Cloud Therapy: EP 015 – Ethan Banks from Packet Pushers

Co-Host of the hit IT podcast, Packet Pushers, Ethan Banks, joins Mike to tell some fantastic stories about his journey in IT. From his haunting memory of the “Broadcast Storm” that took his credit card processing data center down, to how he used SharePoint to allow the higher-ups to see his work, to that time a boss told him he was too harsh on co-workers… Ethan shares the intimate stories that have molded his IT career.

Plus (as usual), Mike has a cool free-bee for the listeners…. a quote template that will save you a ton of time when quoting DR.

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Transcript:

Mike:     Welcome to Episode 15, IT Nation. This is actually a bonus episode. The reason why we’re doing it as a bonus is because the subject matter is a little off of our usual topic of technical topics. This is more of a human IT topic. But, I’m so excited for this episode because I know there’s a ton of takeaways for you guys.

If you like podcasts, which I’m assuming you do if you’re listening to this podcast, and you’re an IT professional, you’ve probably heard of the Packet Pushers brand and the Packet Pushers Podcast. Well, today, I’m thrilled to let you know that we have one of the co-host and co-founders, Ethan Banks, joining us on the show today.

Ethan is going to share with us some of his most personal stories when it relates to his IT path, in his IT career. For instance, the day a broadcast storm took down his entire data center that was actually processing credit card payments – that was their whole business and their whole data center was down – (Obviously, that was a very stressful time) and how that taught him some really good lessons on, basically, incident response strategies that they had to implement with the people that they had on board to make sure that people were in charge, and stuff like that. So, he talks about that.

He talks about things that he does to get positive feedback from his boss, he talks about a time where he actually receives a negative feedback from his boss and how that affected him, as well as a bunch of other good stuff. We’re really telling stories today, having a lot of fun, and I think you’ll learn a little bit about Ethan that you may not know if you’re a follower of Packet Pushers. I’m really excited and I know you’re going to get a lot from today’s bonus episode.

As usual, I also have a cool, free gift for you guys. If you’re shopping for DR for your company or you’re planning on shopping for DR in the near future, the one thing you’re going to want is a great quote template. What I mean by that is you want an Excel spreadsheet that shows all the providers that you’re quoting side by side on the same piece of paper. You do not want to be getting quotes emailed to you, and have all these loose leaf papers flying around, and trying to remember what somebody else included on their price and who else included this feature, and so on. You want it all on the same page.

This is actually what we do at AeroComInc.com a ton. We help companies quote providers and compare them side by side, so we do these quote templates all the time. I decided to make a quote template for you guys and specifically for disaster recovery as a service quotes. What I mean by that is I made a quote template with all the cool equations in it so it calculates your monthly recurring cost based on quantity and unit cost. It also breaks down your installation costs. It shows all the providers in the columns of these Excel spreadsheets side by side and, then, in the rows, I went ahead and pre-populated all the cells with all the main questions that you should be asking if you are quoting DR in the cloud, or backup, or any type of DRaaS service.

For instance, questions like: How much is the provider going to charge for computing cost of your service is idle? How much if they’re active? How much do they charge for the data storage portion? What about bandwidth – idle bandwidth versus active bandwidth? Burstable? All that good stuff. Do they charge you a fee for licensing for Veeam? Are they going to allow you to backup physical servers as well as virtual machines? Do they support Hyper-V or VMWare? All these types of questions, every single possible question that you could think of is accounted for on this spreadsheet. There are questions on here you never would think of asking but are very to ask when you’re quoting these stuff.

I’m going to give you guys this for free. All you have to do is text the word “DRQUOTETEMPLATE” to the number 44-222. Just text the word “DRQUOTETEMPLATE” to the number 44-222 and we will send you this free gift, this free quote comparison spreadsheet that I made just for you guys as a gift for being a podcast listener. So, make sure you guys do that.

Alright, let’s get to our interview with Ethan.

Today, I’m really excited. We have a celebrity guest with us – Ethan Banks from Packet Pushers. Welcome, Ethan.

Ethan:   Oh, Mike. That’s a lot of pressure. You said two things: successful and then celebrity. I don’t know if I’m either of those things exactly, but we’re going to roll with that, I guess.

Mike:     Awesome. Well, for those listeners out there who aren’t familiar with Packet Pushers… There may be a couple out there, but maybe two. Ethan, could you tell us a little bit about Packet Pushers? Expand on that a little bit for us.

Ethan:   Sure. Packet Pushers is, well, at its heart, it’s a podcast that I started with a couple of other gentlemen back in 2010. We were network engineers who were looking for a podcast that talked about what we did for a living and, so, we started a show.

We started recording about the day to day life of a network engineer, and really focused on technology, and keeping it pretty nerdy. A lot of hands-on kind of stuff – what it’s like to configure your equipment. Over the years the show has grown and we’ve got more than just that show now. We’ve got that original weekly show we call it and then a bunch of other channels that we’ve built out. Low and behold, we figured out enough of this media and marketing thing to get some sponsors to make it worth our while to be able to do it full time. So, me and one of the original hosts, Greg Ferro, and then a couple of other folks worked with us to make it a business.

What we do full time over at PacketPushers.net is produce podcasts that still cater to nerds, really, engineering-heavy kind of content. We have a community blog of folks that write, just sharing their experiences, their real world experiences, doing networking, and data center work, and security, and wireless, and the like.

Mike:     Awesome. Thanks. I noticed, just by doing my homework on you a little bit, there’s also a couple of other things you do professionally. Can you tell us a little bit about that as well and, also, a little bit about you personally?

Ethan:   Sure. Just the deal with me – these days I’m full time as the co-founder of Packet Pushers Interactive. That’s the company I was describing before. My function is, really, Chief Operating Officer is how I would define it. I create a lot of the content, but I also, at the back end, make sure that the business works.

Then, beyond that, I spent twenty years in IT. I had titles like network engineer, network operations manager, LAN/WAN engineer, senior network architect. Those were all the sorts of titles that I had as I worked with different companies over the years either in a full time role or sometimes as a consultant. I’ve done both kinds of work. A lot of enterprise work, a lot of data center work, and then, heavily, networking, although other things too. I mean, a collected a pile of certifications over the years. At some point in my career I’ve been an MCSC, a CNE, a CCNA, a CCNP and SP, and even a CEH. All of those are gone now. I’ve let those lapse over time. I just haven’t had reasons to keep up with time with those specific ones. The one I’ve held on to is the CCIE. I’m CCIE number 20655 in routing and switching, and I have been since 2008, although this might be the year I’m finally done with it. I don’t know, man.

Personally, married, two kids. I live in central New Hampshire and I work from home. I work with the InterOp Conference in Las Vegas. This year I’m co-chairing with Greg Ferro the Future of Networking Summit which we’re going to hold at InterOp in Las Vegas, May 2016. With that, I’m planning the track, I’m also going to do some speaking. Then, I’m also an organizer for BOSNOG, the Boston area Network Operators Group. I’m just somebody helping out a little bit. There are several of us that do the organization for that, trying to find a place to meet and find speakers, and so on.

I guess, just a personal thing, I’m a bit of a Subaru fan. I’ve got three of them.

Mike:     Oh, wow.

Ethan:   Well, I’ve got a 2012 Impreza which is not… It’s an alright car. It’s not a turbo, not a [Inaudible 00:11:43] It’s a good car, a 2012 Outback. i just bought a 2004 Forester Turbo, so it’s kind of like the sleeper fast Subaru. It’s not the one that kids drive with the big wings and all that stuff. It looks like a mom and pop grocery getter, but it’s got like the same fast engine under. It’s just my speed, you know, flying under the radar. You’d never see me coming.

Mike:     That’s awesome. Usually, I’d move on to the next thing, but I’ve got to stop there for a second. How did you become a big Subaru fan? What’s the story behind that?

Ethan:   The story is my wife and I are big hikers. If you like the outdoors, New Hampshire is a great place to live. We both hike up in the White Mountains. She needed a car and like, “Whoa, what should we get?” “I don’t know,” and she said “Well, a lot of my friends that hike have Subaru,” so we started looking into that and bought her the Outback, which we loved. Great car. Just fantastic. In New Hampshire we get a lot of snow and misery in the winter, so the Outback wasn’t just good for going up to the mountains and beating around in the rough back roads that you need to go on to get to the trail head sometimes, it was also fabulous in the snow. I couldn’t believe it.

I have this memory of looking out the window as she drove away in the Outback. We have a little slope of a hill where we live. The old car would just struggle and spin its tires on a bad morning, the Outback just drove away like nothing – all wheel drive. We were sold at that point. I needed a car at some point and bought the Impreza. Now we’ve got older kids and need to have a third card occasionally, so I’ve bought the Turbo. It’s, kind of, a toy and if I can get the stupid check engine light to stay off, maybe I can enjoy the thing.

Mike:     Well, that’s cool. Thanks for sharing that. All the stuff – We’re in Southern California, so I love hearing about, you know, you guys driving off in the snow and all that stuff because we don’t get much of a change of seasons where I’m at.

Ethan:   I’ve lived in the Long Beach area for a couple of years so I know what you mean.

Mike:     Oh, yeah. Great. Okay, well, we’re eventually going to get to some really fun stuff, but the first question I always like to ask as we dive into this hear is: If you could take us back to one of the most difficult moments you faced in your IT career and tell us a story about that, to let us know that, you know, you might be a celebrity, we might hear you on a podcast a lot, but you’ve also gone through some tough times too once in a while. So, just to let us know that you are human like the rest of us, could you tell us a quick story about, maybe the toughest time that you’ve experienced in IT?

Ethan:   Well, let me give you a difficult day, particularly, that stands out to me. There’s many. IT is a hard career, so I could pick a lot of anecdotes about tough days, or down days, or difficult days. One that stands out to me the most though was a data center down event. You hear about stories like this and all, you know, the system was down, the network was down, and that was down. This was truly the entire data center was unable to process. The context was a payment processing data center for a large card payment processor.

Mike:     Wow.

Ethan:   You’d swipe a card and a transaction, in real time, would get passed through our data center on its way to some bank who would approve or deny it. It would pass back through our network and then we’d send it back to wherever it came from. So, if we’re down and we can’t process, that means all of our business, the entirety of the card processing business was heading to our alternate data center. We had two at that time, primary data centers, that we process through.

There is no sicker, nauseous feeling you can have in the pit of your gap when the network is the root cause of your downed data center – and it was. So, it was me, in a technical lead position, along with everyone else in the company (managers, engineers, technical people) scrutinizing their systems, trying to get some clue as to what the problem was and we were hard down for over three hours. It was one of those things where everyone was so frantic, and so stressed out, and panicky. Again, even though we were processing in the other data center, this was grim for us to have, basically, half of our capacity down still.

Mike:     Right.

Ethan:   There are conflicting personalities. There are people on conference calls. There are people trying to take charge who don’t know what they’re doing, but they feel like they’ve got to do something, so they’re going to like take command of the situation, and so on.

At the end of the day, it was looking at the symptoms and seeing what was going on, and figuring out, after some packet captures, what was really happening, which was one particular switch in the data center had lost its mind. It had crashed hard and in the process of that crashing, got stuck in some sort of a loop where, at line speed, it was sending out, I presumed it to be, the last bit of data in its buffer, but just doing it over, and over, and over again, hundreds or maybe thousands of times per second. We could see the repeated set of packets showing up in our packet tracer over, and over, and over again, so at the end it became “Which is doing it?” You got a huge data center filled with switches and happen to be repeating traffic on a VLAN that was common to many switches at the data centers. It was hard to track down.

We finally found it, shut the thing down, the network settled, all our network adjacencies came back up, the data center came back up, we rebooted that switch and it was okay. Although it scared us to death, it never flaked out again and we began bringing service back into the data center. But, I’ll tell you, it was just… When you’re someone who is really into IT, when you really take your job seriously, and you love what you do, and you put your brainpower and your late night upgrades, and research, and skill, and calls with tech support into a network over a period of weeks, and months, and years, you love that thing. It’s your baby. When it’s down, it’s a tough day. It’s a tough day.

It’s not just a job for some people in IT. I guess I’m one of those people. I take it way too personally, seriously – I don’t know. Because of that situation where that network was hard down, it sticks out of my mind more than anything else over twenty years of IT drama.

Mike:     What was some of the takeaways that you walked away with from that?

Ethan:   We learned some hard design decisions that day. One of the takeaways was the fact that having a common VLAN to every switch in the data center meant when you had what was, effectively, a broadcast storm going on, every switch was going to see it and going to be affected by it and everything was going to be affected in the data center as a result. That was like, okay, we have to rethink how we’re managing these switches, you know, we put some thoughts into that.

Another thought we came away with was, well, our core switches had spiked CPUs and, therefore, they could not maintain routing adjacencies with neighboring routers and switches because they didn’t have the CPU to do it. That’s all control plane stuff in those switches. They have to have enough CPU horsepower to do it. It’s not like just forwarding where an ASIC does it. Control plane stuff is happening in that CPU that was maxed out trying to deal with this huge volume of traffic coming in from this crashed switch. So, we learned, okay, maybe we need to get serious about a feature called control plane policing and start to implement it.

We also learned about another feature that none of us have every learned about before, but our vendor, CISCO, gave us a recommendation called storm control where we, maybe, could have kept – it still might have been ugly, but we could have kept the network under control had we been using this feature. I think your question really reflects on what our manager and his manager asked at that point, which is: It sucks that it happened, how do we prevent it from happening again? That’s what we spent weeks, actually, months researching, testing in the lab, and then, finally, implementing. We put a lot of changes in place to prevent that one-off, weird, bizarre scenario I had never seen before and will never see again, probably – a crashed switch flooding the network. It’s just to prevent that sort of situation from taking the network down.

Mike:     Yeah. That’s some great wisdom though. When you go through those situations, all those little fail-safes that you put in place and the rookies next year wondering why you’re doing what you’re doing, those are the stories that come back and let everybody know that this is, that one time, this is what thought me to do this.

Ethan:   And those were just the technical things. I mean, the other thing we learned was that we needed a stronger incident command process in place. One thing we learned during that process was that we had a whole bunch of chiefs all of a sudden, not enough [in the end 00:21:15], and there was no good process to really get us to a point of solving the problem. We learned we need to have, before the situation ever happens, an elected incident commander, someone who is going to take command of the situation and begin to dispense tasks and responsibilities out to key people in the organization to help resolve things in an orderly fashion. It was ugly with a lack of organization and a lack of incident response process at that point and that is something that we actually formalized and drilled on after, as I recall, was how to deal with incident response.

Mike:     Wow, that’s really cool. Did that come up again in any other form where you actually used the incident response process that you guys had implemented and it worked well? Or, is it like, when it hits the fan, everybody around, all of a sudden, starts yelling again and you’re like, “We have a process in place. This is not the way it’s supposed to go”? Did it go…?

Ethan:   Fortunately, we never had such an egregious, brutal, hard-down situation like that that we had to go to incident response, but I will say it’s something that… We did have plenty of issues where there was some specific application with a problem and it was, kind of, an all hands on deck, let’s get everybody talking through this thing, and it did lend some structure to those conversations. So, even though it was only one application and it wasn’t like all of our customers were impacted, there was still a benefit that we got from just having thought through incident response that naturally bled over into lesser issues, and gave us some structure and some order. I think the biggest thing we got out of it was learning to listen better to one another rather than everybody running around with like a chicken with their head cut off trying to solve the problem themselves. It instilled a stronger teamwork mentality in our minds because the nature of our business was a lot of IT interdependency.

We had web people, we had network people, and security people, and storage people, and all of us, during an application failure or an underperforming app, let’s say, kind of a problem, would have to get our heads together and talk through each of our areas of specialty, understand one another and, finally, move the ball ahead as to what the problem might be. Again, I look back at that data center down day as, kind of, a touchstone that got us to a point of being better organized whether we used the incident command structure or not.

Mike:     That’s cool. I think the cool thing about us talking is that I feel that I’ve gotten better just by listening to that incident. I hope all the listeners gained something as well. Incident response, especially, you think about if you start trying to implement that how you might get some pushback here and there, but just to hear someone’s perspective who’s gone through a major outage like that and hear you say how important that was that you guys practiced that, and drilled it, and tried to really make that a priority, I think that gives everybody a boost of confidence knowing that if that’s something they’re thinking about implementing, that’s actually a good idea and is vouched for by people who have been through a tough time. So, that’s cool. Thanks for sharing, Ethan.

Okay, let’s switch gears a little bit to something… I always feel like, in IT, there’s probably a little bit of inkling in the back of everyone’s mind: What does my boss really, truly want me to be doing? There are a lot of things I should be doing, but in his/her mind, what would they really like to see me doing? What would make them happy? Obviously, making our boss happy or management happy is good for your career in terms of the human side of IT. I’d love it, Ethan, if you could take us to a time where you’ve actually gotten some positive feedback from management or your boss in your career and what you did to provoke that.

Ethan:   Getting specific is challenging. You and I talked about some of these questions before we started recording and I’ve had some time to ponder them. This particular one is a little tough for me because I know you’re looking for a specific experience, but I still have a good answer for you here though even though I don’t have some specific thing to site.

I’ll put it this way: I’ve always gotten good reviews. In those good reviews, I tended to get some pretty consistent feedback, at least on the positive side. I also have some negative feedback I get, bit there’s some consistently good comments that I’ve gotten.

One thing is reliability. I am there. I show up for work. I don’t make a lot of excuses about, you know, I need another sick day, or I’m going to take a three-hour lunch, or whatever. I’m there, I put in the hours. IT is not a 9-5 job. You get some days like that, but it’s very often you need to be in early to get some things done. Maybe you’ve got to stay late on certain days. Maybe you’ve got a huge change coming up and you just don’t get all the prep-work done and so you fall asleep at your desk on Friday night, wake up in the morning, Saturday, and grind away to get it done for the change window that’s kicking off that 10:00 Saturday morning or whatever it is.

So, being reliable – you’re willing to do what it takes to get IT done. It’s a hard, annoying job [Inaudible 00:27:05] because it doesn’t go on a convenient timetable. Just being willing to do that is something that I’ve gotten good feedback on. I’ve always been that guy that’s happy to do whatever it takes, man. I’ll do it. I’m okay with that.

Another aspect that’s, kind of, related to that, I guess, is responsibility. If I was assigned a project, if I took it on, I would take it on. I would own it. I would make sure it got done and I will do my best to make sure that it got done well. I’m not saying that I perfectly execute every project I ever did or anything like that, but I was very conscientious about it. I really did my best to make sure that the project was going to succeed. I would do the homework, I would try to dot my Is, cross my Ts. I would spreadsheet things to death. I would really carefully plan, talk to vendors, think things through, bounce things off of other people, etc, to do what I could based on my experience and so on to make sure that whatever the project was that we were trying to get done was going to get done.

Today, I’m a co-founder of a small company. I have contractors that I rely on to help me get my business done, two employees that work fulltime for us, so I, kind of get it now. I get just how important being reliable is. If I say to somebody I’m working with “Would you please take care of X” and knowing that I don’t have to think about X anymore because they’re going to take care of it just because I asked them to, you have no idea what a relief that is because it frees me up to work on other things. So, kind of, on the flip side, after all these years of working for other people, now having other people work for me, I get it even more than I did back when I was just trying to do what I though was the right thing.

Mike:     Absolutely. I think those are really fascinating points because you think, okay, Ethan’s talking about times where a boss said “Hey, you’re doing a good job” and you think his main job is on the technical side, but what’s funny is the two things he mentioned right away, all you listeners out there, is he listed things that were not technically focused. He listed reliability and responsibility. The big takeaway for me there is anyone out there trying to impress a boss, the first thing they’re thinking about is not all the certifications that Ethan had. Obviously, Ethan had a ton of technical certifications, a ton of technical ability, he was doing a lot of fancy things with the server room, but one of the two things he remembers the most consistently praised things and it’s reliability and responsibility.

So, sometimes, maybe, focus on those and just think, “Hey, how can I make sure it worked on time every single time?” or make sure I’m getting organized to my boss. As opposed to focusing on how can I become more technical, how can I make sure I’m doing things in a consistent nature when it comes to things like reliability and responsibility because that’s probably the first thing on my boss’ mind. That’s really interesting, Ethan. Thanks, again, for sharing that.

Okay. On a similar note, I feel like a lot of people in corporate America, so to speak, are doing a lot of fantastic things, but they’re not sure if their boss is noticing all the great things that they’re doing. They’re trying to find out ways that they could actually get their boss to notice or maybe communicate upward about the things that they’re doing, but, at the same time, they don’t want to look like a brownnoser, so to speak. So, I’m always curious for guests to tell us a story where they can remember communicating upward to a boss about some good things that they were doing that they thought were important for their boss to notice. Was there a time you can take us, Ethan, where you remember communicating upward to a boss?

Ethan:   A couple of things. This is more, for me, a strategic way I work as opposed to an individual thing. Once again, Mike, I’m going to cheat you. I’m not doing an individual story, but I do have a strategy here to communicate. I got a preface it, though, by saying I am not naturally a person that seeks attention or wants to go to my boss and go “Look what I did” kind of thing. I consider myself to be an introvert.

Now, I know it’s, kind of, trendy if you’re following social media and you read blogs and stuff. A lot of people, they’re all “Oh, yes, I’m an introvert.” It’s, kind of, trendy and popular to wear that hat these days. I’ve dug into the topic and I think that, in fact, it actually maps pretty well to my personality. Let’s assume that’s true whether I’d have to sit down with some professional to tell me whether I’m truly introverted or not, but let’s assume that’s true.

Mike:     Okay.

Ethan:   Going after the spotlight is not easy for me. That is hard for me. I’d rather fly under the radar. I’d rather be in the shadows and so on. However, it is still important for me to know that my boss appreciates what I do. I want the confidence that I am valued as an employee and that my boss has a sense that I am adding value to the organization by my expertise, and what I’m doing, and so on.

There’s a couple of things here. One is, my work has tended to speak for itself pretty well. If you do a good job, if you are technically competent, in addition to the reliability and responsibility thing I was talking about in the previous question, I’ve studied really hard too. Those things, kind of, go hand in hand – trying to make sure that I stay relevant and I’m up on technology, so, therefore, my work has, kind of spoken for itself.

Another thing here that caters to my introverted nature is I just have a public tracking system of all the stuff I’m working on. Now, I tended to work in lead roles where I’m not dealing with a trouble ticketing system unless something from the triage group got escalated to me because they couldn’t sort it out.

So, it’s not as if I work in a trouble ticketing system too often, but I would build my own project database in Microsoft Sharepoint, maybe, so I’d have a webpage of all the projects that I was working on. I’ll keep that updated with things and let my boss know just, kind of, like a side comment, “Hey, I updated the project here because I did this today,” or “I did this call,” or “I did this,” or “I did that. Just a little bug in his ear or her ear – I’ve had, actually, more female bosses than male bosses – and let them know I’m doing this thing, I’m working on this, and if you check out the Sharepoint site, you can get a quick look at all the things that I’ve been doing.

I guess that underscores that Sharepoint or whatever methodology you use, document what you’re doing. Let’s keep track of it in some way so that your boss knows that you’re not just sitting there checking Twitter all day and reading The Oatmeal. You got to, actually, have a record of your productivity especially if you’re someone who doesn’t want to be talking about it all the time because you’re, kind of, quiet and to yourself. Write it down, keep track of it somehow or another, and then you’ve got something you can point back to, which is very helpful especially if, out of the blue, someone thinks you’re not being productive. Now, you’ve got a record you can point to and go “I am so productive. Check me out,” and then off you go.

Mike:     Very true. That is some very cool advice. When you’re telling me about how you’re introverted by nature and you like to be someone in the background or in the shadows, so to speak, I think a lot of IT professionals can relate to you. I think that is the personality makeup of a lot of IT professionals. They like to work hard, they do a fantastic job, but, you know, they just like to do their thing. They like to go and work on stuff, and build stuff, and go off into their room and work on it, and do a good job, and figure things out, and they don’t necessarily like to sit down and talk about it a whole lot.

At the same time, the human side of IT is that, hey, that boss does need to know. Like you said, in order to know that you’re doing a good job so they can promote you or give you a raise, they need to know that stuff. Those little techniques and things like that are absolutely important because you definitely cannot work hoping that your boss somehow notices the fantastic job that you’re doing or walks into the IT room and just notices it on a consistent basis because they won’t. So, that’s fantastic. Thanks for sharing that one.

Okay. So, transitioning to a time where we’re talking about bosses giving feedback about positive stuff. What I’d like to ask, on the opposite end, is can you remember a time where a boss is actually giving you some negative feedback or constructive criticism that was somewhat hard to take and how you dealt with that? I think that if a boss is doing a good job, at some point, you’re going to get some negative feedback. All of us can definitely benefit from hearing stories of people who have experienced that and how they’ve dealt with it because it never seems like it feels good when they get that negative feedback. I always like to hear about times where people got some feedback and how they dealt with it.

Ethan:   Mike, I thought we’ve established that I’m the perfect employee? I don’t get negative feedback. Come on, man.

My biggest issue, I would say, is interpersonal. I would describe it graciously as I don’t suffer fools gladly, so I can get really impatient and upset with people that are pushing my buttons the wrong way. In my younger days, particularly – not that I’m old. I’m in my mid-40s now, enough to have had twenty years’ worth of career behind me. In my younger days, especially in my twenties, I just reacted badly to some people. That is not cool and could be really disruptive and even destructive to your interpersonal relationships in the workplace.

It has definitely come back to bite me. I have had, unfortunately, multiple times in my career where a boss sat across me and says “Dude, I love you, but what are you doing? You can’t do that” kind of thing and would recount some reaction I had to someone, or some loss of temper, or something like that that I had [unprofessionally 00:37:55] in the workplace.

I’ll take you back to a most extreme example, which was twenty years ago. What my boss said to me as I was sitting in our office, behind a close door – you know it’s always bad when they close the door. Her wording was something like, “You can’t just talk to a Vice President who helped found this institution that way. Do you know she almost fired you.” Then, she started crying right in front of me. I was like, “I am a piece of crap. I am lower than low. Oh, my word,” and I started reflecting on what happened.

It was really embarrassing, obviously. The situation was I had reacted curtly, kind of, somewhat rudely to someone who I perceive to be too old to do their job well, just sticking their nose into my very small corner of the business because I had, kind of, an overinflated opinion of what I did. I wasn’t even in IT. I was in, kind of, a nerdy job. I was working at a bank at this point doing electronic funds transfers and wired transfers in this little locked room at the back of a small credit union. It was, kind of, a neat gig. But, because it had its own little room and I was the guy who had to understand this set of rather complicated procedures to be able to send wire transfers to the Federal Reserve Bank, I had all these books that I had to scour through because much of it was not computerized at that time (some of it was, but you still did a lot of looking up of things), I just thought I was it, man. I was pretty awesome, having that gig.

At some point, this Vice President who was, definitely, in my chain of command – she was at the top – cross paths with me and asked me some questions that I felt were just “Lady, back off. You don’t know what I do. You don’t get it. Leave me alone,” and I handled it badly. I don’t remember exactly what I said. I didn’t swear or anything. I just didn’t do good. I mean, getting called on the carpet floor was exactly the right thing. I was just… I didn’t do well. I didn’t do well with that situation at all, Mike.

Mike:     Did you know immediately in that meeting that you had said the wrong thing to that person or was your immediate, knee-jerk reaction defensiveness, like, “Hey, they shouldn’t have been asking me”? What was your immediate reaction?

Ethan:   I knew when the words came out of my mouth to that Vice President that I screwed up because the facial reaction that I got from her and just the body language was so – she was immediately angry. She was immediately put off. Then, I reflected back on what had come out of my mouth and the tone of it, and I was like, “Hm, I’m going to hear about this again.” So, I, kind of, knew it was coming.

Mike:     Right.

Ethan:   I felt like an idiot. Like I said, I wish this was the only time this sort of thing happened. This happens to be the most dramatic example, but I can tell you other times where people start pushing on me and I’ll push back. Sometimes, it can be hard for me to bite my tongue if I feel that justice isn’t being done in some way. Maybe, that’s what I get my back up about – if I think something is unjust or I’m being misunderstood or treated unfairly. There are times it’s just more appropriate to shut your mouth, bite your tongue, and nod, and walk away. It’s okay. That’s life. These things happen – and I’ve struggled with it. It’s gotten better as I’ve gotten older, for sure. A lot better.

Mike:     That’s good. It’s like everybody’s weakness is also their biggest strength in a lot of ways, so I think, for me, it’s always been a matter of trying to utilize the strengths and minimize the opportunities for my weaknesses to shine. It’s like that type of thing. For you, has it been similar where you are thinking, okay, I’m never going to change who I am. I’m definitely going to have those moments here and there. Is there anything you’ve done intentionally to try those moments, or talk yourself down, or anything like that?

Ethan:   The thing for me that I’ve done a lot of, in recent years particularly, is really change how I think about people. If you let people wind you up and get under your skin, you usually have the wrong idea about them. There are those occasions where some people are just purposefully difficult to deal with. They mean to be difficult and they mean to get under your skin, but that’s rare, I find. I have only dealt with a few people like that. So, I’ve just had to change my brain to think about people and put myself in their shoes. If they’re pushing my buttons, there’s something more to the story. It’s probably not me, you know? So, why escalate the situation? Why get upset about it? Why get wound up? Just walk away or try to deal with them like you’re on their side not like it’s an adversarial thing.

Another thought here is that I’ve learned the hard way that even if it’s extremely rare, once in two years you have some sort of an outburst – that can really stand out to people. They may not remember that you were an amazing server tech, or awesome at networking, or whatever it is, but they might remember that day that you left the meeting and slammed the door. I don’t think I’ve actually ever done that. Whatever it was that was so dramatic and got everybody’s attention, they may remember that more than the other thing. Who wants to be remembered for something stupid like that? A momentary outburst – that can jeopardize months or years of all the good stuff that you did.

So, keeping those things in my mind is a perspective change. That’s, really, the point I want to get across. You have to change how you think to fix that sort of behavior. It’s a problem rooted in your insides and how you think, and how you perceive the word, and interact with others. That has to get updated to avoid those situations.

Mike:     That’s cool. That’s some neat insight. It’s always fascinating for me to hear someone like yourself talking about that. I’m, actually, the exact opposite. I’m the person who’s trying to talk myself into having a confrontation now and then that I should have or saying the thing I should say once in a while, so it’s always fascinating for me to hear from people on the opposite side of the spectrum, of trying to not say that thing, because I’m the person going, “Gosh. I can’t believe that I’m letting that person do that, not saying anything about it” or go, “Why do I…?” There’s always that self-talk going on of, like, it’s okay to say it in a constructive way and they’ll take it alright, just bring them in a meeting and discuss it. It’s okay to have some negative feedback once in a while to people. They won’t quit or go home in tears every single time if you’re doing it the right way. So, that’s always…

Ethan:   I’m actually that way too, Mike. I do seek to avoid confrontation, but sometimes it finds me. I just gets up unexpectedly. Temper, I guess, and trying to get control of it. I identify, also, with what you’re saying there about not wanting to be confrontational as well. I also tend to avoid it, oddly enough, despite the negative thing that I was talking about.

Mike:     Yeah. It’s tough specially if you have people working with you that are on your team that you’re in charge of, and having to give the negative feedback once in a while. You go, “It’s not a big deal, but it need to be addressed. I hate even bringing it up,” but if you don’t bring that stuff up, you’re like, “Oh, man. I’ve got to make myself do it because if you don’t, it builds up. One thing that I’ve learned over the years that I think is a really good practice is give feedback on small things not wait until the big thing happens. The small things are no big deal, it’s easy to give feedback on small stuff, but if you let it build, build, build, and then you give feedback on this gigantic thing, that’s where the divide happens with employees, and bosses, and that type of thing, so that advice really helped me out too.

Moving on to, probably, one of my favorite questions, and I hope you really have a good story for us hear because I think this is always entertaining. Tell us about the strangest or funniest thing you’ve ever seen at work, Ethan.

Ethan:   So, I got one that’s just for the network engineers. Switches set to default, and they’re in production, they’re running, they’re carrying traffic, but they’re all default. What that means no security configuration – no configuration at all. You boot the thing up or you log in to manage it, and it’s just a switch named “Switch,” and it’s got VLAN 1, and there’s nothing out else set up on this thing at all. It’s some brand-named CISCO switch someone paid at least hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for and it’s just sitting there passing traffic. It just cracks me up. I mean, [Inaudible 00:47:12] serious enterprise network, this kind of a thing is a no-no, and I’ve seen it repeatedly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into this. “Ha! There’s that switch in the rack and I can’t manage it. I wonder what’s going on?” You plug in a console cable. “Oh! It’s named switch and there’s no configuration. Awesome. Off you go.”

I’ve got another story just about Strange Things. I was on a team that was cleaning out an old data center. We finished a migration and we moved all the equipment from this one data center to the other. It was a great project. We were all pretty proud and going to the old data center and getting ready to shut it down. It was like dessert, almost. It was just like a fun thing, relaxed, we’re going to pull some cables out, we’re going to slide out some racks, and we’ll get them ready for the scrap people that were coming by to pick up the metal.

There were a bunch of us in there, I don’t know, maybe half a dozen of us. We got cable cutters, we’re under the floor, pulling tiles, we’re aligned on our sides, we’re working in racks, we’re all over the place, cutting cables, clipping cables out, making big piles, again, for that junk guy to come and give us its worth in whatever it weighed. As we’re having fun and just, generally, kind of being medieval in there, we hear a very loud pop, more like a bang. We all stared at the noise, and there’s one of our co-workers standing there with pruning shears in his hand and a very obvious burn mark on the cabinet in front of him. He’d been clipping away, but he managed to cut a live electrical wire.

Mike:     Oh, man.

Ethan:   Oh, yeah. Good times. There’s a little smell of ozone in the air and he’s got this look on his face. He’s like, “That could have been bad.” He’s like, “Yeah, okay…” Supposedly, all the power had been shut off to the room, but guess not – we found one of the hot ones. So, for the rest of that day, we were a little more careful with what we’re clipping at.

Mike:     Everybody was thanking a higher power for their life.

Ethan:   Yeah, exactly.

Mike:     That’s awesome. Cool. The last question I have is: Tell us what your next career goal is and if you currently have a strategy to achieve it.

Ethan:   Oh, Mike. Now you’re asking the hard questions. Okay. What is my next career goal?

Mike:     Transparency.

Ethan:   I have been asking myself this a lot in recent months. I’m in a weird spot, right? Because I went from twenty years of hardcore IT, up to my elbows in racks and floor tiles, and, literally, bleeding on racks as I would mount equipment sometimes, being that guy to now I run a media company. I’m still very technical. I still have to understand highly technical things dealing with networking and data center infrastructure, and so on, to do what I do because I’m talking to people who are engineers. So, I keep up. I have a lab environment and doo a little consulting here and there when it comes up.

But, then, I tell you, running a media company is really a different thing. So, is that what I want to do with the rest of my life? You know? I don’t know. We’ll see. It’s working fine so far. It’s paying the bills, and we’ll see how it goes.

Looking beyond whatever happens with my Packet Pushers business, maybe I’m not one of the voice of Packet Pushers someday. One of the things I’ve considered is, maybe, I’ll go work for a big IT vendor. If I were to do that, I’d love to land in a startup – some ambitious startup with some headstrong founder who’s got big ideas and he’s going to change the world. If they were in the world of application delivery for organizations, making that better, which I think the real focus of IT these days, I might give that a try. I mean, I work with a lot of startups now at Packet Pushers and I love those people. They’re great folks. I could, maybe, do something there, so that’s an idea.

Another thought – take all these experience I’ve got, maybe, see if I can be a C-level at some company. A CIO, maybe or a CTO perhaps? If not that, maybe even an IT manager of some sort. I’ve worked with some IT managers that I revere because of their mentorship, and their leadership, and their wisdom. I’d love to grow into someone that was like them.

The struggle I have there as I look into those positions occasionally, I find almost all of them want a Master’s degree. I have a Bachelor’s in Computer Science, but I don’t have a Master’s degree. So, I kind of, think to get into one of those C-level roles, to just be in the running, I would have to have a Master’s degree, or I have that sense anyway, and that’s a struggle. When am I going to have time to go back to school? It’s tough enough to do what I do now, you know?

Somebody might be going, “Dude, you’re an engineer your whole life, why would you even consider management?” I gotta tell you, I don’t necessarily want to be doing major data center changes at 2:00 am for the rest of my life, you know? [Inaudible 00:52:37] burn out on that stuff. I mean, I’m happy to provide the support of the team that are doing those changes, but two decades of, again, up to my elbows in cables, and data center tiles, and old pizza, and body odor, I mean, it’s not the magic it was. So, I’m a little undecided there.

One more idea, Mike, that I’ve been thinking about is being a tech trainer. I have done some contract instruction over the years where, “Hey, could you come teach this CISCO class?” I’ve taught some CISCO security classes. I’ve taught some A+ classes way back – this is going back a long ways, but I’ve done that.

I won’t take you through the whole resume of things I’ve taught, but bottom line is I love it. I really, really like to be instructing, explaining things to folks, helping people work through labs. Actually, my first year out of college, I was a Computer Science instructor for high school. Just being able to communicate ideas to people and have them get it, never gets old for me, it never gets tiring. So, I think, maybe that, ultimately, is what I do. I’d get into some sort of training or instruction where I can teach folks what it’s really like to work in IT.

There are all kinds of trainers that teach for certifications, right? I don’t know that I want to get into that specifically, necessarily, but if I could put a program together that would teach people what it’s really like to be an IT, not just the tech, although that would be really important, but also the business side of things, that would be amazing. I would love the opportunity to do that. But, I have to cogitate on that one a lot more to come up with an actual plan of how I’m going to get there to do that because I think I just described something that’s biting off a lot, an awful lot to be chewing on.

Mike:     Yeah. I think all the listeners can relate. I know I can relate to that where you have a couple of things you know that you really enjoy, that you’re really passionate about, but just trying to think of how you could make that work, whether the math would work income-wise, or “Well, yeah, but that’s not really something where… I don’t know if I can make as much money as I need to make doing that, but I love doing that.” Just trying to figure out where all those paths cross is, I think, something that all of can relate to and all of us struggle with sometimes.

Then, once in a while, it seems like we have a moment of clarity where we know exactly what we want to do for the next year and we go on a passion binge on that, and it’s like, okay. Then, that, kind of, wears off and then it’s like on to the next. I think a lot of people can relate to where you’re at. It seems like you just have a lot of ideas of things that could possibly be your next move or your next long-term move, and just trying to weigh the options or see what starts to materialize and lead you in which direction.

Ethan:   Yeah, exactly.

Mike:     Okay. Well, time for our next section, which I call “Flash Memory.” What this is is this is a few questions where we just ask you quick questions, and you give us quick answers – there is a ton of information within the answers though. So, are you ready for Flash Memory?

Ethan:   I’m ready for Flash Memory.

Mike:     Awesome. What part of your daily routine is most vital to your success, Ethan?

Ethan:   Exercise. Although, I wouldn’t say it’s daily. I exercise more like three or four times a week. I do Crossfit three times a week. In addition, I hike. I am just getting into trail running, I do some snowshoeing and some downhill skiing all depending on the season and what times I’ve got available.

Mike:     Wow. Good for you. That’s one of the toughest ones I think we all battle with. Awesome.

What is your strength?

Ethan:   I’d like to think it is making complex ideas easy for other people to understand.

Mike:     Then, your weakness?

Ethan:   Patience with the little things. I do not like being kept from doing the right thing because of some process that doesn’t fit the situation it might be applied to. This is something I’ve ran into in larger organizations.

Mike:     Awesome. What single training has impacted your career success the most?

Ethan:   I took an Axent Raptor Firewall class many years ago. What made it so memorable is the instructor kept saying to “be the packet.” That was a security class for a specific product, right? But, that principle, thinking from a packet perspective, fundamentally improved my troubleshooting capability across all networking disciplines.

Mike:     Very cool. What is an online resource that you can’t leave without?

Ethan:   Okay, this is going to sound lame, but Google, because Google is where I start for any research or troubleshooting. The answers I need is spread across so many different sites that it would be really hard for me to pick any, single indispensable reference sites. So, definitely Google.

Mike:     Are you a search professional on Google where you know how to use all the search tools the way they’re supposed to be used? I’ve heard I need to learn that better – that there are all these different ways of searching for things on Google that if you take the time to understand it, it definitely can even increase the power of Google.

Ethan:   Yeah. I definitely use a lot of the filters they have there. I am also a big fan of searching by specific sites. If you zoom into some specific site that’s got a great article, it’s like “Ooh, what else does this site got?” Yeah, there are a lot of directives you can type right into the search field that will tighten your query scope and give you a better sifted results, I think, I would say.

Mike:     Gosh. I still need to figure that out. I keep saying I’m going to do it and I never do. Another reminder for me.

Okay. What telecom or cloud service provider have you had the best experience with?

Ethan:   CenturyLink comes to mind. I worked with them on a small, global WAN with, I don’t know, not that many points of presence, a dozen or fifteen or so, but they were scattered all over the world. CenturyLink was always able to fix chronic issues. If we had chronic circuit problems, they always got it taken care off. They can provide service everywhere I needed through their partnerships and so on. On circuit turn-ups, they were reliable. I’m not saying they were perfect, but they got the job done.

Mike:     Awesome. Very cool. I’m going to put you on the spot, Ethan. Would you be willing to go on to our website and write a quick review on that exact experience with CenturyLink?

Ethan:   I have to remember to do it.

Mike:     Got to do it. I got to plug the site. That’s awesome though.

Last question. What are you passionate about outside of work? Could you give us, like, a first step? So, if anyone’s a novice in that area, kind of, give someone a first step to where they’d go to start exploring that passion for themselves?

Ethan:   Sure. A couple of things I’ll talk about here. Music is one. I love music – all kinds. I’ve got a 400+ CD collection. I’ve got 300+ pieces of vinyl. A lot of that includes a great deal of classical music that I developed a taste for growing up in the home of my father who was a real music aficionado and had, probably, more music than I do.

Getting started with that, I would recommend subscribing to Spotify Premium. Paying the $10 a month, skip the ads, you get offline synching so you can take the music with you in your car, if you’re a person who commutes a lot. I’d recommend Spotify for anyone who’d like to give new genres of music a try.

A lot of people listen to whatever the music industry cranks out, the Top 40, and the rock, and all that stuff. That’s fine, but there are so many other interesting genres to explore – classical being one that is, I think, really underappreciated in our world of short attention spans. So, I’d love it if more folks got into it. Start with Beethoven and Bach. Beethoven particularly and just have yourself a good ol’ time, but learn a little patience to find things that you like.

Mike:     I might just go and do that myself. I’m always looking for good music to listen to as I’m working, so I’m going to check out Beethoven and Bach for sure.

Ethan:   Another thing I’m passionate about outside of work is hiking, outdoor activities, which I mentioned earlier. This is going to be longer than, like, a ten-second answer, but I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoy hiking and being outdoors. I have hiked all of the 48 4000 footers in New Hampshire at least once. 4000 footers aren’t big if you’re from Colorado, but these are hikes that are 10+ miles, all of them, to be able to summit these peaks, and the White Mountains are plenty dangerous enough. People manage to get themselves either lost or dead every year. It’s still a thing.

Many other trails in the White Mountain National Forrest I hike as well. I hike all year long, as much as my wife manages to get out there, but I still get out there even in the winter where it’s a bit more complicated because you need more equipment. Honestly, when I’m not hiking, I am thinking about my next hike.

I talked about Crossfit, I mentioned that. Part of the reason I started that was to be able to trailrun over distance. I need more endurance, the strength to pull that off and Crossfit is helping me get there because I can only trailrun short miles now. If I want to do 8/10/12/15 mile runs, then I got a long way to go and Crossfit’s helping me with that.

So, anyone that’s interested in this, they just want to get outdoors more, you want to start hiking, it’s as easy as going out outside. Go for a walk. Open the door and go. You don’t have to be in the woods to make this happen.

Hiking is a simple as walking around the block. Even if you’re in the big city, urban hiking, that’s a thing. Google it and dig around, see what you can find. Hiking could be as complex as a multi-day trip in uncharted wilderness with a big pack on your back that’s got all your supplies in it that you need to live out there for a few days.

You can also Google for your local hiking association. There are hiking associations all over the place. I think there’s even one in Ohio where there are no hills. Some friends of mine live in Ohio and discovered such a thing, if I remember right. Anyway, just look around for some group of people. Go to Meetup.com maybe and see who’s going outside, doing some hiking and get into it.

A lot of us IT folks, man, we sit on our butts all day staring at screens and it tends to be bad. I’ve been a lot heavier than I am now just because of the lifestyle that I’ve taken to, but it’s been so great for me to, just for my daily mental functioning, to be able to be outside and exercising. It’s a big thing.

Mike:     Yeah. That is very, very cool. Our family has experimented with that a little bit. Last year we got out a few times with the kids. We just started by Googling “hiking in Southern California” and found all these different trails that put us in these areas where we had no idea these places even existed, and finding waterfalls, and things that… You know, we’ve lived here our whole lives. My wife and I got to experience some really cool stuff. There are very easy hikes where we took the kids on – it was really cool. Saw snakes and all kinds of stuff.

Ethan:   You brought back a memory of my wife and I mountain biking near the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and [Carbon Canyon 01:04:07], that whole area. Yeah, there are a lot of beautiful places in Southern Cal for sure.

Mike:     Yeah. They’re right by your house, you just don’t know until you take a look. But, again, back to your resource of Google, you just type it in and you go, “Oh, wow. That exists. That’s really cool. That’s a good activity. I guess I should try it out, it’s super close.” That’s cool. That’s awesome. Thanks for sharing. I definitely agree with that.

Alright. Well, that concludes our podcast. The last thing I’d like for you to do, Ethan, is share a little bit about where our listeners can find you and get in touch with you.

Ethan:   Sure. I’ll give you a list. You’ve got lots of options. You can follow me on Twitter @ecbanks. I’m on LinkedIn, you can connect with me. As long as you’re not a sales person trying to sell me something, I will very probably connect with you on LinkedIn. My blog is EthanCBanks.com, PacketPushers.net, you can find a lot of my writing and podcasting there.

You can also find Packet Pushers shows on iTunes if you want. I even have a fun show I’m doing that’s not Packet Pushers related, it’s just something fun. I started it with a friend of mine called “Citizens of Tech” where we talk about all kinds of nerdy stuff that we find in the news and riff about it.

I’ve got a newsletter called the “Hot Aisle,” which you can find at EthanCBanks.com. I write for the Human Infrastructure Magazine, which you can find at PacketPushers.net. You can even find me on some of the bigger publications like Network World, Network Computing, Tech Target, I write the odd whitepaper for Vendors now and again. I’m all over the place.

Mike:     Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Ethan. We really appreciate your time and it’s been fun.

Ethan:   Thanks, Mike for having me. I have enjoyed this very much.

Mike:     Alright. Weren’t those some cool stories? I hope you guys really enjoyed that. I know I did. Even though I’m not an IT professional myself and some of that stuff I won’t be able to implement right now in my career, I know that a lot of you out there will probably benefit a ton from that stuff. Especially, that was really cool about the incident response strategy and how they, basically, set that up and actually tested it. I know that would be something where you’d really have to go out on a limb to tell your best that’s something you want to do, but how smart is that when it comes to a data center down scenario or things like that? So, if you don’t have one of those in place, I definitely think, maybe, you should take some notes or reach out to Ethan and ask him for some advice on how to set something like that up.

Before I go, I just wanted to remind you one more time about our free gift to make sure you take advantage of that and grab that quote template for quoting DRaaS services. Text the word “DRQUOTETEMPLATE” to the number 44-222. Again, text “DRQUOTETEMPLATE” to the number 44-222 and we will give you your free copy.

It’s basically an Excel spreadsheet that is a quote template for quoting multiple DR providers. It has all the questions you should ask. A ton of them that you would never think of asking, and then, also it has a nice little format of ways to categorize monthly recurring charges, installation charges, term of the agreement on the quote, all that good stuff. So, make sure you take advantage of that and get that template. It will save you a ton of time as opposed to you having to create that on your own. It will also make you look pretty good when you show your boss that cool quote template that you put together with all the quotes in it.

Alright. Well, have a great day out there. I’m glad you got a little bit better today. That’s the goal. I know you did if you listened to those stories from Ethan. Have a great day and we’ll see you next time.