Here is the presentation calendar for this week’s event – as always join in on the conversation on twitter with the hashtag #NFD14 and head over to techfieldday.com to watch the live stream.
Watch as the team asks the hard questions, these are in-depth technical session with limited marketing content – if you want to catch up on these innovative technology companies, tune in to the live stream.
In an excited video on YouTube and a post on Facebook, Crazy Leo Urlichich has announced that he has found a co-driver for the 2017 season.
Alex Kihurani will contest the Canadian Rally Championship with Crazy Leo this year with Can-Jam Motorsports. The self-titled Rally Brat has experience all over the world, WRC, USA, UK, front wheel, four wheel and WRC-Academy programs with close to 100 rallies under the belts including multiple championships. Alex was featured in the great documentary “Easier Said Than Done”
Leo has driven all over Canada, and contended for the Drive DMACK trophy in WRC a few years ago. Returning to his roots in Canada with RACE LAB – and now heading back to the CRC – it is clear that Leo is taking this seriously, and with someone as skilled as Alex Kihurani – the fellow racers of Antoine L’Estage and the Subaru Rally Team USA cars better watch out for him at Perce Neige.
We will be there at Perce Neige – following the Rally in the sweep truck, and will bring you interviews with Leo and the team – EXCLUSIVE to this blog.
Some of you may remember this fantastic famous crash at Perce Neige in “The Beast” when Leo did the impossible and not only walked, but drove away from this accident only to make it to the podium.
With the SRTUSA team on our home turf, it was time to show them what we are made of up here in the great white north. I was super happy to have a chance to both meet Travis and hear what he thought of the conditions. Even more exciting was that Subaru would now produce a Launch Control episode about our home event.
With the aim to take a serious shot at the entire 2017 Rally America season, Travis Pastrana and Robbie Durant needed more time to work on their notes capability. With the new “American Rally Association Championship” will start at Rallye Perce Neige – which is no joke of a rally.
In order to prepare for Rallye Perce Neige in Maniwaki Quebec, more time with Robbie and get notes in order, so instead of heading out to a training ground they decided to contest the Rally of the Tall Pines here in Canada. With the team at Vermont Sports Car using this as a training round, Travis is under instructions to go easy – but there is no question he is out here to win.
With the countless wins and championships from Antoine L’Estage there is no question that he is here to win, the championship is on the line. The question was, will Travis take that from him? Will Antoine feel pressured by Travis to push too hard and risk it all.
Speaking with Travis Pastrana on Friday night, he was a super happy guy, and told me that he was happy to be here, but the conditions were challenging.
Travis was gracious enough to sign my hat for me. I go to a dozen events per year, and I never fan boy it up, but really how often do you get the SRT-USA team up here?
Times were traded all day, with Travis and Robbie in the SRT-USA 199 car sometimes within 2-3 seconds on Antoine, and even winning a few stages, but in the end Antoine L’Estage won by only 3 minutes and 25 seconds. While that may seem like an eternity, the next competitor was almost 15 minutes off that pace. With this being the first Rally of the Tall Pines for Travis – that is an amazing accomplishment against someone like L’Estage who basically owns the Canadian Rally Championship.
Without further, here is the final Launch Control of the season, episode 14, where I make an appearance at 5:40 as I live stream for our event from the side lines – bright orange coat on the right of the frame.
Back in August, at Networking Field Day 12 we had a very interesting presentation from ThousandEyes – my take away was excitement about what I saw, but I was cautiously optimistic because I have been told about these groundbreaking new tools before, so I held off, until I could actually go back and put this in a real production environment. Is this “Yet another tool” or can this deliver real value?
We have all been there, let me know if you have heard these complaints before
The Network Is Down
The Internet Is Slow
<insert name of cloud product> is horrible
Our Internet Performance to Site XX from YY is Poor – Fix it now!
The Network Is Down / Slow
This statement is universal – what people REALLY mean is, their perception of the network is poor. This could be caused by just about anything, poor server performance, poor application performance, saturated storage arrays, and yes it could also be the network. The problem is, why is “the network” the default gateway for blame? We cannot fix that mind set.
Cloud Complications
“The Cloud” complicates things for network resources, previously the internet was where you went to get things that did not belong to you. Now with services like Microsoft Office365, SalesForce, Azure and AWS – what was previously external is now used as an internal application, and while the application team is happy to offload their applications to a cloud provider or hosted application, it means that network resources are being forced to basically accept and support a series of routers/switches and infrastructure they have no control over.
Traceroute, Ping and Monitoring
Over the years we have all learned to use all sorts of tools to troubleshoot our networks. Traceroute came in 1988 and uses ICMP messages to probe a network and deliver information about responsive times to each hop along the way. 1988 is a long time ago.
The major problem with these types of tools is, they are probes, some use ICMP, TCP and even UDP to probe and test the network. Many of these tools do not detect things like tunnels and load balancers, and while your probe might show one route a different protocol might take a different route. They were designed for a different time, but yet most legacy tools use them.
The bottom line is – these tools do not provide you with complete data, without complete data you are making poor decisions. These tools commonly deliver inaccurate or incomplete path information.
ThousandEyes – Smarter Network Data
“Legacy products are built for controlled environments, ThousandEyes is designed for chaos” – Mohit Lad – CEO/Co-Founder – ThousandEyes
By deploying sensors all over the internet in a SaaS model, ThousandEyes brings together sensor data from all over the world. When you combine that with agents within your own infrastructure you start to get a very unique view and insight into performance and availability.
The Enterprise Agent provides you with an internal vantage point, performance of your ISP, your WAN, and application traffic. Stop me if you have heard this before, but here is the difference. Combine that with the many data centres and cloud agents that ThousandEyes deploys all over the globe, and you can now monitor, and troubleshoot global availability and performance.
Deployment of Enterprise Agents is very easy, deployed on any virtual platform, inside a Docker container, on metal in Linux, or even within a Cisco IOS Virtual Container. We deployed these in a matter of minutes and had data coming in within less than an hour.
So above is a typical end of end metric for a web site – stay with me – lots of tools provide this, nothing ground breaking here. The problem is we don’t know WHY things are slow, next step? Blame the network. Not so fast.
Visualize Your Path
This would be your typical path visualization – but the tool built this – from the path of the probe, not a network map you provided. Realize that the hops in the middle, are not hops that you own or control – but using proprietary technology, ThousandEyes can probe, test and analyze the health, wellness and performance of those hops.
Catch your ISP
The above is a very typical scenario – people are calling, some users complain that things are slow, but some state things are just fine. Take the far end node, starting in 157. If you look, Chicago users would be fine, St Louis users would be sometimes fine, but that depends on the path their traffic takes.
No question this scenario would end up on the desk of the network engineer – and without a tool like this, it would be near impossible to pin point the problem, because the problem is intermittent. In this case I can call my ISP, and not only tell them the problem – I can even allow them temporary access to ThousandEyes if they want to see the data I have on their network.
Mean time to innocence? Minutes. Gone are the days where you check your infrastructure over and over again while the ISP feigns innocence.
Reverse Path? YES! – Still innocent!
Even reverse path can be troubleshot, in this case, due to issues beyond the network engineers control, and within the external network voice traffic is returning via multiple routes, and not all of them are healthy. This might result in chasing after your SIP provider, troubleshooting gateways, looking at your internal LAN. Open a ticket with the ISP and go grab a coffee Mr Network Engineer — this one isn’t you either.
Path Troubleshooting On Steroids
It is almost impossible for me to show you how great this is with still screen shots because you can zoom in and out, view individual nodes, look at peering – so here I have queued up the demo of the amazing path view capability courtesy of our team at Network Field Day 12, and a demo from Nick Kehpart – Sr Director for Product Marketing.
BGP Path Visualization and Internet Outage Detection
Again, No words on this – you have to see it. In this clip we show the BGP Path Visualization, the ability to see the path from one site to another – and figure out what exactly is going on across that path including troubleshooting BGP routing.
In this case Internet Outage Detection is used to detect packet loss – in the past – and troubleshoot now. Have you ever had someone say “yeah it was horrible yesterday but it is fine now” – wouldn’t it be great to be able to actually see what happened? Was it you? Was it someone else?
ThousandEyes Launches Endpoint Agent
This is big – in fact it is so big, one of our delegates literally jumped up in the middle of the presentation and screamed “TAKE MY MONEY” he was that excited about how much this was going to help him. The room was honestly full of people with their jaws down.
There are other vendors creating “end point” agents – but here is the difference – this one goes to network, it does not start off by blaming the network – it continues with the “Mean Time To Innocence” and helps to prove exactly where the problem is. The same level of detail we get with the entire ThousandEyes suite is extended all the way to the endpoint, and I can drill down, ALL THE WAY to BGP if I want, from application to network layer even WiFi and not only that – retrospectively.
Remember my comments about Cloud? It gets worse!
Users working from home
Users working from a hotel
Public WiFi
Corporate WiFi
VPN
How are we supposed to find the true answer, and worse than that, normally the complaint is something like this
“So yesterday I was working in SalesForce and all of a sudden things were slow, I cannot get work done” – “Oh where were you?” – “I was using public WiFi at an airport in Anchorage” — the typical response is “I cannot troubleshoot that”
You can! With Endpoint Agent – we can look at end users in the home, at work, at public wifi, and compare them – is it really the application? Is it a large internet outage? Perhaps a few users just happen to be on poor wireless, what might look like something, might be a coincidence – but without data how do you know?
So how do we get it on workstations? You can push it out, it is lightweight and works as a browser plugin and a system service, the updates are all automatic and CPU consumption is less than 1% and less than 40mb of memory is ever used. The license is NOT NODE LOCKED – so you can move your licenses around, lets say you have 1000 users, but you don’t want to monitor them all, you could monitor a select 100, or perhaps you have a few users who complain all the time – you can push it only to them. Helpdesk agents could keep a few licenses on hand and deploy as necessary.
Endpoint Agent – DEMO
So before we get into the demo – we start with this, client computer, they are on WiFi, they have internet – oh look, a proxy and the internet site on the far end.
The bottom line – I cannot explain this in a blog – the only thing I can tell you is – you have to see it to believe it. In this demo they will show you a real scenario for what it looks like when troubleshooting real issues. The key word here is DRILL DOWN!
Along with all of that – Cisco Spark Telephony offering PSTN, and not to mention the SX10N integration complete with the ease of use of proximity.
So what now?
From what we can see is – it involves some kind of Pen, making my mark? Maybe i’m way off and I am over reading into the marketing. I’ve heard rumors – but I don’t do rumors. We do know that Cisco is developing more and more for the Cisco Spark Platform with a strong API, including an entire site “Spark for Developers” – last time I checked, we don’t have “WebEx” for developers.
We already have a series of room systems we can run with Spark.
Cisco TelePresence SX10 Quick Set
Cisco TelePresence SX20 Quick Set
Cisco TelePresence SX80 Codec
Cisco TelePresence MX200 G2
Cisco TelePresence MX300 G2
Cisco TelePresence MX700
Cisco TelePresence MX800
Cisco DX70
Cisco DX80
Lots of phone options too..
7800 Series: 7811,7821,7841,7861
8800 Series: 8811 8841 8845 8851 8851NR 8861 8865
What is missing here?
Clearly the focus in Cisco Spark is collaboration – not collaboration technology, but actually collaborating, we have teams now, and we can do text, voice, video, calls, attaching files to messages.
The bottom line is something new is coming – and Cisco is talking all over town about how we all need to be there to watch. They tell every customer, every partner and all the people on the street to sign up for this thing.
I’ll be there – and you will have my take on it as soon as I can get it posted because I am pretty excited to see what is next.
One of the things on my bucket list, is my PPL – that is private pilots license. Well, between Rally, and other hobbies, I have neither time – nor funds. Like my other hobbies, I may need to take some time away from them to get this done. My friend Steve is really inspiring me. Making it worse was thanks to Spectrum Aviation, I was able to get a rare ride in the same Boeing Stearman made famous by Steve in many Flight Chops videos. Nothing will get you addicted to wanting your PAL like an open cockpit flying almost upside down.
Photo Courtesy of Flight Chops
Until then I have been vicariously living through my friend Steve Thorne @flightchops from Flight Chops. As a professional in the video media business, Steve started a great channel a few years ago over on YouTube, filming some of his flights so he could review what he did wrong – so he could get it right. The big bonus was with Steve’s professional capabilities he could actually put some professional production value to his channel so things quickly took off. Once the channel got serious, Steve made this quick video to show more of what was to come – and wow was it great.
It helps that Steve is super humble guy and has no fear of sharing, even entire videos of him screwing up landings over and over, or not being able to figure out IFR (he keeps saying he will get his IFR rating, but we are all still waiting Steve!). Here is the 2017 preview.
Where is this all going? Steve is proving in a manner similar to the likes of, Stevo1Kinevo, Live From the Flight Deck, MrAviation101 and MZeroA that you can actually (almost) make a living on YouTube and while the content is focused on the aviation community, getting mass appeal like someone like Casey Neistat would be difficult when focused on a topic like Aviation. Steve is still proving that with sponsorship and Patreon (yes, I am a patron) that getting enough revenue to make this a real “job” is attainable, and while he is not quite there yet, the time might be soon. The bigger things get, the most they cost, with full production budgets going into the channel now, air to air camera work, travel, extra camera crews (Brock does get himself into some interesting places!)
Justin’s Opinion
The bottom line is – YouTube is changing content creation in a big way, and to quote a talk from Kevin Spacey at Cisco Live! – “If you give people content they want, the way they want it at a price they are willing to pay, people would rather pay for it rather than steal it”. Content creators are finding ways to make a living online without the big studios, with smaller budgets and niche producers, like Steve and FlightChops are able to finally spread their wings (pun totally intended) and create the show they really want to, and I am super happy for him, not just because he is creating amazing content, but because he is also able to realize his dream of doing what he wants to do every day. Even if you want to build a channel about a unique topic, you can build content on YouTube and attain revenue, something that topics with less universal appeal could not do easily before.
A bunch of years ago I googled this “Best Bluetooth Headset Truck Driver” – I was on the hunt for a really good headset, and I did not want your typical “in the ear” design. This is what I ended up with, the B250-XT from BlueParrott, now they have a new model and I will show you why these things are second to none.
I found a bunch of truck forums, all talking about one particular headset, the “BlueParrott B250-XT” – it claimed to be the best headset of all time, so I went to find one. The local truck stop had one, and I put down my $150 (Canadian) for it, which seemed like a pretty good deal considering the price of other headsets
The battery life is ridiculous – they claim 16 hours of TALK time, never mind the days of “oh no I left it on” standby.
The noise cancelling was like nothing I had ever seen, I could drive with the windows open on the phone without problems. Constantly people were asking if I was in the office.
The only fault I could ever find with this particular model was the charge port, it was a barrel connector, so you had to use their specific charge cord/plug.
No surprise that VXi has recently been acquired by Jabra / GN
In full disclosure, they did have a B250-XT+, and a 350 model – but I didn’t review those models, the new 450 is really worth looking at.
The big feature is the noise cancelling, so here is a video I created recently testing the noise cancelling of a few different headsets, including the previous B250-XT, a Plantronics Voyager Edge, and the B450-XT.
The new headset is exactly twice the weight of the old one, weighing in at 149gr (450) vs 73gr (250)
The ear pads are great, you can select what works better for you. The leather pad has significantly more acoustic noise cancelling (room / vehicle noise blocking) than the previous 250 model but your ear does get warm with limited air flow and you do get that “plugged ear” feeling. The foam pad offers less ear blocking and a more open feel with less “plugged head” feeling – I prefer the foam pad as I can still hear out of my ear.
The only real complaint I have is the volume doesn’t go high enough for quiet calls and once you high max volume there is a beep sound that plays to tell you the volume is at MAX, and it is REALLY loud. Previous models have also had concerns about audio feedback volume. Considering we now have the VXi App we can adjust some headset functions with, please VXi give us the ability to either adjust or silence these tones and voice feedback announcements.
The previous B250-XT model was a little more “pocketable”, it was lighter and thinner and I could toss it in a laptop bag – not so much with the B450-XT, it does need a home, maybe a soft or semi soft case offering would be useful.
Here is the basic feature set of the new B450-XT
Final Thoughts
This thing is a total buy, sadly I have to ship back this unit as it was provided to me as a review unit – I tried to buy it from VXi, but apparently they are limited in supply so this one goes back.
Yeah, you look like an aircraft controller – but it is so worth it, besides you are in the car anyway, or sitting at a desk – 24 hours of talk, killer noise reduction, great comfort. All worth it.
These are the highlights for me…
Noise cancelling is better than the previous model, which was already better than any headset I have ever used.
Double the weight at 149gr is still pretty light weight, I didn’t find it weighing down on my head.
The new 450 claims 24+ hours of talk time over the 16 hours of the previous model, the new model has noticeably more battery life over the 250 model – which by the way was already great.
Two different choices for ear pad give you different options for feel and noise isolation
USB Charging is a welcome addition over the old barrel style connector
Well if you are a car nut, it is all over the forums, at least Ford has made good on their current promise. While the dealers do not have all the info yet, it would appear the software itself is floating around.
The upgraded USB hub is almost impossible to get, but it looks like they are trickling in, some of us (me included!) found out what the part number was and ordered it a few months ago to avoid the out of stock issues with the part.
So at least I have the part, and I know the release is here, just working with my dealer on when I can get the software installed in my truck. Finally my 2016 F-150 is getting CarPlay and Android Auto – the question is – when will we get WAZE on these platforms? I am still confused why that hasn’t happened yet!
This is pretty big. Wait others have been doing this for some time!
Ok, except the problem with having a ton of AP’s is management, the bigger problem having tons of AP’s at remote locations – is also management.
Stop me if you have heard it before – simple management – plug it in and you are off to the races, templated configuration. All of what is great about Meraki starts to make a lot of sense when you think about having 100+ little AP’s all over the place.
Why would you want this? I can give you a very good reason why the new Meraki MR30H is a great product.
It stands with their ideal use case – In-Room Hotel / Dormitory use.
The Science – 5GHZ
Let’s talk science for a second… We have all been using 802.11B/G/N for some time on the 2.4GHZ band, that is an ISM band, ISM stands for industrial, scientific, and medical – basically anyone can build stuff on 2.4, and run it – oh and don’t forget your microwave which will wipe out half the band each time you turn it on. The bottom line is 2.4ghz is dead for most people, the band is so noisy, nobody is really designing networks for it anymore.
So now we move to 5GHZ, 802.11a/n/ac – but wait – most people do not seem to realize the coverage for 5GHZ at the same power as 2.4ghz is not the same. In 2002 Magis Networks a semi conductor company did testing on various materials for loss metrics on 2.4GHZ and 5GHZ frequencies.
I’m going to try and explain this – hit me in the comments if I made a math error – but thanks to my good friend and colleague Jason Miles @photomediaguy for helping me check my thought process on this (If you need some amazing photo work, check out his website www.jasonmilesphotography.com)
Concrete is the enemy!
Dry concrete block has about 6.7DB of loss on 2.4ghz, while 5GHZ is has 10.3DB of loss – now that is 3.6DB of loss MORE – but before you think “Well that’s not much” – DB is logarithmic.
A loss of 6.7DB is about 70% signal LOSS and 10.3DB is about 90% Signal Loss.
If I had an access point right on the other side of concrete, and it was running 50mw – if I was on 2.4GHZ, I would get about 10.7mw on the other side, or barely enough to even operate. on 5.0GHZ – I’m looking at 4.6mw – or useless.
I think I am making my point – 5.0ghz is significantly more lossy through the same material than 2.4ghz, and while 2.4ghz was really difficult through concrete – 5.0ghz is pointless.
Even drywall is 37% more lossy on 5GHZ – through a typical office wall you are looking at 1DB per wall.
In Modern WiFi design, we actually design more for performance and density and less about coverage, it is more about low power AP’s, and many of them in order to deliver high-density high performance. The days of running 100MW on AP’s to give us wide coverage with a single AP are long gone. We worry about battery life, and co-channel interference – we don’t want to run high power. So as we build this new world of many low powered APs in more places.
MR30H – Details
So we have talked about Wifi Design, a little about 5GHZ and Loss – now we can talk about the MR30H. This is a pretty good retro fit solution for many clients especially hospitality, education, utility and government where installs are a problem and if could simply replace an existing jack, with an AP, we could easily provide spot wifi, and maintain 802.3af power to hang a phone off it with ease of install and no ladder.
Technical Details
3 Radios – 2.4, 5GHZ and WIPS
Bluetooth BLE
802.3AF Compatible – but 802.3at means you get 802.3AF Power Output
It turns out the Drone market isn’t quite as easy to get into as some companies think – even the big guys like GoPro. Turns out GoPro is saying about 2,500 Karma’s simply lost power while in flight.
GoPro has had a tough go as of late, trying to stay relevant, lauching a TON of products this year – and their stock jumped as high as 16.79 earlier this year and has now dumped it’s way down to 10.14 in after hours trading last night on the new of the Karma problems. A stock price we have not seen since June.
The bottom line – take it back where you got it – all of it, GoPro and Grip as well even though those are not a problem – you got a bundle so it all has to go back.
There is no replacement – it is a full on recall with refund – if/when they fix it, they will just start selling it again.
I’ll admit, I purchased a GoPro Hero 3 Black a few years ago, and while the video performance is stellar, the batteries have been total garbage, and some tell me “Oh the 4 they fixed it” but I still hear of issues on the GoPro 4.
Part of why I have not purchased another GoPro is because of the problems I have had – I even considered a Karma because I wanted the new GoPro, plus I wanted the Grip. That being said DJI Osmo Mobile is probably in my future.
Prediction
If DJI comes out with an action cam – GoPro is finished.
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