Category: training

Several of the conversations I had at the recent RIPE70 meeting were focused on career advice (usually along the lines of “which technology should I focus on next”) and inevitably we ended up discussing the benefits of T-shaped skills versus I-shaped skills… and I couldn’t resist drawing a few graphs illustrating them.

Here’s a short question I got from one of my readers:

I am a CCIE in SP/DC & working as Technical Architect in US. I follow your website but I don’t know where to start for SDN/Virtualization/Openstack…

I guess he’s not alone, so here’s a long list of resources I put together in the last 5+ years.

Before I get started: you’ll find links to most of these resources on ipSpace.net SDN Resources page.

The IPv6 Security Summit at the Troopers conference always has a few awesome IPv6 presentations (many people claim Troopers is the conference to attend if you’re serious about IPv6), and this year was no exception. A day after the MLD bashing, Enno Rey delivered a great in-depth presentation on DHCPv6 features and shortcomings.

It seems the DHCPv6 intricacies presented in that talk were too much for some of the attendees – that afternoon I accidentally stumbled upon a visibly distressed gentleman who started our chat with “How could anyone expect us to deploy IPv6 in a production environment?”

I’ll be speaking at two conferences in March: SDN event in Zurich organized by fantastic Gabi Gerber, and the best boutique security conference – Troopers 15 in Heidelberg. If you’ll be attending one of these events, just grab me, drag me to the nearest coffee table, and throw some interesting questions my way ;) … and if you happen to be near one of these locations, let me know and we might figure out how to meet somewhere.

Last Friday my students attending this year’s Designing Scalable Web Applications course presented their semester-long assignments. I can’t tell you how pleasantly surprised I was – the results were much better and more polished than what I’ve seen during the previous years.

Scott Berkun has (yet another) fantastic article on his blog: a teacher was complaining that the students use Facebook or check their e-mail in class. Scott’s response? Maybe it’s the teaching skills and the fascination with one-way lecturing, not the Internet, that’s at fault. Read the whole response; if you’ve been faced with too many narrow-minded teachers in your life, you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

Every now and then I stumble upon an elegy lamenting the need to study IP Multicast to pass one or the other certification exam. The history obviously repeats itself; we’ve been dealing with similar problems in the past and one of my favorite examples is Banyan VINES.

If you’ve been working with Cisco routers for more than 15 years, you might still have fond memories of Router Software Configuration (RSC) course, at its time one of the best networking courses. In those prehistoric days, the networks were multi-protocol, running all sorts of things in parallel with IPv4. The week-long RSC course thus covered (at least) the following protocols: IPv4, AppleTalk, Novell IPX, DecNET, XNS, Banyan VINES, CLNP and SNA (I probably forgot one or two). By the third day, everyone (including the instructor) was sick-and-tired of the endless stream of lookalike protocols and ready to skip a section or two.

Bad designer, one of my favorite devil’s advocates asked an interesting question about post-course survey results:

Once in a course or similar and you get to know someone it becomes v difficult to give bad results, in particular, if it is life effecting in some way such as bonuses or future work etc. In fact one can argue that you should get high results just for high effort with integrity.

The bias toward higher scores is definitely present and is in fact so strong that 4.0 usually represents a barely acceptable result; sometimes the minimum acceptable average score for an instructor is set to 4.3 – 4.5. It’s also very important to understand how the questions are phrased and what the results actually mean.

The Market trends in Service Provider networks webinar was well received by the attendees... the “only” problem was that there were so few of them. The conversion ratios were murderous:

• From over a hundred thousand visitors who have seen the webinar announcement, approximately 1% clicked on the registration link. This is normal and expected; most people are banner-blind and many visitors are not interested in the particular topic or don’t want to attend a webinar.
• Over a thousand visitors decided that the registration page is worth looking at, but only around 1% actually registered for the webinar. This ratio needs some serious fixing; increasing it by a few percentage points would make the whole idea viable.

If you were among those that were interested enough in the webinar to look at the registration page but did not proceed, please tell me what stopped you from registering. And, obviously, if you’ve spotted a glaring stupidity I made, please share it with me.

A while ago I’ve created a short presentation describing modern IP- and web-based services. It describes the application-layer topics I’ve been focusing on in the last few years, from cloud computing to web-based applications. I've tried to keep it simple enough that someone without the prior knowledge of the field would not get lost after two slides, but still far away from high-level marketing nonsense (you can get plenty of that anywhere else). Today I finally found some time to spend on the paperwork and wrote the description of the Next-generation IP Services tutorial.

Anyone who has ever had the “privilege” of interviewing a certified individual with purely theoretical knowledge appreciates the value of hands-on tests. The creators of certifications in the IT industry (including Cisco Systems) have responded by including more and more hands-on exercises in the certification exams. Unfortunately, Cisco decided not to use the real equipment, but rather simulations. While this is definitely better than relying exclusively on multiple-choice tests, students can still work their way through the simulations without having a decent level of hands-on experience.

Readers who commented on some of my previous certification-related posts have complained about the vagueness of exam questions. I have to agree with them; I’ve seen my fair share of dubious questions in the exams I’ve taken. For example, when I was developing EIGRP and BGP courses for Cisco, my lowest scores on the CCIE recertification exams were in those two categories. I knew too many details and was confused by the vagueness of the questions.

Brain dumps are the biggest threat to the certification industry these days, significantly devaluing certifications that rely primarily on multiple-choice answers. Similarly to the threat-prevention measures adopted by airport security (read the insightful analysis of their behavior from Bruce Schneier, a renowned security guru), IT vendors are responding with high-tech measures.

Numerous companies use certifications to screen job candidates. Even if all the caveats associated with this process are given, you might encounter candidates who have multiple high-level certifications but cannot differentiate a router from a box of cheese. How can you identify (and reject) such people?

My previous certification-related post described how some companies use certifications to filter job applicants for networking-related positions. Should you follow that example? If you’re in a country with a saturated job market, where the number of applicants far exceeds the number of job postings (consider yourself very lucky if you’re an employer), you should certainly use whatever filters you can to screen the hundreds of applications you receive … but be aware that you have potentially lost a few gems hidden in the flood.