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Category Archives for "Packet Pushers Podcast"

FAT or Entropy Label?

In this article we are going to see two features that improve the load-balancing in the MLPS Core. Why? In the networking when dealing with redundancy of links or paths we are facing the polarization issue. This problem happens when one of the link is congested. Let’s take the example of LAGs, if the hashing […]

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Youssef El Fathi

Youssef El Fathi

Youssef is a network engineer working for a french service provider. He is also a dual CCIE (RS, SP). You can find him on Twitter.

The post FAT or Entropy Label? appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Youssef El Fathi.

Restoring Trust in the Internet – Part 1

The Internet has a trust problem. With the recent revelations of government surveillance, traffic interception and modification, compromised products, and suspect algorithms, we have serious problems. Greg and Ethan spoke to this briefly on Show 175 regarding the pwning of several firewall products by the NSA, but the issue goes much further than just compromised […]

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Jonathan Strine

Jonathan Strine

Jonathan Strine is a Network Engineer who's been in the IT industry since the turn of the century and holds a CCNP, CCDP, and is preparing for the CCIE lab. His experience covers a variety of industries. He currently works for Cisco where he gets to play with new equipment in the lab all day. Well, some days at least. His and his wife's long term goal is to downsize to a 500 sq-ft house and live simply. To contact him directly and securely, please see his current PGP Keys.

The opinions and views expressed are solely his and not necessarily those of his current or previous employers.

The post Restoring Trust in the Internet – Part 1 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Jonathan Strine.

One leg too few? Architectural Best Practice on SSL VPNs

A couple of times in the past month I’ve been asked where a SSL VPN appliance should be deployed in relation to the firewall. In both cases it was relating to the Juniper Secure Access / MAG platform, but best practice should apply equally to any IPSEC or SSL VPN platform, so I thought it […]

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Glen Kemp

Enterprise Security Architect. Designing & deploying “keep the bad guys out” technologies. Delivering elephants and not hunting unicorns.

Please free to add me on , follow me on Twitter or check out my other blogs on Juniper J-Net, sslboy.net and SearchNetworking.

The post One leg too few? Architectural Best Practice on SSL VPNs appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Glen Kemp.

Show 177 – Current Practices

More Engineers talking about their day-to-day problems. We found Justin Seabrook Rocha and Shawn McGuire lurking in the #PacketPushers ITC channel complaining about stuff. Now they are doing it in front to a microphone. Bring the real world to your real world. Guests Shawn McGuire bigbash on the #Packetpushers channel on irc.freenode.net Twitter : @mcguiresm Blog: http://8bitsbytes.com […]

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Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus.

The post Show 177 – Current Practices appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

The Secret Sauce for Network Services

Tunneling is the Duct Tape of Networking..It is interesting to realize that a big chunk of network features in Data Center, Service Providers and Enterprises use tunneling in one form or another..It would be fun to imagine a “world” without tunnels! Most known MPLS applications are tunneling techniques, for instance in a VPLS/L3VPN Scenario the […]

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Karim Jamali

Karim Jamali

Karim is a network engineer, blogger, and CCIE #25064. His main focus areas are Data Center, Virtualization and Security..Karim has been working in the industry for more than 6 years covering both pre-sales & post-sales functions.

The post The Secret Sauce for Network Services appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Karim Jamali.

Please Fill Out Our 2014 Audience Survey

Packet Pushers is a big part of Greg’s & Ethan’s lives and the show is continuing to grow in 2014. We learn a lot, laugh a lot, and work hard to bring you the show every week and fresh content on the blog site. Despite enjoying editing and writing along with producing the podcast, the […]

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Ethan Banks

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials and high tech since 1995. Ethan co-hosts the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over 2M downloads and reaches over 10K listeners. With whatever time is left, Ethan writes for fun & profit, studies for certifications, and enjoys science fiction. @ecbanks

The post Please Fill Out Our 2014 Audience Survey appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

BGP Path Hunting/Exploration

 Only one change or link flap can cause one hour or more traffic drop.  It is weird, right? But this is true. In this article BGP Path Hunting/ Path Exploration behavior will be shown, BGP route flap dampening and its variants will be explained and how only one interface flap can cause very long down […]

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Orhan Ergun

Orhan Ergun, CCIE, CCDE, is a network architect mostly focused on service providers, data centers, virtualization and security.

He has more than 10 years in IT, and has worked on many network design and deployment projects.

In addition, Orhan is a:

Blogger at Network Computing.
Blogger and podcaster at Packet Pushers.
Manager of Google CCDE Group.
On Twitter @OrhanErgunCCDE

The post BGP Path Hunting/Exploration appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Orhan Ergun.

Show 176 – Intro to Python & Automation for Network Engineers

Network engineers keep hearing about Software Defined Networking (SDN) and wonder, “Will I have to become a programmer to keep my job?” The answer is, “Probably not.” However, there’s still an awful lot to be said for network engineers becoming familiar with the tools of network automation. There’s a gain in productivity to be had […]

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Ethan Banks

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials and high tech since 1995. Ethan co-hosts the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over 2M downloads and reaches over 10K listeners. With whatever time is left, Ethan writes for fun & profit, studies for certifications, and enjoys science fiction. @ecbanks

The post Show 176 – Intro to Python & Automation for Network Engineers appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

SDN 2014 – Make Our Garden Grow – Part 1

Let dreamers dream what worlds they please Those Edens can’t be found The sweetest flowers The fairest trees Are grown in solid ground We’re neither pure nor wise nor good We’ll do the best we know We’ll build our house and chop our wood And make our garden grow And make our garden grow These […]

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Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson, the last of four children of the seventies, was born in London and has never been too far from a shooting, bombing or riot. He's now grateful to live in a small town in East Yorkshire in the north east of England with his wife Sam and their four children.

He's worked in the IT industry for over 15 years in a variety of roles, predominantly in data centre environments. Working with switches and routers pretty much from the start he now also has a thirst for application delivery, SDN, virtualisation and related products and technologies. He's published a number of F5 Networks related books and is a regular contributor at DevCentral.

The post SDN 2014 – Make Our Garden Grow – Part 1 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Iveson.

Farewell to Networking

Almost twenty years ago, I began my career in networking.  HP hubs and routers, no VLANs, one router PHY port per subnet.  From there I installed an ATM backbone using LANE in the venerable Catalyst 5500 platform, then moved on to GigE in 3750 stacks and finally to 10G Nexuses (Nexa, Nexi?).  I’ve seen WiFi […]

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Matthew Mengel

Matthew was a Senior Network Engineer for a regional educational institution in Australia for over 15 years, working with Cisco equipment across many different product areas. However, in April 2011 he resigned, took seven months of long service leave to de-stress and re-boot before becoming a network engineer for a medium sized non-profit organisation. At the end of 2013, he left full-time networking behind after winning a scholarship to study for a PhD in astrophysics. He is on twitter infrequently as @mengelm.

The post Farewell to Networking appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Matthew Mengel.

Healthy Paranoia Show 21: Windows Forensics with Andrew Case

That’s right, it’s time for another surveillance-free, EFF-approved episode of Healthy Paranoia! Where the passwords are salted and the packets are always encrypted. This episode is hosted by the infamous Mrs. Y, queen of metadata and official privacy advocate for Healthy Paranoia, and recorded in the NSA-proofed SCIF with Grecs, of Novainfosec.com and Shmoocon Firetalks. […]

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Mrs. Y

Snarkitecht at Island of Misfit Toys

Mrs. Y is a recovering Unix engineer working in network security. Also the host of Healthy Paranoia and official nerd hunter. She likes long walks in hubsites, traveling to security conferences and spending time in the Bat Cave. Sincerely believes that every problem can be solved with a "for" loop. When not blogging or podcasting, can be found using up her 15 minutes in the Twittersphere or Google+ as @MrsYisWhy.

The post Healthy Paranoia Show 21: Windows Forensics with Andrew Case appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Mrs. Y.

Cisco ACI – Speculation of its Inner Workings

Last week I was at a Cisco users group meeting where some sales engineers were giving a presentation on the new Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) architecture and Nexus 9000 products. It was a very high-level overview, but it was interesting. I had assumed when Cisco made the ACI announcement that it would be based on […]

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Eric Flores

Eric Flores

Eric is a senior network engineer for a major real estate company. He has seven years in the field and has a passion for anything related to technology. Find him on Twitter @nerdoftech.

The post Cisco ACI – Speculation of its Inner Workings appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Eric Flores.

Show 175 Dying Desktops, Insecure Firewalls, Networking The Internet of Things

This week Greg and Ethan go back and forth on a bunch of current happenings. Data Networking is full of releases, updates and progress. In 80 minutes we will discuss the topics that look important to us.

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Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus.

The post Show 175 Dying Desktops, Insecure Firewalls, Networking The Internet of Things appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

CEF Secret Attributes, Part 2

In Part 1 we saw there were three markings that can be potentially applied to a prefix in CEF. They are the Precedence, qos-group and traffic_index. It’s unfortunate these terms were used because we also find that we are marking prefixes in CEF, not packets, so these terms don’t perfectly map to our traditional sense […]

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Dan Massameno

Dan Massameno is the president and Chief Engineer at Leaf Point, a network engineering firm in Connecticut.

The post CEF Secret Attributes, Part 2 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Dan Massameno.

Microloop!

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 […]

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Russ White

Russ White
Principle Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White is a Network Architect who's scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about, or don't really care about. You want numbers and letters? Okay: CCIE 2635, CCDE 2007:001, CCAr, BSIT, MSIT (Network Design & Architecture, Capella University), MACM (Biblical Literature, Shepherds Theological Seminary). Russ is a Principal Engineer in the IPOS Team at Ericsson, where he works on lots of different stuff, serves on the Routing Area Directorate at the IETF, and is a cochair of the Internet Society Advisory Council. Russ will be speaking in November at the Ericsson Technology Day. he recently published The Art of Network Architecture, is currently working on a new book in the area Continue reading

Secret CEF Attributes, Part 1

Welcome to the first in a series of articles that will explore some of the interesting properties we can insert into CEF, Cisco’s implementation of the Forwarding Information Base (FIB) in Layer-3 rotuers. CEF represents the high-speed forwarding architecture in the Cisco platforms. If we can insert data into the CEF memory structure we can […]

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Dan Massameno

Dan Massameno is the president and Chief Engineer at Leaf Point, a network engineering firm in Connecticut.

The post Secret CEF Attributes, Part 1 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Dan Massameno.

Network Topologies

Resiliency of the networks is almost the most important design criterion which needs to be considered. Packets need to be reached to destination within the time expected by the application. Although too much redundancy will affect MTBF/MTTR curve directly and start to increase MTTR of the entire system, carefully designed network topologies will play a […]

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Orhan Ergun

Orhan Ergun, CCIE, CCDE, is a network architect mostly focused on service providers, data centers, virtualization and security.

He has more than 10 years in IT, and has worked on many network design and deployment projects.

In addition, Orhan is a:

Blogger at Network Computing.
Blogger and podcaster at Packet Pushers.
Manager of Google CCDE Group.
On Twitter @OrhanErgunCCDE

The post Network Topologies appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Orhan Ergun.

IP/FRR and Centralized Control Planes

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 […]

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Russ White

Russ White
Principle Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White is a Network Architect who's scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about, or don't really care about. You want numbers and letters? Okay: CCIE 2635, CCDE 2007:001, CCAr, BSIT, MSIT (Network Design & Architecture, Capella University), MACM (Biblical Literature, Shepherds Theological Seminary). Russ is a Principal Engineer in the IPOS Team at Ericsson, where he works on lots of different stuff, serves on the Routing Area Directorate at the IETF, and is a cochair of the Internet Society Advisory Council. Russ will be speaking in November at the Ericsson Technology Day. he recently published The Art of Network Architecture, is currently working on a new book in the Continue reading

Please Check Your Feed URLs – FeedBurner Is Dead To Us

We here at Packet Pushers used to use FeedBurner. It was a value-added RSS service that was eventually brought under Google’s mighty power. Sadly, as with Buzz and Wave, Google has killed FeedBurner. While the FeedBurner service is still limping along, we’re seeing unpredictable results. Even the 301 redirects Greg programmed a while back are […]

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Ethan Banks

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials and high tech since 1995. Ethan co-hosts the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over 2M downloads and reaches over 10K listeners. With whatever time is left, Ethan writes for fun & profit, studies for certifications, and enjoys science fiction. @ecbanks

The post Please Check Your Feed URLs – FeedBurner Is Dead To Us appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

The NSA, surveillance, and Call Records

First off, let me be very clear. I do *not* condone placing backdoors into critical infrastructure such as firewalls and routers. This post is about the packets themselves, and capturing only what is legally allowed. I believe the NSA has the legal right (and the mandate) to do much of what they are currently doing, […]

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Ken Matlock

Ken Matlock

Ken Matlock is a networking veteran of 19 years. He has worked in many fields in the networking industry including Service Provider, Retail, and Healthcare. When he's not fixing the problems of the networking world, he can be found studying for his CCIE, spending time with his family, and trying to chase the ever-elusive sleep.

He can be found on twitter @KenMatlock , email at [email protected] , irc.freenode.net #PacketPushers, or the occasional blog or forum post.

The post The NSA, surveillance, and Call Records appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ken Matlock.