Author Archives: Russ White
Author Archives: Russ White
Deploying OpenStack Ken Pepple OpenStack is a wide ranging initiative started by Rackspace and NASA in 2010 designed to provide open source software to build and manage IaaS cloud services. What’s often missing in open source projects like OpenStack is a definitive guide to the release schedule, the different pieces, how the different pieces interact, […]
Cloud Architecture Patterns Bill Wilder Networks support applications. Okay, that might seem a little obvious, but it needs to be said from time to time. In that vein, I often find it useful to get a better grip on the applications people are putting on networks, and how they expect the network to behave. In […]
Don’t look now, but you have microloops. How do I know? Because virtually every network with rings larger than three hops, running a link state protocol, will develop a microloop during normal convergence. Okay, so what’s a microloop, and how dangerous is it? Let’s figure this out looking at the (now rather standard) five router […]
I’ve been spending some time in the last few months talking through various fast reroute systems – we’ve looked at one (unconventional!) view of P/Q space, an alternate way of explaining MRT, Not-Via, LFAs, and a few others. Now, let’s close this series by asking: How does all this relate to the “new wave’ of […]
We’ve come almost to the end of our little series on fast reroute; in this episode we’ll look at maximally redundant trees (MRTs) — this episode is going to be a little “graphy,” so get your seatbelts on. The general idea behind IP fast reroute is to precalculate a set of alternate paths that can […]
As an avid reader of RFCs and RFC drafts, I’m always running across little bits of knowledge I either already knew and forgot (I forget a lot of things), or things I didn’t know and wouldn’t have expected. RFC5942, published way back in 2010 (a long time in network engineering terms), discusses a topic I […]
There’s something terribly wrong about this… RUSH hour in Nairobi can be a nightmare. “Most motorists don’t follow traffic rules and small inconveniences like a minor traffic accident or even a sudden downpour can cause delays of up to an hour,” says John Kimani, a small business owner in the Kenyan capital. A text message […]
This is a long video, but you need to watch it. I’ll have a couple of longer reports on IETF 88 in the coming weeks, as I get the chance to write stuff up. Edit: For anyone who’s interested in this topic specifically, please join the perpass IETF mailing list.
In the last episode in our world wide tour of fast reroute mechanisms, we discussed Not-Via. While an interesting concept, Not-Via does require a number of extra IP addresses, as well as a new set of special routing advertisements, to work properly. So while Not-Via is conceptually simple, it hasn’t ever really been accepted as […]
EMC Education Services Safari | Amazon I’m a routing geek. Not a storage, compute, SONET, web design, and mobile phone geek — a routing geek. But even routing geeks need to know something about the stuff that attaches to the network right? In the spirit of learning something new, I recently picked up (and […]
In our last episode (it’s been two weeks!), we talked about P’s and Q’s. Now we’ll get down into a few details, and think through what is probably the simplest mechanism ever designed for finding alternate loop free paths through a two connected network: not-via. Let’s use the embedded network as an example. In this […]
The engineering world has a long standing tradition none of us should be too proud of: rudeness. There was, in fact, a time when I was working the phones on customer support that the general attitude was, “feel free to flame me when I ask a question, just answer the question in the flame.” Flames […]
In the midst of this series of posts around fast convergence, someone asked if I could explain p and q space a little better. The illustration here might help readers who have more of a visual mind to understand the concepts involved. (feel free to click through to a larger version) Essentially, we can think […]
So –we’ve covered on of the two cases dealing with calculating a new path, and then I left you hanging for a week. What’s the second case? Let’s return to our small network for a moment to figure it out. What happens if D’s cost to reach the destination isn’t lower than E’s cost? E […]
In my last installment on the topic of fast convergence, I said I’d be discussing the calculation stage of fast convergence next. Orhan tried to scoop me in the comments, but that’s okay –I’m working at this through the process switched path, rather than interrupt context. In parallel with flooding information about the topology change […]
Software Defined Networks Thomas D. Nadeau and Ken Gray If you’ve been trying to find a good, solid, introduction to network programmability, you need look no farther than Software Defined Networks. While the authors do include a good bit of information that’s outside the field of network programmability, overall this is about the best overview […]
In the last post in this series, I spent some time talking about the process of detecting a link failure (given down detection is always the more important issue in fast convergence); let’s continue by looking at notification. If a router discovers a down link, or a down neighbor, how does it tell all the […]
“How fast is fast?” In the “bad old days,” when routing protocols were young, and we still shot NERF guns at one another in TAC, IGRP was a going concern (not EIGRP, IGRP!). IGRP holds the distinction of being the slowest converging routing protocol (with default timers) ever deployed in real networks. How slow is […]
“Should I get a second CCIE, or a CCDE?” A number of people have asked me this recently; in the process of answering those questions, I’ve developed a couple of lines of reasoning that I thought worth sharing here. No, I’ve not been posting much recently — I’m wrapped up in a bunch of different […]
“Say I’m convinced that my company should choose one technology over another. How can I tell the whole truth, cover all the bases, explain all the alternatives, while making certain I make the case that the technology I’ve made, or would like to make, is the right one?” In case you’ve ever wondered what it’s […]
The post How do I Justify this? appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.