QOTW: Brilliance

Stupid people can cause problems, but it usually takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe.Thomas Sowell

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HL: IS-IS Deployment in IP Networks

Concepts in IS-IS including algorithmic details like Djikstra etc. are very well explained here. This book was exactly what I was looking for in trying to understand IS-IS.

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Worth Reading: The blame pipeline

But in a cross-discipline team, it is the team that is responsible for success or failure. Blame, if any, resides with the team itself and not the people that comprise it. That kind of insulation helps individuals rise above the fear of committing egregious errors and instead embrace the kinds of thinking needed to make new IT happen. via networking nerd

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How the Internet Really Works

Way back in April of 2014, I started a series over on Packet Pushers called “How the Internet Really Works.” This is a long series, but well worth reading if you want to try and get a handle around how the different companies and organizations that make up the ecosystem of the ‘net actually do what they do.

Overview
DNS Lookups
The Business Side of DNS (1)
The Business Side of DNS (2)
Reverse Lookups and Whois
DNS Security
Provider Peering Types
Provider Peering and Revenue Streams (1)
Provider Peering and Revenue Streams (2)
Standards Bodies
IETF Organizational Structure
The IETF Draft Process
Reality at the Mic (Inside the IETF, Part 1)
Reality at the Mic (Inside the IETF, Part 2)
Reality at the Mic (Inside the IETF, Part 3)
Internet Exchange Points
That Big Number Database in the Sky (IANA)
NOG World (Network Operator Groups)
The Internet Society

The slides that go with this set of posts are available on slideshare, as well. This set is in Ericsson format, but I have older sets in “vendor neutral” formatting, and even cisco formatting (imagine that!).

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Worth Reading: How we ended up with microservices

I am sorry to disappoint my fellow techies, but the reason we migrated to microservices had to do much more with productivity than pure technical matters. I’ll explain. via phil calcado

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Sunk

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HL: Friends may come and go…

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Worth Reading: Which path are those applications taking?

“Learning about and avoiding impairments (delay, loss, jitter) along the path that business critical traffic takes.” That is what I wrote in my previous blog “IWAN’s Intelligent Path Control & Using Your Backup Link.” But how is that possible to do? via networking with fish

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Information wants to be protected: Security as a mindset

I was teaching a class last week and mentioned something about privacy to the students. One of them shot back, “you’re paranoid.” And again, at a meeting with some folks about missionaries, and how best to protect them when trouble comes to their door, I was again declared paranoid. In fact, I’ve been told I’m paranoid after presentations by complete strangers who were sitting in the audience.

Okay, so I’m paranoid. I admit it.

But what is there to be paranoid about? We’ve supposedly gotten to the point where no-one cares about privacy, where encryption is pointless because everyone can see everything anyway, and all the rest. Everyone except me, that is—I’ve not “gotten over it,” nor do I think I ever will. In fact, I don’t think any engineer should “get over it,” in terms of privacy and security. Even if you think it’s not a big deal in your own life, engineers should learn to treat other people’s information with the utmost care.

In moving from the person to the digital representation of the person, we often forget it’s someone’s life we’re actually playing with. I think it’s time for engineers to take security—and privacy—personally. It’s time Continue reading

Worth Reading: Open Source Medicine

In the end, open standards produce the APIs and architectures open source needs to work, and open source can potentially be a great source of the software projects open standards need to work the ideas and architectures out on something other than on a napkin. via network computing

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QOTW: Outsourcing Memory

Culture is more than the aggregate of what Google describes as “the world’s information.” It’s more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the Net. To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.Nicolas Carr, The Shallows

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Buenos Aires

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Worth Reading: Open Standards vs Open Source

The “one off” nature of the open standards process appears, from the outside, to result in a slow process that is further slowing down. via network computing

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Evaluating my own books…

This is a bit of a slow week in the US, and I’ve been deeply imbibing philosophy and theology this weekend (getting ready for the first two PhD classes), so I’m going to do something a little different this week. A lot of folks email me asking about which of my books are worth buying, or asking me if they should buy this or that specific book I’ve written across the years. So, herewith, an honest appraisal of my own books.

Advanced IP Network Design

This book is based on single question—what have we learned from working on failed networks from the perspective of TAC and Escalation in terms of good network design? It’s hard to believe, but this was (AFAIK) the second book published by Cisco Press, in 1999 (that’s 16 years, 10 books, and two degrees ago!). While I have a fond place in my heart for this book, all the material here is generally updated and improved in Optimal Routing Design, below.

EIGRP for IP

This started life as the EIGRP white paper, written based on a thorough reading of the EIGRP code base as it existing in 2000, along with many hours spent with GDB, Continue reading

Worth Reading: Big Changes in Storage Networking

There’s been a lot of talk around the shifts coming in storage, but for the network engineer it’s hard to understand and piece together the context. What really is going on in the storage world? via netcraftsmen

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Worth Reading: Globally Distributed Applicaitons

Putting the right architecture and processes in place will enable your systems and company to withstand the common hiccups distributed, high traffic applications face. This enables you to stay ahead of scaling constraints, manage inevitable network and system failures, stay calm and debug production issues in real-time, and grow your company and product successfully. via high scalability

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QOTW: Humility

Yet it remains true that general progress needs peace and co-operation, and that it is greatly hindered by pettiness of mind. In face of others’ superiority, there is only one honorable attitude: to be glad of it, and then it becomes our own joy, our own good fortune.

Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

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Worth Reading: IWAN at Networking by Fish

IWAN stands for “Intelligent WAN” — bringing intelligence to the WAN edge. Intelligence like “Intelligent Path Control” which can help you with not only utilizing that backup link… but doing so with a level of intelligence that “begins with the end in mind”. via fish

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Micromanaging networks considered harmful: on (k)nerd knobs

Nerd Knobs (or as we used to call them in TAC, knerd knobs) are the bane of the support engineer’s life. Well, that and crashes. And customer who call in with a decoded stack trace. Or don’t know where to put the floppy disc that came with the router into the router. But, anyway…

What is it with nerd knobs? Ivan has a great piece up this week on the topic. I think this is the closest he gets to what I think of as the real root cause for nerd knobs —

Instead of using cookie-cutter designs, we prefer to carefully craft unique snowflakes that magically integrate the legacy stuff that should have been dead years ago with the next-generation technologies… and every unique snowflake needs at least a nerd knob or two to make it work.

Greg has a response to Ivan up; again, I think he gets close to the problem with these thoughts —

Most IT managers have lost the ability to recognise technical debt and its impacts … Nerd Knobs are symptoms of much deeper problems/technical debt in the networking market and treat the cause not the symptom.

A somewhat orthogonal article caught my eye, Continue reading

Worth Reading: Redefining SDN

Regarding state, introducing latency to network state is pretty insurmountable if performance is relevant in any way. The races conditions abound and eventually will cascade into failure. Dealing with state locally is hard enough, shipping it north is race condition central. via network static

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