Author Archives: Keith Miller

About Keith Miller

Keith Miller is currently a network engineer for a consulting company on a military base in South Carolina, USA. He was promoted from help-desk technician to network engineer in June of 2010 and has been doing it ever since. Networking is definitely his passion, however he enjoys most things that are IT or technology related. Keith is always looking for ways to improve myself and network with his peers in this industry so feel free to contact him if you’d like to exchange ideas! Twitter: @packetologist

Ghosts in the network

It all started with an e-mail from a co-worker on a recent Saturday afternoon, shortly after we finished performing Windows updates on all of our servers. It read something like this:

 “Syslog server’s C: drive ran out of space so I created an additional drive with 20GB of space and moved all of the logs to it.”

Now I’ve only been with this new company for 4 months now, but one of the first things I did when I began learning the network was to take a look at our syslog server to see how it was configured and for baselining how many logs in an hour and day were normal for our network. So when I saw that the drive ran out of space with the amount of syslogs normally generated per day, it immediately raised an alarm.

Continue reading →

SolarWinds Ambassador

Leave a reply

In January, I was honored with the offer to become a SolarWinds “Geek Speak” Ambassador for the month of February. Being a SolarWinds Ambassador consists of writing 4 blog posts (1 per week) about topics that interest you, in relation to IT as a whole. My particular interests that I chose to write about revolved around networking monitoring. Although my schedule was slated to be very hectic that month, I decided to take on the challenge as it was something I had never done before and the opportunity wasn’t guaranteed in the future. I’m so glad I did it. If you’re interested, the four posts are below:

What’s most important to you when choosing an NMS?

Get with the flow… with NetFlow!

Configuration management… More than meets the eye

Network Discovery: Manual vs Automated

Disclaimer: While I was paid for the content I wrote, I was not swayed in any manner to write content that was favorable for SolarWinds or it’s products.

The Pay It Forward scholarship continues

2 Replies

I have a great announcement to make that is long overdue! The Pay It Forward (PIF) scholarship has its second recipient.

Sometime shortly after the new year, I was mulling over whether I would write a post asking for applications for this year’s scholarship. I had just started my new job and I knew that this year would be extremely busy for me, both personally and professionally. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to devote the funds or time to this valiant cause, however, I could not refuse this highly motivated individual.  Continue reading →

I’m going to Cisco Live US!

Leave a reply

As the title suggests, I pulled the trigger and I booked my FIRST trip to Cisco Live US! The conference is scheduled for May18th – May 22nd in San Francisco, CA. By registering today and not waiting until January 14th or later, I saved $400 off the registration price (pre-registration discount). This might not seem like much to some ($400 has always been a lot to me), but when you look at the total cost of the trip which I estimate is going to cost $3600, it makes sense to save wherever you can. Continue reading →

FIN 2013

Leave a reply

2013 was a very eventful year and brought a lot of good things to my family and I. I changed jobs twice which brought me to an employer that I’ve wanted to work for over the past 2 years. The salary is decent, the benefits are good, and the people I work with are great! I have been challenged since day one to keep up with everything going on which is exactly what I was looking for. In addition to changing positions every quarter, I passed Juniper’s JNCIA-Junos exam, Microsoft’s MCITP (Windows 7) exam, and a couple of Cisco exams (SECURE and FIREWALL) that brought me closer to becoming CCNP Security certified.

Continue reading →