Announcing the March 2018 Members of the Month

[CarolineS]

March is over (how'd that happen?!), which means it's Members of the Month (MOTM) shout-out time!

March 2018 Meraki Community Members of the Month

@PhilipDAth

104 kudos

@Adam

48 kudos

@MRCUR

36 kudos

@Uberseehandel

32 kudos

For the 7th straight month, @PhilipDAth leads the pack - congratulations, Philip!

Congratulations also to @Adam, @MRCUR, and @Uberseehandel for repeated MOTM appearances! Read below to learn more about MRCUR, our featured member this month.

Your MOTM profile badges will appear shortly, as will this month's swag!

Q&A with MRCUR

One of MRCUR's deployed MX450s (trivia piece: It's a pre-production unit!)

MRCUR has been a member of the Meraki Community since our beta days back in August 2017 (here's his first post!). He has been an active contributor ever since, as shown by his 424 posts, 170 kudos, and 17 solutions.

MRCUR is also the proud holder of CMNO certification #12, so clearly he enjoys being an early adopter. 😀

I had a few questions for him:

Tell us a bit about yourself and your experience with Meraki.

I work for a small IT consulting firm in Southeastern PA that specializes in K-12 EDU work. All of the districts we support are Meraki customers, which makes my job much easier. Being able to use the same management UI across the products is great. We actively support MR, MX, MS, SM and MV networks. I hosted an MV webinar recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-Tg8E3OsdE 

What are some of the unique challenges managing your clients' networks?

Schools are the targets of malware campaigns quite often unfortunately, so implementing MX Advanced Security with AMP & IDS has been really helpful. This is another very advanced feature that Meraki makes simple for me to implement & maintain.

Any particular Meraki product / feature that you're particularly fond of or couldn't live without?

Remote packet capture! This feature is a lifesaver. No more dragging a laptop into network closets, setting up a port mirror on the switch and capturing the traffic. It's awesome that this feature is built into all of the Meraki product lines. I think wireless health is going to quickly become my #2 favorite troubleshooting feature soon!

How does the community help you in your day-to-day work?

The Meraki Community is a fantastic place to find other Meraki admins and discuss how they solve problems. I'm a big fan of not reinventing the wheel for every problem, so the Community has been incredibly helpful in discussing problems with others and seeing how they've solved them previously. It's also been fantastic to see the level of participation from Meraki employees all across the company, including my own SE @MerakiDave.

Thanks, @MRCUR!

As always, thanks to EVERYONE who participated in the community last month (and to all the lurkers too!)!

Official terms & conditions for the Members of the Month awards

[Uberseehandel]

Congratulations to @PhilipDAth, @Adam and @MRCUR (and @CarolineS for discernment)

I doubt I'll be re-appearing for some time, it's conference season and because of the present international state of tension, I get to do my schtick, a lot. But that is great, and if I didn't do that, I wouldn't have the Meraki stack in the first place. Between gigs I will be working on a "Janet & John Guide" (ask an Australian) to setting up security for a small office ( it takes time because I am only theoretically a network engineer). But at the moment, what I really really want to get back to is the autonomous electric foiling boat project, which I do with a chum that has also been a member of the Yacht Research Society for almost sixty years (we were precocious SOBs).

Also, as I use NodeRed for the autonomous vehicle stuff, I'm also going to work on using it for interfacing to the Meraki API and seeing if we can set up parallel threads . . .

One of the benefits of being a "Geeza" is that conference organisers are quite accommodating when I decline air tickets and chose to travel by train. These days I can get so much work done on the train, and the stations are in the city centres . . .

Finally, thanks to all those people who found something in what I wrote that was interesting.

[Adam]

Thanks for the awesome community.  I learn as much as I share here.  

[PhilipDAth]

Sorry to use you go @Uberseehandel and I look forward to hearing about the release of the "Uber Foil".  I bet it works out great.

And thank you again @CarolineS for the recognition and managing this community.

[Uberseehandel]

@PhilipDAth

Thanks for the good wishes - the engineering I'm happy with, the gig-runners will screw it up, however. Never mind, once they have exhausted the (quite extraordinary) funding, we can get on with it. We can legally do 70 knots through the Thames Barrier on the way to London City Airport, land transport is lucky to do 18 kph.

[MRCUR]

Congrats to @PhilipDAth (I do not expect your MOTM streak to ever end!), @Adam and @Uberseehandel! And thanks as always to @CarolineS for all of the amazing work you do on the community. 

[MerakiDave]

There they are... some of the usual suspects!  🙂  Congrats to the members of the month @Uberseehandel @Adam @PhilipDAth and thank you for your continued dedication and valuable contributions to the Meraki Community!  Congrats @MRCUR for your special recognition this month!  

@CarolineS I'd like to add that while @MRCUR is CMNO # 12, not only is he an early adopter, but he actually provided valuable input and feedback during the development of CMNO itself!  Sometimes I joke with him that's the only reason he passed it.  (Joking of course! ...he rocked it.)  The initial batch of CMNO graduates just happened to be about 15 or so people (don't recall the exact numbers) and he was in that first round of official CMNO graduates.  So I often say that he's actually CMNO #1, in my book, anyway!  The #12 may just reflect the fact that he tested in the 2nd group or on the 2nd day that first week.  

Quick funny story.  Only because the eagle-eyed among you will notice another vendor's switch in that image.  Which is ok, no environment is perfect (joke) and we all make mistakes sometimes (another joke).  @MRCUR asked once about using another vendor's optics, if only temporarily.  I explained that while Meraki does recognize (does not lock out) 3rd party optics, Meraki devices have an electromechanical plunger deep in the SFP cage that, upon detection of another vendor's optics, will immediately and forcefully eject the SFP onto the floor, and Dashboard will generate a scolding email alert, and shorten your license by a month on subsequent attempts.  His response was classic, something like, "I think I'll go make a wish, can you put in the FR, I've gotta see that!" 🙂 

[Uberseehandel]

@MerakiDave

quote - Meraki devices have an electromechanical plunger deep in the SFP cage that, upon detection of another vendor's optics, will immediately and forcefully eject the SFP onto the floor, and Dashboard will generate a scolding email alert, and shorten your license by a month on subsequent attempts. 

Whilst Dave is still on 1 April time - I did manage to find a rare photograph of the first prototype, scalding but no email alert, still gives one a jolt

SKU - SFP2018-04-01(late)

[PhilipDAth]

My cool new Meraki swag has arrived.  Thanks @CarolineS.

[Uberseehandel]

@CarolineS

Thanks, indeed for the swag, greatly appreciated.

Over the weekend I had to talk about the first data leak I had to deal with. We had let space in our building to one of the great Japanese trading houses. After work the Japanese manager would go through the bags of shredded cables in the basement car park and report back to Japan. Not only was our Japanese business not very profitable but we discovered that, as a trading house, they were speculating in the global commodities markets against us.

So we thew them out of our building (nobody bowed or scraped) and built our own internal messaging system across NZ and Australia to serve all the works and sales offices in those countries (really cool with split screens and dynamic function keys on the DEC VT100 asynch terminals we used), all linked by a fixed  line X.25 ring network with redundant links. At certain locations there were interfaces to transient X.25 connections that linked us to all the continents in the world (yes, once, by prior arrangement we did link to Scott Base and McMurdo in Antarctica to confirm the air shipment of their festive Christmas feast).

This was 38 years ago, I recall that the resident code on the servers that checked what was arriving to see if other processes had to do anything was only 91 bytes in size, before I padded it up to optimise performance (aligning on word boundaries is faster).

What I will keep under my new Meraki black cap are the thoughts that computing has gone a long way over those 38 years, not always in a forwards direction (fire up task manager and compare what you see with those 91 bytes).

So thanks Caroline.

[CarolineS]

Wow, great story @Uberseehandel! Thanks for sharing, and I do hope the cap (and the webcam cover!) serves you well.

[Uberseehandel]

@CarolineS

The web cam cover will be saved for a new laptop, the present one has an excellent camera that has a bar each side of the lens which prevents attachment of the cover (perhaps there is what @PhilipDAth would recognise as a Nippon-Clipon, that I neglected to buy originally)