Short Take – Breaking Things

Should you be breaking things intentionally on your network? The idea might sound preposterous to some, but in this short take Russ White explains how intentional failures can make your network more resilient.

Russ White

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Episode 22 – Securing BGP

In part 3 of our deep dive into BGP operations, Nick Russo and Russ White join us again on Network Collective to talk about securing BGP. In this episode we cover topics like authentication, advertisement filtering, best practices, origin security, path security, and remotely triggered black holes.

We would like to thank Cumulus Networks for sponsoring this episode of Network Collective. Cumulus is offering you, our listeners, a completely free O’Reilly ebook on the topic of BGP in the data center. You can get your copy of this excellent technical resource here: http://cumulusnetworks.com/networkcollectivebgp

Show Notes:

• Authentication
  1. Classic MD5
  2. Enhanced Authentication extensions (EA). Supported by IOS XR and allows for SHA1 as well, along with key-chain rotations. Doesn’t appear commonly used
  3. GTSM, and how it can be better than the previous option in some cases
• Basic prefix filtering:
  1. From your customers: allow any number of their own AS prepended
  2. From the Internet: block bogons (RFC1918, class D/E, etc)
  3. To your peers: only your local space (ie, your customers)
  4. From your peers: only routes originating from their AS (any # of prepends)
• BCP38
  1. Techniques for spoofing prevention
  2. Describe with a simple snail mail analogy
  3. Usually uRPF strict Continue reading

Short Take – Broadcom SDKLT

In this Short Take from Network Collective, Russ White shares his thoughts on the recently released Broadcom SDKLT and the impact it will have on the networking industry.

Russ White

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History Of Networking – Joel Halpern – Policy Based Management

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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Episode 21 – Tools For Network Engineers

In this episode of Network Collective, Hank Yeomans and Jonathan Davis join us to take a look at some of our favorite tools as network engineers. Whether it’s hardware or software, tools are the things that help us do our jobs well, and if used correctly, can help set you apart.

We would like to thank Cumulus Networks for sponsoring this episode of Network Collective. Cumulus invites you to find out more about how Linux is changing the data center networking space by downloading their free ebook “Linux Networking 101” here: http://cumulusnetworks.com/NetworkCollectiveLinux

Show Notes:

• Text Editer
  • It sounds simple, but a good text editor saves a lot of time
  • Regex search and replace is incredibly powerful once you know how to use it well
  • Standard features as well, like tabbed interfaces
  • Good options – Sublime Text, Notepad++
• Terminal Software
  • Options
    • Secure CRT
      • Term colorization
        • Hank’s colorization file:  https://thenetworkcollective.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/CiscoWords.zip
      • Saved session management
      • Secure credential management w/ auto login
      • Dynamic logging
    • iTerm2
      • Similar feature set as Secure CRT
      • Replacement shell on mac
    • Putty
      • Very good go-to on jump boxes and other systems
      • Session managers make putty better for long term use
  • Good monowidth fonts make Continue reading

Short Take – Intent Based Networking

In this Network Collective Short Take, Jordan shares his thoughts on the biggest current industry buzzword – Intent Based Networking. Is it real? Is it innovative? Should you be paying attention or rolling your eyes?

Jordan Martin

Host

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Off the Cuff – NFD17 Wrap Up

Networking Field Day 17 (NFD17) was in Silicon Valley last week, with two of our co-founders participating as delegates – but the conversation doesn’t have to stop there. In this Off The Cuff episode of Network Collective, we’ve gathered a few of the delegates from the event to talk about their impressions on the information that was presented and some of the broader themes they experienced across the presentations. Vendors at the invent included Cisco, Cumulus, Extreme, Ixia, Juniper, Mellanox, Thousand Eyes, and VMware.

You can check out the event and see the presentations for yourself over at the Event Page at techfieldday.com.

Jordan Martin

Co-Host

Eyvonne Sharp

Co-Host

Phil Gervasi

Co-Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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History Of Networking – Paul Vixie – DNS Adoption

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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Short Take – Why Does History Matter

Why is it important to look backwards, when our entire industry is looking forward. This is Jordan’s take on why history matters.

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Episode 20 – Cloud Connectivity

The flexibility of cloud infrastructure has had a significant impact on the way that organizations build out their infrastructure, but the industry is continuing to learn just how complicated connecting to cloud resources can be.  In this episode of Network Collective we take a look at the challenges around cloud connectivity and talk about some ways to do it well.

Miguel Villareal

Guest

Scott Wheeler

Guest

Jordan Martin

Co-Host

Eyvonne Sharp

Co-Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post Episode 20 – Cloud Connectivity appeared first on Network Collective.

History Of Networking – Paul Mockapetris – Origins of DNS

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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Episode 19 – BGP: Traffic Engineering

In this Community Roundtable episode, returning guests Russ White and Nick Russo continue our three part deep dive into the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, with a look at the mechanisms within the protocol to perform traffic engineering.

Show Notes

Influence Ingress

• Classic bestpath options to influence ingress
• AS-path prepend outbound to influence inbound traffic
  • Why AS Path prepend doesn’t always work
    • In many areas, ISPs are in a full or almost full mesh and connected to common backbones making AS Path prepend largely irrelevant
    • Providers normally use their own local preference for outbound traffic back to a customer
  • MED
    • MED is a hint, it’s often stripped or ignored
    • MED only works if the AS Path is the same on all routes
    • MED is non-transitive and doesn’t mean anything beyond the next hop
  • • Longest Match
      • Be careful about this, as it pollutes the DFZ
        • DFZ = default free zone
          • A router belongs to the DFZ if it doesn’t need a 0.0.0.0 route to reach everything on the internet
      • Tragedy of the commons here
        • An enterprise can force inbound traffic to be load-balanced better but it pushes the processing of that traffic engineering onto the internet
      • This is Continue reading

History Of Networking – Alistair Woodman – VoIP Continued

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post History Of Networking – Alistair Woodman – VoIP Continued appeared first on Network Collective.

Episode 18 – Whitebox Networking

In Episode 18 of Network Collective, Pete Lumbis of Cumulus Networks and Kevin Myers of IP Architechs join us to talk about the pros and cons of running whitebox or commodity hardware in your network. There’s no denying that the price point on commodity hardware is attractive but we discuss all you should consider when you’re looking to transition away from a major network hardware vendor.

Show Notes

What is whitebox networking?

• Has a variety of definitions depending on the person answering
• Associated with ONIE and Oss like Cumulus Linux, BigSwitch, IPI
• Commodity hardware not mainstream vendor with OS that may or may not be from the same vendor
• To some, hardware has more to do with hardware
• Commodity hardware has to do with using chipset, board, or even layout that someone else created
• Component of disaggregation to consider
• Britebox is the larger vendors offering disaggregation options
• Whietbox equipment isn’t about homemade devices soldered together in our garages

Why whitebox networking?

• The original impetus for whitebox was often around cost, and sometimes it still is
• Current reasons are to have more options like customized operating systems
• Whitebox utilizes the equipment to move to an x86 model that compute Continue reading

History Of Networking – Jeff Tantsura – Segment Routing

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post History Of Networking – Jeff Tantsura – Segment Routing appeared first on Network Collective.

Episode 17 – BGP: Peering and Reachability

In this Community Roundtable episode, returning guests Russ White and Nick Russo start our three part deep dive into the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, with a look at terminology, how peer relationships form, the differences between internal and external BGP, and scaling techniques.

Show Links

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4271

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1771.txt

http://bgp.us/

Show Notes

Overview

• BGP is an external gateway protocol used widely in both the public internet and with enterprise organizations
• BGP is the only external gateway protocol and is traditionally used primarily to connect networks to other networks
• BGP was built primarily for policy propagation to provide reliability, scalability, and control
• BGP v4 is created which is the base version we still use today though updated over the year

Terminology

• Devices running BGP are called speakers
  • A connection between two speakers is called a peering session
  • The two speakers are often called peers or neighbors
• Network Layer Reachability Information is a key term to remember — NLRI
  • Address Families (AFs) carry NLRIs for different topologies and different kinds of reachability information (v4, v6, ethernet, mpls, etc.
• Autonomous System–a set of bgp speakers contained within a single administrative domain (with some rather loose Continue reading

History Of Networking – Alistair Woodman – VoIP

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post History Of Networking – Alistair Woodman – VoIP appeared first on Network Collective.

History Of Networking – Alistair Woodman – VoIP

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post History Of Networking – Alistair Woodman – VoIP appeared first on Network Collective.

Episode 16 – Overview of Overlays

Whether it’s a single GRE tunnel or a full Datacenter fabric, network overlays have played significant role in empowering network engineers to implement policy beyond simple IP reachability. In episode 16 of Network Collective we take a broad look at the types of overlays available to use in our networks, why you might want to implement an overlay, and some of the things to watch out for when employing overlay networking. Joining the NC hosts are two excellent guests: Ron Fuller, currently an SE at VMware on the NSX product team, and Warren Jackson, Technical Architect at WWT with a focus on SD-WAN technology.

Ron Fuller

Guest

Warren Jackson

Guest

Jordan Martin

Co-Host

Eyvonne Sharp

Co-Host

Phil Gervasi

Co-Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post Episode 16 – Overview of Overlays appeared first on Network Collective.

Episode 16 – Overview of Overlays

Whether it’s a single GRE tunnel or a full Datacenter fabric, network overlays have played significant role in empowering network engineers to implement policy beyond simple IP reachability. In episode 16 of Network Collective we take a broad look at the types of overlays available to use in our networks, why you might want to implement an overlay, and some of the things to watch out for when employing overlay networking. Joining the NC hosts are two excellent guests: Ron Fuller, currently an SE at VMware on the NSX product team, and Warren Jackson, Technical Architect at WWT with a focus on SD-WAN technology.

Ron Fuller

Guest

Warren Jackson

Guest

Jordan Martin

Co-Host

Eyvonne Sharp

Co-Host

Phil Gervasi

Co-Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post Episode 16 – Overview of Overlays appeared first on Network Collective.