June 18, 2025 • 42 mins
Beyond the sundecks and buffet lines lies a technological marvel most cruise passengers never consider - the complex network infrastructure keeping these floating cities connected and operational. In this fascinating conversation with Will Robbins, we dive deep into the unique challenges and solutions of maritime networking that blend hospitality technology with critical operational systems.
Have you ever wondered how thousands of cruisers can simultaneously post vacation photos from the middle of the ocean? Modern cruise ships deploy an impressive array of connectivity solutions - up to 15 separate connections including both traditional satellites and multiple Starlink antennas working in concert. This connectivity ballet must account for both the ship and satellites being in constant motion while managing variable weather conditions. The reduced latency of Starlink connections (150-250ms versus 500ms) has revolutionized the passenger experience, enabling video calls and remote work capabilities that were previously impossible.
What surprises most network professionals is the scale of onboard infrastructure. Each vessel houses a complete data center with 10-15 racks of equipment supporting everything from guest services to critical ship operations. These floating data centers must function independently since cloud-based applications would be unreliable with satellite connections. Adding to the complexity, the all-metal construction creates wireless challenges requiring thousands of access points while radar systems limit available wireless frequencies.
The conversation explores security considerations unique to maritime environments, including the practice of using different networking vendors across ships to prevent fleet-wide vulnerabilities. We also examine how these networks prioritize traffic, with casino operations receiving highest priority as major revenue generators. Whether you're a networking professional curious about specialized environments or a cruise enthusiast wondering how your vacation technology works, this episode offers rare insights into the engineering behind modern maritime adventures. Ready to see cruise ships through entirely new eyes?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is the Art of Network Engineering, where
technology meets the human sideof IT.
Whether you're scaling networks, solving problems or shaping
your career, we've got theinsights, stories and tips to
keep you ahead in theever-evolving world of
networking.
Welcome to the Art of NetworkEngineering podcast.
My name is Andy Laptev and inthis episode we are talking
about cruise ship networking.
(00:22):
Is that what a cruise shipsounds like?
I don't think so.
I've been trying to think oflike pirate analogies and all
kinds of nonsense.
I was even on chat GPT lookingfor funny intros, but that's all
I got is just a stupid cruiseship horn.
I am joined in this episode byJeff Clark.
How you doing, jeff?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Doing great.
Glad to be here.
Thanks for having me Do acruise ship sound?
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yes, and our guest who knows all thing cruise ship
networking, his name is WillRobbins.
How you doing, will, I'm goodThanks for having me.
Well, thanks for being here.
We were just talking rightbefore we started recording that
.
You know I've managed networksfor I don't know 15 to 20 years
(01:03):
give or take.
I've lost track and Jeff hasmanaged a bunch.
And never once did I reallyconsider like I was so excited
when you reached out because I'mlike whoa Networks on cruise
ships, like holy crap that's.
You know, five years into ashow you're like I think we've
covered it all.
Guys Like should we shut thedoors?
I don't know.
And then you appeared like hey,you want to talk about cruise
(01:27):
ships, so I'm pretty jazzed toget into it.
So I guess, how did you becomeinvolved with cruise ship
networking?
Is this one of those thingslike you're a network engineer
hopping along and then you getthis cool job at a cruise ship
company?
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Well, so I was working at an MSP and there was
a few.
When you just apply online andyou're like, just apply online
and you're like they're notgoing to hire me, it sounds cool
.
So I applied and they called meback.
I did a video interview wherethey basically have a question
(01:56):
on the screen and you have fiveminutes to answer, and they went
through three questions and itwas kind of like, well, I hope
they hear back.
And I heard back and thenthey're like questions, and you
know, it's kind of like, well, Ihope they hear back.
And I heard back and thenthey're like, hey, you want to
come aboard?
I'm like, hell, yeah, I do doeshe say come?
Speaker 1 (02:11):
aboard yeah, is it full of, like you know, maritime
analogies?
Speaker 3 (02:17):
yes, but, but.
But when you, when you call acruise ship, a ship, call it a
ship.
They get very angry.
When you call it a boat, yeah,I'm like, uh, so we get on this
boat and they look at me.
It's not a boat, it's a ship,call it a ship.
They get very angry when youcall it a boat.
Yeah, I'm like, so we get onthis boat and they look at me
it's not a boat, it's a ship,okay so the interview?
Speaker 1 (02:31):
was it um, technical and like usually when you go
through interviews, it's likethey make sure you're not a
sociopath and then it's atechnical and it's a kind of
that two-layer the first part.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
Uh, the video interview was a little technical
, you know they.
They were like I think one ofthe questions was about you know
Palo Alto's, you know what ispre-rules and what are
post-rules and which order dothey come in, and I had to
record me explaining that.
And I think another one was onspanning tree or something.
And then in the, I guess, faceI would call it face-to-face
(03:01):
interview yeah, there was alittle bit more technical
questions and just like wheredid I see myself?
And all that kind of fun stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
So some networking, some security.
I would have fell on my face insecurity because I've never
configured like an enterprisefirewall.
So did you know that there'd besome security stuff in there?
Was that part of the jobdescription?
Yeah, yeah, and you know,through my career, I've worked,
(03:38):
you know, a lot of a lot ofcompanies have worked for, you
know, firewalls have usuallybeen added on along with load
balancers, vpns, cruise shipnetworking.
Because what I'd like to do, Ithink what would be most
interesting to me and hopefullythe audience, is how does cruise
ship networking, how is itsimilar and different from what
we're all used to?
Right On the ground, thebuilding isn't moving, we're not
in weather, we're notconstantly, you know, like I
mean, it almost reminds me oflike OT, right, like it's almost
(04:06):
like um, like an industrialenvironment.
Right, there's heat, there's,there's salt water, there's
humidity, there's.
It seems kind of like a brutalenvironment.
So what were you doing beforethe cruise stuff?
Speaker 3 (04:12):
but then there's a hotel side of it as well.
So before that I worked for anmsp dedicated to a a uh
government contractor customercarpeting, space buildings, not
moving ships.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, well, I mean what we're mostly used to, right
.
So, like people who arelistening I don't think anyone
listening hardly anyone willhave any experience on like
cruise ship networking, besidesone person I think we had.
It was at the era footman.
I remember there was somebodywe had on and she like, oh no,
no, she worked on like oil rigs.
Yeah, that's cool's cool too.
Yeah, yeah, all right.
So you're a network engineerlike the rest of us.
(04:46):
You've done the job and thenyou get this really cool job
doing cruise ship networking.
Like what were some of thebiggest surprises?
What's so?
Like?
It's all satellite, I guess.
Right, like, walk us through.
Like what does this look like?
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Like you know, do you have one data center.
Larger ships have two datacenters?
Speaker 1 (05:09):
are they hosting applications?
Is that why they have a datacenter?
Speaker 3 (05:11):
yes, yes, you know, um, one of the prime examples
was on some cruises.
Now they don't have menus, theyhave qr codes.
So you scan the qr code on yourphone, it it links up to the
network and it pulls that day'smenu.
It's like a food orderingsystem, just like the menus,
because I guess they don't wantto hand out physical menus
(05:33):
anymore.
Everything is a QR code.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
You can't host that in the cloud because of the
satellite latency, I guess.
So you need an on-prem datacenter in each ship, depending
on the size of the ship.
You said so every ship has adata center.
Yes, yeah, depending on thesize it depends on if it's one
or two.
Yeah, can you give us any senseof like?
Is it one rack Like one?
Speaker 3 (05:55):
Oh no, it's a decent-sized data center.
There are probably 10 to 15racks in them for the larger
ones.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
For smaller ones there may be like five or six
Power cooling servers, gpus,routers I mean everything you'd
have in a regular data center.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah, so that sounds pretty traditional data center.
What were the things?
I mean, some of the things thatI would think about on a ship
like that would be.
I mean, you're in a giant metalbox right, a big Faraday cage,
so I would think wireless wouldbe a nightmare to deal with.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
Yes, so what?
What a lot of, what a lot of umtimes they did is they had
those little in room, those whatthey call them hospitality
access points, um, and they wereconnected via what the phone is
and the phone actuallyconnected the ap.
The ap connected, you know, andthat's how a lot of them did
that.
So you have that in roombecause, like you said, you know
, in traditional hotels, youknow, between rooms is what?
(06:51):
Drywall maybe not, I mean thindrywall, so the signal can
easily penetrate that, but whenyou're on a ship it's steel yeah
between rooms.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
It's steel everywhere what about your outdoor?
A piece of stuff.
I mean, I mean, I'm not an avidcruise goer or anything like
that, but I have lots of friendsthat I have.
In fact, I was talking topeople about us doing this
episode and they were telling meoh yeah, the last time I went
on a cruise ship the internetspeed was surprisingly really
good and we had wirelesseverywhere.
I would assume is there a lotof ruggedized stuff on there, or
(07:21):
is it standard traditional offthe shelf data center stuff?
Speaker 3 (07:25):
So outside, yes, but inside it's just.
You know, your, your averageequipment, it's not, you're not,
you're not raining on theinside, hopefully, most times,
yeah, no, let's, let's take onwater, but yeah, it's, there's
nothing industrial that's needed.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
I'm because I'm a data center person.
I guess I'm fixated on that atthe moment.
Is any of that?
I don't know if ruggedized iseven a word, but, like you know,
is each cable like screwed inwith a special fastener so it
can't fall out.
No, it's just standard.
Whatever right Like stuffscrewed in.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
I guess if the boat's rocking that much, Andy, they
probably have bigger problems inthe data center.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Everything is secured in the data center, but not
everything is tied down.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
So is there a you, a network engineer, on each ship
and is part of your job cruisingthe world, or is it remote?
Speaker 3 (08:18):
No.
So on each ship they have thesethings called IT officers, and
the IT officers are moregeneralists, so they know a
little bit of networking, theyknow a little bit of server.
They do a lot of end usersupport, like every time
someone's having a problem withtheir computer on the ship, they
(08:39):
take it to the IT officer andif the IT officer doesn't know
then they move up the chain.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
But yeah, depending on the size of the ship, there's
two to three it officers that'snot a bad gig for somebody not
tied down with like a ton ofresponsibility, like as a
married life or something likewhat do you do?
I just travel the world on acruise ship.
I'm an it guy.
Like that's not bad.
Get all the food and drinks,probably for you know, right?
Yeah, well, that's bad.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
They get the uh, they go to the crew mess so the crew
has an entirely separate areauh, than than guests do and they
serve.
They actually serve a lotbetter food like well, well,
it's, it's.
It's like you know, with crewships there are, you know,
ethnicity is from all over theplace.
What they serve the guests ismore, you know, palatable to
(09:28):
everybody.
In the crew mess they serve alot of, like ethnic dishes, like
you're like oh my god.
Like you know stuff that theycan only get away with in a crew
mess, because you knowespecially Americans going
what's this that soundsdelicious?
Yeah, no, it definitely was.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Now, did you go on any of the cruises as part of
your job, or was it just the funfor you?
Speaker 3 (09:51):
So I went on.
Onboarding was a cruise of theCaribbean, right, yeah, no, no.
So no, the onboarding was wedid a thing called a dry dock in
Spain, and then I did atransatlantic.
I spent 20 days on a new shipgoing from Cadiz, spain, to New
(10:15):
York.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
So why do they have you on a ship?
Like your job is remote, Ithink.
Yes, Well, so it you know, likea geffiler in the environment
you're going to support, I guess, right, yeah, I want you to
hand it on.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Yeah, and sometimes having an American passport
makes things a lot easier, yeah.
So yeah, that was my initialand then I got moved to security
and we have a group that doeslike the dry docks and that's
like their main focus and attimes you know people in that
(10:48):
group.
It can be hard on them becausethey travel 50, probably 50
percent of the time and you knowwhen they needed help, like I
went on a couple of cruises toinstall some compute nodes.
So I'd be on the cruise for aweek, install the compute nodes.
We'd move over some someequipment off physicals and
install the compute nodes.
We'd move over some, um, someequipment off physicals and onto
the compute node, so you'd beat sea installing stuff.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
I guess some I'm thinking like my.
I have some family that workedin the airline industry and you
know they're only making moneywhen they're in the air.
So I would assume that youwould do moves, ads, changes,
you know, upgrades while theship is docked, but then they're
not making money, so they setyou out so that they can
generate revenue and then youjust do stuff at sea that makes
sense, yeah, yeah, like the, uh,the actual like installing the
(11:31):
equipment and staging, it wasall c days, but the actual
cutovers was uh when we weredocked so the data center sounds
kind of run of the mill.
Right, it's, it's a data center,um, I guess you know there's.
There's a land network on theship, right like local
communication there are, thereare tons of them.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah, yeah, because you've got guests, you got
hospitality, you've got uh pointof sale, you've got yeah well
leaving controls for the ship.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
I'm thinking, right, like so.
I'm thinking of our friend Lexiwho works for Blue Origin and
she runs the network on aspaceship.
Right, and I didn't reallyuntil she said it it didn't dawn
on me, but you know, like therockets talking to the control
system and the thruster thingand like so all the systems in
the craft making it go have totraverse the network.
(12:20):
So the same on a cruise ship,right, Like all the controls and
the bridge and the navigationand every control in the ship I
guess goes through your network.
So the same on a cruise ship,right, Like all the controls and
the bridge and the navigationand every control in the ship I
guess goes through your network.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Yeah, they were starting to move more to that.
They were on their kind of ownnetworks before, but then they
started moving it.
Yeah, moving it to the-.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
But I can see the one in the second.
So I was trying to get throughthe network before we went to
security but you just kind ofbrought me there.
It's pretty important.
So I was trying to get throughthe network before we went to
security but you just kind ofbrought me there, like it's
pretty important, so I can't seesomeone.
Well, I guess I could.
I'm not a hacker, but if Iwanted to take a cruise ship
down or get on the news, youknow, and do something nefarious
, I guess I could easily get a$500 ticket on a cruise ship, I
(12:59):
could get in there, I could hacktheir network and I could try
to I don't know take thecontrols over or something right
, and like give me a million inbitcoin and I'll release your
ship.
But the security, especiallyfor the critical systems on the
ship, must be pretty.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
I mean, yeah, it's basically uh, port security and
vlan.
Um, where it chooses the vlanyou plug it in, it identifies
the vice and it puts it in thecorrect vlan.
So you know your laptopplugging in is not going to
match any of the things it needsto and you're going to be put
into a quarantine VLAN.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
And I'm guessing it's layers upon layers of security,
right Like layered security tolike.
It's not just Mac learning atlayer two, port address security
, they're doing all kinds ofstuff.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Yeah, so they're doing where they're like when
you're.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
I don't want to reveal their security, like I
don't want to reveal the hotelsurface and give people ideas,
but it does profile.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
So like when you connect, okay, it knows.
Hey, it's a Windows machine,you know it doesn't have a lot
of.
It is certificate based.
Hey, store only allowingcertain CAs.
Okay, well, you don't have thecert.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
It's like modern security.
Jeff, I think you were walkingme through that.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Yeah, this is standard.
Nac is what he's talking about,Network Access Control, A lot
of 802.1X stuff.
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
And all cert-based and the actual guest is
completely separate.
I guess they call it an air gap.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
So you're obviously not running something like MPLS
out.
There Is a lot of SD-WAN onthese.
I would assume you'd be largeSD-WAN.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Is it dual WAN?
When you say SD-WAN, I thinkmultiple WAN connections.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Yeah, so that's the actual interesting part.
So traditionally, some largerships will have two or three of
what they call traditionalsatellites at you know 500
milliseconds.
And then, um, cruise linesstarted putting in starlink, and
you know what a lot of peoplethink starlink they're like oh
(14:55):
yeah, that thing that you know Ipaid a couple hundred dollars
for and I I sync it with myphone and you know, I got my one
satellite.
No, no, no, no, it's not likethat at all.
Maritime is different.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
So what a lot of the ships had is they had 12
starlings and channel bonding onthat yes, when you say 12, like
12 dishes on the ship, well, uh, they were each connected to a
satellite.
Like I don't know anythingabout SATCOM.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Okay, I'm not big into the SATCOM part, but when
it handed off to the network.
There are 12 separateconnections, Wow 12.
Wan connections, basically Well, 12 and then three of the
traditional.
Wow.
So what happened is a lot ofSD-WAN providers are going to
have problems trying to manage15 separate connections.
(15:46):
So there was a service that thecruise ships usually do.
That is basically an aggregator.
They plug all these things inand then they hand you off an
Ethernet port and they sort ofdo it in the background.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Isn't that interesting.
Like none of the SD-WANproviders thought to create a 15
channel, like when, well, youknow, it's like you know.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
Why would you like?
You know like two, okay, cool,all right.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Three, all right four now, why do they have so much?
Is it to kind of overcome thelatency of satellite?
Speaker 3 (16:17):
and well, it's, it's, it's, uh.
So traditional satcom, like thetraditionals, were
bi-directional satellites.
Uh, the starlink areunidirectional, so they only go
one way you can only send orreceive at a time.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Is that what you mean ?
Speaker 3 (16:31):
Yeah, and what they basically said Starlink said was
well, however many satellitesyou have, two-thirds of those
need to go to upload.
So like, for example, if youhad 12, then 8 are upload and 4
are download.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
I wonder why specifically upload.
I would have actually thoughtit would have been the opposite
of that.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
I would have thought I did too Well.
Apparently with satellites theupload really sucks.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
So they need more of it.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
There's no trick around the latency stuff right
Like if you have 12 WANconnections.
Does that make your 500millisecond latency any better?
Speaker 3 (17:08):
So what's different is Starlink is low Earth orbit
satellites, so they're anywherefrom like 150 to maybe 250.
As opposed to what?
Speaker 1 (17:18):
geosynchronous.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
Oh no, as, like your typical, satcom is going to be
around 500 milliseconds, butsince the Starlink is low Earth
orbit, you're getting 150 to 250milliseconds.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Because they're lower than, yeah, the other side.
Yeah, like I kind of rememberit's funny.
I used to be a comcast cableguy and we'd have to learn like
stuff, I want to say likegeosynchronous work, but it was
like 22 500 something.
I forget what it was, but itwas like you know the distance
between.
So I didn't realize thatstarlink is low earth orbit.
You get better latency, whichis pretty and like I mean, if
(17:52):
you're out, what are peopledoing?
So I was thinking of thisearlier, like I went on a cruise
.
It was probably 2011.
And I don't even know if I hada smartphone at the time.
Right, like I'm an old guy,this was a long time ago.
I know I didn't have theinternet.
So you know, today it's like,well, I got to document it, I
got to get on, exactly, I got toshow Instagram and TikTok that
I'm on this thing, and so it'sfunny how, just in those 10 or
(18:15):
12 years, you have to haveinternet, no matter where you
are, even if you're in themiddle of the ocean, just so you
can show people what you'redoing.
Does that come?
I know it depends, but doesthat come with your ticket?
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Are you paying extra for internet.
So where a lot of the cruiselines are moving to is free
internet, but it's what I willcall freemium internet.
Yeah, it's where the they'llgive you the base level
absolutely free so you can getsome wi-fi.
But you know then thinkingabout, oh, oh, you want it
faster, you want more uploads.
(18:49):
You know you need to pay forthat, but right now, but right
now, and any internet you haveto pay for.
And the thing that that thatreally got me was they don't
only charge the customers forinternet, they charge the crew.
Oh really, and I was like, Iwas like, really, that that's
that kind of sucks.
And then I thought about it.
(19:10):
So there's probably maybe oneto two thousand crew members, so
you're having another, you know, 1,000 or 2,000 people on your
Wi-Fi.
That's how much crews on a ship.
Huh, depends on the size of theship.
Wow, yeah, you know.
And then it's like, oh, yeah,you're going to charge, you're
going to charge.
There are a lot better ratesthan the customers.
Yeah, but still, you're goingto charge them something.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
So is wireless the biggest, I guess, challenge,
because Jeff said it's all metal, it's a Faraday cage, it's, you
know, like running a datacenter probably isn't a huge
deal.
Land communication, whatever Iswireless like?
Did you have anything to dowith the wireless or is that a
completely separate?
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Yeah, so no for the wireless.
I wasn't the one doing the sitesurveys, but a lot, of, lot of
it, you know, is the good andbad side of of steel is
reflection.
So it's going to take thesignal and it's going to start
reflecting everywhere.
So it's a way to get signalaround as well.
You know it's not okay, it'snot preferred you know, because
(20:13):
I mean, it's non-porous.
so you know, like if it was, ifit was concrete or drywall, the
signal would go through and thenit would, just, you know,
eventually die.
It's non-porous, so you know,like if it was concrete or
drywall, the signal would gothrough and then it would just,
you know, eventually die.
Here it's just bouncing offeverywhere, and this is one of
the ones where they, you know,they use more APs to sort of
cover these things.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
More APs turn the antenna strength down.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
The other big limiting factor was you know, in
a lot of places you know youcan use all the channels,
including DFS, but on a cruiseship you can't.
We have radar, oh yeah, weatherradar.
So now we're stuck to Uni 1 andUni 3.
So all the channels in Uni 2and Uni 2 Extended Because of
(20:53):
radar?
Yeah, because it interfereswith radar and the ships use
radar so is.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Is radar at the the higher frequency range or lower
frequency?
I would assume it'd be lowerfrequency right, uh, in in five
gigahertz.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Oh, it isn't a five gigahertz range no it's the five
.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Yeah, okay yeah, yeah , that that could.
That could definitely causesome issues with your wireless.
That that's interesting.
I wouldn't.
I wouldn't have even thoughtabout that yeah, and neither did
I.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
You know, these are just things that I just didn't
think of and obviously if you'reonly running Uni1 and Uni3,
you're not going to be able todo much channel bonding Right,
you know, maybe 40 megahertzchannels and that's it.
You know you're not going to begetting gig Wi-Fi you're not
going to be getting gig Wi-Fi.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Well, I would assume that part of the challenges with
satellite is that satellite'snot great in terms of a dense
number of individuals and you'vegot to make sure that the
ship's communication obviouslyis going to take priority, which
I assume.
What do you do?
Dedicated satellitespecifically for internal
communication, or they all sharethe same?
Speaker 3 (21:53):
They all share the same, but the uh guest is, I
believe it's policed yeah, it'srate limited.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
I was gonna ask about loss or like policing.
Yeah, because you want to givecritical systems priority, right
?
Yeah yeah, over some schmucksurfing netflix in the pool well
, I was actually gonna.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
That's one of the things I was curious about is,
from a security perspective, inthe wireless there, did you have
any rules in terms of what theywere allowed to go to?
Were you blocking things orrate limiting things that were
high bandwidth?
Speaker 3 (22:25):
So they had plans you could choose from.
Once the premium was therethey're top tier and you could
do Zoom calls.
You can do whatever you wanttop tier and you could.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
You know you can do zoom calls, you can do whatever
you want.
Now, was it 150 millisecondsthat's?
I guess that's that'ssufficient to be able to
actually do a wipe call.
I mean, I think it's 300milliseconds is where you start
to really run into issues, yeah,where you actually notice it.
But what was, what was it likefor you working on that stuff,
did you?
Was it a noticeable latency onany equipment you were working
on?
Speaker 3 (22:53):
so.
So the first ship I went ononly had the traditional
satellites.
It didn't have starlink yet andthat was painful yeah, I bet
because because, yeah, I noticedit.
I I noticed it a lot, but whenI went on the ones with starlink
it was just noticeable enough.
And and that's me, you know.
So I'm a network engineer, so,like these are the kinds of
(23:14):
things I noticed.
Like I noticed my own homeWi-Fi when I go it's not as fast
.
You know, and I have gig,wireless gig connections and if
something's a little off, I'mlike let me check my router.
But you know it was fast, butyou could still tell it.
You could still tell when Iwent around and asked people
(23:38):
there were people just workingand they're like when Starlink,
the internet's great.
I love this.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Yeah, I would suspect Starlink.
I would bet Starlink made ahuge difference to the cruise
ship industry.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
Yeah, most definitely .
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Because it does mean that people who normally would
not be able to go for the lengthof a cruise because of work or
whatever, now if you've got towork from home job, you can work
from anywhere.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Yep Work from anywhere.
Yeah, you know, with a nicedrink in your hand.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah, what about regulatory stuff?
Speaker 1 (24:06):
I'm sorry, go ahead oh no, no, I wanted to go kind
of down the regulatory cybercompliance route.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Yeah, I was just curious if there was stuff that
was different regulatory when itcomes to regulations.
It was maybe surprising to you,because it was.
You know this ship is travelingfrom one part of the globe to
another.
Like I know, wireless, forexample.
You've got different standardsfor wireless depending on the
country that you're in.
How does that work on a cruiseship, I guess?
Speaker 3 (24:32):
So it's usually where it's based out of.
Yeah, okay, so if we have aship that's based out of Spain,
then Spain.
If it's based out of the US, weuse US channels, right right
right but still DFS off, andthat was globally.
It didn't matter.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Wait, wait.
This sounds fascinating to me.
So there's different wirelessfrequencies.
You can use in different partsof the world is that?
Is that what you're saying, andyou have to change depending on
?
Speaker 3 (25:00):
I didn't know that and what's dfs?
Uh, it's, I don't know, thedeath I'm trying to remember.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
I'm not trying to remember what it stands for as
well, you said dynamic frequencyselection it's dynamic, yeah,
it's.
It's basically what do you tellit?
You tell it hey, choose thechannel that's best for you.
Now you're like nope, you haveto.
Yeah, what?
Speaker 3 (25:14):
yeah, yeah, and those were what they consider Uni 2
and Uni 2 Extended in the 5gigahertz range, and then
non-DFS channels are Uni 1 andUni 3.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
So I guess this is like an IEEE question or whoever
the hell sets those regulations.
But what's the thinking behindregulating wireless channels
regionally?
What's the thinking behindregulating wireless channels
regionally, and I guess why I'masking?
That is like if Spain is usinga particular frequency and
Portugal's using it, or you know, and the US like they're not
(25:48):
going to be physically closeenough to interfere with each
other.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
It's not a bad interference, I guess.
Right, yeah, it's more or lessavailable channels and what you
can do in airspace, oh what?
Speaker 1 (25:58):
they're using in a particular area, like maybe
their air traffic control usesdifferent frequencies than ours?
Speaker 3 (26:03):
Well, as far as there are a set number of channels,
like, the best one that I cancompare to is in 2.4.
There are 14 channels andeveryone's like, oh, we'll use
1.6 and 11.
Right channels and everyone'slike, oh, we'll use one, six and
eleven.
Right, you know.
And in and in the us, I think,I think we use up to 12, 12 or
13, but, like in other countries, they can use 14 I guess I
(26:25):
don't understand why it'sdifferent in different countries
.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
If I mean, the air is the same anywhere on the planet
, physics is the same, so whywould it be different?
This might be a dumb question,but I don't know why they would
change.
I'm giving my speculationregionally, but you know what I
mean because they'regeographically dispersed.
What's the point of regulatingthose things, gotcha?
Speaker 2 (26:44):
well, like will was saying, though, on the cruise
ship, you had to be carefulbecause it could interfere with
uh, you know, with uh the radars, right so in other countries.
I would assume there's differentfrequencies they use for their
radio channels, different thingsthat they do and you know just
different regulations that arekind of grandfathered in that
those frequencies have alreadybeen allocated to some other
(27:05):
service.
I mean, you think about the 900megahertz phones that we use
for the longest time and then2.4 gigahertz phones and all
that stuff.
Yeah, they started interferingwith wireless for a while there.
Um, I assume it's probably likethat.
Other countries.
It's speculation.
I bet gpt can answer that forme.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
But again another comcast cable guy story.
But I remember going to a houseevery time their phone, their
cordless phone, ring in thehouse the internet was about,
because the cordless base justhappened to be on the same exact
frequency, the 2.4 frequency,that the so, yeah, that that's.
That's interesting.
I didn didn't realize.
I learned something.
Is there any special?
So I'm trying to parse.
(27:40):
This sounds much like regularnetwork engineering.
If you're a network engineeryou could work on a ship.
Some of the differences seem tobe satellite communications.
There's latency and bandwidthand bonding of 15 channels and
stuff like that.
Wireless is going to be toughbecause of all the metal uh
surfaces.
Is there anything else thatstands out?
That's like completelydifferent than any other
(28:01):
networking job you had well, uh,more, more or less it was uh,
newer technologies.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
So, for example, a lot of the um, a lot of
companies I work for you weresort of that traditional data
center with the sort of coredistribution, you know,
aggregate hierarchy, and a lotof the ships are moving to
fabrics, where everything is afabric, yeah, and basically
(28:28):
including out to the accessswitch.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Yeah, really collapses core.
Yeah, exactly, collapse core,collapse backbone, the whole
thing's collapsed.
Something that was alsointeresting and I didn't think
of this is yeah, exactlycollapse, core collapse,
backbone, the whole thing'scollapsed.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Yeah, yeah, something that was also interesting and I
didn't think of this isdifferent ships may use
different vendors, like a lot ofthem have a dual vendor
strategy.
So ship a could be you know,you know cisco, or, and ship b
could be aruba, or, you know,ship b could be juniper, and and
everything on it would beJuniper, everything on it would
(28:58):
be Cisco.
And I was like why would you dothat?
And then someone was like well,if one of the vendors has some
zero-day vulnerability, then wedon't have all of our ships
vulnerable, we only have theones that have that equipment.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
And I was like that's a good idea ones that have that
equipment and I was like, sothat's a good idea.
So I guess another ships aremulti-vendor.
You're not going to have, like,say, cisco and juniper data
center and then and theneverybody but wireless, like
it's going to be one throat tochoke one yeah except for like
firewalls and sd-wan.
Yeah, those, those were thethings that were different
vendors it's easier to manage,probably right like just have
(29:35):
all one unified solution in anenvironment like that?
Speaker 2 (29:39):
Yeah, what about power on the ship?
I mean, I know that I wouldassume it's PDU A, pdu B, that's
on two different circuits andthey color code the actual.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
I call them pigtails, you know the ones you put in
the rack.
You plug, yeah, you plug onered, one blue in.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
Do you have any say over the?
So?
Like, at places I worked, youknow there was architects that
kind of made forward thinking,design, design decisions on.
Like, okay, in our next refreshwe're going to go with this
vendor solution for thesereasons.
Like, did you have really like,hey guys, you know, I I see a
gap here.
I think we could do better onthe next refresh cycle maybe.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
Yeah, that was there there over that, yeah there was
only one, even though I was anarchitect.
There were 15 other people onmy team who were all architects,
which you know.
I, I, I joke.
Uh, you remember the qos thingis if everything is ef, nothing
is ef if everybody's architects,you know so.
(30:49):
So there were.
There are junior architects,senior architects and principal
architects so you get architectinstead of engineer.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yeah, yeah, I got you .
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Yeah, so the job was half architecture and then half
project engineer, sort of thing,you know, and they had what?
They split them up into two bigteams and I started on the ship
side team and then moved tosecurity, which is considered
shore side, which includesterminals.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Now, did you guys do security on each ship, or did
everything get trumped back tothe data center and security was
done there?
Speaker 3 (31:22):
No, everything is on the ship.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
I figured you would probably split tunnel it for
most of them and everythingthere.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
Yeah, there were very few things that actually went
back to the shore.
There were some things that did, but obviously with latency,
everything that can be on theship is on the ship interesting.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
So you're, you're talking servers and all that
stuff, so you're not going.
That's why you you said, whenyou said data center, I'm
thinking, okay, he means racks.
I didn't realize.
You meant data center, datacenters that, yeah, that does
make sense.
And it is a floating datacenter because, yeah, you're
right, you can't dial home, youknow, back to the, you can't do
a hub and spoke topology on that.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
Everything's a hub.
Yes, we can refer to on-premdata centers.
Everyone has an on-prem datacenter.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
What do changes look like?
So I wanted to talk aboutchange management and then get
into outages as I'm thinkingthrough this.
So an outage is an example.
I don't know If an applicationgoes down in a data center, oh
boo-hoo, customers can't reachtheir thing.
I can't get my cat pictures foran hour, I can't process my
Visa card, like okay, that sucks.
(32:25):
But when you're on a cruiseship and your survival, like the
7,000 or 10,000 people on theship, their survival depends on
those systems working which relyon the network.
I mean there must have beenoutages.
Has you get a call like hey,everything's down, what do we do
?
Speaker 3 (32:43):
That's so awful.
I was in architecture, I wasn'toperational.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
More break-fix.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Yeah, somebody else would get that call yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
But there's outages at sea, I guess, is what I'm
getting at.
Yeah, massive failures or badchange that gets pushed
overnight yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
And they try to do things when they're docked, uh,
uh, depending on the, dependingon the risk of it, and if they
can't do it while they're docked, they're going to do it, like
at like two o'clock in themorning.
That makes sense.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
And it's a self-contained data center, so
really if it breaks it, italmost doesn't matter.
If someone can get to it toomuch, it doesn't have to get
home.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
And the IT officers are there on board.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Yeah Well, I guess that's what I'm getting at Like
if your thrusters and yourengines and your navigation
relies on the network.
I've worked in global datacenters that completely melted
Like everything's down.
Holy crap, something really badhappened.
You know, I'm sitting at mydesk and people can't get the
applications.
It sucks.
We're going to lose a lot ofmoney but we're not out in the
middle of the unforgiving sea,dead in the water literally.
(33:46):
I mean I guess that happensright Like awful work.
Outages happen your networksnever break.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
Well, no, no, no Network outages happen, but I
still think there are somesystems that are not on the
network and that's just for thatreason.
It's very smart, right.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
And that's kind of what I was digging at a little
bit earlier, like thesegmentation of critical systems
and um.
You wouldn't want themtraversing.
You know the the Netflixdelivery um system.
So, like you, you touched onbig changes happening at port,
which is which is smart.
So I mean, I guess you're youknow there's change management
management, right, I guess youhave to like submit changes to a
(34:26):
review board and put in achange ticket and pick a window
and and all that fun stuff rightand pick a window that the it
officer agrees with.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
They are you know, if you don't get the it officer's
approval, you can't, you can'tdo it.
They know when the ship isgoing to be in the right place
in order to do this now.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Do you want?
Speaker 3 (34:44):
to and sorry go ahead what I was going to say is now,
when the ship is in port, it'sa little different because, um,
they have, basically, from thegangway we'll get a fiber
connection into the terminal.
Yeah, so we're not.
We're not using the satellitenow?
Speaker 2 (34:59):
is that in every country, or is that mainly in
its home port?
Speaker 3 (35:02):
uh in, in countries where, where the port is, where
we have a presence and sometimes, um, if we have a relationship
with uh, the port of the country, what they will give us is just
an internet connection, whichis fine.
I mean, we have the sd-wan,it'll connect over.
Yeah, makes sense.
What would you guess is thenumber one revenue generator on
(35:24):
a cruise ship?
Alcohol and gambling.
That's my guess.
Gambling the casino?
Yeah, like, like those casinos,you cannot have an outage.
Yep, you know, like, evenduring normal times, they don't
want outage in the casinos,because those casinos are open
24 hours a day and they are thecash cows, people you love to
(35:45):
gamble and feed them the freedrinks, and that's what they
make a lot of money in.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
That's their big gen.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
It's funny you bring that up, because one of the
things I was thinking about aswe've been talking here and you
kind of talked about some of theother parts of the network that
are on a cruise ship A cruiseship sounds a lot like a casino
because in the same way that acasino has a hotel attached to
it usually and has guestaccommodations and they've got
yeah, you've got to do all thepoint of sale stuff You've got
to do I assume there's tons ofmedia stuff that you had to
(36:18):
handle with in-roomentertainment stuff and that's
all IP.
It's really similar in thecasino thing.
So to me it sounds like one ofthe really nice things about a
job like working on a cruiseship or working in a casino is
that in reality you've worked inI don't know half a dozen, a
dozen different industries thatare all kind of combined in one.
(36:39):
You've done data center, you'vedone hospitality, you've done
point of sale stuff, you've donewireless and all that.
We've asked a lot of questionsbut there's probably stuff we
didn't think to ask.
What's something that you thinkthat would really be like for
the people listening would be areal surprise, or maybe
something we should have asked,that we didn't think to.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
Oh, like I said, the big thing for me was just how
many people it is.
You know we say, like you know,floating data center, but it's
almost like a floating city,floating campus.
You know there are APseverywhere, like even in crew
areas, so the crew only areas.
You know every single crewmember has their own room, so
(37:21):
sometimes they bug with people,but you know they have their own
rooms.
They have, you know, know,their own mess hall.
they, you know, have their ownbars and all these places are
still lit up with wireless yeahand like on some, I think on
some of the smaller ships theyhad probably like four to five
hundred aps and some of thelarger ships it was a few
thousand and I I just at thetime I was like wow, a few
(37:45):
thousand access points.
I thought that was really crazy.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
People can fit on a big ship, including crew.
What's a big ship?
10,000?
I have no idea.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
Probably like 5,000 or 6,000 people, not a really
big ship.
A lot of people to have toworry about.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
I really appreciate you coming on here, will, but
this has been really interesting.
I've I brought this up to acouple of different people and
all of them kind of said thesame thing, which is everything
thought about networking on acruise ship, so it's been really
enlightening to me and I a lotof cool stuff to think about.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
Well, the other part, just you know.
One more thing was when it'smoving, like what?
Like when we think ofsatellites, right, we, okay,
well, I'm stationary and thesatellites are moving On a ship,
you're moving, yeah, and thesatellites are moving.
So at times the bandwidth, thelatency is all variable at
(38:39):
variable times.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
And that includes hey , if it's raining, we're
probably going to get probablyless bandwidth.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Which is why, like you said, self-contained, each
of them is really self-contained.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
Self-contained.
It's just the fact that thereare two things that are moving
at the same time.
I thought that was reallyinteresting as well.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
Yeah, it is fascinating.
Like I said, I had never reallythought about the fact that
it's got to be a moving,self-contained data center, and
it makes perfect sense, right?
You can't be reliant on SaaSapplications.
You can't be reliant on yourhub sites.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Will.
Is this a good job for anetwork engineer out there who's
looking like?
Would you recommend being anetwork engineer on a cruise
ship?
Looking back, it's not your jobanymore.
Was this a good experience, orare you like guys avoid?
Like the plane, it's awful.
Like what?
29.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Yeah, well, it depends, so you know, it depends
on whether it's ship side orshore side.
So the ship side, you know, Iwould say for younger people,
for younger network engineers,that that may be great because,
you know, if you don't reallyhave anything tying you down,
then you can go on these drydocks, you can travel 50% of the
(39:48):
time and you can get to seedifferent countries, you can see
different ports and you get tobasically build this network on
a ship.
For me I was later in my career,with wife and children, so
being gone 50% of the timewasn't going to work.
So being at the shore side kindof gave me the benefits of okay
(40:11):
, well, I still have a job, thatyou know I had traveled maybe
25% of the time, so a lot lower,but you know, I still got to
get out there and I got to, youknow, experience it and it was,
it was great, like the bestthing I loved about it and it,
it.
It's just a very simple thingis like when I was done for the
day, I'd go walk up and down theship grab some ice cream and
(40:35):
you know just, you know justthese very simple things and
just people watch.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
That's a fun, not a bad life, I'm sure.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
Yeah, uh well, thank you so much for coming on.
We learned a ton um this, likeI said, 170 something episodes
in and, uh, you, you broughtsomething new to the table,
which hasn't been easy for us todo, so I really appreciate you
coming on and teaching us allabout, uh, cruise ship
networking, um, for all things.
Art of net eng you can checkout our link tree that's link
(41:03):
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Art of net edge we have a merchstore, we got our website, we
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this one, and we also have ourdiscord server called it's all
about the journey.
Did I get that right?
Yeah, it's all about thejourney.
Thousands of people in there.
It's a great community.
We were just in there today.
Are we talking about today?
(41:23):
I try to hop in once a day andI'm just amazed at what I see in
some of the different chats andsome of the stuff nerding out.
But it's a great community.
If you need a community oflike-minded folks, hop on in
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That's another one from us.
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(41:44):
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(42:06):
Thanks for listening.
This is the Art of Network Engineering, where
technology meets the human sideof IT.
Whether you're scaling networks, solving problems or shaping
your career, we've got theinsights, stories and tips to
keep you ahead in theever-evolving world of
networking.
Welcome to the Art of NetworkEngineering podcast.
My name is Andy Laptev and inthis episode we are talking
about cruise ship networking.
(00:22):
Is that what a cruise shipsounds like?
I don't think so.
I've been trying to think oflike pirate analogies and all
kinds of nonsense.
I was even on chat GPT lookingfor funny intros, but that's all
I got is just a stupid cruiseship horn.
I am joined in this episode byJeff Clark.
How you doing, jeff?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Doing great.
Glad to be here.
Thanks for having me Do acruise ship sound?
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Yes, and our guest who knows all thing cruise ship
networking, his name is WillRobbins.
How you doing, will, I'm goodThanks for having me.
Well, thanks for being here.
We were just talking rightbefore we started recording that
.
You know I've managed networksfor I don't know 15 to 20 years
(01:03):
give or take.
I've lost track and Jeff hasmanaged a bunch.
And never once did I reallyconsider like I was so excited
when you reached out because I'mlike whoa Networks on cruise
ships, like holy crap that's.
You know, five years into ashow you're like I think we've
covered it all.
Guys Like should we shut thedoors?
I don't know.
And then you appeared like hey,you want to talk about cruise
(01:27):
ships, so I'm pretty jazzed toget into it.
So I guess, how did you becomeinvolved with cruise ship
networking?
Is this one of those thingslike you're a network engineer
hopping along and then you getthis cool job at a cruise ship
company?
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Well, so I was working at an MSP and there was
a few.
When you just apply online andyou're like, just apply online
and you're like they're notgoing to hire me, it sounds cool
.
So I applied and they called meback.
I did a video interview wherethey basically have a question
(01:56):
on the screen and you have fiveminutes to answer, and they went
through three questions and itwas kind of like, well, I hope
they hear back.
And I heard back and thenthey're like questions, and you
know, it's kind of like, well, Ihope they hear back.
And I heard back and thenthey're like, hey, you want to
come aboard?
I'm like, hell, yeah, I do doeshe say come?
Speaker 1 (02:11):
aboard yeah, is it full of, like you know, maritime
analogies?
Speaker 3 (02:17):
yes, but, but.
But when you, when you call acruise ship, a ship, call it a
ship.
They get very angry.
When you call it a boat, yeah,I'm like, uh, so we get on this
boat and they look at me.
It's not a boat, it's a ship,call it a ship.
They get very angry when youcall it a boat.
Yeah, I'm like, so we get onthis boat and they look at me
it's not a boat, it's a ship,okay so the interview?
Speaker 1 (02:31):
was it um, technical and like usually when you go
through interviews, it's likethey make sure you're not a
sociopath and then it's atechnical and it's a kind of
that two-layer the first part.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
Uh, the video interview was a little technical
, you know they.
They were like I think one ofthe questions was about you know
Palo Alto's, you know what ispre-rules and what are
post-rules and which order dothey come in, and I had to
record me explaining that.
And I think another one was onspanning tree or something.
And then in the, I guess, faceI would call it face-to-face
(03:01):
interview yeah, there was alittle bit more technical
questions and just like wheredid I see myself?
And all that kind of fun stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:09):
So some networking, some security.
I would have fell on my face insecurity because I've never
configured like an enterprisefirewall.
So did you know that there'd besome security stuff in there?
Was that part of the jobdescription?
Yeah, yeah, and you know,through my career, I've worked,
(03:38):
you know, a lot of a lot ofcompanies have worked for, you
know, firewalls have usuallybeen added on along with load
balancers, vpns, cruise shipnetworking.
Because what I'd like to do, Ithink what would be most
interesting to me and hopefullythe audience, is how does cruise
ship networking, how is itsimilar and different from what
we're all used to?
Right On the ground, thebuilding isn't moving, we're not
in weather, we're notconstantly, you know, like I
mean, it almost reminds me oflike OT, right, like it's almost
(04:06):
like um, like an industrialenvironment.
Right, there's heat, there's,there's salt water, there's
humidity, there's.
It seems kind of like a brutalenvironment.
So what were you doing beforethe cruise stuff?
Speaker 3 (04:12):
but then there's a hotel side of it as well.
So before that I worked for anmsp dedicated to a a uh
government contractor customercarpeting, space buildings, not
moving ships.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, well, I mean what we're mostly used to, right
.
So, like people who arelistening I don't think anyone
listening hardly anyone willhave any experience on like
cruise ship networking, besidesone person I think we had.
It was at the era footman.
I remember there was somebodywe had on and she like, oh no,
no, she worked on like oil rigs.
Yeah, that's cool's cool too.
Yeah, yeah, all right.
So you're a network engineerlike the rest of us.
(04:46):
You've done the job and thenyou get this really cool job
doing cruise ship networking.
Like what were some of thebiggest surprises?
What's so?
Like?
It's all satellite, I guess.
Right, like, walk us through.
Like what does this look like?
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Like you know, do you have one data center.
Larger ships have two datacenters?
Speaker 1 (05:09):
are they hosting applications?
Is that why they have a datacenter?
Speaker 3 (05:11):
yes, yes, you know, um, one of the prime examples
was on some cruises.
Now they don't have menus, theyhave qr codes.
So you scan the qr code on yourphone, it it links up to the
network and it pulls that day'smenu.
It's like a food orderingsystem, just like the menus,
because I guess they don't wantto hand out physical menus
(05:33):
anymore.
Everything is a QR code.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
You can't host that in the cloud because of the
satellite latency, I guess.
So you need an on-prem datacenter in each ship, depending
on the size of the ship.
You said so every ship has adata center.
Yes, yeah, depending on thesize it depends on if it's one
or two.
Yeah, can you give us any senseof like?
Is it one rack Like one?
Speaker 3 (05:55):
Oh no, it's a decent-sized data center.
There are probably 10 to 15racks in them for the larger
ones.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
For smaller ones there may be like five or six
Power cooling servers, gpus,routers I mean everything you'd
have in a regular data center.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Yeah, so that sounds pretty traditional data center.
What were the things?
I mean, some of the things thatI would think about on a ship
like that would be.
I mean, you're in a giant metalbox right, a big Faraday cage,
so I would think wireless wouldbe a nightmare to deal with.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
Yes, so what?
What a lot of, what a lot of umtimes they did is they had
those little in room, those whatthey call them hospitality
access points, um, and they wereconnected via what the phone is
and the phone actuallyconnected the ap.
The ap connected, you know, andthat's how a lot of them did
that.
So you have that in roombecause, like you said, you know
, in traditional hotels, youknow, between rooms is what?
(06:51):
Drywall maybe not, I mean thindrywall, so the signal can
easily penetrate that, but whenyou're on a ship it's steel yeah
between rooms.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
It's steel everywhere what about your outdoor?
A piece of stuff.
I mean, I mean, I'm not an avidcruise goer or anything like
that, but I have lots of friendsthat I have.
In fact, I was talking topeople about us doing this
episode and they were telling meoh yeah, the last time I went
on a cruise ship the internetspeed was surprisingly really
good and we had wirelesseverywhere.
I would assume is there a lotof ruggedized stuff on there, or
(07:21):
is it standard traditional offthe shelf data center stuff?
Speaker 3 (07:25):
So outside, yes, but inside it's just.
You know, your, your averageequipment, it's not, you're not,
you're not raining on theinside, hopefully, most times,
yeah, no, let's, let's take onwater, but yeah, it's, there's
nothing industrial that's needed.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
I'm because I'm a data center person.
I guess I'm fixated on that atthe moment.
Is any of that?
I don't know if ruggedized iseven a word, but, like you know,
is each cable like screwed inwith a special fastener so it
can't fall out.
No, it's just standard.
Whatever right Like stuffscrewed in.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
I guess if the boat's rocking that much, Andy, they
probably have bigger problems inthe data center.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Everything is secured in the data center, but not
everything is tied down.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
So is there a you, a network engineer, on each ship
and is part of your job cruisingthe world, or is it remote?
Speaker 3 (08:18):
No.
So on each ship they have thesethings called IT officers, and
the IT officers are moregeneralists, so they know a
little bit of networking, theyknow a little bit of server.
They do a lot of end usersupport, like every time
someone's having a problem withtheir computer on the ship, they
(08:39):
take it to the IT officer andif the IT officer doesn't know
then they move up the chain.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
But yeah, depending on the size of the ship, there's
two to three it officers that'snot a bad gig for somebody not
tied down with like a ton ofresponsibility, like as a
married life or something likewhat do you do?
I just travel the world on acruise ship.
I'm an it guy.
Like that's not bad.
Get all the food and drinks,probably for you know, right?
Yeah, well, that's bad.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
They get the uh, they go to the crew mess so the crew
has an entirely separate areauh, than than guests do and they
serve.
They actually serve a lotbetter food like well, well,
it's, it's.
It's like you know, with crewships there are, you know,
ethnicity is from all over theplace.
What they serve the guests ismore, you know, palatable to
(09:28):
everybody.
In the crew mess they serve alot of, like ethnic dishes, like
you're like oh my god.
Like you know stuff that theycan only get away with in a crew
mess, because you knowespecially Americans going
what's this that soundsdelicious?
Yeah, no, it definitely was.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Now, did you go on any of the cruises as part of
your job, or was it just the funfor you?
Speaker 3 (09:51):
So I went on.
Onboarding was a cruise of theCaribbean, right, yeah, no, no.
So no, the onboarding was wedid a thing called a dry dock in
Spain, and then I did atransatlantic.
I spent 20 days on a new shipgoing from Cadiz, spain, to New
(10:15):
York.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
So why do they have you on a ship?
Like your job is remote, Ithink.
Yes, Well, so it you know, likea geffiler in the environment
you're going to support, I guess, right, yeah, I want you to
hand it on.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
Yeah, and sometimes having an American passport
makes things a lot easier, yeah.
So yeah, that was my initialand then I got moved to security
and we have a group that doeslike the dry docks and that's
like their main focus and attimes you know people in that
(10:48):
group.
It can be hard on them becausethey travel 50, probably 50
percent of the time and you knowwhen they needed help, like I
went on a couple of cruises toinstall some compute nodes.
So I'd be on the cruise for aweek, install the compute nodes.
We'd move over some someequipment off physicals and
install the compute nodes.
We'd move over some, um, someequipment off physicals and onto
the compute node, so you'd beat sea installing stuff.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
I guess some I'm thinking like my.
I have some family that workedin the airline industry and you
know they're only making moneywhen they're in the air.
So I would assume that youwould do moves, ads, changes,
you know, upgrades while theship is docked, but then they're
not making money, so they setyou out so that they can
generate revenue and then youjust do stuff at sea that makes
sense, yeah, yeah, like the, uh,the actual like installing the
(11:31):
equipment and staging, it wasall c days, but the actual
cutovers was uh when we weredocked so the data center sounds
kind of run of the mill.
Right, it's, it's a data center,um, I guess you know there's.
There's a land network on theship, right like local
communication there are, thereare tons of them.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah, yeah, because you've got guests, you got
hospitality, you've got uh pointof sale, you've got yeah well
leaving controls for the ship.
Speaker 1 (11:59):
I'm thinking, right, like so.
I'm thinking of our friend Lexiwho works for Blue Origin and
she runs the network on aspaceship.
Right, and I didn't reallyuntil she said it it didn't dawn
on me, but you know, like therockets talking to the control
system and the thruster thingand like so all the systems in
the craft making it go have totraverse the network.
(12:20):
So the same on a cruise ship,right, Like all the controls and
the bridge and the navigationand every control in the ship I
guess goes through your network.
So the same on a cruise ship,right, Like all the controls and
the bridge and the navigationand every control in the ship I
guess goes through your network.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Yeah, they were starting to move more to that.
They were on their kind of ownnetworks before, but then they
started moving it.
Yeah, moving it to the-.
Speaker 1 (12:38):
But I can see the one in the second.
So I was trying to get throughthe network before we went to
security but you just kind ofbrought me there.
It's pretty important.
So I was trying to get throughthe network before we went to
security but you just kind ofbrought me there, like it's
pretty important, so I can't seesomeone.
Well, I guess I could.
I'm not a hacker, but if Iwanted to take a cruise ship
down or get on the news, youknow, and do something nefarious
, I guess I could easily get a$500 ticket on a cruise ship, I
(12:59):
could get in there, I could hacktheir network and I could try
to I don't know take thecontrols over or something right
, and like give me a million inbitcoin and I'll release your
ship.
But the security, especiallyfor the critical systems on the
ship, must be pretty.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
I mean, yeah, it's basically uh, port security and
vlan.
Um, where it chooses the vlanyou plug it in, it identifies
the vice and it puts it in thecorrect vlan.
So you know your laptopplugging in is not going to
match any of the things it needsto and you're going to be put
into a quarantine VLAN.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
And I'm guessing it's layers upon layers of security,
right Like layered security tolike.
It's not just Mac learning atlayer two, port address security
, they're doing all kinds ofstuff.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
Yeah, so they're doing where they're like when
you're.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
I don't want to reveal their security, like I
don't want to reveal the hotelsurface and give people ideas,
but it does profile.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
So like when you connect, okay, it knows.
Hey, it's a Windows machine,you know it doesn't have a lot
of.
It is certificate based.
Hey, store only allowingcertain CAs.
Okay, well, you don't have thecert.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
It's like modern security.
Jeff, I think you were walkingme through that.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Yeah, this is standard.
Nac is what he's talking about,Network Access Control, A lot
of 802.1X stuff.
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
And all cert-based and the actual guest is
completely separate.
I guess they call it an air gap.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
So you're obviously not running something like MPLS
out.
There Is a lot of SD-WAN onthese.
I would assume you'd be largeSD-WAN.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Is it dual WAN?
When you say SD-WAN, I thinkmultiple WAN connections.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Yeah, so that's the actual interesting part.
So traditionally, some largerships will have two or three of
what they call traditionalsatellites at you know 500
milliseconds.
And then, um, cruise linesstarted putting in starlink, and
you know what a lot of peoplethink starlink they're like oh
(14:55):
yeah, that thing that you know Ipaid a couple hundred dollars
for and I I sync it with myphone and you know, I got my one
satellite.
No, no, no, no, it's not likethat at all.
Maritime is different.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
So what a lot of the ships had is they had 12
starlings and channel bonding onthat yes, when you say 12, like
12 dishes on the ship, well, uh, they were each connected to a
satellite.
Like I don't know anythingabout SATCOM.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
Okay, I'm not big into the SATCOM part, but when
it handed off to the network.
There are 12 separateconnections, Wow 12.
Wan connections, basically Well, 12 and then three of the
traditional.
Wow.
So what happened is a lot ofSD-WAN providers are going to
have problems trying to manage15 separate connections.
(15:46):
So there was a service that thecruise ships usually do.
That is basically an aggregator.
They plug all these things inand then they hand you off an
Ethernet port and they sort ofdo it in the background.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Isn't that interesting.
Like none of the SD-WANproviders thought to create a 15
channel, like when, well, youknow, it's like you know.
Speaker 3 (16:07):
Why would you like?
You know like two, okay, cool,all right.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Three, all right four now, why do they have so much?
Is it to kind of overcome thelatency of satellite?
Speaker 3 (16:17):
and well, it's, it's, it's, uh.
So traditional satcom, like thetraditionals, were
bi-directional satellites.
Uh, the starlink areunidirectional, so they only go
one way you can only send orreceive at a time.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Is that what you mean ?
Speaker 3 (16:31):
Yeah, and what they basically said Starlink said was
well, however many satellitesyou have, two-thirds of those
need to go to upload.
So like, for example, if youhad 12, then 8 are upload and 4
are download.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
I wonder why specifically upload.
I would have actually thoughtit would have been the opposite
of that.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
I would have thought I did too Well.
Apparently with satellites theupload really sucks.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
So they need more of it.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
There's no trick around the latency stuff right
Like if you have 12 WANconnections.
Does that make your 500millisecond latency any better?
Speaker 3 (17:08):
So what's different is Starlink is low Earth orbit
satellites, so they're anywherefrom like 150 to maybe 250.
As opposed to what?
Speaker 1 (17:18):
geosynchronous.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
Oh no, as, like your typical, satcom is going to be
around 500 milliseconds, butsince the Starlink is low Earth
orbit, you're getting 150 to 250milliseconds.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Because they're lower than, yeah, the other side.
Yeah, like I kind of rememberit's funny.
I used to be a comcast cableguy and we'd have to learn like
stuff, I want to say likegeosynchronous work, but it was
like 22 500 something.
I forget what it was, but itwas like you know the distance
between.
So I didn't realize thatstarlink is low earth orbit.
You get better latency, whichis pretty and like I mean, if
(17:52):
you're out, what are peopledoing?
So I was thinking of thisearlier, like I went on a cruise
.
It was probably 2011.
And I don't even know if I hada smartphone at the time.
Right, like I'm an old guy,this was a long time ago.
I know I didn't have theinternet.
So you know, today it's like,well, I got to document it, I
got to get on, exactly, I got toshow Instagram and TikTok that
I'm on this thing, and so it'sfunny how, just in those 10 or
(18:15):
12 years, you have to haveinternet, no matter where you
are, even if you're in themiddle of the ocean, just so you
can show people what you'redoing.
Does that come?
I know it depends, but doesthat come with your ticket?
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Are you paying extra for internet.
So where a lot of the cruiselines are moving to is free
internet, but it's what I willcall freemium internet.
Yeah, it's where the they'llgive you the base level
absolutely free so you can getsome wi-fi.
But you know then thinkingabout, oh, oh, you want it
faster, you want more uploads.
(18:49):
You know you need to pay forthat, but right now, but right
now, and any internet you haveto pay for.
And the thing that that thatreally got me was they don't
only charge the customers forinternet, they charge the crew.
Oh really, and I was like, Iwas like, really, that that's
that kind of sucks.
And then I thought about it.
(19:10):
So there's probably maybe oneto two thousand crew members, so
you're having another, you know, 1,000 or 2,000 people on your
Wi-Fi.
That's how much crews on a ship.
Huh, depends on the size of theship.
Wow, yeah, you know.
And then it's like, oh, yeah,you're going to charge, you're
going to charge.
There are a lot better ratesthan the customers.
Yeah, but still, you're goingto charge them something.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
So is wireless the biggest, I guess, challenge,
because Jeff said it's all metal, it's a Faraday cage, it's, you
know, like running a datacenter probably isn't a huge
deal.
Land communication, whatever Iswireless like?
Did you have anything to dowith the wireless or is that a
completely separate?
Speaker 3 (19:50):
Yeah, so no for the wireless.
I wasn't the one doing the sitesurveys, but a lot, of, lot of
it, you know, is the good andbad side of of steel is
reflection.
So it's going to take thesignal and it's going to start
reflecting everywhere.
So it's a way to get signalaround as well.
You know it's not okay, it'snot preferred you know, because
(20:13):
I mean, it's non-porous.
so you know, like if it was, ifit was concrete or drywall, the
signal would go through and thenit would, just, you know,
eventually die.
It's non-porous, so you know,like if it was concrete or
drywall, the signal would gothrough and then it would just,
you know, eventually die.
Here it's just bouncing offeverywhere, and this is one of
the ones where they, you know,they use more APs to sort of
cover these things.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
More APs turn the antenna strength down.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
The other big limiting factor was you know, in
a lot of places you know youcan use all the channels,
including DFS, but on a cruiseship you can't.
We have radar, oh yeah, weatherradar.
So now we're stuck to Uni 1 andUni 3.
So all the channels in Uni 2and Uni 2 Extended Because of
(20:53):
radar?
Yeah, because it interfereswith radar and the ships use
radar so is.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Is radar at the the higher frequency range or lower
frequency?
I would assume it'd be lowerfrequency right, uh, in in five
gigahertz.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Oh, it isn't a five gigahertz range no it's the five
.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Yeah, okay yeah, yeah , that that could.
That could definitely causesome issues with your wireless.
That that's interesting.
I wouldn't.
I wouldn't have even thoughtabout that yeah, and neither did
I.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
You know, these are just things that I just didn't
think of and obviously if you'reonly running Uni1 and Uni3,
you're not going to be able todo much channel bonding Right,
you know, maybe 40 megahertzchannels and that's it.
You know you're not going to begetting gig Wi-Fi you're not
going to be getting gig Wi-Fi.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Well, I would assume that part of the challenges with
satellite is that satellite'snot great in terms of a dense
number of individuals and you'vegot to make sure that the
ship's communication obviouslyis going to take priority, which
I assume.
What do you do?
Dedicated satellitespecifically for internal
communication, or they all sharethe same?
Speaker 3 (21:53):
They all share the same, but the uh guest is, I
believe it's policed yeah, it'srate limited.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
I was gonna ask about loss or like policing.
Yeah, because you want to givecritical systems priority, right
?
Yeah yeah, over some schmucksurfing netflix in the pool well
, I was actually gonna.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
That's one of the things I was curious about is,
from a security perspective, inthe wireless there, did you have
any rules in terms of what theywere allowed to go to?
Were you blocking things orrate limiting things that were
high bandwidth?
Speaker 3 (22:25):
So they had plans you could choose from.
Once the premium was therethey're top tier and you could
do Zoom calls.
You can do whatever you wanttop tier and you could.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
You know you can do zoom calls, you can do whatever
you want.
Now, was it 150 millisecondsthat's?
I guess that's that'ssufficient to be able to
actually do a wipe call.
I mean, I think it's 300milliseconds is where you start
to really run into issues, yeah,where you actually notice it.
But what was, what was it likefor you working on that stuff,
did you?
Was it a noticeable latency onany equipment you were working
on?
Speaker 3 (22:53):
so.
So the first ship I went ononly had the traditional
satellites.
It didn't have starlink yet andthat was painful yeah, I bet
because because, yeah, I noticedit.
I I noticed it a lot, but whenI went on the ones with starlink
it was just noticeable enough.
And and that's me, you know.
So I'm a network engineer, so,like these are the kinds of
(23:14):
things I noticed.
Like I noticed my own homeWi-Fi when I go it's not as fast
.
You know, and I have gig,wireless gig connections and if
something's a little off, I'mlike let me check my router.
But you know it was fast, butyou could still tell it.
You could still tell when Iwent around and asked people
(23:38):
there were people just workingand they're like when Starlink,
the internet's great.
I love this.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Yeah, I would suspect Starlink.
I would bet Starlink made ahuge difference to the cruise
ship industry.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
Yeah, most definitely .
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Because it does mean that people who normally would
not be able to go for the lengthof a cruise because of work or
whatever, now if you've got towork from home job, you can work
from anywhere.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
Yep Work from anywhere.
Yeah, you know, with a nicedrink in your hand.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Yeah, what about regulatory stuff?
Speaker 1 (24:06):
I'm sorry, go ahead oh no, no, I wanted to go kind
of down the regulatory cybercompliance route.
Speaker 2 (24:12):
Yeah, I was just curious if there was stuff that
was different regulatory when itcomes to regulations.
It was maybe surprising to you,because it was.
You know this ship is travelingfrom one part of the globe to
another.
Like I know, wireless, forexample.
You've got different standardsfor wireless depending on the
country that you're in.
How does that work on a cruiseship, I guess?
Speaker 3 (24:32):
So it's usually where it's based out of.
Yeah, okay, so if we have aship that's based out of Spain,
then Spain.
If it's based out of the US, weuse US channels, right right
right but still DFS off, andthat was globally.
It didn't matter.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Wait, wait.
This sounds fascinating to me.
So there's different wirelessfrequencies.
You can use in different partsof the world is that?
Is that what you're saying, andyou have to change depending on
?
Speaker 3 (25:00):
I didn't know that and what's dfs?
Uh, it's, I don't know, thedeath I'm trying to remember.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
I'm not trying to remember what it stands for as
well, you said dynamic frequencyselection it's dynamic, yeah,
it's.
It's basically what do you tellit?
You tell it hey, choose thechannel that's best for you.
Now you're like nope, you haveto.
Yeah, what?
Speaker 3 (25:14):
yeah, yeah, and those were what they consider Uni 2
and Uni 2 Extended in the 5gigahertz range, and then
non-DFS channels are Uni 1 andUni 3.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
So I guess this is like an IEEE question or whoever
the hell sets those regulations.
But what's the thinking behindregulating wireless channels
regionally?
What's the thinking behindregulating wireless channels
regionally, and I guess why I'masking?
That is like if Spain is usinga particular frequency and
Portugal's using it, or you know, and the US like they're not
(25:48):
going to be physically closeenough to interfere with each
other.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
It's not a bad interference, I guess.
Right, yeah, it's more or lessavailable channels and what you
can do in airspace, oh what?
Speaker 1 (25:58):
they're using in a particular area, like maybe
their air traffic control usesdifferent frequencies than ours?
Speaker 3 (26:03):
Well, as far as there are a set number of channels,
like, the best one that I cancompare to is in 2.4.
There are 14 channels andeveryone's like, oh, we'll use
1.6 and 11.
Right channels and everyone'slike, oh, we'll use one, six and
eleven.
Right, you know.
And in and in the us, I think,I think we use up to 12, 12 or
13, but, like in other countries, they can use 14 I guess I
(26:25):
don't understand why it'sdifferent in different countries
.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
If I mean, the air is the same anywhere on the planet
, physics is the same, so whywould it be different?
This might be a dumb question,but I don't know why they would
change.
I'm giving my speculationregionally, but you know what I
mean because they'regeographically dispersed.
What's the point of regulatingthose things, gotcha?
Speaker 2 (26:44):
well, like will was saying, though, on the cruise
ship, you had to be carefulbecause it could interfere with
uh, you know, with uh the radars, right so in other countries.
I would assume there's differentfrequencies they use for their
radio channels, different thingsthat they do and you know just
different regulations that arekind of grandfathered in that
those frequencies have alreadybeen allocated to some other
(27:05):
service.
I mean, you think about the 900megahertz phones that we use
for the longest time and then2.4 gigahertz phones and all
that stuff.
Yeah, they started interferingwith wireless for a while there.
Um, I assume it's probably likethat.
Other countries.
It's speculation.
I bet gpt can answer that forme.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
But again another comcast cable guy story.
But I remember going to a houseevery time their phone, their
cordless phone, ring in thehouse the internet was about,
because the cordless base justhappened to be on the same exact
frequency, the 2.4 frequency,that the so, yeah, that that's.
That's interesting.
I didn didn't realize.
I learned something.
Is there any special?
So I'm trying to parse.
(27:40):
This sounds much like regularnetwork engineering.
If you're a network engineeryou could work on a ship.
Some of the differences seem tobe satellite communications.
There's latency and bandwidthand bonding of 15 channels and
stuff like that.
Wireless is going to be toughbecause of all the metal uh
surfaces.
Is there anything else thatstands out?
That's like completelydifferent than any other
(28:01):
networking job you had well, uh,more, more or less it was uh,
newer technologies.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
So, for example, a lot of the um, a lot of
companies I work for you weresort of that traditional data
center with the sort of coredistribution, you know,
aggregate hierarchy, and a lotof the ships are moving to
fabrics, where everything is afabric, yeah, and basically
(28:28):
including out to the accessswitch.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Yeah, really collapses core.
Yeah, exactly, collapse core,collapse backbone, the whole
thing's collapsed.
Something that was alsointeresting and I didn't think
of this is yeah, exactlycollapse, core collapse,
backbone, the whole thing'scollapsed.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Yeah, yeah, something that was also interesting and I
didn't think of this isdifferent ships may use
different vendors, like a lot ofthem have a dual vendor
strategy.
So ship a could be you know,you know cisco, or, and ship b
could be aruba, or, you know,ship b could be juniper, and and
everything on it would beJuniper, everything on it would
(28:58):
be Cisco.
And I was like why would you dothat?
And then someone was like well,if one of the vendors has some
zero-day vulnerability, then wedon't have all of our ships
vulnerable, we only have theones that have that equipment.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
And I was like that's a good idea ones that have that
equipment and I was like, sothat's a good idea.
So I guess another ships aremulti-vendor.
You're not going to have, like,say, cisco and juniper data
center and then and theneverybody but wireless, like
it's going to be one throat tochoke one yeah except for like
firewalls and sd-wan.
Yeah, those, those were thethings that were different
vendors it's easier to manage,probably right like just have
(29:35):
all one unified solution in anenvironment like that?
Speaker 2 (29:39):
Yeah, what about power on the ship?
I mean, I know that I wouldassume it's PDU A, pdu B, that's
on two different circuits andthey color code the actual.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
I call them pigtails, you know the ones you put in
the rack.
You plug, yeah, you plug onered, one blue in.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
Do you have any say over the?
So?
Like, at places I worked, youknow there was architects that
kind of made forward thinking,design, design decisions on.
Like, okay, in our next refreshwe're going to go with this
vendor solution for thesereasons.
Like, did you have really like,hey guys, you know, I I see a
gap here.
I think we could do better onthe next refresh cycle maybe.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
Yeah, that was there there over that, yeah there was
only one, even though I was anarchitect.
There were 15 other people onmy team who were all architects,
which you know.
I, I, I joke.
Uh, you remember the qos thingis if everything is ef, nothing
is ef if everybody's architects,you know so.
(30:49):
So there were.
There are junior architects,senior architects and principal
architects so you get architectinstead of engineer.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yeah, yeah, I got you .
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Yeah, so the job was half architecture and then half
project engineer, sort of thing,you know, and they had what?
They split them up into two bigteams and I started on the ship
side team and then moved tosecurity, which is considered
shore side, which includesterminals.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Now, did you guys do security on each ship, or did
everything get trumped back tothe data center and security was
done there?
Speaker 3 (31:22):
No, everything is on the ship.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
I figured you would probably split tunnel it for
most of them and everythingthere.
Speaker 3 (31:27):
Yeah, there were very few things that actually went
back to the shore.
There were some things that did, but obviously with latency,
everything that can be on theship is on the ship interesting.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
So you're, you're talking servers and all that
stuff, so you're not going.
That's why you you said, whenyou said data center, I'm
thinking, okay, he means racks.
I didn't realize.
You meant data center, datacenters that, yeah, that does
make sense.
And it is a floating datacenter because, yeah, you're
right, you can't dial home, youknow, back to the, you can't do
a hub and spoke topology on that.
Speaker 3 (31:58):
Everything's a hub.
Yes, we can refer to on-premdata centers.
Everyone has an on-prem datacenter.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
What do changes look like?
So I wanted to talk aboutchange management and then get
into outages as I'm thinkingthrough this.
So an outage is an example.
I don't know If an applicationgoes down in a data center, oh
boo-hoo, customers can't reachtheir thing.
I can't get my cat pictures foran hour, I can't process my
Visa card, like okay, that sucks.
(32:25):
But when you're on a cruiseship and your survival, like the
7,000 or 10,000 people on theship, their survival depends on
those systems working which relyon the network.
I mean there must have beenoutages.
Has you get a call like hey,everything's down, what do we do
?
Speaker 3 (32:43):
That's so awful.
I was in architecture, I wasn'toperational.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
More break-fix.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Yeah, somebody else would get that call yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
But there's outages at sea, I guess, is what I'm
getting at.
Yeah, massive failures or badchange that gets pushed
overnight yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
And they try to do things when they're docked, uh,
uh, depending on the, dependingon the risk of it, and if they
can't do it while they're docked, they're going to do it, like
at like two o'clock in themorning.
That makes sense.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
And it's a self-contained data center, so
really if it breaks it, italmost doesn't matter.
If someone can get to it toomuch, it doesn't have to get
home.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
And the IT officers are there on board.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
Yeah Well, I guess that's what I'm getting at Like
if your thrusters and yourengines and your navigation
relies on the network.
I've worked in global datacenters that completely melted
Like everything's down.
Holy crap, something really badhappened.
You know, I'm sitting at mydesk and people can't get the
applications.
It sucks.
We're going to lose a lot ofmoney but we're not out in the
middle of the unforgiving sea,dead in the water literally.
(33:46):
I mean I guess that happensright Like awful work.
Outages happen your networksnever break.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
Well, no, no, no Network outages happen, but I
still think there are somesystems that are not on the
network and that's just for thatreason.
It's very smart, right.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
And that's kind of what I was digging at a little
bit earlier, like thesegmentation of critical systems
and um.
You wouldn't want themtraversing.
You know the the Netflixdelivery um system.
So, like you, you touched onbig changes happening at port,
which is which is smart.
So I mean, I guess you're youknow there's change management
management, right, I guess youhave to like submit changes to a
(34:26):
review board and put in achange ticket and pick a window
and and all that fun stuff rightand pick a window that the it
officer agrees with.
Speaker 3 (34:34):
They are you know, if you don't get the it officer's
approval, you can't, you can'tdo it.
They know when the ship isgoing to be in the right place
in order to do this now.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Do you want?
Speaker 3 (34:44):
to and sorry go ahead what I was going to say is now,
when the ship is in port, it'sa little different because, um,
they have, basically, from thegangway we'll get a fiber
connection into the terminal.
Yeah, so we're not.
We're not using the satellitenow?
Speaker 2 (34:59):
is that in every country, or is that mainly in
its home port?
Speaker 3 (35:02):
uh in, in countries where, where the port is, where
we have a presence and sometimes, um, if we have a relationship
with uh, the port of the country, what they will give us is just
an internet connection, whichis fine.
I mean, we have the sd-wan,it'll connect over.
Yeah, makes sense.
What would you guess is thenumber one revenue generator on
(35:24):
a cruise ship?
Alcohol and gambling.
That's my guess.
Gambling the casino?
Yeah, like, like those casinos,you cannot have an outage.
Yep, you know, like, evenduring normal times, they don't
want outage in the casinos,because those casinos are open
24 hours a day and they are thecash cows, people you love to
(35:45):
gamble and feed them the freedrinks, and that's what they
make a lot of money in.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
That's their big gen.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
It's funny you bring that up, because one of the
things I was thinking about aswe've been talking here and you
kind of talked about some of theother parts of the network that
are on a cruise ship A cruiseship sounds a lot like a casino
because in the same way that acasino has a hotel attached to
it usually and has guestaccommodations and they've got
yeah, you've got to do all thepoint of sale stuff You've got
to do I assume there's tons ofmedia stuff that you had to
(36:18):
handle with in-roomentertainment stuff and that's
all IP.
It's really similar in thecasino thing.
So to me it sounds like one ofthe really nice things about a
job like working on a cruiseship or working in a casino is
that in reality you've worked inI don't know half a dozen, a
dozen different industries thatare all kind of combined in one.
(36:39):
You've done data center, you'vedone hospitality, you've done
point of sale stuff, you've donewireless and all that.
We've asked a lot of questionsbut there's probably stuff we
didn't think to ask.
What's something that you thinkthat would really be like for
the people listening would be areal surprise, or maybe
something we should have asked,that we didn't think to.
Speaker 3 (36:58):
Oh, like I said, the big thing for me was just how
many people it is.
You know we say, like you know,floating data center, but it's
almost like a floating city,floating campus.
You know there are APseverywhere, like even in crew
areas, so the crew only areas.
You know every single crewmember has their own room, so
(37:21):
sometimes they bug with people,but you know they have their own
rooms.
They have, you know, know,their own mess hall.
they, you know, have their ownbars and all these places are
still lit up with wireless yeahand like on some, I think on
some of the smaller ships theyhad probably like four to five
hundred aps and some of thelarger ships it was a few
thousand and I I just at thetime I was like wow, a few
(37:45):
thousand access points.
I thought that was really crazy.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
People can fit on a big ship, including crew.
What's a big ship?
10,000?
I have no idea.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
Probably like 5,000 or 6,000 people, not a really
big ship.
A lot of people to have toworry about.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
I really appreciate you coming on here, will, but
this has been really interesting.
I've I brought this up to acouple of different people and
all of them kind of said thesame thing, which is everything
thought about networking on acruise ship, so it's been really
enlightening to me and I a lotof cool stuff to think about.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
Well, the other part, just you know.
One more thing was when it'smoving, like what?
Like when we think ofsatellites, right, we, okay,
well, I'm stationary and thesatellites are moving On a ship,
you're moving, yeah, and thesatellites are moving.
So at times the bandwidth, thelatency is all variable at
(38:39):
variable times.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
And that includes hey , if it's raining, we're
probably going to get probablyless bandwidth.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Which is why, like you said, self-contained, each
of them is really self-contained.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
Self-contained.
It's just the fact that thereare two things that are moving
at the same time.
I thought that was reallyinteresting as well.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
Yeah, it is fascinating.
Like I said, I had never reallythought about the fact that
it's got to be a moving,self-contained data center, and
it makes perfect sense, right?
You can't be reliant on SaaSapplications.
You can't be reliant on yourhub sites.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Will.
Is this a good job for anetwork engineer out there who's
looking like?
Would you recommend being anetwork engineer on a cruise
ship?
Looking back, it's not your jobanymore.
Was this a good experience, orare you like guys avoid?
Like the plane, it's awful.
Like what?
29.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
Yeah, well, it depends, so you know, it depends
on whether it's ship side orshore side.
So the ship side, you know, Iwould say for younger people,
for younger network engineers,that that may be great because,
you know, if you don't reallyhave anything tying you down,
then you can go on these drydocks, you can travel 50% of the
(39:48):
time and you can get to seedifferent countries, you can see
different ports and you get tobasically build this network on
a ship.
For me I was later in my career,with wife and children, so
being gone 50% of the timewasn't going to work.
So being at the shore side kindof gave me the benefits of okay
(40:11):
, well, I still have a job, thatyou know I had traveled maybe
25% of the time, so a lot lower,but you know, I still got to
get out there and I got to, youknow, experience it and it was,
it was great, like the bestthing I loved about it and it,
it.
It's just a very simple thingis like when I was done for the
day, I'd go walk up and down theship grab some ice cream and
(40:35):
you know just, you know justthese very simple things and
just people watch.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
That's a fun, not a bad life, I'm sure.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
Yeah, uh well, thank you so much for coming on.
We learned a ton um this, likeI said, 170 something episodes
in and, uh, you, you broughtsomething new to the table,
which hasn't been easy for us todo, so I really appreciate you
coming on and teaching us allabout, uh, cruise ship
networking, um, for all things.
Art of net eng you can checkout our link tree that's link
(41:03):
tree forward slash.
Art of net edge we have a merchstore, we got our website, we
got our podcast feed with abunch of cool shows, including
this one, and we also have ourdiscord server called it's all
about the journey.
Did I get that right?
Yeah, it's all about thejourney.
Thousands of people in there.
It's a great community.
We were just in there today.
Are we talking about today?
(41:23):
I try to hop in once a day andI'm just amazed at what I see in
some of the different chats andsome of the stuff nerding out.
But it's a great community.
If you need a community oflike-minded folks, hop on in
there and check it out.
That's another one from us.
Thanks so much for listeningand we'll catch you next time on
the Art of Network Engineeringpodcast.
Hey folks, if you like what youheard today, please subscribe
(41:44):
to our podcast and your favoritepodcatcher.
You can find us on socials atArt of NetEng, and you can visit
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(42:06):
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