Worth Reading

For whatever reason, we seem to have moved into the “summer doldrums” a bit early this year. Emails seem to just not being answered for weeks — if ever — several friends have emailed me in the last week or two ago asking if it was just them, or if the IT industry was going crazy. All that said, though, there is still a lot going on in the world of IT.

Geoff Huston — if you don’t follow the rantings of Geoff, you really should — makes a point I wish I’d thought of first. The Internet of Things isn’t necessarily a security risk so much as it’s just a stupidity risk. He uses the example of millions of smaller home based devices being shipped with hard coded IP addresses that impact time and DNS servers to make the point that once things are deployed, they don’t tend to be touched. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” He calls it the Internet of Stupid Things.

Along those same lines, I saw an article this week about how Microsoft is threatening the end of the world (or some such) because they’re ending support for Windows 2003 server. The Continue reading

Ambition

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Vendor Neutral

And then Bilbo held the router up to the light and wondered aloud… Whatever is, vendor neutral?

Vendor neutral certainly receives a lot of play in the world of network engineering. You might have even heard the words come out of my mouth during my case study on the Telepost Greenland network at Interop a couple of weeks ago. Maybe even more than once.

But what does vendor neutral actually mean?

Does it really mean, “Can I buy my next piece of equipment from any vendor I like, and not worry about it working in my network?” Or, perhaps, “Can I buy my next piece of equipment from any vendor I like, and not worry about it disrupting my network management and operations?” The second question is the harder, in the real world — and one we’re not likely to get an answer to any time soon.

What about an open API into every piece of equipment in your network? That would be nice — but how do we get from where we are today to that nirvana? We’ve had the drive towards a MIB based interface, a common set of command line configuration constructs, several API driven Continue reading

Bahrain

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General Howe’s Dog

The morning after a battle — one of the first won by the American army in its battle for freedom from the British Empire — if you happened to be on the scene, you might see an American soldier, under a white flag of truce, struggling with something small he is carrying between the lines. Approaching, you can see the package is, in fact, a small terrier — a dog. If you could read the note the carrier is holding there in his scrip, you would find it says —

General Washington’s compliments to General Howe, does himself the pleasure to return to him a Dog, which accidentally fell into his hands, and by the inscription on his collar, appears to belong to General Howe… October 6th, 1777

So — in the midst of a war that cut people down from their young lives, we find a singular scene of a man carrying a dog across a field to return it to the enemy’s commander. What has any of this to do with the life of an engineer? Perhaps more than you think.

Let me return to a much younger time in my technical life, a time when I was Continue reading

IT/IT: A GUI and a Wizard

One of the brilliant things about conferences like Interop is the hallways (and if you’re not going to Interop, this is why you should be!). It’s not that I don’t enjoy the sessions, but — like the IETF — I often get much more out of the conversations with folks who know networking, and yet have a completely different view of the problems we face in the networking industry, and hence completely different ideas about the way forward in resolving those problems. One of my major problems in life is I often can’t think of a solid answer when I’m sitting there in the conversation itself (one of the reasons I always converted TAC cases to email, rather than sitting on the phone with a customer).

One such conversation (with @cigoodwi) brought out a phrase I thought I’d never hear in the networking world — “a GUI and a wizard.” The context was this: what most x% (your beliefs about the percentage may vary) companies need is a network they can run with a GUI and a wizard. It’s a startling statement, of course, but — in reality — true in many respects. Given this is our Continue reading

Iceberg

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Face to Face, Machine to Machine

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Own the Problem

In the late 1990’s, I was on the routing protocols TAC team in Raleigh — which means I answered the phone, and said things like, “This is Russ from Cisco TAC, how can I help you?” Generally what followed was a crash, or, well, just about anything. The design on the left is what we had on the back of our shirts — including what we called ourselves, the Gateway of Last Resort.

Of course it’s a play on words, as you might imagine — where does a host send traffic it doesn’t know what to do with? The gateway of last resort. And what is the gateway of last resort? A router. And what the RP team worked on was, well, routers. But there’s another reason we adopted this slogan for ourselves — because it was, generally speaking, how the CRC (the folks who took the initial call and figured out which backline team to hand it off to) conceived of our little team. The PIX, the 7200, VIP cards, crashes, hangs, tracebacks, any sort of routing protocol problem, lots of hardware problems, anything to do with the forwarding path, memory fragmentation, and just about anything else. A Continue reading

IT/IT: Observations on Ownership

We are clearly moving to a software focused world — this conclusion is almost as inevitable and natural as taking your next breath (or eating that next Little Bits burger — but don’t get the big one unless you’re really hungry).

But, as with all things, there is a flip side to the world going to software. It could actually turn out that the IT world is on the path to becoming our own worst enemies. This, by the way, is what caught my eye this week, and what causes me to rant a little.

The cost and hassle of repairing modern tractors has soured a lot of farmers on computerized systems altogether. In a September issue of Farm Journal, farm auction expert Greg Peterson noted that demand for newer tractors was falling. Tellingly, the price of and demand for older tractors (without all the digital bells and whistles) has picked up. “As for the simplicity, you’ve all heard the chatter,” Machinery Pete wrote. “There’s an increasing number of farmers placing greater value on acquiring older simpler machines that don’t require a computer to fix.”

The issue at stake, at least in the United States, is the Digital Continue reading

The Net

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Williamsburg

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In theory…

I don’t normally peruse the reviews of my books — while I appreciate well thought out criticism, I normally find personal notes from folks who’ve read my books more profitable for mining out where I’m falling down on the job as a writer than reviews posted on book seller or book review sites. But one specific book review caught my eye the other day that I think points to a larger issue in the world of engineering, especially network engineering. The reviewer stated, in essence, that there was not enough practical application in my more recent tomes, and that I’m covering the same information over and over again.

Let me begin here — I’m not writing this as a defense of my own writing so much as to think through a habit of mind I think doesn’t really help us as an engineering community.

As far as the facts on the ground go, the reviewer is right on both counts, and wrong on both counts. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that you want to understand how a car works. You approach three different people — one a race car driver, another a top flight mechanic, and another an engineer who Continue reading

IT/IT: Merge Lane

You’re probably living in a bubble (or sleeping on a mat in the data center — remind me to tell you about the sleeping bag I carried in the back of my truck for a while…) if you’ve not heard about the Nokia/Alcatel merger. What’s interesting, from a network engineering perspective, is what this means. To get a better idea, it’s important to consider another story posted this last week.

The white box switching market could see some monumental change within even one year, according to Dell’Oro Group analyst Alan Weckel. That’s mainly because of the rise of hyperscale cloud players — specifically Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Their buying power has grown substantially in the past few years — and white boxes have progressed rapidly during that time, too.

So what does white box have to do with the Nokia/ALU merger? Just about everything, most likely. To better understand, we need to first posit that the world is going software. Not that we won’t have hardware any longer, but rather that the hardware is going to become much less interesting over the next five to ten years as the software used to run the hardware is separated out and Continue reading

Affection

Bahrain

The facts, while interesting, are irrelevant

Maybe my excuse should be that it was somewhere around two in the morning. Or maybe it was just unclear thinking, and that was that. Sgt P. and I were called out to fix the AN/FPS-77 RADAR system just at the end of our day (I normally came into the shop around 6:30AM after swimming a mile in the Ft. Dix pool, showering, and eating breakfast, so I truly had an early start), so we’d been fighting this problem for some seven or eight hours already. For some reason, a particular fuse down in the high voltage power supply kept blowing. Given this is the circuit that fed the magnetron with 250,000 volts at around 10 amps (yes, that’s a lot of power, especially for a device originally built in 1964), it made for some interesting discussion with the folks in base weather, who were thus dependent on surrounding weather RADAR systems to continue flight operations.

They weren’t happy.

We traced the problem back, using our best half splitting skills in a high voltage circuit that took minutes to power up and down, and finally decided it was a particular resistor located over on a corner of one assembly (we Continue reading

Barcelona

Busyness is the point

Freedom to

Pardon me if I go a little bit on the philosophical side of life as a network engineer this week, but we need to have a little talk about freedom. This last week, Ethan wrote a post on his new criteria for network design and architecture. While I agree with the points Ethan makes in his post, there was one thing that put me sideways. In fact, this one thing has always put me sideways to our modern world.

Freedom.

Ethan gives what is a pretty standard (Lockian) definition of the idea when he says, “Freedom is the power or right to act, speak or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.”

But, harking back to the story of Ishmael and Isaac, we need to remember there is a real difference between freedom from and freedom to. Freedom from constraint might feel like real freedom, but it’s the freedom of the wilderness. Freedom to create might feel like slavery with its self-discipline and bounds, but it’s the freedom to build — to create.

Let’s turn to one of Ethan’s examples here — open standards, and vendors sticking to them, to bring the point to the world of network Continue reading