BGP Hell Is Other People

If you configure a newsreader to alert you every time someone hijacks a BGP autonomous system (AS), it will probably go off at least once a week. The most recent one was on the first of April courtesy of Rostelecom. But they’re not the only one. They’re just the latest. The incidences of people redirecting BGP, either by accident or be design, are becoming more and more frequent. And as we rely more and more on things like cloud computing and online applications to do our daily work and live our lives, the impact of these hijacks is becoming more and more critical.

Professional-Grade Protocol

BGP isn’t the oldest thing on the Internet. RFC 1105 is the initial draft of Border Gateway Protocol. The version that we use today, BGP4, is documented in RFC 4271. It’s a protocol that has enjoyed a long history of revisions and a reviled history of making networking engineers’ lives difficult. But why is that? How can a routing protocol be so critical and yet obtuse?

My friend Marko Milivojevic famously stated in his CCIE training career that, “BGP isn’t a routing protocol. It’s a policy engine.” When you look at the decisions of Continue reading

SD-WAN and Technical Debt

Back during Networking Field Day 22, I was having a fun conversation with Phil Gervasi (@Network_Phil) and Carl Fugate (@CarlFugate) about SD-WAN and innovation. I mentioned that it was fascinating to see how SD-WAN companies kept innovating but that bigger, more established companies that had bought into SD-WAN seemed to be having issues catching up. As our conversation continued I realized that technical debt plays a huge role in startup culture in all factors, not just with SD-WAN. But we’ll use SD-WAN as an example here to focus our discussion.

Any Color You Want In Black

Big companies have investments in supply chains. They have products that are designed in a certain way because it’s the least expensive way to develop the project or it involves using technology developed by the company that gives them a competitive advantage. Think about something like the Cisco Nexus 9000-series switches that launched with Cisco ACI. Every one of them came with the Insieme ASIC that was built to accelerate the policy component of ACI. Whether or not you wanted to use ACI or Insieme in your deployment, you were getting the ASIC in the switch.

Policies like this Continue reading

The Bane of Backwards Compatibility

I’m a huge fan of video games. I love playing them, especially on my old consoles from my formative years. The original Nintendo consoles were my childhood friends as much as anything else. By the time I graduated from high school, everyone had started moving toward the Sony Playstation. I didn’t end up buying into that ecosystem as I started college. Instead, I just waited for my brother to pick up a new console and give me his old one.

This meant I was always behind the curve on getting to play the latest games. I was fine with that, since the games I wanted to play were on the old console. The new one didn’t have anything that interested me. And by the time the games that I wanted to play did come out it wouldn’t be long until my brother got a new one anyway. But one thing I kept hearing was that the Playstation was backwards compatible with the old generation of games. I could buy a current console and play most of the older games on it. I wondered how they managed to pull that off since Nintendo never did.

When I was older, I did Continue reading

Fast Friday Thoughts on Where We Are

It’s been a crazy week. I know the curse is “May you live in interesting times,” but I’m more than ready for things to be less interesting for a while. It’s going to take some time to adjust to things. From a networking perspective, I have a few things that have sprung up.

• Video conferencing is now a big thing. Strangely, Cisco couldn’t make video the new phone. But when people are stuck at home now we need to do video again? I get that people have a need to see each other face-to-face. But having worked from home for almost seven years at this point I can tell you video isn’t a necessity. It’s a nice option, but you can get a lot accomplished with video calls and regular emails.
• Along side this is the fact that the push to put more video out there is causing applications to reach their breaking points. Zoom, which is fairing the best out of all of them so far, had some issues on Thursday morning. Tripling the amount of traffic that’s going out and making it very sensitive to delay and jitter is going expose a lot of flaws in the system.
• Continue reading

I Hate Excellent Questions

I was listening to a recent episode of the Packet Pushers Podcast about SD-WAN and some other stuff. At one point, my good friend Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind) asked the guest something, and the guest replied with, “That’s an excellent question!” Greg replied with, “Of course it was. I only ask excellent questions.” I was walking and laughed out loud harder than I’ve laughed in a long time.

This was also a common theme during Networking Field Day. Everyone was asking “great” or “excellent” questions. I chuckled and told the delegates that it was a canned response that most presenters give today. But then I wondered why all our questions are excellent. And why I hated that response so much.

Can You Define “Excellent”?

The first reason why I think people tend to counter with “excellent” praise is because they are stalling for an answer. It’s a time-honored tradition from spelling bees when you don’t know how to spell the word and you need a few more seconds to figure out if this is one of those “i before e” words or not. I get the purpose of defining something of non-native speaker origin. But defining a Continue reading

There Are No More Green Fields

I’ve looked at quite a few pieces of technology in the past few years. Some have addressed massive issues that I had when I was a practicing network engineer. Others have shown me new ways to do things I never thought possible. But one category of technology still baffles me to this day: The technology that assumes greenfield deployment.

For those not familiar, “greenfield” is a term that refers to a project that is built on a site completely from scratch. It originally comes from a day when the project in question was a factory or other capital improvement that was literally being built in a field with green grass growing on top. The alternative to that project was one where something was being built in a location where there was existing infrastructure or other form of site pollution. And, of course because everyone in humanity never gets older than twelve, this is called a “brownfield” site.

Getting back to the technology side of things, let’s talk about greenfield deployments. When was the last time you walked into a building and found zero technology of any kind? Odds are good that’s not the case. Sure, there are some SMBs that Continue reading

Denial of Services as a Service

Hacking isn’t new. If you follow the 2600 Magazine culture of know the name Mitnick or Draper you know that hacking has been a part of systems as long as their have been systems. What has changed in recent years is the malicious aspect of what’s going on in the acts themselves. The pioneers of hacking culture were focused on short term gains or personal exploitation. It was more about proving you could break into a system and getting the side benefit of free phone calls or an untraceable mobile device. Today’s hacking cultures are driven by massive amounts of theft and exploitation of resources to a degree that would make any traditional hacker blush.

It’s much like the difference between petty street crime and “organized” crime. With a patron and a purpose, the organizers of the individual members can coordinate to accomplish a bigger goal than was ever thought possible by the person on the street. Just like a wolf pack or jackals, you can take down a much bigger target with come coordination. I talked a little bit about how the targets were going to start changing almost seven years ago and how we needed to start figuring Continue reading

What Is Closed-Loop Automation?

During Networking Field Day 22 last week, a lot the questions that were directed at the presenters had to do with their automation systems. One term kept coming up that I was embarrassed to admit that I’d never heard of. Closed-loop automation is the end goal for these systems. But what is closed-loop automation? And why is it so important. I decided to do a little research and find out.

Open Up

To understand closed-loop systems, you have to understand open-loop systems first. Thankfully, those are really simple. Open-loop systems are those where the output isn’t directly affected by the control actions of the system. It’s a system where you’re going to get the output no matter how you control it. The easiest example is a clothes dryer. There are a multitude of settings that you can choose for a clothes dryer, including the timing of the cycle. But no matter what, the dryer will stop at the end of the cycle. There’s no sensor in a basic clothes dryer that senses the moisture level of the clothes and acts accordingly.

Open-loop systems are stable and consistent. Every time you turn on the dryer, it will run until it finishes. Continue reading

Fast Friday – Networking Field Day 22 Thoughts

Since I’m on the road again at Networking Field Day this week, I have had some great conversations with the delegates and presenters. A few stray thoughts that may develop into full blown blog posts at some point, but I figured I could get some of them out here for some quick entertainment.

• The startup model means flexibility. That also means you can think about problems in a new light. So it would follow that you get to develop some new idea without a mountain of technical debt. Things like archaic platforms and crusty old user interfaces. You’d be surprised the amount of stuff that gets carried forward as technical debt.
• Integrating products isn’t easy. Even if you think you’ve got the right slot for your newest acquisition you may find it isn’t the best fit overall. Or, even better, you may find a synergy you didn’t know existed because of a forgotten tool. Very rarely does anything just neatly fit into all your plans.
• The more guest Wi-Fi I have to register for, the more I long for the days of Passport and OpenRoaming. If you already know who I am, why oh why must I continually register. Who Continue reading

Agility vs. Flexibility

When you’re looking at moving to a new technology, whether it be SD-WAN or cloud, you’re going to be told all about the capabilities it has and all the shiny new stuff it can do for you. I would almost guarantee that you’re going to hear the words “agile” and “flexible” at some point during the conversation. Now, obviously those two things are different based on the fact there are two different words to describe what they do. But I’ve also heard people use them interchangeably. What does it mean to be agile? And is it better to be flexible too?

Agile Profile

Agility is the ability to move quickly and easily. It’s a quality displayed by athletes and fighters the world over. It’s a combination of reflexes and skill. Agility gives you the ability to react quickly to situations.

What does that mean in a technology sense? Mostly, agile solutions or methodologies are able to react to changing conditions or requirements quickly and adapt to meet those needs. Imagine a platform that can react to the changing needs of users. Or add new functions on the fly on demand. That’s the kind of agility that comes from software functionality Continue reading

Meraki Is Almost An Enterprise Solution

You may remember a three or so years ago when I famously declared that Meraki is not a good solution for enterprises. I know the folks at Meraki certainly haven’t. The profile for the hardware and services has slowly been rising inside of Cisco. More than just wireless with the requisite networking components, Meraki has now embraced security, SD-WAN, and even security cameras. They’ve moved into a lot of areas that customers have been asking about while also still trying to maintain the simplicity that Meraki is known for.

Having just finished up a Meraki presentation during Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the progress that Meraki has been making toward embracing their enterprise customer base. I’m not entirely convinced that they’ve made it yet, but the progress is starting to look good.

Playing for Scale

The first area where Meraki is starting to really make strides is in the scalability department. This video from Tech Field Day Extra is all about new security features in the platform, specifically with firewalls. Take a quick look:

Toward the end of the video is one of Continue reading

Really Late Company Christmas Shopping

I’m headed out to Cisco Live Europe today, so I’m trying to get everything packed before I head to the airport. I also realize I need to go buy a few things for my suitcase. Which must be the same thing that a bunch of companies thought this week as they went on a buying spree! Seriously:

• VMware buys Nyansa for the VeloCloud unit
• Arista is going buy Big Switch Networks, as first reported by SDxCentral but pretty much what’s happening for sure.

I don’t think we’re quite done yet, either. An oblique tweet from a friend with some inside sources leads me to believe that the reason why this is happening right now is because some of the venture funds are getting antsy and are calling in their markers. Maybe they need the funds to cash out investors? Maybe they’re looking to reduce their exposure to other things? Maybe they’re ready to jump on a plane to an uncharted island somewhere?

This is one of the challenges when you’re beholden to investors. Sure, not all of us are independently wealthy and capable of bootstrapping our own startup. We need some kind of funding to make that happen. But Continue reading

Why Do You Need NAT66?

It’s hard to believe that it’s been eight years since I wrote my most controversial post ever. I get all kinds of comments on my NAT66 post even to this day. I’ve been told I’m a moron, an elitist, and someone that doesn’t understand how the Internet works. I’ve also had some good comments that highlight a specific need for tools like NAT66. I wanted to catch up with everything and ask a very important question.

WHY?

Every Tool Has A Purpose

APNIC had a great post about NAT66 back in 2018. You should totally read it. I consider it a fair review of the questions surrounding NAT’s use in 2020. Again, NAT has a purpose and when used properly and sparingly for that purpose it works well. In the case of the article, Marco Cilloni (@MCilloni) lays out the need to use NAT66 to use IPv6 at his house due to ISP insanity and the latency overhead of using tunnels with Hurricane Electric. In this specific case, NAT66 was a good tool for him to use to translate his /128 address to something useable in his network.

If you’re brave, you should delve into the comments. A Continue reading

The Art of Saying “No”

No.

It’s the shortest sentence in the English language. It requires no other parts of speech. It’s an answer, a statement, and a command all at once. It’s a phrase that some people have zero issues saying over and over again. And yet, some others have an extremely difficult time answering anything in the negative.

I had a fun discussion on twitter yesterday with some friends about the idea behind saying “no” to people. It started with this tweet:

Coincidentally, I tweeted something very similar to what Bob Plankers had tweeted just hours before:

The gist is the same though. Crazy features and other things that have been included in software and hardware because someone couldn’t tell another person “no”. Sadly, it’s something Continue reading

Time For Improvement

Welcome to 2020! First and foremost, no posts from me involving vision or eyesight or any other optometrist puns for this year. I promise 366 days free of anything having to do with eyeballs. That does mean a whole world of other puns that I’m going to be focusing on!

Now, let’s look back at 2019. The word that I could use to describe it was “hectic”. It felt like everything was in overdrive all year long. There were several times that I got to the end of the week and realized that I didn’t have any kind of post ready to go. I’m the kind of person that likes to write when the inspiration hits me. And instead I found myself scrambling to write up some thoughts. And that was something I told myself that I was going to get away from. So we’re going to call that one a miss and get back to trying to post on a day other than Friday.

That also means that, given all the other content that I’ve been working on with Gestalt IT that I’m going to have to schedule some time actually working on that content instead of hoping that Continue reading

Fast Friday- Keeping Up With The Times

We’re at the end of the 2010s. It’s almost time to start making posts about 2020 and somehow working vision or eyesight into the theme so you can look just like everyone else. But I want to look back for a moment on how much things have changed for networking in the last ten years.

It’s true that networking wasn’t too exciting for most of the 2000s. Things got faster and more complicated. Nothing really got better except the bottom lines of people pushing bigger hardware. And that’s honestly how we liked it. Because the idea that we were all special people that needed to be at the top of our game to get things done resonated with us. We weren’t just mechanics. We were the automobile designers of the future!

But if there’s something that the mobile revolution of the late 2000s taught us, it was that operators don’t need to be programmers to enjoy using technology. Likewise, enterprise users don’t need to be CCIEs or VCDXs to make things work. That’s the real secret behind all the of the advances in networking technology in the 2010s. We’re not making networking harder any more. We’re not adding complexity for Continue reading

Stop SIS – Self-Inflicted Spam

Last month I ran across a great blog post by Jed Casey (@WaxTrax) about letting go of the digital hoard that he had slowly been collecting over the years. It’s not easy to declare bankruptcy because you’ve hit your limit of things that you can learn and process. Jed’s focus in the article is that whatever he was going to try and come up with was probably out of date or past its prime. But it got me to thinking about a little project that I’ve been working on over the past few months.

Incoming!

One of the easy ways to stay on top of things in the industry is to sign up for updates. A digest email here and a notification there about new posts or conversations is a great way to stay in-the-know about information or the latest, greatest thing. But before you know it you’re going to find yourself swamped with incoming emails and notifications.

I’ve noticed it quite a bit in my inbox this year. What was once a message that I would read to catch up became a message I would scan for content. That then became a message that I skipped past Continue reading

Magical Mechanics

If you’re a fan of this blog, you’ve probably read my last post about the new SD-WAN magic quadrant that’s been making the rounds and generating discussion. Some people are smiling that this report places Cisco in an area other than leadership in the SD-WAN space. Others are decrying the report as being unfair and contradictory. I wanted to take another look at it given some new information and some additional thoughts on the results.

Fair and Square

The first thing I wanted to do is make sure that I was completely transparent with the way the Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) works. I have a very good idea thanks to a conversation with Andrew Lerner (@Fast_Lerner), who is the Research VP of Networking at Gartner. Andrew was nice enough to clarify my understanding of the MQ and accompanying documentation. I’ll quote him here to make sure I don’t get anything wrong:

In an MQ, we assess the overall vendors’ behavior and offering in the market. Product, service/support sales, marketing, innovation, etc. if a vendor has multiple products in a market and sells them regularly to the enterprise, they are part of the MQ assessment. Viable products are not Continue reading

SD-WAN Squares and Perplexing Planes

The latest arcane polygon is out in the SD-WAN space. Normally, my fortune telling skills don’t involve geometry. I like to talk to real people about their concerns and their successes. Yes, I know that the gardening people do that too. It’s just that no one really bothers to read their reports and instead makes all their decisions based on boring wall art.

Speaking of which, I’m going to summarize that particular piece of art here. Note this isn’t the same for copyright reasons but close enough for you to get the point:

So, if you can’t tell by the colors here, the big news is that Cisco has slipped out of the top Good part of the polygon and is now in the bottom Bad part (denoted by the red) and is in danger of going out of business and being the laughing stock of the networking community. Well, no, not so much that last part. But their implementation has slipped into the lower part of the quadrant where first-stage startups and cash-strapped companies live and wish they could build something.

Cisco released a report rebutting those claims and it talks about how Viptela is a huge part of Continue reading

Fast Friday- Perry Mason Moments

It’s the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in the US which means lots of people discussing things with their relatives. And, as is often the case, lots of arguments. It’s the nature of people to have a point of view and then to want to defend it. And it’s not just politics or other divisive topics. We see it all the time in networking too.

EIGRP vs OSPF. Cisco vs Juniper. ACI vs NSX. You name it and we’ve argued about it. Every viewpoint has a corresponding counterpart. Yes, there are good points for using one versus the other. But there are also times when every piece of factual information doesn’t matter because we “know” the right answer.

It’s those times when we run into what I call the “Perry Mason Problem”. It’s a reminder of the old Perry Mason TV show when the lawyer in the title would win a case with a carefully crafted statement that just ends any arguments. It’s often called a Wham Line or an Armor-Piercing Question. Basically, Mr. Mason would ask a question or make a statement that let all the air out of the argument. And often it would result in him winning the case Continue reading