Welcome to the first volume of Wahl Network’s Tech Blast, published bi-weekly on Saturdays to review some of the topics I have found engaging on the Internet. While most of the content will likely revolve around enterprise IT, don’t be surprised if you find a link or two on social media, digital gadgetry, coding shenanigans, and other fun stuff.

Brain Food

For those looking to enter the world of 802.11ac wireless in their home, I recently acquired the Linksys EA6900 wireless router off Amazon after reading this awesome bake off page written by Paul Braren. I’ve been wanting to switch over to the 5GHz band for a long time – since the 2.4GHz band is essentially the “garbage” portion of wireless. So far, so good.
Have a long haul flight coming up – such as a tech conference / event – and want to fight jet lag? Everyone’s body is different, but this fasting tip from Stephen Foskett worked wonders for me on the way over to HP Discover in Barcelona.
I stumbled upon Bo and Yana, a pair of kid friendly robots that a 5+ year old can program. The next time your development team says a feature would be too hard to code, maybe point them to this video? 🙂
The vSphere OpenStack Virtual Appliance (VOVA) Demo published a while ago, yet I was a bit late to see and view it. I’m glad to see so much effort from VMware to contribute code and resources to OpenStack, and kudos to Rawlinson Rivera for posting this.
Andy Hill provides a neat little Python script for figuring out which VLANs are enabled via SNMP. I’m a sucker for just about anything Python.
Since I’m on a script kick, Larry Smith has one using PowerCLI to add Syslog servers to your vSphere environment.
The master of not supported, William Lam, has a great post showing you how to verify replication between SSO 5.5 instances. Perhaps this will be baked into the product in the future, a la dcdiag for AD?
The idea of public and private clouds still spark a comical amount of angst among vendors, analysts, and IT professionals. Massimo Re Ferrè had a brilliant comment on the concept using his pendulum example – you can find an expanded post on his ideas here.
I recently had a listen to a pair of Packet Pushers shows on Cisco FabricPath – part 1 and part 2. I love how this show in particular included architects and a real world use case / customer. Nice to hear the reality of a technology in practice.
One of the major RSS feed platforms, Feedly, is still something I’m getting acclimated to after the death of Google Reader. As a tip, here are a list of keyboard shortcuts you can use with Feedly to speed up your RSS feed reading and more thoroughly enjoy the app.

Chris’ Thinking Cap

I’ve spent a lot of time recently catching up on podcasts, with some of my favorites being Geek Whisperers, Packet Pushers, Virtualization User Podcast as a Service aka VUPaaS (disclaimer, I co-host this one), Grey Beards on Storage, and The Cloudcast. If you don’t listen to podcasts, I recommend picking up one or two and listening to them during commutes or down time. It’s like having experts at your disposal to gain wisdom and insight from.

[symple_highlight color=”blue”]Which podcasts do you listen to that you’d like to share with other readers?[/symple_highlight]