Ethan Banks

Author Archives: Ethan Banks

Day Two Cloud 158: On Leadership With Chris Wahl

According to Chris Wahl, everyone in an organization can lead--not just those with "chief" or "manager" in their job title. Leadership isn't about telling everyone else what to do. Not at all. Have a listen as Chris explains what it is to lead, and how you can do so yourself while enabling others around you to do the same.

Heavy Networking 641: Network Design For NVMe Over Fabric

Today on Heavy Networking, we discuss NVMe over fabric, where your Ethernet and IP network is the fabric. Many NVMe over fabric discussions focus on what’s happening inside the storage packets themselves. This conversation focuses on the network. What does the topology need to be? What are the latency and loss characteristics of an NVMe transport fabric? What QoS tools should you be considering, how do they work, and when should you use them? Our guest for this vendor-neutral conversation is J Metz.

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Heavy Networking 641: Network Design For NVMe Over Fabric

Today on Heavy Networking, we discuss NVMe over fabric, where your Ethernet and IP network is the fabric. Many NVMe over fabric discussions focus on what’s happening inside the storage packets themselves. This conversation focuses on the network. What does the topology need to be? What are the latency and loss characteristics of an NVMe transport fabric? What QoS tools should you be considering, how do they work, and when should you use them? Our guest for this vendor-neutral conversation is J Metz.

Day Two Cloud 157: Highlights Of Cloud Field Day 14

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast brings you highlights from Cloud Field Day 14, where Day Two Cloud's Ned Bellavance was a delegate. The Field Day event brings together cloud vendors and tech bloggers for in-depth presentations. Ned will share  highlights and impressions from presentations from companies including Weka, Alkira, and Morpheus Data.

I, The Braggart – A Network Fable

My boss stepped into our shared cubicle space and rested his arm on top of the fabric wall. He peered down at me. “Hey.” He always started with a quiet “hey” when he was about to ask me to do something new. I glanced at my whiteboard filled with projects and statuses, and steeled myself for the fresh request.

“Hey. I just got out of a meeting with Lewis.” I groaned inwardly. Lewis was my boss’s boss, and while Lewis was a fantastic human being, meetings with him were usually in the context of projects. Big ones. I put on a fake smile to mask creeping despair. “Oh? How did that go?”

My boss ripped off the band-aid. “Lewis wants a monthly summary from everyone of what they’ve been doing. So, on the last Friday of the month, make sure you have all your project statuses updated, including key milestones. Your whiteboard is great for you and me since we share this space, but now you’re going to need to log your statuses into the project database.” He smirked. “Like a big boy.”

I died a little inside. One of the reasons I’d left consulting Continue reading

Heavy Networking 640: Architecture Vs. Engineering Roles

What’s been your experience with architecture vs. engineering roles? Are those distinct functions or combined in your organization? How do the roles interact? Does the architecture team hand down holy designs from their ivory tower the engineering team is expected to implement them? Is the architecture and engineering function more combined, where experienced engineers are expected to create an architecture and help put it in place? Ethan Banks and guest Pat Allen share their experiences with architecture and engineering roles from organizations they've worked in.

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Heavy Networking 640: Architecture Vs. Engineering Roles

What’s been your experience with architecture vs. engineering roles? Are those distinct functions or combined in your organization? How do the roles interact? Does the architecture team hand down holy designs from their ivory tower the engineering team is expected to implement them? Is the architecture and engineering function more combined, where experienced engineers are expected to create an architecture and help put it in place? Ethan Banks and guest Pat Allen share their experiences with architecture and engineering roles from organizations they've worked in.

Day Two Cloud 156: Multi-Cloud Experience Monitoring With Broadcom Software (Sponsored)

It's hard to guarantee quality of experience for users accessing cloud applications. The users are connected via networks we don’t own, and the apps are hosted on networks we don’t own. So what can a network operations team do about quality of experience in a world of cloud-hosted apps and cloud-connected users? Sponsor Broadcom Software is here to help us answer this question.

Improving DNS Privacy With QNAME Minimization (RFC7816)

This post originally appeared on the Packet Pushers’ Ignition site on October 1, 2019.   When a host doesn’t know the IP address for a hostname, what does it do? It asks its configured DNS server to resolve the hostname. (Usually. There are apps, notably browsers, that might do their own thing. But let’s go […]

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Heavy Networking 638: Don’t Block DNS Over TCP

DNS is our subject on today's Heavy Networking. More specifically, DNS transport over TCP. We talk with John Kristoff, one of the forces behind RFC9210, which covers the operational requirements for DNS transport over TCP. This is not an esoteric document covering a tiny, nuanced DNS use case. Instead this doc will likely affect most of you listening, whether you’re a network operator or a name server operator. We talk with John about the implications of this RFC.

The post Heavy Networking 638: Don’t Block DNS Over TCP appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Heavy Networking 638: Don’t Block DNS Over TCP

DNS is our subject on today's Heavy Networking. More specifically, DNS transport over TCP. We talk with John Kristoff, one of the forces behind RFC9210, which covers the operational requirements for DNS transport over TCP. This is not an esoteric document covering a tiny, nuanced DNS use case. Instead this doc will likely affect most of you listening, whether you’re a network operator or a name server operator. We talk with John about the implications of this RFC.

Setting Up Public-Private Keys For SSH Authentication

This post originally appeared on the Packet Pushers’ Ignition site on February 18, 2020.   The more pedantic in the tech community argue about the merits of public-private key authentication vs. simple password authentication when logging into an SSH host. I have no strong opinion regarding your security posture when using one vs. the other. […]

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Marketing Docs Are Not Written For Engineers

When reading marketing literature as an engineer, you must always be careful to parse the words correctly. For example, I was reviewing a vendor’s pitch deck on a new hardware switch. The switch was described as having the following attributes.

  • Cloud-native
  • AI-driven
  • Secure
  • Next-generation

From an engineering perspective, nothing of value has been described to you in that list.

I have no idea what they are trying to get at with cloud-native. I can think of no greater antithesis to “cloud-native” than a chunk of hardware you bolt into a rack to do network things. Someone on Twitter suggested that because the switch supports ZTP, it’s cloud-native…which, if so, is comedy gold.

AI-driven means…what, exactly? That there is some AI on the switch itself doing data analysis and changing the network configuration in response to whatever the algorithm thinks is best? It could mean that, although then we’d have to discuss what’s meant by AI, whether or not the “AI” is happening off- or on-box, and why that’s different from software-defined.

Secure is a word you sprinkle over every technology product. Because of course it’s secure. But again, what does secure mean in this context? That the switch was built Continue reading

Understanding OSPF Router ID (RID) Assignment

This post originally appeared on the Packet Pushers’ Ignition site on March 24, 2020. In both OSPFv2 (IPv4) and OSPFv3 (IPv6), the router ID (RID) is a 32-bit number assigned to the router. The RID must be unique within the OSPF network, as a RID provides a point of origin for link state advertisements (LSAs). […]

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Day Two Cloud 153: IaC With GPPL Or DSL? IDK

On Day Two Cloud we’ve had a lot of conversations about using infrastructure as code. We’ve looked at solutions like Ansible, Terraform, the AWS CDK, and Pulumi. Which begs the question, which IaC solution should you learn? A Domain Specific Language (DSL)? A General Purpose Programming Language (GPPL)? Something else? We discuss.

Put In The Work

Would you like to stand out from your peers? Would you like to impress the people you work for, or perhaps the people you’d like to work for? Put in the work. Putting in the work to achieve a goal is a form of self-sacrifice. To get the thing you want, you need to give up something else.

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Join The Packet Pushers For A Live Stream With Gluware June 28, 2022

We're hosting the "Real World Enterprise Automation" live stream with sponsor Gluware on June 28, 2022. Gluware is a network automation vendor that's especially good at taking your existing, multi-vendor network and adding automation to it. We'd like it if you'd register to attend this hour-or-so event in real-time via https://packetpushers.net/live. Thanks!

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How To Reference Nested Python Lists & Dictionaries

This post originally appeared in the Packet Pushers’ Ignition site on March 10, 2020. When getting data back from API queries in Python, the data is often delivered in JSON format. Python libraries such as requests will convert that JSON data structure into a Python-native data structure you can work with. That Python data structure […]

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