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New #SolarWinds "New to Networking" guide published by @mcbridea on TCP/IP Networking - http://bit.ly/bPv35e

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11 Mar 2010

Evolution, Justice, and the Art of Being a Geek

by: Josh Stephens  |  Filed Under: Careers & other Craziness
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I've mentioned it before, but The Big Bang Theory is one of my absolute favorite TV shows and if you're a geek like me you really ought to check it out sometime. Spoiler alert - if you watch the show I'm just about to discuss this week's episode... This week they did a bit where the guys had been following Adam West around Pasadena  (hey, if you saw Adam West driving around town wouldn't you follow him?) and stumbled into a garage sale where they bought a box of miscelaneous items for $65. Among various other treasures was the One Ring. The one, single, remaining ring used in the filming of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (just about the best movies ever made in my book). Wow. Of course the guys all fought over it and it was hilarious. I thought this was especially interesting as I've been trying to buy myself one of these rings for a while but haven't found one in my size yet. Yes, my precious...

I don't think I've mentioned this before, but for the last several months (ever since I moved into this house) I've been receiving Martha Stewart Living in the mail. I can't for the life of me figure out why. At first I thought maybe they were being delivered for the previous owner of the house but sure enough my name and address are on the shipping label. Then I thought maybe one of my friends sent it as a gag lift (or even worse a gift gift) but I've asked around and either none of my friends did it or none of them would admit it. Nevertheless, this month things changed...

This month Marth Stewart Living never arrived. Instead, Maxim showed up. When I opened the mailbox and saw it there, quite literally the clouds parted, the sun came out, and angels were suddenly singing all around me... This my friends is justice. Yes, I do believe in karma. I give money to the homeless dude outside of our office with the cardboard sign that says "Lear Jet ran out of fuel" and I always I park my humongous truck in the spots designated for beasts such as this. This is my reward. What goes around comes around folks...

To bring these two seemingly random subject togther, this month's Maxim included a special interview and photo shoot with Kaley Cuoco, star of The Big Bang Theory where she plays the smokin' hot chick that lives across the hall from the geeks. In the article she says that she loves geeks, she only dates dudes that like dogs, they have to be funny, and she prefers older men.

Kaley, if you're out there, I can be reached at headgeek@solarwinds.com


Flame on...
Josh
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4 Mar 2010

It's time dude, cut the cord already...

by: Josh Stephens  |  Filed Under: Planning & Design, LAN & Wireless, WAN
Comments (6) |
Some things really are a matter of opinion. My buddy Greg Newman prefers spinnerbaits while I prefer to fish with plastic worms. My brother Zach prefers to shoot a pump gun while I shoot an over/under. And apparently my friend and fellow-blogger Michael Morisy over at Tech Target prefers to waste his money on less secure,old school wired networks than to step into the 21st century and join the wireless fan club... You can read all about his take on this subject here . Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of places where wired networks are the only logical choice and I don't...
25 Feb 2010

Understanding When to Deploy a Distributed Network Management Architecture

by: Josh Stephens  |  Filed Under: Planning & Design, WAN, Network Monitoring, Traffic and Performance
Comments (1) |
Here at SolarWinds we offer a product called EOC - or Enterprise Operations Console. EOC is used when you want to deploy Orion in a distributed management architecture. Today I received a question about when you should think about deploying such an architecture so I thought I'd take a few minutes to write on the subject. Before we go into the reasons to deploy such an architecture we should agree on what exactly a distributed network manaement architecture is. For the purposes of this conversation, a distributed network management architecture is any NMS that has more than core...
22 Feb 2010

Understanding the difference between NetFlow and IP SLA

by: Josh Stephens  |  Filed Under: LAN & Wireless, WAN, Network Monitoring, Traffic and Performance, SLA Management
Comments (0) |
One of the most common things I'm asked to explain is the difference between Cisco IP SLA and NetFlow. At a glance, they have a lot in common: They're both supported on many Cisco devices (routers, swithes, firewalls, etc) They both can help you understand network performance, especially on the WAN Network management applications like Orion and the SolarWinds free tools support both All that said, the similarities mostly end there... NetFlow Let's for a moment group all flow technologies including NetFlow, JFlow, sFlow, and IPFix together and just call them "NetFlow"...
11 Feb 2010

Analyzing Web Traffic

by: Josh Stephens  |  Filed Under: Troubleshooting, Network Monitoring, Traffic and Performance
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One of the most difficult aspects of analyzing network traffic is that so much of today's network traffic is web traffic riding on either port 80 (HTTP) or port 443 (HTTPS). When you analyze network traffic using a technology like NetFlow, sFlow, JFlow, or IPFix, the protocol tells you (among other things) the source and destination addresses, the protocol (TCP, UDP, etc), and the source and destination port numbers - but not the application. There are a few ways of getting around this. The latest version of the Orion NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) leverages one of these methods...





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