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Rowell Dionicio

Networking, security, and entrepreneurship

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Are Wi-Fi Conferences Worth It?

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Yes, Wi-Fi conferences are worth attending.

Wi-Fi conferences have grown into their own culture amassing crowds of people with varying expertise, opinions, and personalities. But are they worth attending today? The answer lies within a blend of need and belonging.

Purpose Of A Conference

Most conferences are put on by vendors and some are neutral, funded by sponsors. You most likely decide to attend a Wi-Fi conference because of the vendor technology you’re refining your expertise around, the insights you’re soaking up, or the community you find yourself surrounded by.

The main purpose is to educate and inform the community around the technology. In the end, you bring back knowledge that can be utilized in the workplace.

Your Intent

What is your intent for attending a Wi-Fi conference. Find your why. Because this “so called Wi-Fi Community” is what you make of it.

You get as much as you put in. Approach it with an open mind. Be willing to change your stance on a particular subject either by an insightful presentation or a tableside talk.

If you want to speak and share, then that’s great. Thats awesome! Use that platform as any other platform we have access to. It’s also a perfect way to practice public speaking.

But if you don’t want to stand up on that stage, that’s okay too. No one is forcing you.

How Do You Feel?

What’s that feeling you have when departing? Do you feel like you’ve learned something new? Have you met new people? Are you reinvigorated to do better at work? Maybe you’ve come up with new ideas you want to test out.

There’s no mistaken belief around Wi-Fi conferences.

We may not be a family. These events may not be perfect. But you can leave with new friends or contacts. You can be part of a community. And the outcome entirely depends on your attitude and the respect you have for yourself and others.

How I Made $132,026 last quarter

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Imagine a sales manager, from a scene in Wolf of Wall Street, motivating his sales team into realizing telephones won’t dial themselves. I’ve always known sales people and vendors to be running with their heads cut off trying to meet end of quarter or end of year sales goals.

We’re lucky that at Packet6, we don’t think about quotas too much. But we do track our financial metrics closely. Finishing the year strong is always preferred and top of mind but not at the expense of being an overbearing sales person and treating clients like numbers.

How were Q4 financial goals met?

We brought in $132,026 in revenue through professional services, managed network services, and reselling. Three services keeping business rolling like a trio sonata coming together in a single composition.

27% of those clients were referrals – which is why it’s so important to maintain relationships with people and keep existing clients very happy.

45% were returning clients initiating new projects – a sign that we’ve been doing well with previous projects. One thing I need to include in our process is getting feedback on the work we’ve performed to learn where we can make improvements. As if in a period of courtship, wooing the client in hopes of an engagement of some sort but in our case resulting in an invoice.

I don’t hold ourselves to arbitrary quotas just for the purpose of increasing revenue. There needs to be more value to it than hitting a quota for the sake of hitting a quota. There’s no round gold gong, sitting in front of a sea of cubicles with our sales target written in a red ink on a whiteboard, waiting to be banged.

During the last week of December, one evening, I rocked back and forth in my white desk chair wondering if an invoice would get paid. It accounted for 47% of the quarter’s revenue, comprised of licensing and subscriptions. As a network operator, I cringe at the idea of subscription models for network equipment. But for the vendor and the VAR, it is recurring income. It nearly becomes passive income.

Compared to the previous quarter, this was a 518% increase in licensing and subscriptions. This comes from renewals coming due after 1, 3, or 5 years. Something to consider and forecast for future revenue streams.

Professional services saw a 20% decrease quarter over quarter. We have clients who pay on-time and we’re grateful for their quickness. But the growth is limited due to my capacity, I cannot in two places at once. I have two options – increase prices or bring on help. If I increase prices, I can lower the amount of active projects. When bringing on additional help, I have to consider the salary I will take on and most likely increase prices slightly but that means we can take on more projects and complete them faster, thus increasing revenue.

Then we have irregular sales, such as antennas, which had a 1,200% increase compared to last quarter. This was in fact due to Meraki finally shipping hardware that had been ordered last August of 2022. I’m glad the client didn’t cancel the order!

Supporting revenue streams included a 20% increase in podcast sponsorships. Quite the year for Clear To Send which is allowing us to reinvest it back to our goals for the podcast.

Expenses are still high

My overall goal last year was to decrease expenses. In Q4FY22, it increased 7.38%. Not too bad but its 7.38% too much. It was led by expenses with vehicle use, web hosting, software subscriptions, and airfare.

Compared to FY21, our expenses decreased 5.22% which meets our goal for the year and leaves us with more net profit.

Happy with where we are

While we brought in $132,026 in revenue, I was more ecstatic to have a net profit of $41,132! Having different revenue streams within the business helps minimize the risk of a single source of income. Where we saw professional services take a dip was picked up by reselling activities and managed network services.

Our cost of goods sold totaled $16,784 but we were able to have margin to keep for ourselves to reinvest and build a better business in 2023.

If you’ve seen my previous posts and goals, I keep hammering on lowering expenses. I made it an objective for 2022 to get rid of things we no longer need to pay for. And I may just keep doing that in 2023. We get to retain more money in the business which in turn allows us to grow and plan for the future. We’re able to save some money for any unexpected bumps or dips in revenue, especially in a questionable economy.

Key takeaways: Different revenue streams, keeping an eye on expenses, executing on a goal, and persistence.

Revenue vs Profit – IT Consulting

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Are you an IT professional who runs their own business? If so, then you know how important it is to be financially healthy. Revenue and profit are two crucial metrics that every entrepreneur should understand.

A business owner could be leaving money on the table or even putting the business at risk if it is unknown to how income and profit is generated.

While revenue is important, profit is the ultimate goal of any business as it represents the actual income that the business owner can use to reinvest, pay themselves, or grow their business.

Managing the relationship between revenue and profit can be challenging, and requires careful management of both inflows and outflows of money to ensure a healthy bottom line.

Revenue vs Profit

The first thing to understand is the difference between revenue and profit. Revenue is the total income generated through sales. In our case, we generate most of our sales from consulting and reselling network equipment.

Revenue: Pro services and reselling hardware

We have project-based consulting and monthly recurring managed network services. We resell network hardware from major vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks, and others.

On the other hand, profit is the income remaining after subtracting operating costs, debt, taxes, and other expenses incurred of generating revenue. This is also known as net income. Gross profit is the total income minus costs directly associated with revenue such as cost of goods sold.

Building for Profit

It’s important to build your business model with profit in mind. This means rethinking your finance models and finding ways to increase profitability.

For example, you could cut costs by eliminating unneeded software subscriptions and other unnecessary expenses. You could also increase revenue by raising your rates and adding additional value to your service offerings.

After all expenses, our net profit increased 133% compared to 2021.

Reviewing Finances

To gauge your business’ financial health, it’s important to review your profit and loss (P&L) statements on a regular basis. This will help you identify trends and make informed decisions about your business. You should ask yourself questions like:

  • What is driving sales?
  • What drives profit?
  • How can we generate more profit? What decreases profit?
  • What expenses are needed to support profit?
  • What is our profit margin and what should it be?
  • Do we generate enough profit to support ourselves and the business?

We typically have net 30 terms (Accounts Receivable) set up with clients but we do require 50% up front for any services-related projects.

Our professional services accounted for 32.7% of revenue. Manage Network Services accounted for 17.6% and reselling activity accounted for 44.2%.

With our services, our direct costs is labor. That is me doing the work to complete projects. Our cost of goods sold accounted for 27.5% of revenue which included subcontractors and equipment purchased for reselling purposes.

Improve every quarter

Finance is a crucial aspect of running a successful small business. By understanding the difference between revenue and profit, building for profit, and regularly reviewing your finances, you can make informed decisions that will help your business grow.

Sending Palo Alto Networks firewall alerts to Slack

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Aren’t you tired of getting lost in logs? Email is the worst way to get logs too. No one reads them. I have a folder with over 190k unread emails about various logs but it’s hard to go through.

If your organization is like mine, we heavily utilize Slack. It would be great if specific logs could be delivered to a Slack channel.

My goal is to configure my Palo Alto Networks firewall to send specific logs from my domain email address through Gmail.

To make this work properly and to prevent spam, I’ll be setting up my Gmail SMTP Relay through Google Workspace.

Within Gmail, I’ll configure the SMTP Relay to allow emails from specific IP addresses, but alternatively authentication can be used.

Set up Gmail SMTP Relay

The Gmail SMTP Relay service is important for sending with an organizational email address. We want to be sure this is done correctly so that spam isn’t sent from our email domain. Within Google Workspace, we use SMTP Relay.

The benefit of using Gmail SMTP Relay is to ensure you’re allowing authorized emails from 3rd party devices such as our firewall but it can be used for devices such as printers, scanners, and more.

The Gmail SMTP Relay allows you to send emails from your devices through smtp-relay.gmail.com.

You’ll need administrator access to your Google Workspace. Then head over to Routing. Scroll down to SMTP relay service and click on Add Rule.

Gmail smtp relay service

After giving this service a name (I’ve named it SMTP Relay), we have some options to select. If you’d like to use an email address in your organization then select “Only addresses in my domains” for the first option.

Under Authentication, we have two options:

  1. Only accept mail from specified IP addresses
  2. Require SMTP Authentication

For simplicity, I will use option 1. In the screenshot, I’ve added specific IP addresses that emails will come from. But I’ve blurred out the whole IP address.

Using IP address is less secure but I just want to set up something simple.

Then the third option is to Require TLS Authentication.

settings for smtp relay service

Set up Slack

Now that we’ve taken care of the SMTP Relay Service, let’s head over to our Slack channel and set up an email address to send to.

To create generate an email address for the channel that will receive alerts. Click on the down arrow to get channel details. Then click on Integrations and click on “Send emails to this channel” at the bottom.

generate slack channel email address

You’ll be prompted to confirm setting up an email address. Click on “Get Email Address.”

Then copy the email address that was automatically generated for you and save it. You can always go back to this section to find out what your Slack channel email address is.

Here’s an example of an email alert inside of the Slack channel.

Palo Alto Networks Firewall

Let’s log into our Palo Alto Networks firewall and click on Device on the top navigation menu. We need to configure an Email Server Profile so we can send alerts to the email address that was generated for our Slack channel.

Create a new Email Server Profile, give it a name, an Email Display Name, and the from email address you want these alerts to come from.

In the To field, paste in the Slack channel email address.

The email gateway must be set to smtp-relay.gmail.com.

In our Gmail SMTP Relay configuration earlier we decided to use IP address as a way to authenticate the sender. That means we’ll set the Type in the Email Server Profile to Unauthenticated SMTP and use port 587.

Click on Test Connection and you should get a notification in your Slack channel. If you don’t receive a test notification then head over to the troubleshooting section below.

Log Settings

Next step is to set up specific logs to be sent to our Slack email address. Under the device navigation click on Log Settings on the left.

For the types of logs you want to be notified on we will add Email as a Forward Method. For example, for System and Configuration click Add. Give the forwarder a name and filter on the types of alerts you’d want forwarded.

Then add the Email Server profile we created earlier under the Email Forward section.

You’ll repeat this step for each type of log section.

Be sure to commit your configuration to the firewall.

Troubleshooting

If you’ve happened to fail the Test Connection under the Email Server Profile configuration you’ll want to re-look at your Gmail SMTP Relay Service options and allowing the correct IP address and correct authentication (if being used.)

From the sending device side, try using port 25 or port 587.

Google has an Email Log Search where you can find out if there’s a reason for emails not being forwarded to your Slack channel.

Verify email is making it through successfully using Google’s Email Log Search.

Here’s an example of what a blocked message looks like.

You’ll be able to view messages that were delivered as well. If you click on the subject you can view more details along with the destination email address it is being sent to.

Do you have any questions? Let me know in the comments below.

Viewing Wi-Fi Channel Utilization or BSS Load

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Channel utilization is one metric we use to gauge Wi-Fi performance. Understanding congestion at the access point (AP) level can mean a few different things.

A more standards-based term for this is Basic Service Set (BSS) Load. It is defined in the 802.11 standard and part of 802.11e. It was formally called QBSS Load.

BSS Load is a method for an AP to communicate channel usage. And in a perfect world, devices can use this information to select better AP candidates for roaming.

Besides channel usage, or utilization, BSS Load can advertise how many devices are associated to an AP. But the number of associated devices does not necessarily correlate with a specific amount of channel utilization.

You can find the BSS Load details inside a beacon frame. Within the BSS Load element there is a Channel Utilization and Station Count field.

Wireshark frame capture displaying BSS Load
Beacon frame containing BSS load

The way Channel Utilization field is defined by a percentage of time with 255 representing 100% of that AP sensed the medium was busy. This is done by physical or virtual carrier sense. What this means it is possible to have one or more associated devices (also called a station) occupying most of the medium.

It’s important to note that the Channel Utilization is only calculated for the primary channel (as the standard says.)

The Station Count field tells you how many devices are associated to that BSS or AP.

BSS Load element from WiFi Explorer Pro point of view.
BSS Load Element

If multiple APs were operating on the same channel in the same area, you would see similar Channel Utilization on both BSS’. Since the APs would be sensing the medium for that same channel.

Other ways you could find BSS Load is using a spectrum analyzer such as the Ekahau Sidekick. In my examples, I have used WiFi Explorer Pro – which obtains channel utilization from the BSS Load element. It is gathered the same way when looking at it from a frame capture.