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Category Archives for "Packet Pushers Podcast"

PQ Show 23 – OpenFlow and SDN – ONF Testing & Interoperability with Michael Haugh

In this show we speak with Michael Haugh, the chairperson of Testing and Interoperability Working Group  https://www.opennetworking.org/working-groups/testing-a-interop  at the Open Networking Foundation. Michael is a Senior Product Line Manager and oversees Ixia’s Carrier Ethernet go-to-market strategy and product line on the Ixia core and IxN2X platforms. Michael has been in networking for 17 years and […]

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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 PQ Show 23 – OpenFlow and SDN – ONF Testing & Interoperability with Michael Haugh appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

Handling Tech Support Interaction Effectively

Network engineers deal with technical support frequently. That’s the nature of the networking business: the products often don’t work as advertised or break down under their own complexity. Throw in some ambiguous documentation that leaves you scratching your head, and you’ll finally resort to opening a case with the vendor to resolve the issue. In […]

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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 3M 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 Handling Tech Support Interaction Effectively appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

The Man in the White Suit

I know this is a technical blog, but I’ve always agreed with those that believe the best way to deliver a message is through a story. As imaginative and creative as I feel I can sometimes be, writing fiction just isn’t one of my strong points. So, rather than tell you an original story of my own I’m going to relate […]

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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 The Man in the White Suit appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Iveson.

When Am I Going to Use This?

I imagine that prior to the industrial revolution, people didn’t struggle with niche skillsets that didn’t transfer. They didn’t need to wonder if they were spending countless hours learning something with no particular use outside their current job, listen to well-meaning friends and spouses assure them they’re worrying about nothing, only to face a layoff […]

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Keith Tokash

Keith Tokash

Keith Tokash, CCIE (R&S) #21236, began his career in 1999, and has spent the last decade running around large content and small ISP networks. He spends his spare time with his newborn son, on the mat at the local Jiu-Jitsu gym, and trying to keep his fat yap shut.

The post When Am I Going to Use This? appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Keith Tokash.

Show 141 – The Pace of Change Is Picking Up – #NFD5 Discussion

Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks of PacketPushers.net host a discussion with Dr. Peter Welcher, Brent Salisbury, and Stephen Foskett about many of the presentations from the Network Field Day 5 event held March 6-8, 2013 in San Jose, California. The leading podcast topic was software defined networking, as that was the vendor focus during 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 3M 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 141 – The Pace of Change Is Picking Up – #NFD5 Discussion appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Firewalls: Expensive, Broken Routers

In a previous post on IPS, I made a fairly negative comment on the value that you get from enterprise firewalls in the modern environment. At the time, I said that I was just going leave that comment hanging and see what happened. Well, precisely no one challenged me on it, which means either everybody […]

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Neil Anderson

Neil is a freelance network security architect and contractor working with a number of clients in Scotland and Europe. He is CCIE #18705 and also holds a CISSP. He can often be found sampling beer in remote locations and ranting about tech to anyone too stupid to run away. If you're very unlucky, he may talk to you in Gaelic.

Neil can be occasionally be found on Twitter.

The post Firewalls: Expensive, Broken Routers appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Neil Anderson.

Using IP SLA Delay Feature to Safely Monitor Lossy Links

IP SLA is a great feature if you want to add some automation and intelligence into the network. SLA is no SDN/OpenFlow, but it can be very useful. It can also take down a network. Let’s say you are using DMVPN for a number of spoke locations in your network. You have a primary Internet […]

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Charles Galler

Charles Galler

Charles is a network and UC engineer for an integrator. He has worked in the networking industry for about 15 years. He started as a network administrator for a small CLEC (carrier) where he did it all in internal IT and worked on the carrier network. After the CLEC, Charles went to work for a large healthcare organization in the Houston area and stayed with them for about three and a half years. Now he works for a reseller in the professional services part of the organization. He is currently studying for his CCIE in Routing and Switching and plans on passing it sometime. You can find him on the Twitter @twidfeki.

The post Using IP SLA Delay Feature to Safely Monitor Lossy Links appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Charles Galler.

Surprised by Spam

I attended my first in person meeting of the ISOC Advisory Council this last week — I’m a newly minted co-chair, and already haven’t been participating as much as I should (just like I don’t blog here as much as I should, a situation I’m undertaking to resolve!). We had a long discussion on the […]

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Russ White

Principal Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White has scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, nibbled and noodled at a lot of networks, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about — or don't really care about. You can find Russ at 'net Work, the Internet Protocol Journal, and his author page on Amazon.

The post Surprised by Spam appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.

Six Things About F5 BIGIP v11 iApps

F5 Networks’ Local Traffic Manager (LTM) is my load balancer – okay, Application Delivery Controller, if you insist – of choice. The LTM platform is as feature-rich and well-supported as they come, with all sorts of customizability as well as the iRule scripting language (a superset of TCL) that lets you do fancy transaction manipulation. […]

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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 3M 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 Six Things About F5 BIGIP v11 iApps appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Show 140 – Introduction OpenStack and Quantum Projects

OpenStack is progressively developing into a product that networking needs to be a part of. One way to describe OpenStack is to say it’s an API for infrastructure. OpenStack is a combination of open source plus a significant number of hardware vendors who see contributions to OpenStack as a way of growing or maintaining their own markets and customers.

Customers want OpenStack as an alternative to VMware or other commercial software - not all applications and service need to have expensive software licenses and maintenance. We need to be able to build a core of functional services that can deliver services.

In the future, it seems likely that OpenStack Quantum API will be important. We discuss Open Vswitch and how it’s changing from being a “switch” to including routing, firewall and load balancing features. If you don’t like that, you could consider using Quantum API as a way to consume load balancers from your preferred vendor - the API exists to simplify the consumption of network resources.

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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 Continue reading

What’s Next for OpenFlow and Open Source?

One year ago, the Open Networking Foundation was setting a blistering pace of standards development. Though their process is closed to outsiders, word had leaked out that not only were they on track to produce version 1.3 of the OpenFlow standard, but 1.4 would follow before the end of 2012. At some point that plan […]

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Bill Owens

Bill Owens

Bill has had his hands in networks since 2400 baud was fast, but lately he thinks that things like DNS, IPv6 and OpenFlow are more fun. During the day he helps take care of a statewide optical/IP network. You can find him on Twitter as @owens_bill and lurking around lots of different network-related mailing lists.

The post What’s Next for OpenFlow and Open Source? appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Bill Owens.

Tough Questions To Ask Network Vendors When Evaluating Products

Introduction In my previous post, I proposed investing in careful planning to extract the maximum value from your vendor meeting. But what happens when the presentation begins? In this post, I’ll outline a few high-level questions and lots of in-depth questions to help you get a better understanding of the ‘real’ product that’s being sold. High-level […]

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John Harrington

John is an experienced data center engineer with a background in mobile telecoms. He works as a network test engineer for a large cloud service provider, and is gradually accepting that he's a nerd. He blogs about network technology and careers at theNetworkSherpa.com. You can reach him on twitter at: @networksherpa

The post Tough Questions To Ask Network Vendors When Evaluating Products appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by John Harrington.

Vendor Certifications: A Career Jump Starter

“…I’d love to share how certifications have propelled me into a mid-level networking position. I can share my own personality, thoughts, and views on the subject… as long as I’m doing self-study. I don’t like having a teacher and same goes with a job, I personally really enjoy being my own technical lead, which I […]

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Joey Lucero

Joey Lucero

Joey's a fairly recent college grad on the verge of a promising new career in networking. No matter how much he learns, it's never enough... So he spends the majority of his free time studying, labbing, and blogging.

The post Vendor Certifications: A Career Jump Starter appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Joey Lucero.

Webinar – Anuta Networks Demonstrates nCloudX – Register Now

This past January, Anuta Networks came out of stealth at Cisco Live in London, showing off their nCloudX platform, an SDN controller aimed at multitenant cloud providers. Anuta’s nCloudX controller can manage hardware common to many networks. As such, Anuta isn’t forcing providers to install OpenFlow switches, build a tunnel fabric, or otherwise disrupt their production environments […]

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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 3M 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 Webinar – Anuta Networks Demonstrates nCloudX – Register Now appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Show 139 – Making Your Way Down The Path To Nirvana

Regular hosts Greg Ferro & Ethan Banks are joined by Brandon Carroll, Josh O’Brien, and Tom Hollingsworth in Packet Pushers Weekly Show 139. We translate all the SDN hype into a more practical conversation about what network engineers should be doing to update their skills. This is a mostly raw podcast with little editing – just […]

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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 3M 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 139 – Making Your Way Down The Path To Nirvana appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Extracting The Most Value From Network Vendor Presentations

Vendors love nothing more than getting in front of their customers and talking about their products. You’ll always learn something from a presentation, but mostly they are an exercise in death-by-powerpoint. In this post, I’ll provide some some tips on getting the most from your time in these presentations. Vendor presentations can be really informative […]

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John Harrington

John is an experienced data center engineer with a background in mobile telecoms. He works as a network test engineer for a large cloud service provider, and is gradually accepting that he's a nerd. He blogs about network technology and careers at theNetworkSherpa.com. You can reach him on twitter at: @networksherpa

The post Extracting The Most Value From Network Vendor Presentations appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by John Harrington.

Why Would A Vendor Care About Network Field Day Events?

I’m in San Jose, California as a member of the Network Field Day 5 delegation this week. NFD is under the Tech Field Day umbrella of events, and is not a Packet Pushers event as such – although we’ve been a part of them, and Greg in particular has helped to organize some of them. […]

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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 3M 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 Why Would A Vendor Care About Network Field Day Events? appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Show 138 – HP’s Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Strategy and Solution

Show 138 – HP’s Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Strategy and Solution [Written by HP.] There has been a lot of interest in the market place recently around software-defined Networking (SDN). HP has been a leader in SDN technologies from the very beginning. HP has played an instrumental role in the development of OpenFlow and continues to […]

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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 3M 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 138 – HP’s Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Strategy and Solution appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

My First Junos Switch: Detailed Review After Three Days Under The Covers

Background This post is the story of my first practical look at Junos on Juniper EX-series switches. One day last December, Skeeve Stevens from eintellego opened a can of worms by offering a deal on Juniper equipment to all network engineers on the AusNOG mailing list. I had been looking for an excuse to try […]

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Paul Gear

Paul is a freelance consultant working in Linux system administration, virtualisation, programming, and networking. When not working, he can often be found enjoying the surf near his home on Australia's Sunshine Coast.

The post My First Junos Switch: Detailed Review After Three Days Under The Covers appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Paul Gear.

Thoughts On Working As A Consultant For A VAR

One of the questions I’m frequently asked via e-mail is how to get started in networking and/or whether or not a particular job change is a good idea. Those are always hard questions to answer intelligently because everyone’s individual situation is different. In addition, everyone’s personality is different. Different jobs work for different people. It […]

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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 3M 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 Thoughts On Working As A Consultant For A VAR appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.