Not that this is a surprise, of course. I mean, it’s been severely mistreated for the past several decades. Left out in the fields, burdened with obnoxious and atrocious tow bars and roll bars, left to rust for years on end. It’s no wonder it wouldn’t know how to react to a little TLC.

Nevertheless, I still managed to make some progress. I understand that the Jeep needs to come apart in order for me to check to see what pieces are working, what need to be replaced, and what needs to be cast aside like 60-year old underwear.

To that end, I had a few goals that I was looking to accomplish:

• Remove the abomination that is the roll bar
• Remove the abomination that is the tow bar
• Remove the hood
• Clean and inspect the carburetor

Okay, so if you think that’s an odd list of high priority, I admit the last one was just one of those things that I desperately wanted to get into. Until I started this project I didn’t even know what the carburetor was, let alone how it worked and how to fix one.

In short, it scared me, so I wanted to attack it as one of the first things.

Now that the weekend is done, I can see that I actually accomplished more than I thought I had. After all, when I started the weekend I didn’t have any idea how to work an air compressor or an air wrench, didn’t even have a toolbox, and a lot of rusty bolts to take off.

Using an awful lot of penetrating lubrication spray is a must, but even that didn’t help everything. The abominations came off relatively easy (and being able to use the new air impact wrench was a lot of fun!).

Die hideously, mutant abomination!

The hood, on the other hand, was (and still is) a major pain. The screws are rusted completely together to the nuts on the inside of the firewall, which are not easily accessible (or in at least one of the cases, accessible at all until I start removing additional pieces).

These suckers don't want to cooperate

Today I was told that a possible solution is to hit the screws with heat (enough to get them red-hot) and then let them cool, repeat a couple of times, and then try to remove them. The idea is to get the metal to expand and then contract, loosening them from the corrosion. Given the penetrating lubricant has warnings all over the place about how flammable it is, I’m thinking that a good bath of soapy water would be a good idea before doing so.

(Must also remember to get a fire extinguisher…)

Given how much difficulty I was having with this (and a few other bolts around the Jeep), I moved back and forth between the engine and lubricating the bolts. I probably learned more this weekend about how engines worked than I have in my entire life.

Hands-on Lab

(Remember, when I say I know/knew nothing about how engines work, I’m not exaggerating!)

Part of the problem was the sheer amount of grease and grime on the engine, so I decided to clean it up a little.

Here’s what it looked like when I first saw it:

Before cleaning...

And after a little cleaning up:

Shut up, Grime!

There’s a lot more that needs to be done, but at least it’s easier to see things! Looking at it from the other side really tends to show off the original color:

Hmmm… maybe it doesn’t look as dramatic as I thought. Oh well.

Unfortunately the one thing that I’ve been dying to work on, the original Carter W-O carburetor, didn’t quite go so well. After taking it apart according to the original Carter instructions, I found that several of the pieces were so rusted that it couldn’t even come apart correctly.

Moments from Death

Sadly, the picture above was taken only a couple minutes before the valve plating screws disintegrated on contact. This, combined with several of the jets already being stripped, meant that the carburetor I have is useful for little more than spare parts.

There are replacement carburetors available, of course, from Solex. Now that I’ve had the chance to look, play with, and take apart the original Carter, though, I kinda feel like I want to stick with the original, but I genuinely don’t know how well I’ll be able to rebuild it even with donor parts. Plus, a ‘new’ rebuilt Carter WO is gonna run around $300. Quite frankly, I’m not really sure I want to be that anal about restoring with original parts.

One of the things that I’m really gutted about is that I desperately wanted to have a success story here. I wanted to take something that I knew 100% nothing about, disassemble it, clean it, fix it, and have it working afterwards, but I got stymied on the first part. There’s a part of me that kind of hopes that I’ll find a donor carb that I can use to replace some of the broken bits and, with the help of new gasket kits, rebuild the carb like I would like.

Yeah, I seriously doubt it too.

For now, I’m just going to add it to the (wish)list of things that I know I need to replace. How handy that these restoration web sites have wishlists for just such a thing.

Nevertheless, we made some tremendous progress on the Jeep this weekend, and ironically it now is looking more like a Jeep than with all the extra crap bolted on.

The results of the first Jeep weekend

You’ll notice that I took the tires/wheels off. It has made it a lot easier to access the undercarriage of the Jeep! But there was also a very interesting thing that we found out during the process.

During the time when this Jeep was made, it was apparently common to have left-hand bolts on the left hand (driver’s) side of the Jeep. As it turns out, this was still the case for this one too.

The odd thing, though, is that the front passenger’s side was also left-hand bolts! I’d never heard of this before. What this means is that 3 out of the 4 wheels were left-hand bolts. If there’s anyone reading this who has heard of this before, I’d love an explanation. I am completely stumped about this.

I have a feeling that when I can get the body panels off and separate from the frame, the photos will continue to look like there’s a lot of progress going on. However, there is a lot to learn before I can take things off and not wind up hurting interconnected systems. So, the photos may not be as interesting or dramatic until that can happen.

In any case, the next steps are, well, to come up with the next steps. I’m going to try to come up with a plan of action to know how to continue the dismantling, and while there are a couple of sites on the ‘net that have great pictorials about restoring this type of Jeep, I’m finding that following their lead isn’t very easy. We’ll see.

A day earlier, my Service and Repair manual came in the mail, so obviously it’s helping engender quite a bit of excitement.

Mechanic's Service Manual

Perhaps a little too much excitement. I also picked up a lot of tools that I didn’t have (I have a tendency to be a bit paranoid about not having the right tool for the job and winding up breaking something because I improvise). Last week I went to Harbor Freight and wound up getting dollies, jacks, brushes and a lot of lubricant for the rusted bolts.

Today I went to Sears and picked up wrenches and a Craftsman 150 psi air compressor. I can’t wait to use this sucker to clean out the debris in the engine. I made sure it was powerful enough to run the air wrench and air ratchet, as well as eventually be useful enough for running a grinder and a media blaster.

One of the things I’m going to be doing (just haven’t done yet) is begin to record 1) how much money I’ve been spending and 2) how much time it’s going to take. So far I’ve only been applying the lubricant to the bolts on the front tow bar and (hideous) roll bar, since I need to see how it works and I honestly don’t care if something goes wrong with those two pieces.

This weekend, though… boy I’m looking forward to being able to use more than 10 minutes of daylight that I’ve had after I get home from work.

Backing it in

Parked in its new home

Ever since I was a kid I wanted to rebuild/restore a car. The problem? As a Navy brat we never lived anywhere long enough to actually start a project with the reasonable expectation of finishing.

The other problem? I know next-to-nothing about cars. Seriously. I’m a total noob.

I do, however, have a total thirst to learn; I’m a sponge. In fact, I’ve spent several hours reading about restoring cars (especially old Jeeps). Anything I can get my hands (or web browsers) on, I’m there. Any advice I’m given, I’m taking.

For about 3 months now I’ve been looking for a project car. I thought about restoring a ’69 Camaro RS/SS (just like the one in Better Off Dead, or like this one), but realized that was probably way above my payscale. And if that weren’t too difficult, then the ‘65 Cobra Kit car was right out!

So, having owned a 1991 Jeep Wranger (and loved it), I’ve had some experience with the LEGO-like nature of the car, and thought it might be a great starting point. I noticed, for instance, that you can pretty much build an entire Jeep with parts from a magazine catalogue if you wished.

For the past 3 months or so I’ve been looking at Jeeps that might qualify. I was looking for something that might actually be running, perhaps not a “frame-off” restoration (though I thought that would be cool too). In general something that was worth restoring.

The day after Christmas, 2011, I found what I was looking for, for the price I was willing to consider.

Is it beautiful? No. But then that wasn’t exactly the point. It is, however, in good enough nick that I should be able to keep as much of the original pieces as possible, though. It will be a frame-off restoration, but as I think more about it I believe that it will ultimately be much, much better for it. I don’t want to cover up rust issues; I want to fix and prolong the life for as long as possible.

So, without further ado, here are the photos of the Jeep that I’ll be cutting my teeth on.

If you have ever seen the show, it’s a pretty predictable formula. Even the opening narration explains it: “Corporate CEOs are out of touch.” The show appeals to those who have no idea what it takes to run a company, what kinds of long hours are put in, and the difficult decisions that need to be made that can affect hundreds, even thousands of people.

The format of the show takes the CEO to a different location on each day and are placed in menial jobs, acting as cashiers, cleaners, janitors, etc. in order to learn what the “real” people do to make their companies successful.

As someone who is as much of a Libertarian and Ayn Rand aficionado as I am, you may wonder why I watch the show at all. After all, the implied message is that no matter how hard these CEOs work, their individual efforts don’t amount to the lowest of their payroll.

The answer is that I find it fascinating to see “behind the scenes” at some companies and learn how things work (or don’t). I’ll put up with the heavy-handedness, the forced tear-jerker “rewards”, and the inevitable sob-story backgrounds that every ”valued employee” has in order to get a glimpse of how these companies work. These are glimpses that I wouldn’t ever get, otherwise.

Plus I like to learn about the people who run these companies and find out who is running the show.

The Baja Fresh Episode

So what made this episode so especially problematic? Was it the fact that the food was something out of Kitchen Nightmares? No. The food was fine.

The issues began when our intrepid CEO, David Kim, who looks like an all-around good guy in the first place, appears to have been told by his PR people that he had to put himself down at every opportunity while accepting abuse and humiliation.

Humiliation? You betcha.

Let’s forget for the moment that these are CEOs and look at them as they are presented to the “unsuspecting” staff. They are playing out-of-work people who are on their first day. How would you treat someone on their first day?

Apparently at Baja Fresh, the answer is to abandon them completely.

Abandonment #1

At one of the stores in NM, Kim is introduced to the operations manager, Rami, who has him do typical prep work for the lunch rush. When the rush comes, however, Rami says to Kim, “Okay, I need you to make an Ultimo Steak sandwich.” He obviously hasn’t shown Kim how to make such a sandwich, and hasn’t left any instructions or guides on how to create the sandwich. Rami then leaves Kim with no supervision to go flirt with the girls at the cashier counter.

Kim, obviously unsure of what to do, and not getting any help from any of the other staff, inevitably (and understandably) makes a mistake in the sandwich. Rami returns from his flirting to poke fun at Kim for screwing up.

Rami’s reward for abandoning Kim on his first day to go flirt? $5000 for a golfing weekend with his father.

Abandonment #2

Anyone who has ever worked in a fast food restaurant knows that the lunch rush can be absolutely brutal. Customers are pressed for time and often they will take out their anxiety of being late on the poor shlub behind the counter. For this reason, and because of the fact that turnover is what makes the restaurant money, you would never place a first-day trainee on a cashier, especially unsupervised.

Abandoned.

Nevertheless, this is precisely what happened in the Cypress, California store. Kim is given barely a glance at the Point of Sale (POS) with arguably one of the worst UIs possible, and then the doors open for lunch. The manager pulls the trainer off of the cashier at that point in time to move umbrellas on the patio.

What kind of asshole would take someone who has never worked a Point of Sale (POS) system before and abandon them during the lunch rush. This is precisely what happens. This is what qualifies for a training program at Baja Fresh? The trainer disappears while the manager watches the guy on his first day of the job (doing nothing herself). The line gets backed up (naturally).

Join the Queue

Then it gets worse.

Kim calls for help, but other employees either ignore him or merely look on, almost as if he’s speaking a different language. The line gets longer and longer, which of course means death in a fast-food restaurant.

Finally the manager comes over and makes a show of pointing out just how foolish Kim was for accidentally pushing the wrong button on that terrible POS UI.

“Ken [the pseudonym Kim is using] is having trouble, holding up the line. I can see the faces of the customers getting frustrated. That’s not good.”

Well, why aren’t you giving someone to help him. It’s his first day, he’s not been trained properly, and you’re the manager for Chrissakes!

Which leads us to…

Abject Humiliation

The manager, Jakelyn, pulls Kim aside and says, “Okay, we’re now going to go out into the lobby and apologize to our customers for you being so slow.”

You’re going to do what!?

And she does! She carts him around the tables apologizing to customers, pointing out that it’s Ken’s fault, and giving out coupons for free burritos.

This is Ken. It's all his fault.

Is this what Baja Fresh does to its first day employees? Abandon them, and then humiliate them in front of customers?

Hi, welcome to working at Baja Fresh! I’m going to put you in impossible situations, humiliate you in front of complete strangers, and then rub salt in the wound by showing just how much money you cost us to boot!

Oh, and by the way, he rewarded the trainer who abandoned him with $15,000 to relocate his mother closer to where he lived. Not for anything that he did as part of his job, mind you, but just because this 20-year-old was also a Christian, just like Kim. I can’t help but wonder what he would have done if his trainer had been an Atheist.

Personally, this is not behavior I wish to encourage, and if the only discouragement I can make is to do so with my business, I’ll gladly take it elsewhere.

Pointless Manipulation

While I can put up with a bit of expected manipulation (especially of the heartstrings), this was a 43:37 commercial for Baja Fresh (and fodder for selling books) with non-events that was supposed to be “dramatic.”

For instance, a refrigeration table was suffering from a bad thermometer, which threatened the freshness of the vegetables. Not really a big deal. You place ice under the trays, call for a technician, and you make do until you can get him to come out.

Not here. Cue drama. David Kim, the CEO, must call Bill the Operations Manager and exclaim, “I’m not going to apologize for my disappointment.”

Really? You’re disappointed? Are you freakin’ kidding me?

Could he have suggested that they put ice under the trays? Yes. Could he have merely said, “Is there a technician you could call?” Yes. Does he do any of these things? Of course not.

"Not going to apologize for my disappointment."

Rami gets a phone call from Bill and immediately puts the plan into action. Kim is so impressed by this that he ultimately rewards Rami (for acting quickly and following the directions, not for thinking for himself and solving the problem on his own) with $5,000 for business classes so that he can eventually run his own business. No word on how many phone numbers Rami got as well during the taping of the show as an additional bonus.

Bottom Line

When the show started I found Kim to be an affable, likable guy. A dork, yes, but likable. By the end of the show the bizarre business practices and apparently institutional policy of abandonment and humiliation of first-day employees was enough to convince me that this was not a company that is ethical or moral.

Moreover, rewards are obviously based on capricious whims of management, rather than actual merit or ability of the employees. Your religious affiliation is a great way to get ahead, even if you happen to abandon your coworkers when they cry out for help. You don’t have to think for yourself, your mind is useless, but if you have great flirting capability there is room for you in our organization.

Thank you, Baja Fresh, for making it so clear as to how you run your business. I’ll be taking mine elsewhere.

You can subscribe to this blog to get notifications of future articles in the column on the right. You can also follow me on Twitter: @jmichelmetz

During the course of the transition this treatment has declined to the point where on my last flight I was livid.

When boarding any flight nowadays the inconsistency between United and Continental’s customer service is a serious detraction – to the point that I’m starting to look at other flying alternatives.

Why? Apparently my loyalty does not mean anything to Continental any longer. There are so many Global Services, Premier, Premiere executive, Platinum, Gold, Silver Elite members on each flight that are permitted to take oversized luggage in the cabin that the storage space is full by the time non-elite passengers are ready to board. There are no more spaces available on the plane and people are forced to check their bags when they have every right to expect their own reserved space.

My last flight I was seated in row 10 but by the time I boarded the first available overhead bin was located at Row 19! I’m just grateful that I didn’t have another flight to catch, otherwise swimming upstream would have prevented me from making it.

Simply adhering to your own baggage-sizing rules would mitigate this problem. Why does Continental nor United do this?

Additionally, the inconsistency with which upgrades are applied is problematic. E.g., if I upgrade to “Economy Plus” do I get the priority line or not? On a recent flight (before reaching elite status) I was told that I did before I purchased, but the gate agent sent me to the back of a *very* long line. How much of my $115 upgrade fee should be refunded for not being able to fit my *own* single carry-on onto the plane? Why should I be punished for doing what I am supposed to, especially after I pay *extra* to ensure that I have the space that I should have reserved for me by the nature of purchasing the flight ticket in the first place?

Add to that the additional charges for food, the difference between Continental’s stellar service record and United’s terrible one (United Breaks Guitars, anyone?), customer loyalty is becoming remarkably difficult to justify.

Please help me understand how Continental is working to address these issues so as to justify remaining.

Sincerely,

J Metz

Now, being the cautious person that I am, I read up on how to do the upgrade “safely,” read through the known issues, even read the troubleshooting tips before I got started. The best blogs I have found come from Spanning Sync and BusyMac for some of the best info overall, however.

Even so, I knew that it wasn’t going to work. I knew it in my heart and in my bones.

Why? Because I have a situation that has had known issues for years and there’s isn’t anything that I can do about it.

At work I must use Exchange 2003 services for calendaring and email. I have no choice. That’s what we got.

All my personal calendaring has been done on iCal on my Mac. With MobileMe syncing, I have been able to sync my calendar (e.g., back it up in a way) to MobileMe, which in turn can be pulled down from any of my other Macs.

On iOS devices, however, it’s one or the other. You can’t sync the personal stuff from your Mac and the Outlook stuff from work and have it show up in a single calendar. In fact, you can’t even sync the Outlook (or Entourage, which is even worse at syncing) with iCal directly and expect it to work correctly.

So, my workaround was this: I would have my Outlook sync with Google Calendar, and then in turn use Spanning Sync to sync my iCal with Google Calendar to get my work calendar to show up in iCal. I would then sync iCal to my iOS devices through iTunes.

Not pretty. Not pretty at all, but it worked (mostly) – there were still well-known issues with time zones but it was do-able.

It became unusable yesterday, just as the early adopoters had been talking about since the change was announced.

MobileMe copied all of the data “to the cloud” (up, up and away!), and then deleted the calendar events (yes, I exported in advance).

Trying to see some verification of what was happening, I moved to Safari to check out my online calendar. Shock of shocks, nothing was there.

So, I went back to my iCal program, and sure enough the files were there, but under the “MobileMe” section.

Then things got really weird.

I had downloaded and installed the latest update for MobileMe on my Windows machine because I read that it worked with Outlook for Windows. Maybe, just maybe, things may have been done right after all.

Starting up Outlook gave me a shock. I had 20 new calendars in my Outlook as MobileMe had pulled in a new calendar for each separate category in iCal.

I went back to Safari and saw that now the appointments that had originally been in iCal were now listed. Why it took longer to get the Safari page to load the events I had no idea. But the categories were all messed up.

Figuring that I would start from scratch from the Outlook side, and knowing that the MobileMe version was now the master, I started to delete the events from the Safari window. Makes sense, right?

Heh. Famous last words.

They disappeared from the window, but did not disappear from the calendar. If I selected next week, for instance, and then went back to this week, everything was still there.

I lost count of the number of times I got the error dialog box “A script on this page has stopped responding. Would you like to stop or continue?”

Of course, the “continue” button didn’t work, and spawned two more error dialog boxes. Stopping the process didn’t do anything other than cause the page to go blank. After closing the window, and then shutting down the browser and restarting, no less than 4 times, I decided to give it up.

This is not the way I want my calendar to work.

This is not the way I want my relationship to be with Apple.

This is my data, not yours, and if you are taking the control away from me you better damn well let me have access to it whenever I damn well please!

So, I’ve turned it off. Losing this kind of control with the ineptitude that Apple has always exhibited with their cloud services.

Nearly a year ago I wrote about how I was beginning to sour on the Apple Kool-Aid, and it looks like those predictions are starting to come to pass.

I have seen rumors that the 10.7 “Lion” upgrade will require using the Mac Store, something that does not surprise me but drives me absolutely crazy, because of the way the store keeps track of what’s on your computer. Quite frankly, I do not want the contents of my hard drive – regardless of its nature – to be distributed across the “cloud.” This is especially true since 1) Apple sucks at it and 2) we’ve seen what can happen.

I’ve turned off MobileMe syncing because the basic premise is that Apple no longer wants to leave me in charge of my own data, they want to be able to control where it sits, how it does or does not sync with my devices, and how it does or does not work (mostly does not) as a cloud-based app.

Screw that. It’s my data, not theirs.

To me, this misses the point entirely.

Let’s put it this way. What if it wasn’t just a scan. What if it was something else? Something that would make you do almost anything to avoid having to do it. Something that makes it pretty clear that all we have to do is give up our rights for the sake of convenience and we find that they become very difficult to re-acquire.

The Deal

I’ll make you a deal. I’ll hit you in the face twice whenever you want to go somewhere. Two quick jabs.

Puh-pow!

See? It’s over now. That wasn’t so bad. See, it’s necessary to do this because you don’t actually have a right to go anywhere, and if you want to use the public streets you will have to submit to this procedure.

Very private photos, very private.

No, it has absolutely nothing to do with you getting to where you’re going. No, it doesn’t help you get their safely. No, no one has ever actually been shown to be saved or helped by doing this.

Why are you complaining? I mean, it’s only two quick jabs to your face. There’s no permanent marks, no lasting effects. We’ve tested it repeatedly. Studies have shown – independent studies – that it’s safe.

What? No, I don’t know which studies. But they’ve shown it to be safe.

Okay, look. I’m tired of all your questions. Who do you think you are? Don’t you realize that you don’t actually have any rights over your own body? When you enter anything that can be considered “public,” you belong to the public.

Trust me, I’m the government.

It was a well-written piece, but I couldn’t help but get the feeling that Mr. Inskeep was missing a much larger picture and, as a result, does deserve to be examined within a broader scale.

In short, Mr. Inskeep, I respectfully disagree with your selective scorekeeping.

As it happens I agree that, should the criticisms of O’Keefe’s tactics be confirmed, then Schiller’s removal from the office was patently unfair. However, she should never have been in the position long enough for O’Keefe to run his con if for no other reason than for the way she handled the Juan Williams firing.

Mr. Inskeep insists that we should view NPR based upon “my colleagues’ reporting technique [which] demonstrates their values.”

But isn’t that the problem?

You can talk about all the times you have legitimate, hard-working reporters who actually do legitimate reporting, but it’s not the comparisons to O’Keefe that are the problem. It’s the comparisons to Nina Totenberg’s wishing AIDS upon the grandchildren of Jesse Helms, or her reporting of the Tea Party as “cockamamie”, all of which were done on-air and were not op-ed.

Not that Juan Williams should be a conservative hero here. He had a notorious streak during the Los Angeles Port Unions dispute several years ago, when he would interview only union members who gleefully reported their willingness to illegally slow down work, while never discussing the other side of the negotiation table (still searching for the citation).

Should we even begin to discuss the lopsided reporting on Global Warming?

My own breaking point with NPR came years ago when Beth Fertig reported a story (on “All things considered”) on a New York City program that provided continuing education to students who had 2, 3 or more children of their own before they were 16 years of age. Even now, on NPR’s page, “the program hasn’t lived up to its promise.”

In short, NPR took on the role that the Nanny State should rule supreme, that those who refuse to take one shred of accountability are victims – an extremely liberal bias that still goes unchecked.

This, Mr. Inskeep, is not the exception to NPR’s programming, it is the rule. The international levels of correspondence are – within the world of news reporting – supposed to be head-and-shoulders above the domestic reporting because by its very nature it has salience to a broader audience.

It is disingenuous to characterize the nature of international reporting (and those correspondents) to the bulk of NPR’s reporting curriculum.

Despite the protests in the op-ed piece, and the selected examples therein, there still has yet to be a compelling argument as to why taxpayers should be forced to sacrifice their already-limited income to what is arguably a propaganda media outlet?

If, as you say, it is not propaganda (which can be defined as closing off conversation, as shown in the examples listed here) and is widely supported by both conservatives and liberals alike, as you state, why can it not survive in the marketplace of ideas? Why must NPR use the force of government to extricate money from the taxpayers for its survival?

Your position comes from a source of one who must not actually pay for his own supper, but attempts to justify the pillaging of others’ dinner tables. This is rationalization and justification, a platitude you tell yourself that you are needed and enrich the lives around you but are not actually sure if your constituents are willing to agree with you.

Only when your benefactors have a choice of contributing or not (e.g., your fund drives are good enough) would we truly see if your audience sees you as even-keeled as you make yourself out to be.

Sorry, but as long as a gun is held to my tax-paying head in order to provide your organization sustenance, I will be unable to see just how “balanced” you claim this arrangement to be.

At first I thought that Chris’ article might have simply been a matter of laziness or FUD, but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions about his motives – and I’m glad that I didn’t. In a very thorough email outlining where he got his information I can not only fathom how he came to understand things the way he did, but also empathize with his frustration as a result.

In short, it’s not his fault. At all. He’s frustrated, and quite frankly so am I.

Sometimes I feel like Sisyphus, condemned to roll his stone up the hill only to be robbed at the summit by having it roll back to the bottom. I’ve been trying very hard to be as accurate as I can with respect to FCoE, but there are some pretty heavy hitters lined up against me who knock that stone back down to the bottom of the hill.

Chris asked some very pointed (and excellent!) questions about how FCoE works and how the standards fit into the process. He cited quotations from numerous white papers and vendor documentation that should have been 1) technically accurate and 2) marketing neutral. They were neither.

We’re not talking little faux pas here, we’re talking things that are just flat-out wrong.

He had quote after quote from several vendors (not just one) that would have lead any reasonable person to think the exact opposite of how FCoE actually works.

Muddying The Waters

A couple of examples that Chris provided me are worth illustrating the point (vendor names have been removed to protect the guilty):

Vendor #1: “The enhanced transmission selection (ETS) algorithm will strengthen the ability of FCoE to reliably use Ethernet as a transport layer and minimize the chance of link congestion and frame loss.”

ETS does nothing of the kind. It has nothing to do with reliability, congestion, or frame loss. ETS has to do with bandwidth allocation and groupings.

Vendor #2: “PFC allows Fibre Channel storage traffic encapsulated in FCoE frames to receive lossless service from a link that is being shared with traditional LAN traffic, which is loss-tolerant.”

While technically correct, the sentence implies that FCoE and LAN traffic are thrown willy-nilly onto the link and that one type can interrupt the other. This is misleading.

Vendor #3: “For example, with PFC, if storage traffic has a higher priority than LAN traffic and a large storage transfer causes congestion, PFC can be engaged to pause the storage transfer and let the LAN transfer proceed.”

In this case “priority” is used in the colloquial sense, i.e., there is a hierarchy of prioritization where some traffic is more important than others. In the case of DCB networks, “priority” is a misnomer because it relates to classes of service rather than how important they are. In either case, PFC does not “let LAN transfer proceed,” it focuses on making one type of traffic lossless – that’s all. It has nothing whatsoever to do with acting as a traffic cop for permitting which traffic should be transmitted and which should not.

Vendor #1 again: “Based on the priority information collected through PAUSE, the server stops sending any traffic for that specific application while the other applications continue to make progress without disruption on the shared link.”

PFC (nor PAUSE – these are two completely different mechanisms, though the terminology is reused) does not “collect priority information.” This is pure fantasy. As a result, neither PAUSE nor PFC have any role in whether or not “other applications continue to make progress without disruption on the shared link.”

Vendor #4 (Ironically from a company that does not even have a FCoE product currently offered): “Typically in the data center FCoE traffic will be assigned to the higher priority classes. This ensures that congestion due to other less sensitive traffic between servers will not cause loss of FCoE storage traffic.”

Again the definition of “priority” causes havoc here. Typically FCoE is assigned to CoS (or “priority”) 3. Now, this means that you will have to be careful if you’ve assigned other types of traffic to CoS/”priority” 3, but it does not mean that FCoE is any more or less important than traffic on, say, priority 2 or 5. These are non-hierarchical lanes.

Again, from Vendor #1 (different white paper): “In addition, 802.1Qbb can leverage prioritization to establish bandwidth allocation on a per-application basis. Time-sensitive applications such as inter-process communications (IPC) can be given a higher percentage of available bandwidth as needed while other applications are assured portions of the remaining available bandwidth.”

802.1Qbb (PFC) says no such thing. Priority Flow Control is, well, Priority Flow Control. Bandwidth allocation is part of 802.1Qaz, Enhanced Transmission Selection. That’s controls the transmission selection and enhances it (i.e., bandwidth management). (By the way, the Qaz document also defines how devices can communicate configuration information and establish correct settings, also called DCBX.)

This is not an exhaustive list of what he shared with me, or that I have found for myself. Let’s not even get into the confusion surrounding QCN (Congestion Notification) and TRILL at this point. It’s sufficient to point out that all the errors mentioned above are compounded.

Is it any wonder this is frustrating? Remember these come from technical white papers not marketing or press releases!

So Why Bother?

Despite some criticisms to the contrary, and the nature of my role at Cisco (if this is the first time reading my blog, in the interest of transparency it should be noted I am a Product Manager for FCoE for the Data Center Business Unit) it might be easy to assume that it may be a case of “the PM protests too much!” After all, it’s in my best interest (and my company’s) to promote FCoE at all costs, no matter what, damn the torpedoes full speed ahead!

Right? Right?!

Actually, not-so-much. It’s in my best interest to make customers and partners understand the role storage-over-Ethernet (whether it be FCoE or not) plays in their Data Center, even if that role is “not at all.”

I have tried to be consistent in my approach: I have never said (nor would I state) that FCoE is right for all customers in all occasions in all situations.

I do think that for certain situations and for certain customers FCoE is a very cool technology that can allow for some very interesting (and cost effective!) solutions to long-term issues within the Data Center.

But how are those customers supposed to know if they are the ones who would benefit the most? How are they supposed to make decisions if all they get is crap like this? Poor Chris, whose job it is to break it down into plain English, is stuck because he relies on the very same documents are completely unreliable!

I mean, really, can he (or anyone else) be blamed when public statements made by these vendors about aspects of FCoE cannot be trusted?

I don’t think so.

The practical upshot is that there is a gap between how things really work and what customers (and partners) are learning about the technology. For my part, while I may not have any control over what other vendors are writing about, I do have some influence over what my company presents (limited though it may be), and I have 100% control over the accuracy and accountability of my own tweets, blogs, and presentations.

As a result, I strive very hard to be as accurate as I can be. Things change, and sometimes I’m flat-out incorrect. But at least I can make the promise to remain accountable to what I write.

Obviously I can’t stop the misinformation single-handedly, but it doesn’t mean that I can’t get that rock up to the summit. If anyone wants to help, come on board.

Homework

If it seems like I’m being pedantic here, complaining about the incorrect identification of PFC when they really mean ETS (or vice versa), look at it this way:

The building blocks that make up FCoE can be arranged to create some very complex and creative solutions. If you don’t know what those building blocks are, how can you expect to use them properly?

Here’s a recent product announcement for a Dell PowerConnect 8024F Switch. If you look at the graphics on the page it implies that it can do a lot of different things. It does, for instance, claim to be “Unified Fabric Ready” right next to a very beautiful picture of LAN/SAN/IPC traveling within the same wire.

So far so good, right?

With all the talk about FCoE, Priority Flow Control, LAN/SAN convergence, can you determine:

• Whether this switch can run FCoE? After all, it mentions Unified Fabric and 802.1Qbb/PFC
• Take part in device discovery and configuration with other DCB switches?
• Where it might fit into an FCoE fabric?
• Bonus: Whether this switch can handle InfiniBand traffic (implied by IPC)

As you can see, those little building blocks suddenly make a huge difference.

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“Official Disclaimer: Some of the individuals posting to this site, including the moderators, work for Cisco Systems, Inc. Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors, not those of Cisco.”

The main misunderstanding revolves around FCoE standards, because by and large most people have no real clue how they work and what they mean. My goal is to help clear up some of that confusion and give a baseline understanding of standards as they apply to FCoE.

Disclosure(s)

At the bottom of this page you’ll see an official disclosure but let me say it up front, too. I am a Product Manager for FCoE for Cisco and, as of this writing, I have been in the position for a little over 3 weeks. My role is to help promote FCoE (and related products) in the Data Center on Cisco’s behalf.

This means two things.

First, it means that I am aware of the issues of credibility that it might bring to bear. I’m also acutely aware that vendor blogging can be fraught with problems. For those who might simply dismiss what I write for these reasons, well, I suppose that’s your prerogative, but I do tend to back up what I write with sources and strive for the highest accuracy. Nevertheless, I’m not writing on Cisco’s behalf here, nor am I espousing a Cisco point of view. Instead, I’m focusing on FCoE and standards as a technology problem, not a business analysis problem.

The second thing it means is that I now have access to a wealth of information and resources that I could never have had in my wildest dreams as an independent voice. During these brief three weeks I have come to understand that my own understanding of DCB, FCoE, and standards have been askew (okay, in some cases flat-out wrong).

For that reason I’m pretty lenient when articles are published with respect to standards that are erroneous, by and large. After all, the standards committees themselves don’t make it easily accessible to the general public to figure out what is going on, let alone their relationship to each other. So if I’m having trouble piecing this puzzle together and it’s my main focus, who am I to blame someone for not getting their facts straight?

The Big Picture – Who is Who

First and foremost, when it comes to FCoE you need to understand that there is no FCoE Standards Committee. So, when you see an interview, or a press release, that makes a claim that “the FCoE standards committee” does this, or says that, or plans on doing something else, you need to immediately understand that the content is suspect.

However, the two technologies in FCoE have standards bodies: the Fibre Channel (FC) side has T11, and the Ethernet side has IEEE.

T11 is the group that defines Fibre Channel technologies, and another group (called FCIA) markets them. For over ten years T11 has defined how to transport FC over other protocols, and with each version additional features are added. When it comes to FCoE itself, T11 is your group (more on this below).

IEEE is the group that determines Ethernet standards. They have a different naming convention than T11 (which is one reason some people get very confused as to what qualifies as a standard for FCoE and what doesn’t), but effectively they do the same basic thing: they determine what problems there are, and the best way to solve them. When it comes to the consolidation of multiple traffic types over Ethernet, IEEE is your group (again, more on this below).

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There is no FCoE Standards Committee

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What Standards Are, and Aren’t

This is the biggie. If you get nothing else from this article, get this part:

Standards are meant to be a solution to a problem.

Many people believe, erroneously, that you need to have standards in order to have technology. This simply isn’t true.

Standards do not address the question of what to do, they address the question of how to do it.

So in the case of FCoE, let’s say you want to put Fibre Channel frames and carry them over Ethernet. There are some technical issues that you need to take into consideration, and standards that relate to FCoE will tell you how to do it.

Is it the only way to solve that problem? No. Is it required? No. In fact many vendors will often sell pre-standardized products into the marketplace because standardization does not often require hardware upgrades (the obvious exception is if it happens to be a hardware standard!).

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Standards do not address the question of what to do, they address the question of how to do it

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This means that if a vendor releases a pre-standardized product and the standard changes the functionality, it’s often merely a software/firmware upgrade.

What this means is that standards are not requirements for either operation or interoperability.

FCoE and Standards, or Why It’s Not Required

As it turns out, when it comes to putting Fibre Channel frames onto Ethernet, you really need only a couple of things. You need to add a way for Fibre Channel to behave like Fibre Channel, even while being transported over Ethernet, and you need Ethernet to behave in a lossless fashion just like Fibre Channel.

What do you know? Both of those problems have been solved and finalized.

You can create lossless Ethernet with the PAUSE capability and, believe it or not, that was standardized in 1999.

You can place Fibre Channel frames onto other media (e.g., Ethernet), and if you want to do it in a standardized way, then the T11 group told you how to do it in 2009.

But wait, there’s more!

What if you want to run more than one type of traffic on a single wire? This is a problem, right? As it happens, it’s a problem that is being worked on by the IEEE Data Center Bridging Task Group.

When you realize that standards are meant to solve a problem it makes a lot of things easier. What if, for instance, you don’t have a particular problem that the standards are trying to address? Well, in that case you can simply ignore the irrelevant standard.

For instance, the working group for Fibre Channel that was responsible for FCoE was also working on a larger solution to put FC on multiple different technologies, not just Ethernet. This meant that FCoE wasn’t the only thing that came out of FC-BB-5 in June, 2009.

However, we don’t concern ourselves with problems we don’t have. If, like some people think, we were required to follow FC-BB-5 then we’d have to incorporate FC over TCP/IP, FC over GFPT, FC over MPLS into every FCoE switch.

Why? Because that’s what FC-BB-5 covers!

As you can see, just because something is standardized doesn’t mean that it must be implemented if you don’t have that problem.

The same thing follows for IEEE’s DCB standards. The DCB standards contain several additions and enhancements to Ethernet to allow extra features, including some of the ones we’ve all heard about (Priority Flow Control, Enhanced Transmission Selection, etc.). These are all solutions designed to address problems that people may want to solve. Each of the extensions defined by DCB solves a specific problem, and there are no cases of two solutions for the same problem.

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If standards were “required,” FCoE switches would have to have FC-BB-5 features that they don’t need.

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If, however, someone comes up with a better way to solve the problem, they are more than welcome to do it. If someone comes up with additional features that solve additional problems that the standards committees haven’t thought of yet, they can do that too. It won’t change the fact that FCoE can still be implemented reliably.

Standards and Versions

There’s an additional misunderstanding when it comes to standards and the versions that are perpetually in development.

Darren Thomas, head of Dell Storage recently gave an interview to Storagenewsletter.com, where he exacerbated this misunderstanding:

No dates yet, and to be clear, the FCoE standards committee has pushed out the date where you can do end-to-end FCoE by more than two years.

Well, we’ve already seen that there is no such thing as “the FCoE standards committee,” so it’s not clear what committee he’s referring to.

First, in Fibre Channel (and FCoE is Fibre Channel), it’s best to think of those topologies as “core-to-edge,” rather than “end-to-end,” but that’s best left for another post.

Second, even using Thomas’ terminology, you can do “end-to-end FCoE” right now. If, as a customer, you are looking for a standardized way to do it, then it was completed with FC-BB-5 in 2009.

It seems that Thomas is telling people to wait for the next version of the standards – in this case FC-BB-6 - but that implies a lack of understanding of how standards work.

Think of it like an operating system: each version of an operating system has a set of features and capabilities, but you don’t need to wait until the next version comes out in order to have a computer now.

The same is true for FCoE standards. If you are simply waiting for the next version to come out you’ll never buy a switch!

Mea Culpa

This is the part where I server up an extra large portion of my hat. I’d like some tabasco sauce, please. Maybe a nice Bordeaux.

Earlier I had mentioned that FCoE was not the equivalent of DCB. If I had stayed right there I would have been on safe ground. But instead, I had to say that FCoE was a subset of DCB, which as you can see from reading this standards article, is patently incorrect.

In case I got a little unclear, let me explain a bit better.

FCoE is a definition of how to put Fibre Channel onto Ethernet, which is defined by T11 (the Fibre Channel people). DCB is an Ethernet series of features that come from IEEE. As a result, FCoE is not dependent upon DCB to work, nor does DCB require FCoE to work.

FCoE has only one single requirement from Ethernet: be lossless, and this can be achieved without any DCB at all, by proper network design or by using another mechanism (PAUSE) defined by IEEE over 10 years ago. FCoE is independent from DCB, and this is why it has been standardized by T11.

If everything you want to deploy is FCoE, there is no need of DCB. If, however, you want to achieve I/O consolidation (e.g., carrying both FCoE and other Ethernet traffic over the same wires), then you’ll need to solve some additional problems – problems that the DCB standards are addressing.

In short, it’s all about network and deployment requirements, not about protocol requirements.

Putting It All Together

Look, I’ll be blunt. Standards are not the most fascinating topic of conversation, nor are they easy to grasp. Having been to the June T11 working group meetings I realized it was a non-trivial process to see how everything fits together.

It’s a lot like trying to figure out box scores in the newspaper without understanding the rules of baseball. Or watching cricket.

If you’re not already familiar with the interconnections of the game, and who the players are, you may often find yourself guessing as to what the important parts are to look for.

When it comes to FCoE, there are really only a few crucial things to know from a standards perspective:

• The problem of making Ethernet lossless was standardized in 1999.
• The problem of putting Fibre Channel frames on Ethernet was standardized in 2009
• Therefore, FCoE standards are done. Baked. Completed. Ready-to-Rock-and-Roll.
• Additional solutions to problems are nearing completion, and several of these solutions are already implemented in shipping products today.
• More conversations about how to solve problems are ongoing, so you can expect even more features to be available as time goes on

As you’ve read this far, I hope you’ve found this useful. I have been spending a lot of time lately trying to wrap my head around the standards process and have found myself on the business end of a slap upside the head – more than once!

I have no doubt that I’ll continue to find that some of my assumptions need revisiting, and I’ll probably have a few more moments where I’ll be forced to admit that I was… ahem… incorrect. When that happens, I’ll be the first to identify where those shortcomings are and do my best to be as accurate as possible.

In the meantime, though, with all the news reports that have come out in June 2010 with respect to FCoE from a large number of vendors, it’s important to stay grounded as to what the standards mean when the term is thrown about with careless abandon.

And now you know.

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You can subscribe to this blog to get notifications of future articles in the column on the right. You can also follow me on Twitter: @jmichelmetz

“Official Disclaimer: Some of the individuals posting to this site, including the moderators, work for Cisco Systems, Inc. Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors, not those of Cisco.”