Cisco CML Free Tier (No Kidding)
I first came across this on LinkedIn that Cisco is introducing a free tier of their Cisco CML platform (starting from version 2.8). My initial reaction was, 'Cisco giving something away for free? That can't be true!' But it turns out, it is. I couldn't wait to try it. I believe it’s limited to five nodes, but I’ll take it.
I could never justify paying $199 per year when there are free alternatives available (EVE-NG, GNS3, Containerlab). If it were a one-time purchase, I might have gone for it, but $199 every year is just too much for me.
In this post, I'll cover how to get the free version and how to install it on VMware Workstation.
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Downloading the CML image requires a Cisco account, which you can create for free. Also, make sure to add your address to your profile, or you might not be able to download it.
Downloading the Image
Head over to the Cisco download page and select CML version 2.8 Free Tier. As I mentioned earlier, you need a Cisco account, which is easy to create. Depending on your installation method, you can choose either the bare-metal or OVA Continue reading
HN 759: Deploying the BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP) at ISP Scale
The BGP Monitoring Protocol, or BMP, is an IETF standard. With BMP you can send BGP prefixes and updates from a router to a collector before any policy filters are applied. Once collected, you can analyze this routing data without any impact on the router itself. On today’s Heavy Networking, we talk with Bart Dorlandt,... Read more »Hedge 251: Regulating Local Data Centers
What impact do local regulations have on our ability to build and operate new data centers in the United States? What impact do these regulations have on local economies? Juan Londoño, from the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, joins Ned Bellavance and Russ White to discuss yet another part of the network engineering world.
TNO009: From Network Monitoring to Observability: Make the Leap for Better NetOps
Traditional network monitoring was built around SNMP and logs. And while there’s still a role for these sources, network observability aims to incorporate more data to help you build a holistic picture of the network and its behavior and performance. These sources can include flows, streaming telemetry, APIs, NETCONF, the CLI, deep packet inspection, synthetic... Read more »Dynamic BGP Peers
You might have an environment where a route reflector (or a route server) has dozens or hundreds of BGP peers. Configuring them by hand is a nightmare; you should either build a decent automation platform or use dynamic BGP neighbors – a feature you can practice in the next lab exercise.
Click here to start the lab in your browser using GitHub Codespaces (or set up your own lab infrastructure). After starting the lab environment, change the directory to session/9-dynamic and execute netlab up.
SC24 Over 10 Terabits per Second of WAN Traffic
The SC24 WAN Stress Test chart shows 10.3 Terabits bits per second of WAN traffic to the The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC24) conference held this week in Atlanta. The conference network used in the demonstration, SCinet, is described as the most powerful and advanced network on Earth, connecting the SC community to the world.
SC24 Real-time RoCEv2 traffic visibility describes a demonstration of wide area network bulk data transmission using RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCEv2) flows typically seen in AI/ML data centers. In the example, 3.2Tbits/second sustained trasmissions from sources geographically distributed around the United States was demonstrated.
SC24 Dropped packet visibility demonstration shows how the sFlow data model integrates three telemetry streams: counters, packet samples, and packet drop notifications. Each type of data is useful on its own, but together they provide the comprehensive network wide observability needed to drive automation. Real-time network visibility is particularly relevant to AI / ML data center networks where congestion and dropped packets can result in serious performance degradation and in this screen capture you can see multiple 400Gbits/s RoCEv2 flows.
SC24 SCinet traffic describes the architecture of the real-time monitoring system used to Continue reading
What is Network Automation?
Ever since AutoCon1, I've been trying to define Network Automation, at least in my own mind. The thinking is, we need to define terms before we can tackle solutions. In a jet lagged, sleep deprived moment, it occurred to me that NAF is trying to help us go from a single celled organisms to a READ MORE
The post What is Network Automation? appeared first on The Gratuitous Arp.
TL008: How to Hire Top Performers
Hiring is never an easy process. On today’s show, guest Brian Hogan and host Laura Santamaria explore the intricacies of hiring top performers in the tech industry. Brian talks about how to set up a fair and structured interview process, including the use of rubrics to evaluate candidates consistently. He discusses the challenges of assessing... Read more »N4N004: Essential Topics in Networking: Ethernet, NAT, and More
What are the most essential topics to understand for a new networkers? Ethan Banks and Holly Metlitzky address a listener’s question about foundational topics, covering what a network is, the differences between packet-switched and circuit-switched networks, and the nature of the internet as a “network of networks.” They discuss the importance of Internet Protocol (IP),... Read more »Public Videos: Enterprise MPLS/VPN
Over a decade ago, I created a webinar describing enterprise MPLS/VPN use cases. Surprisingly, some networking engineers still find it useful in the wonderful new world of SD-WAN duct tape, and starting today, you can access it without an ipSpace.net account.
Bigger and badder: how DDoS attack sizes have evolved over the last decade
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are cyberattacks that aim to overwhelm and disrupt online services, making them inaccessible to users. By leveraging a network of distributed devices, DDoS attacks flood the target system with excessive requests, consuming its bandwidth or exhausting compute resources to the point of failure. These attacks can be highly effective against unprotected sites and relatively inexpensive for attackers to launch. Despite being one of the oldest types of attacks, DDoS attacks remain a constant threat, often targeting well-known or high traffic websites, services, or critical infrastructure. Cloudflare has mitigated over 14.5 million DDoS attacks since the start of 2024 — an average of 2,200 DDoS attacks per hour. (Our DDoS Threat Report for Q3 2024 contains additional related statistics).
If we look at the metrics associated with large attacks mitigated in the last 10 years, does the graph show a steady increase in an exponential curve that keeps getting steeper, especially over the last few years, or is it closer to linear growth? We found that the growth is not linear, but rather is exponential, with the slope dependent on the metric we are looking at.
Why is this question interesting? Simple. The answer Continue reading
Resilient Internet connectivity in Europe mitigates impact from multiple cable cuts
When cable cuts occur, whether submarine or terrestrial, they often result in observable disruptions to Internet connectivity, knocking a network, city, or country offline. This is especially true when there is insufficient resilience or alternative paths — that is, when a cable is effectively a single point of failure. Associated observations of traffic loss resulting from these disruptions are frequently covered by Cloudflare Radar in social media and blog posts. However, two recent cable cuts that occurred in the Baltic Sea resulted in little-to-no observable impact to the affected countries, as we discuss below, in large part because of the significant redundancy and resilience of Internet infrastructure in Europe.
On Sunday, November 17 2024, the BCS East-West Interlink submarine cable connecting Sventoji, Lithuania and Katthammarsvik, Sweden was reportedly damaged around 10:00 local (Lithuania) time (08:00 UTC). A Data Center Dynamics article about the cable cut quotes the CTO of Telia Lietuva, the telecommunications provider that operates the cable, and notes “The Lithuanian cable carried about a third of the nation's Internet capacity, but capacity was carried via other routes.”
As the Cloudflare Radar graphs below show, there was no apparent impact to Continue reading
SC24 Real-time RoCEv2 traffic visibility
NAN079: From Network Monitoring to Observability: Make the Leap for Better NetOps
Traditional network monitoring was built around SNMP and logs. And while there’s still a role for these sources, network observability aims to incorporate more data to help you build a holistic picture of the network and its behavior and performance. These sources can include flows, streaming telemetry, APIs, NETCONF, the CLI, deep packet inspection, synthetic... Read more »TACACS+ on ISE Deep Dive
In this post we’ll add a Network Authentication Device (NAD) to ISE to perform TACACS+ authentication and authorization. We’ll also do a deep dive on AAA commands on the NAD. First let’s start with the overall goal of the lab and an overview of how TACACS+ works.
The goal of the lab is to have two users, Bob and Alice, where Bob works in the NOC and Alice is a network admin. Based on the AD group they belong to, they should get different permissions when administrating devices. Alice will be able to use all commands, while Bob will only be able to use basic commands. This is shown below:
Why would we use TACACS+ over RADIUS? The main reason is that it gives us per command authorization and accounting. The overall flow of TACACS+ is shown below:
Enabling TACACS+
To get things started, we must first enable TACACS+ on the PSN. Go to Administration -> Deployment located under System:
Click the > symbol next to Deployment and select your PSN that you want to enable TACACS+ on:
Scroll down to the Policy Service part. Notice that Device Admin is currently not enabled:
Select Enable Device Admin Service. You Continue reading
Backup and Restore of ISE Lab Server
The ISE evaluation license gives you 90 days of full access and after that you won’t be able to make any changes. Currently, my server has 28 days remaining:
As I intend to keep labbing, I’m going to perform a backup and restore where I’ll restore the configuration on another VM that I’ll be installing. Note that this can be automated, but in this post we’re going to focus on the process of doing it manually to understand what steps are involved.
The steps that will be performed are:
- Setup a SFTP repository to use for backups.
- Take a configuration backup of existing node.
- Take an operational backup of existing node.
- Export trusted- and system certificates of existing node.
- Install a new VM.
- Restore the configuration from the configuration backup.
The configuration backup will give us everything we need to restore all the system settings and policies. The operational backup gives us data such as logs. While the configuration backup includes the trusted- and system certificates, it’s good to also export them separately in case you need to perform a restore using another method.
The first thing I’m going to do is to install SFTP on my Windows server using Continue reading
DO it again: how we used Durable Objects to add WebSockets support and authentication to AI Gateway
In October 2024, we talked about storing billions of logs from your AI application using AI Gateway, and how we used Cloudflare’s Developer Platform to do this.
With AI Gateway already processing over 3 billion logs and experiencing rapid growth, the number of connections to the platform continues to increase steadily. To help developers manage this scale more effectively, we wanted to offer an alternative to implementing HTTP/2 keep-alive to maintain persistent HTTP(S) connections, thereby avoiding the overhead of repeated handshakes and TLS negotiations with each new HTTP connection to AI Gateway. We understand that implementing HTTP/2 can present challenges, particularly when many libraries and tools may not support it by default and most modern programming languages have well-established WebSocket libraries available.
With this in mind, we used Cloudflare’s Developer Platform and Durable Objects (yes, again!) to build a WebSockets API that establishes a single, persistent connection, enabling continuous communication.
Through this API, all AI providers supported by AI Gateway can be accessed via WebSocket, allowing you to maintain a single TCP connection between your client or server application and the AI Gateway. The best part? Even if your chosen provider doesn’t support WebSockets, we handle it Continue reading
HS089: Return to the Office: What’s Next?
Some high-profile companies like Amazon are mandating all employees return to the office, full time. Justifications, when given, mostly revolve around productivity and innovation. We say, whoa there! The data don’t back up the idea that hybrid and remote work hurt productivity (kind of the opposite) or innovation, and the real justifications likely lie elsewhere.... Read more »