Time: 
2017-05-07 15:00 to 2017-05-07 16:00
Room: 
CC-235

Experience level

Learner

Session Track

Infrastructure

Mixed OS Infrastructure - No money, no time, just black magic.

 Why will attendees be excited to hear this talk?

This talk has a bit of something for everyone. It touchs on networking tools and troubleshooting, 802.11X authentication, open radius servers, ldap, a mixed os domainless environment and a joke about a keurig. It's real talk from a guy who has really had to support networks and infrastructure for companies that don't have tons of time, money, or resources to make it perfect.

 

Level of Knowledge:  Learner (Ideally in basic network and infrastructure concepts)

What will attendees learn? The attendees of this talk with get a real life glimpse into what it is to be an infrastructure engineer. Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of networking concepts such as vlans, network based authentication protocols, network tools for troubleshooting like MTR, and antivirus deployment strategies without a domain in place.

 

Overview of the session:

In this presentation we will begin by giving an overview of how infrastructure is in the real world. To sum that up in a sentence explaining to those in the audience that for the most part as an infrastructure engineer you are asked to shove a square peg into a round hole and just "make it work." From here I will give a very brief summary of what I have done and do for a living in infrastructure, network / sysadmin / linux admin / windows admin / buyer of direct water line injected cofee makers (specializing in keurigs). I will then pose some questions to the audience in regards to how they would solve real world problems I had been charged with solving. Below are some examples of those situations:

  • How would you deploy antivirus to a company of several hundred staff using Windows, Linux, and OSX without any of the machines being on a domain? - Our answer was Panda's Cloud based antivirus.
  • How would you make sure that everyone in the company actually had the antivirus installed? (with no domain) - Panda's cloud based antivirus has single web based dashboard to track this from the client installs.
  • How can you ensure the antivirus won't impact the iops of the machine? - Testing on a small sample size of the highest touch developers we had to make sure no perceivable impact was noticed.
  • How would you enforce network logins for Windows / Linux / OSX? (with no domain) - 802.11X at the switch level, juniper switches in our case, with a backing radius server talking to an ldap server worked like a dream
  • What would you use for authentication in the above? (with no domain) - 802.11X works across all three OS's
  • If you were having intermittent connectivity issues to the internet what tools might you use to track that down? - MTR in our case showed us we were dropping a ton of packets at our ISP's edge router in the office so we had them dash down a new one to us.
  • It's the middle of the workday in your office and all of a sudden no new users can connect to the wireless network but users already connected are working without issue. What would you do to figure out the issue? - We reviewed our wireless infrastructure and saw more clients were trying to connect than ip addresses were available in the wifi vlan. Live in the middle of the day we moved and resized the vlan from a /24 to a /20 network, queue nail biting exciting music.

From here I will open the talk up to questions from the audience.