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Category Archives for "Networking"

Cumulus Networks is Excited to Announce being the First to Power Facebook’s Next Generation, Open Modular Platform, Minipack

Cumulus Networks, the leader in building open, modern and scalable networks, announced at OCP Summit that Cumulus Linux is the first network operating system to fully support the Minipack next-generation modular switch platform. Developed by Edgecore and contributed by Facebook to the Open Compute Project, Minipack empowers organizations of all sizes to architect, design and scale their infrastructure with unprecedented flexibility, capacity and interoperability.

Figure 1: Minipack Modular Chassis

Minipack is a modular switch platform, which means together, Cumulus Networks and Edgecore are bringing the benefits of web-scale networking to the mainstream. Minipack follows the open networking principles of disaggregation that allow customers to maintain consistent automated provisioning across all their switches of different form-factors (fixed or chassis).

Minipack leverages the latest ASIC technology from Broadcom including the Tomahawk III, the industry’s highest performance switch silicon. Compared to its predecessor, Backpack, Minipack is ½ the height, uses ½ the power and offers equivalent capacity making it one of the most operationally efficient open networking data center spine switches available today.

Additionally, Minipack offers either 100GE or 400GE options with Field Replaceable Port Interface Modules (PIM)’s in the following form factors:

Open Cloud Networking-Redefined

7368x4-JU-Blog

Networking vendors have long touted distinct routers and switches with different LAN/WAN interfaces for different customer use cases. After three decades of evolution, Ethernet now truly addresses all aspects of the present state and the next generation of networking, making it possible to support these previously separate use cases from a single common platform, which flexibly incorporates new capabilities in an open, standards-based approach. Arista, together with an ecosystem of partners including Broadcom and Cloud Titan customers, has a history of collaborating in many industry forums to define these new networking capabilities, including OCP, 25/50G and COBO, while driving next generation optics such as OSFP and QSFP-DD.

How did Facebook go down despite multiple data centers?

The Mercury retrograde kicked in big time on Wednesday as Facebook suffered an eight hour-outage that also affected Instagram and Facebook Messenger.No one was believed to be harmed; a few might have even had offline interactions with other human beings. Learn about backup and recovery: Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference How to pick an off-site data-backup method Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet? The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space Facebook said it wasn’t an attack, like a Denial of Service attack, and has since issued a statement attributing it to a configuration error.To read this article in full, please click here

How did Facebook go down despite its several data centers?

The Mercury retrograde kicked in big time on Wednesday as Facebook suffered an eight-hour outage that also affected Instagram and Facebook Messenger.No one was believed to be harmed; a few might have even had offline interactions with other human beings. Learn about backup and recovery: Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference How to pick an off-site data-backup method Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet? The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space Facebook said it wasn’t attacked, such as via a denial-of-service attack, and has since issued a statement attributing the problem to a configuration error.To read this article in full, please click here

How did Facebook go down despite multiple data centers?

The Mercury retrograde kicked in big time on Wednesday as Facebook suffered an eight hour-outage that also affected Instagram and Facebook Messenger.No one was believed to be harmed; a few might have even had offline interactions with other human beings. Learn about backup and recovery: Backup vs. archive: Why it’s important to know the difference How to pick an off-site data-backup method Tape vs. disk storage: Why isn’t tape dead yet? The correct levels of backup save time, bandwidth, space Facebook said it wasn’t an attack, like a Denial of Service attack, and has since issued a statement attributing it to a configuration error.To read this article in full, please click here

On the ‘net: Directory Services

Have you ever decided you needed to contact someone in another area of the world, only to discover you do not have their email address, nor any way to find their email address? You could go to your favorite social media site, of course, but if they are not on any form of social media? Or if they do not put their contact information there? Or—perhaps—this little situation happened before the rise of social media? GASP! From some of the younger readers.

3 Stumbling Blocks for Network Engineers Adopting Ansible

Ansible, ansible, ansible seems to be all we hear these days. There are lots of resources out there all trying to convince us this is the new way get stuff done. The reality is quite different – adoption of tools like this is slow in the networking world, and making the move is hard for command-line devotees.

Here are the three main problems I encountered in my adoption of Ansible as a modern way to manage devices:

1. Most network devices don’t support Python

Ansible is derived from the systems world, and is only latterly coming to be used for managing network devices. It is often said that Ansible is agentless, but when managing a Linux host (for example) the control machine pushes the Ansible playbook to that host and executes it there. In effect, *Python* is the agent.

Most network devices don’t have on-box Python, so when using Ansible against a router or a switch you have to have ‘connection: local’ in your playbook:






---
 name: Get info 
 hosts: all
 roles:
 Juniper.junos          # Invokes the Junos Ansible module
 connection: local        # Tells it to run locally
 gather_facts: no 





What this does is run the playbook using the local  Continue reading
				

	

			
		




														



														

		

		
		
		
		
BrandPost: Micro Data Centers Evolve to Fit New Business Requirements of Edge Computing

		
		
					

	
Recent breakthroughs in technology have expanded the possibilities for where data is gathered, processed, stored and analyzed. IT staffs and their business counterparts now have the flexibility of deciding whether their applications are more efficient residing in the cloud, within a traditional data center, or on the network edge. In fact, for the first time, the nature of the applications themselves is determining where they best should run. Over the last several months, micro data centers have emerged as a technology of choice for helping to manage the growing computing needs across edge environments.To read this article in full, please click here
				

	

			
		




														

		

		
		
		
		
QoS Is Dead. Long Live QoS!

		
		
					


Ah, good old Quality of Service. How often have we spent our time as networking professionals trying to discern the archaic texts of Szigeti to learn how to make you work? QoS is something that seemed so necessary to our networks years ago that we would spend hours upon hours trying to learn the best way to implement it for voice or bulk data traffic or some other reason. That was, until a funny thing happened. Until QoS was useless to us.


Rest In Peace and Queues


QoS didn’t die overnight. It didn’t wake up one morning without a home to go to. Instead, we slowly devalued and destroyed it over a period of years. We did it be focusing on the things that QoS was made for and then marginalizing them. Remember voice traffic?


We spent years installing voice over IP (VoIP) systems in our networks. And each of those systems needed QoS to function. We took our expertise in the arcane arts of queuing and applied it to the most finicky protocols we could find. And it worked. Our mystic knowledge made voice better! Our calls wouldn’t drop. Our packets arrived when they should. And the world was  Continue reading
				

	

			
		




														

		

		
		
		
		
Juniper vSRX 15.1X49 on QEMU

		
		
					


Recently, I have been quite busy running into some problems with deployment of Junos 15.1X49-D15.4 on Qemu image. So, I want make your lifer easier and I share my quick installation steps with you.


1. Download vSRX VMware Appliance


Download the file media-srx-ffp-vsrx-vmdisk-15.1X49-D15.4.ide.ova. The good news is that you do not need to enter a licence key after you download the image. The bad new is that you still need a valid contract with Juniper in order to download the file. Luckily, you can find the installation file flying somewhere on the Internet.


2. Extract Archive and OVA files


$ unrar e media-srx-ffp-vsrx-vmdisk-15.1X49-D15.4.ide.rar

$ tar xvf media-srx-ffp-vsrx-vmdisk-15.1X49-D15.4.ide.ova


3. Convert StreamOptimized Virtual Machine Disk to Format 


Details ale explained in my original vSRX article.


$ qemu-img convert -O qcow2 media-srx-ffp-vsrx-vmdisk-15.1X49-D15.4-disk1.vmdk media-srx-ffp-vsrx-vmdisk-15.1X49-D15.4-disk1.img 


4. Hack Image To Support QEMU


Unfortunately, vSRX 15.1 image boots to “Wind River Linux 6.0.0.15” prompt but it would not launch the freebsd VM within the nested KVM instance. The workaround along with the detailed explanation of the issue is originally posted here.


$ /usr/local/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 -m 4192M  Continue reading
				

	

			
		




														

		

		
		
		
		
Pulling Configs from Cisco NSO using curl and json2yaml.py

		
		
					

We’re using Cisco NSO in our lab at the moment to provision L3VPNs across multi-vendor environments as part of a demo.  Just noting down a few things here for future reference:









You can use the curl (command-line URL) utility to query NSO’s API and retrieve the configuration of a device it knows about.  You probably know that NSO syncs a device’s config locally, so this will be a way to retrieve the device config that NSO knows about – if the device is out of sync, of course this won’t quite be the latest:





curl -u username:password -H "Accept: application/vnd.yang.data+json" http://192.168.8.172:8080/api/config/devices/device/CPE-3/config | json2yaml





I’ll break this down:





curl -u username:password – provides the username and password of your NSO installation





-H “Accept: application/vnd.yang.data+json” – specifies an HTTP header to send in the request.  In this instance, we are saying that we are expecting a JSON response.   Alternatively you could specify ‘vnd.yang.data+xml’ to receive an XML response.





http://192.168.8.172:8080/api/config/devices/device/CPE-3/config – this is the API request we are making.  CPE-3 is the device we are requesting the configuration of.





| json2yaml – this pipes the JSON response through a python module  Continue reading
				

	

			
		




														

		

		
		
		
		
Using Screen Scraping in Network Automation

		
		
					
The first time I encountered screen scraping was in mid-1990. All business applications were running on IBM mainframes those days, and IBM used proprietary terminal system (remember 3270) that was almost impossible to interact with, so some people got the “bright” idea of emulating that screen, scraping information off the emulated screen and copying it into HTML pages… thus webifying their ancient apps.
Guess what – we’re still doing the very same thing in network automation as Andrea Dainese succinctly explained in the latest addition to his Automation for Cisco NetDevOps article.
Keep reading
				

	

			
		




								

															

						

							
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