Rick Mur

Author Archives: Rick Mur

JNCIE-DC Lab Experience

After plenty of hours of studying and labbing the wide ranging topics on the JNCIE-DC blueprint, I took the JNCIE-DC lab exam and passed! I can proudly say I’m JNCIE-DC #389. In this conclusion of the previous JNCIE-DC blogs about my lab setup and about the remote lab environment, I will talk about my experience […]

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JNCIE-DC lab in EVE-NG

As explained in my previous post on my home servers, I have a bare metal system deployed with EVE-NG Pro installed. As I’m (slowly) preparing for the JNCIE-DC certification I wanted to share the topology that I’m using. As the hardware required to study for the JNCIE-DC is quite significant, it makes a lot of […]

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Home Network 2020

Recently I moved to a new house and as a lot of reconstruction was done to bring the house up to date. I took the opportunity to have something I’ve always wanted in my home: a server rack! In my previous lab set-ups they were either located in my employers lab location or placed in […]

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Next Generation Global Connectivity

Technologies like SDWAN have fundamentally changed the way we think about WAN infrastructures for enterprise IT environments over the past few years. Global WAN offerings are no longer a necessity as pretty much ‘any’ connectivity will do. You are no longer bound to private (MPLS-based) connections/networks. Software and smarter routing mechanisms will fix all your […]

Why leave a vendor job….twice?

Over the past few months I’ve been working hard on my new start-up company PeakFactory, it’s going really well, but for this post I want to focus on the reason why I chose to leave the companies I used to work for. I thought this was relevant, as many people have asked me why, but also in general there is a lot of discussion how to advance your career in different directions.

Why leave a comfortable and good job at all?

Back in 2013 I was working in a very good position, where I had a lot of freedom in choosing the customers I’d like to work on and was involved in all technical aspects of a project (pre-sales, proof of concepts, implementation and support). Still I had this feeling that I wanted to explore more an different areas for a wider audience. Which is why I decided to start working for a networking vendor. My main reason for choosing a vendor is that I could leverage my experience in the technology and apply it for a wider audience (maybe even worldwide)

Why work for Cisco and Juniper?

In early 2014 I got in touch with Cisco and I left Continue reading

What is P4?

Recently I attended a workshop organised by the Open NFP organisation about Data Plane acceleration. The primary goal of the workshop was to get students and researchers (why was I there you may think) familiar with the P4 programming language.

P4 is a programming language created to simplify writing data planes for networking use cases.  Recently the P4-16 spec was released and could be considered a mature version of the language.

Now I’m not a hardcore developer. I know my way around in Python, GoLang and C#, but I never wrote anything more low level like C. P4 is created a little bit like GoLang, where I do not mean it as comparison, but as an architecture. P4 is designed so you only need to focus on the actual networking features that you want to make available on the hardware you are programming it for. Then when you compile it, it will generate runtime code for your hardware. Or as the creators explain it:

At one level, P4 is just a simple language for declaring how packets are to be processed. At another level, P4 turns network system design on its head.

There is no need to worry on low Continue reading