An Explanation of the Meltdown/Spectre Bugs for a Non-Technical Audience
Last week the news of two significant computer bugs was announced. They've been dubbed Meltdown and Spectre. These bugs take advantage of very technical systems that modern CPUs have implemented to make computers extremely fast. Even highly technical people can find it difficult to wrap their heads around how these bugs work. But, using some analogies, it's possible to understand exactly what's going on with these bugs. If you've found yourself puzzled by exactly what's going on with these bugs, read on — this blog is for you.
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” — Yogi Berra
Late one afternoon walking through a forest near your home and navigating with the GPS you come to a fork in the path which you’ve taken many times before. Unfortunately, for some mysterious reason your GPS is not working and being a methodical person you like to follow it very carefully.
Cooling your heels waiting for GPS to start working again is annoying because you are losing time when you could be getting home. Instead of waiting, you decide to make an intelligent guess about which path is most likely based on past experience and set Continue reading
Ways that Network Performance Management Has Evolved
SDxCentral's recent report highlights how big data, analytics, and convergence are impacting network and application monitoring.
Preserving Our Future, One Bit at a Time
“Culture, any culture… depends on the quality of its record of knowledge.” — Don Waters, “‘Preserving Digital Information”
Our culture and society has been enriched by the creation and proliferation of the Internet. Information has become increasingly more accessible and has enabled so many of us to become active creators rather than passive consumers of content. With that, we’re experiencing an explosive growth of digital data, with 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day and that data needs a place to live.
Not only does our data need a place to live, but it needs a place to survive into the future. What happens if years from now, we are no longer able to access our photos, documents, music — essentially all the records of our lives? We will not only be forgotten, but we’ll be thrusting the future into a “digital dark age,” as Vint Cerf calls it.
In short: “More and more of our lives are bound to the ones and zeroes of bits residing on a cloud server, or mobile device. Those bits in turn are mediated by the software and hardware implements we use every day. The bitstreams are unintelligible, however, without Continue reading
GHD Uses Riverbed SteelConnect to Link 100 Global Offices
Global professional services company GHD recently merged with Conestoga-Rovers and Associates (CRA), adding more than 3,000 employees in 100 offices, including 50 small sites. With this sudden growth, GHD needed a simple, cost-effective solution to add those new sites onto the company’s network. The answer was Riverbed SteelConnect, which has fueled stronger collaboration between its... Read more →
8 Ways Data Center Storage Will Change in 2018
SSD advancements will be among the major trends impacting enterprise storage this year.
New Design on www.ipSpace.net
One of my readers sent me a polite email a while ago saying “your site is becoming like $majorVendor’s web site – every corner looks completely different based on when you made it”
The worst part is that he was right, so I spent the last two weeks as a website janitor, mopping up broken markup, fixing CSS cracks, polishing old texts…
Read more ...BGP in 2017
This is a report on the experience with the Internet's inter-domain routing system over the past year, looking in some detail at some metrics from the routing system that can show the essential shape and behaviour of the underlying interconnection fabric of the Internet.Salt Overview
Salt is open source software for infrastructure automation. Salt was initially an agent based system but the team have since implemented an ssh based connector for devices that do not support or have the ability to install an agent. This agent/agentless feature give you the ability...continue reading
MC-LAG
MC-Lag
Everyone mostly know what MC-Lag does, for the benefit its a variant of LAG where the Down stream Devices share LAG interface on two Physical devices instead of One, I know its confusing let see a sample topology
Vqfx1 will see the upstream as 1 ae1 instead of two different VMX devices, this has its own advantage and the entire discussion is something out of scope of this blog post.
Blog Post Goal – Demonstrate MC-Lag on VMX and Quickly highlight the options Common and different in MC-LAG, a ready reference for someone going for an exam or a implementation.
Take-Away’s
-> ICCP is the protocol between the nodes
- Uses TCP/IP to replicates control plane and forwarding traffic between peers
- One stand-by and one active (active responsible status control)
- ICCP messages exchange configuration information to ensure both peers use correct LACP Parameters
- ICL-PL (interface between Mx1 and Mx2 ex) supports Multiple MC-Lag Between the peers so its recommended to be a AE.
-> ICL-PL HA
- A Keep-alive message is exchanged between MC-LAG peers which is recommended to be the management connection
- If ICL-PL fails, keep alive is still through the management Continue reading