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Category Archives for "Networking"

Manage user performance, not the network, with machine learning-based tools

Over the past decade, network management tools have evolved from being fault based to performance based. This has become a critical element in running infrastructure because faults don’t matter as much.That might seem like a strange thing to say, but consider the fact that critical infrastructure such as switches, routers, Wi-Fi access points and servers are deployed in a way to protect against outages. Infrastructure is built so redundantly today that any hardware device can go down and its likely no one will notice.Also on Network World: 7 must-have network tools A bigger problem is managing user performance. Often users calling about a certain application not working well, but when the engineer looks at the dashboard, everything is green. Performance problems are much harder to diagnose and can kill employee productivity. To read this article in full, please click here

Manage user performance, not the network, with machine learning-based tools

Over the past decade, network management tools have evolved from being fault based to performance based. This has become a critical element in running infrastructure because faults don’t matter as much.That might seem like a strange thing to say, but consider the fact that critical infrastructure such as switches, routers, Wi-Fi access points and servers are deployed in a way to protect against outages. Infrastructure is built so redundantly today that any hardware device can go down and its likely no one will notice.Also on Network World: 7 must-have network tools A bigger problem is managing user performance. Often users calling about a certain application not working well, but when the engineer looks at the dashboard, everything is green. Performance problems are much harder to diagnose and can kill employee productivity. To read this article in full, please click here

Real-time WiFi heat map

Real-time Wifi-Traffic Heatmap (source code GitHub: cod3monk/showfloor-heatmap) displays real-time WiFi traffic from SC17 (The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, November 12-17, 2017). Click on the link to see live data.

The Cisco Wireless access points in the conference network don't currently support sFlow, however, the access points are connected to Juniper EX switches which stream sFlow telemetry to an instance of sFlow-RT analytics software that provides real-time usage metrics for the heat map.

Wireless describes the additional visibility delivered by sFlow capable wireless access points, including: air time, channel, retransmissions, receive / transmit speeds, power, signal to noise ratio, etc. With sFlow enabled wireless access points, additional information could be layered on the heat map. The sFlow.org web site lists network products and vendors that support the sFlow standard.

Next-Generation Assurance in NFV Networks

next-generation assurance Download the Huawei White Paper,  In the digital era, communications service providers (CSPs) are undergoing a technological evolution, and network virtualization is playing a key role—in particular, network functions virtualization (NFV).  NFV offers reduced time to market, agility, innovation, an open ecosystem to avoid vendor lock-in, and future CAPEX and OPEX reduction. However, operational transformation... Read more →

Developing a Hybrid Plan for SD-WAN Q&A

Developing a Hybrid Plan for SD-WAN Q&A Thanks to all who joined us for the Comcast Business 2017 SD-WAN and Virtual Edge Report webinar, Developing  a Hybrid Plan for SD-WAN, where they discussed how to ease into SD-WAN to test and experience new business capabilities across a distributed enterprise. After the webinar we took questions from the audience. Unfortunately we ran out... Read more →

Wi-Fi Capacity Infographic

Learn tips and tricks for building a high-performance WLAN!

I teamed up with the great staff at Ekahau to put together this infographic about how to design and deploy high capacity Wi-Fi. It's the second poster in the series, following the Wi-Fi Design Poster that focused on radio frequency (RF) factors.

The Wi-Fi Capacity Infographic covers:

  • An overview of airtime and why it is important
  • Understanding the two primary factors affecting airtime:
    1. Airtime within a cell
    2. Airtime across cells
  • Methods to maximize airtime efficiency to get the most out of your WLAN
  • Channel inventory as it relates to capacity
  • How client capabilities affect airtime consumption, and hence capacity, in a WLAN
  • Factors to consider when selecting infrastructure to deploy
  • Factors to consider with infrastructure placement and configuration
  • Features available within Ekahau Site Survey to set you up for success

Download the Wi-Fi Capacity Infographic today!

High capacity-magnifying glass-landing page image.png

NetDevOpEd: The power of network verification

Microsoft just published information on their internal tool called “CrystalNet” which Microsoft defines as “a high-fidelity, cloud-scale network emulator in daily use at Microsoft. We built CrystalNet to help our engineers in their quest to improve the overall reliability of our networking infrastructure.” You can read more about their tool in this detailed ACM Paper. But what I want to talk about is how this amazing technology is accessible to you, at any organization, right now, with network verification using Cumulus VX.

What Microsoft has accomplished is truly amazing. They can simulate their network environment and prevent nearly 70% of the network issues they experienced in a two-year period. They have the ability to spin up hundreds of nodes with the exact same configurations and protocols they run in production. Then applying network tests, they verify if proposed changes will have negative impact on applications and services. This work took the team of Microsoft researchers over two years to develop. It’s really quite the feat!

What I find exciting about this is it validates exactly what we at Cumulus have been preaching for the last two years as well. The ability to make a 1:1 mirror of Continue reading

Learning to Ask Questions

One thing I’m often asked in email and in person is: why should I bother learning theory? After all, you don’t install SPF in your network; you install a router or switch, which you then configure OSPF or IS-IS on. The SPF algorithm is not exposed to the user, and does not seem to really have any impact on the operation of the network. Such internal functionality might be neat to know, but ultimately–who cares? Maybe it will be useful in some projected troubleshooting situation, but the key to effective troubleshooting is understanding the output of the device, rather than in understanding what the device is doing.

In other words, there is no reason to treat network devices as anything more than black boxes. You put some stuff in, other stuff comes out, and the vendor takes care of everything in the middle. I dealt with a related line of thinking in this video, but what about this black box argument? Do network engineers really need to know what goes on inside the vendor’s black box?

Let me anser this question with another question. Wen you shift to a new piece of hardware, how do you know what you are Continue reading

5 tricks for using the sudo command

The sudoers file can provide detailed control over user privileges, but with very little effort, you can still get a lot of benefit from sudo. In this post, we're going to look at some simple ways to get a lot of value out of the sudo command in Linux.Trick 1: Nearly effortless sudo usage The default file on most Linux distributions makes it very simple to give select users the ability to run commands as root. In fact, you don’t even have to edit the /etc/sudoers file in any way to get started. Instead, you just add the users to the sudo or admin group on the system and you’re done.Adding users to the sudo or admin group in the /etc/group file gives them permission to run commands using sudo.To read this article in full, please click here

Turn Network Engineers into Software Engineers

Peyton Koran, Director of Technical Engagement at Electronic Arts, delivered a great session on why network vendors are losing to open source and whitebox. His view is that network engineers need to embrace software engineering, be flexible. Vendors and VARs are no longer working to benefit of the customer but to benefit themselves with increased […]

Thwarting the Tactics of the Equifax Attackers

Thwarting the Tactics of the Equifax Attackers

We are now 3 months on from one of the biggest, most significant data breaches in history, but has it redefined people's awareness on security?

The answer to that is absolutely yes, awareness is at an all-time high. Awareness, however, does not always result in positive action. The fallacy which is often assumed is "surely, if I keep my software up to date with all the patches, that's more than enough to keep me safe?". It's true, keeping software up to date does defend against known vulnerabilities, but it's a very reactive stance. The more important part is protecting against the unknown.

Something every engineer will agree on is that security is hard, and maintaining systems is even harder. Patching or upgrading systems can lead to unforeseen outages or unexpected behaviour due to other fixes which may be applied. This, in most cases, can cause huge delays in the deployment of patches or upgrades, due to requiring either regression testing or deployment in a staging environment. Whilst processes are followed, and tests are done, systems are sat vulnerable, ready to be exploited if they are exposed to the internet.

Looking at the wider landscape, an increase in security research Continue reading

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