical lab i'm asking because i get beat up on this and when i hear somebody get a physical lab i get excited because i have one too and i i love it because i learned so much on it you know did you learn things in a physical lab that you wouldn't have learned and say gns or you know why did you get a physical lab absolutely i mean at the time um i lucked out and there was an old ccie that was selling it on uh on a marketplace um so i happen to get it real relatively cheap but there are some i mean i've had some people trying to do something virtually and they were they weren't confident of what was happening and i offered to spin up my physical lab and just run the test again and we got completely different results and it happened to do with cabling and you know i hate to say it because a lot of things are going fiber now but there's something about building your own cable and patching it in and realizing you missed a pin and then you got to fix it yeah you know it's there's there's physical things and moving cables around and yeah they're both great they're both great uh i i can't say anything other than that yeah you still have your physical lab where you sell it and virtually most of it's still sitting in the basement no okay it doesn't power on too often but it's still there i i it's it's kind of got a i got a soft spot in my heart for it i kind of can't get rid of it for some reason yeah yeah same i i think that there's there's pros and cons to having to having everything i don't think it's it's just physical lab or just virtual lab you know everybody starts out with packet tracer that's how you get your feet wet you get the taste for it it's like your first drug right and and i think that if you're doing your studying right and your labbing right you will find that packet tracer has its limitations and once you start to see and feel those limitations that's when you know you're ready to move on to something else right when you keep hitting that that wall and you get frustrated it's like okay all right maybe it's time for some actual gear or you know gns3 and even g are a pretty good step up because they don't have some of the limitations that packet tracer has they're a lot closer to the real feel the real deal but it too has its limitations compared to working with actual physical gear so um you know i have a lab i added to it this week i got another router in there so now i got four routers for switches um and and i still use gns3 i still use my physical lab if i want to do some bigger topologies i'll fire up gns3 if i want to test something out real quick it's a lot easier to fire up a virtual router than it is fire up my stack behind me but i still play with my stack i love it i do a lot of ansible with it i'm learning python and i've been you know throwing python stuff at it lately so it's a lot of fun and both of them definitely have their use cases absolutely you know there's there's some virtualization limitations to certain switching platforms um that you just can't do you know and i mean even at the router level it's there's things you know like physically unplugging a cable to see how hsrp is actually going to handle the failover you know yeah okay some you can virtually unplug the cable some of them don't do that very well but if i got a physical router i unplugged that cable it's gone and that's real world right you know you don't virtually unplug your cable in the real world so there there's absolutely to your point there's uh really good benefits to both i fought bfd for days on a virtual 9k for days you can enable the feature it'll take the config but it will never neighbor up and for days i'm like what am i doing wrong yeah and then somebody on twitter told me oh that's not a supported feature in the v9ks i'm like why the hell can i enable the feature and it takes the config you know and then went round and round with that but yeah like real gear won't lie and i can tell you when i interviewed for my first job that the job i have now um they were impressed that i had you know i built an enterprise network in my basement with you know real gear it i think it pulled a little more weight than like you know hey i did some stuff in packet tracer or gns again not knocking them i use them too it is so much easier just to spin up you know a quick thing in gns but yeah i i love me some physical lab sorry i'm off my physical ad soap box we were having a conversation about this in the jobs channel in the discord earlier people were talking about oh well i don't have the experience well have you ever done it in a lab well yeah i lab bijrp all the time in lab well does the igrp work differently on a lab router than it does a production router absolutely not because if you're using you know a physical lab router it was once a production lab router it's the same code and it works exactly the same way so it's still really good experience yeah you bring up a good point that you know people tend to hesitate to apply to jobs because they don't have the experience well you've been studying for your ccna ccnp you have experience mention it you know it's you don't pass those by reading a book you kind of got to play with the technology and start to understand how it works so uh yeah i mean if you're interested in something put put your resume out there and you know you've been studying you've been playing with it do it no it counts absolutely i'll i'll speak i'll speak you know i don't know about you aj but um from of our perspective there are certain customer scenarios that i will lab up oh 100 i have done this yeah i lab it up and you know make sure my my logic and thinking is sound um i'm sure you're all familiar with uh phil gervasi he does that too he he's oh he's tweeted about it like do you guys not laugh at it i go yeah absolutely you know there's certain scenarios i want to be sure when i walk into whatever whatever change i'm doing whatever new hardware i'm putting in i know what's going to happen yeah i i've definitely done that um and you know for me what i like to do if i'm if i'm going to do like a change window or something with the customer i will try to get as close as i can to their system on either my physical gear or virtual gear and i step through the process and that way i have all the commands i need to do in front of me in a word doc so i can you know just copy paste copy paste or it's it's something i present to the customer like this is the process here here's how this is going to go you know the night of the maintenance and then you know at this point if we get like a go no go decision here you know we can roll back by doing these commands and so on and so forth so just to have the whole process mapped out and to be able to do that on the lab that i have access to i don't have to schedule it it's just here uh it's a great resource yeah no absolutely and that kind of brings me to another point too that uh my college instructor taught me and i i think this is something i see too often uh with people that are hesitant to get into the career is being afraid of not knowing how something should be done and my college instructor his biggest thing he said at the end of my entire associate's degree was if you walk away knowing one thing it's know what you don't know but know how to find out and i think that goes a long way because there's no possible way any of us in this technology field can know everything i think that's such great advice for for anybody in our kind of position you know like you can't be expected to know it all um but there's resources there's so many resources and and just you know spend some time free time reading googling looking at different stuff bookmark i have tons and tons and tons of bookmarks so if i hit an issue i might not know the answer but i know you know there's there's somebody i know on twitter that's an expert in this or i read a document or white paper on that uh so yeah absolutely great advice yeah know what you don't know and know where to find the resource to to figure it out just because you don't know it doesn't mean you can't know it exactly everything is figure out about so you're edible i like that figure out of them i think someone has that sign somewhere i've seen it before sounds like a good bumper sticker all right matt well thank you very much uh i've really enjoyed spending this time with you if people want to learn more about you or follow you how can they do that yeah so i'm on twitter at matt olette i'm hoping their show notes because my last name is an absolute atrocity to try and spell um other than that every once in a while on packetpilot.com i post a few links and if you want to dig up my youtube there's a few drum covers that i tend to do once in a while but yeah that's about it we will absolutely drop links to your twitter your packetpilot.com blog and because you mentioned it i'm gonna go dig up those youtube videos and we'll throw this all in the show notes that's fine i take constructive criticism very well before we sign off this evening i do want to give a huge shout out to a couple of people on the discord channel they go by the screen names of mila and pongu tracer they killed their ccnas this past week so congratulations to them on passing and obtaining their ccna yay all right very nice i love it congratulations guys all right thank you so much everybody have a good night and we'll catch you on the next one 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 net edge that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at artoofnetworkengineering.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