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Category Archives for "Networking"

IDG Contributor Network: How IoT trackers can fight poachers

Sea turtles have been survived for millions of years, but now face extinction.  as poachers. How do you protect sea turtles eggs on remote, miles-long beaches in developing countries from poachers working in the dark?Global System for Mobile Communications, or GSM, enabled IoT trackers may provide an answer to this scourge.Background Poachers kill sea turtles for their shells and their eggs are considered a delicacy and aphrodisiac. Sad but true. The trade of sea turtle products is restricted, but that doesn’t stop poachers. Tracking this illegal trafficking is difficult. The transit routes and final destinations are unknown.Sea turtle products are the second most frequently trafficked wildlife product smuggled from Latin America to the US. Eggs are a quarter of illegal imports and most originate in Mexico or Central America. This trade is devastating to turtle populations. A recent shipment of a thousand turtle eggs that was intercepted at the Mexico/U.S. border represented nearly 5 percent of the year’s total egg production for the beach from which they were poached!To read this article in full, please click here

OpenStack SDN – OpenContrail With BGP VPN

Continuing on the trend started in my previous post about OpenDaylight, I’ll move on to the next open-source product that uses BGP VPNs for optimal North-South traffic forwarding. OpenContrail is one of the most popular SDN solutions for OpenStack. It was one of the first hybrid SDN solutions, offering both pure overlay and overlay/underlay integration. It is the default SDN platform of choice for Mirantis Cloud Platform, it has multiple large-scale deployments in companies like Workday and AT&T. I, personally, don’t have any production experience with OpenContrail, however my impression, based on what I’ve heard and seen in the last 2-3 years that I’ve been following Telco SDN space, is that OpenContrail is the most mature SDN platform for Telco NFVs not least because of its unique feature set.

During the time of production deployment at AT&T, Contrail has added a lot of features required by Telco NFVs like QoS, VLAN trunking and BGP-as-a-service. My first acquaintance with BGPaaS took place when I started working on Telco DCs and I remember being genuinely shocked when I first saw the requirement for dynamic routing exchange with VNFs. To me this seemed to break one of the main rules of cloud Continue reading

2017 in review and 2018 goals

Here we are – the first day of 2018 and Im anxious and excited to get 2018 off to a good start.  Looking back – it just occurred to me that I didn’t write one of these for last year.  Not sure what happened there, but Im glad to be getting back on track.  So let’s start with 2017…

2017 was a great year for me.  I started the year continuing my work at IBM with the Watson group.  About half way through the year (I think) I was offered the opportunity to transition to a role in the Cloud Networking group.  It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up to work with folks whom I had an incredible amount of respect for.  So I began the transition and within 3 months had fully transitioned to the new team.  Since then, I’ve been heads down working (the reason for the lack of blog posts recently (sorry!)).  But being busy at work is a good thing for me.  For those of you that know me well you know that “bored Jon” is “not happy Jon” so Im in my own Continue reading

Enterprise Network on GNS3 – Part 5 – Data Center

The article is the fifth of the series of the articles discussing the enterprise network configuration. The article focus on the Data Center (DC) configuration. DC consists of the two devices - Server1 and the switch vIOS-Ser-I. Of course, the DC network with a single switch and the server is far away from any known DC network design. Typically, modern horizontally scaled large-size Layer 3 DCs consist of thousands of servers connected to the Top of Rack (ToR) l3 switches and they follow leaf and spine design. The DC of this size can be hardly emulated on a single PC. For this reason I only share the configuration of the Cisco L3 switch that is located in our DC. The switch is running Cisco vIOS-L2, version 15.2 and it has assigned 768MB RAM by GNS3.

The switch vIOS-Ser-I connects Ubuntu Linux Server to DC network. The configuration of the services such as bonding, NTP, DHCP, Syslog-ng, DNS and RADIUS running on the server is explained in more details later.

Picture 1 - Data Center

Note: The configuration file of the device vIOS-Serv-I is attached here.

1. Switch vIOS-Ser-I Configuration

Rather than explaining every line of the configuration, we Continue reading

General – Taking the Long Road

As we start the new year, I started thinking about something. Why do people think it’s acceptable to take shortcuts in their IT career? Is it because people don’t see the true effect of their work? Or is the cheating as prevalent in law and medicine but we working in IT aren’t aware of it?

Trust me, I understand that some people live really tough lives, they want to put food on the table for their family, find a better living, perhaps start a new life in a new country. The competition is fierce. Some countries have more engineers coming out of universities every year than we have people living in Sweden.

The thing is though, if you cheat your way to a CCIE, sooner or later you will be caught. But regardless of that. How would you feel if a power plant goes down due to your mistake? Having a heart monitoring unit fail because of your mistake? Having people’s private information leaked due to your mistake? We all make mistakes but we shouldn’t be making them because we pretend that we are something that we aren’t, experts. Networking is a critical part of everyones life now. Most of Continue reading

2018 Is The Year Of Writing Everything

Welcome back to a year divisible by 2! 2018 is going to be a good year through the power of positive thinking. It’s going to be a fun year for everyone. And I’m going to do my best to have fun in 2018 as well.

Per my tradition, today is a day to look at what is going to be coming in 2018. I don’t make predictions, even if I take some shots at people that do. I also try not to look back to heavily on the things I’ve done over the past year. Google and blog searches are your friend there. Likely as not, you’ve read what I wrote this year and found one or two things useful, insightful, or amusing. What I want to do is set up what the next 52 weeks are going to look like for everyone that comes to this blog to find content.

Wearing Out The Keyboard

The past couple of years has shown me that the written word is starting to lose a bit of luster for content consumers. There’s been a bit push to video. Friends like Keith Townsend, Robb Boardman, and Rowell Dionicio have started making more video Continue reading

All Of Ethan’s Podcasts And Articles For December 2017

Here’s a catalog of all the media I produced (or helped produce) in December 2017.

PACKET PUSHERS WEEKLY PODCAST

PRIORITY QUEUE PODCAST

All Of Ethan’s Podcasts And Articles For December 2017

Here’s a catalog of all the media I produced (or helped produce) in December 2017.

PACKET PUSHERS WEEKLY PODCAST

PRIORITY QUEUE PODCAST

2017 End of Year Blog Statistics

Didn’t I just write the 2016 statistics post like…. last week? Another year has flown by and with it another year of attempting to prioritize my writing. I’ll be honest, I’m not optimistic about what I’m going to find when I compare 2017 to 2016. It was a year filled with a lot of change and opportunity so I’ll use that as my excuse as to why I didn’t write as much or as often as I had planned.

I was thinking though: every year I set a goal of writing more posts than the previous year, but that’s only 1 metric to go by. Most of my posts are very detailed and fleshed out. It’s nothing to write a post that’s 1000 words. I regularly eclipse 2000 words and have even hit 3000 words. Perhaps I should be thinking more about word count and not post count? Certainly a 2000 word post takes more effort than a 1000 word post. On the other hand, word count says nothing about quality and could easily lead to excessive wordiness and run-on posts just to tilt the metrics.

Enough musing. Let’s review the data!

2017 Year over Year Session Count

Ack. Yep, Continue reading

1 … 1,419 1,420 1,421 1,422 1,423 … 3,350