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Net Neutrality and the FCC’s December 14 Vote

Net neutrality is defined differently in different circles. For the Internet Society, it means that an Internet service provider should not block, filter, throttle a users’ Internet usage, or give preferential treatment to one end user or content provider over another. Fundamentally, everyone should be able to access the content and services they choose without corporate or government interference. We believe this will ensure the Internet remains an engine for innovation, free expression, and economic growth. In some jurisdictions, this may require policy, regulatory, and technical measures.

On December 14, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is likely to vote to repeal the 2015 Open Internet Order, which classified broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. Under FCC Chairman Pai’s proposal, the FCC would yield authority over broadband providers to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

Since the announcement of that vote, many American Internet users have been anxious that their Internet service provider may undo their commitments to provide open access to the Internet for their customers. They are right to be anxious. We are already seeing signs that ISPs may change their net neutrality commitments in light of the upcoming ruling.

American users have Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Network analytics will change everything

The way we manage and monitor networks is morphing. Passive, reactive tools are being replaced by more proactive network analytics systems that give the entire network team a single source of truth about network behavior and a much deeper understanding of where infrastructure issues are hiding and what to do about them.Before IT was forever changed by the arrival of mobile devices, virtualization and cloud apps, fixing network problems was relatively simple because users plugged into the network from one location to access local applications and resources.But with the proliferation of diverse wireless clients – a range of hardware using different versions of different operating systems (the permutations can quickly scale into the thousands) – and the use of applications and services that are often not under IT’s control, getting to the heart of individual user and systemic client network problems has become the new nightmare.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Network analytics will change everything

The way we manage and monitor networks is morphing. Passive, reactive tools are being replaced by more proactive network analytics systems that give the entire network team a single source of truth about network behavior and a much deeper understanding of where infrastructure issues are hiding and what to do about them.Before IT was forever changed by the arrival of mobile devices, virtualization and cloud apps, fixing network problems was relatively simple because users plugged into the network from one location to access local applications and resources.But with the proliferation of diverse wireless clients – a range of hardware using different versions of different operating systems (the permutations can quickly scale into the thousands) – and the use of applications and services that are often not under IT’s control, getting to the heart of individual user and systemic client network problems has become the new nightmare.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Refactoring the network

The fundamental shift of the enterprise toward the cloud has posed a conundrum for many. The largest issue is the state of most enterprise networks. These networks were designed for an era gone by. Their original designs could not foresee the coming of technologies such as SDN, SDWAN, Segment Routing, the Cloud and an exponential increase in bandwidth that have all happened over the past 10 years.The IPv4 Internet BGP routing table alone has experienced a 10% year over year growth between 2009 and 2017 along. In 2009 the table eclipsed 286,000 routes. Here in 2017 we are at approximately 650,000. These figures only account for IPv4 routes, and not the full IPv4 and IPv6 tables. During that same period we have gone from token ring and 10Base-T to 100GbE.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Refactoring the network

The fundamental shift of the enterprise toward the cloud has posed a conundrum for many. The largest issue is the state of most enterprise networks. These networks were designed for an era gone by. Their original designs could not foresee the coming of technologies such as SDN, SDWAN, Segment Routing, the Cloud and an exponential increase in bandwidth that have all happened over the past 10 years.The IPv4 Internet BGP routing table alone has experienced a 10% year over year growth between 2009 and 2017 along. In 2009 the table eclipsed 286,000 routes. Here in 2017 we are at approximately 650,000. These figures only account for IPv4 routes, and not the full IPv4 and IPv6 tables. During that same period we have gone from token ring and 10Base-T to 100GbE.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: IoT devices communicate by Chirping

Most IoT systems assume there will be some form of connectivity. But what happens when there isn’t any Bluetooth, WiFi or cellular connectivity? R2D2, the adorable robot from Star Wars, may have the answer with the bird-like noises he used to communicate.How can sensors share data when connectivity isn’t available? How can IoT devices be designed to last longer without being recharged? How can legacy equipment be retrofitted affordable to communicate with other devices?Most IoT devices communicate through either a Bluetooth, WiFi, LoRaWAN, SIGfox or cellular connection. The mode chosen is determined by the size of the payload to be transmitted, distance to be traversed, and the power available to the transmitting device. Walls, other electronic equipment and conflicting radio signals also influences the selection of the protocol to be used. What’s needed is that can work in ‘noisy’ environments and work with very little power.To read this article in full, please click here

Gartner analyst predicts doom for on-premises data centers

Enterprise software’s days are numbered, and if you don’t adopt artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, your data center will be useless.Those are the claims of Gartner Research Vice President Milind Govekar, who gave a presentation at Gartner’s annual conference for IT infrastructure operations professionals recently in Las Vegas.Govekar said that as soon as 2019, at least a third of the largest software vendors will have transitioned their products from cloud-first to cloud-only. Although he didn’t mention it by name, you have to think Microsoft is in that category because it is already cloud-first with its enterprise apps. Office 365 already outsells the packaged Office 2016, so I can see a major de-emphasis of the client product in the coming years.To read this article in full, please click here

Gartner analyst predicts doom for on-premises data centers

Enterprise software’s days are numbered, and if you don’t adopt artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, your data center will be useless.Those are the claims of Gartner Research Vice President Milind Govekar, who gave a presentation at Gartner’s annual conference for IT infrastructure operations professionals recently in Las Vegas.Govekar said that as soon as 2019, at least a third of the largest software vendors will have transitioned their products from cloud-first to cloud-only. Although he didn’t mention it by name, you have to think Microsoft is in that category because it is already cloud-first with its enterprise apps. Office 365 already outsells the packaged Office 2016, so I can see a major de-emphasis of the client product in the coming years.To read this article in full, please click here

The end of the road for Server: cloudflare-nginx

The end of the road for Server: cloudflare-nginx

Six years ago when I joined Cloudflare the company had a capital F, about 20 employees, and a software stack that was mostly NGINX, PHP and PowerDNS (there was even a little Apache). Today, things are quite different.

The end of the road for Server: cloudflare-nginx CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Randy Merrill

The F got lowercased, there are now more than 500 people and the software stack has changed radically. PowerDNS is gone and has been replaced with our own DNS server, RRDNS, written in Go. The PHP code that used to handle the business logic of dealing with our customers’ HTTP requests is now Lua code, Apache is long gone and new technologies like Railgun, Warp, Argo and Tiered Cache have been added to our ‘edge’ stack.

And yet our servers still identify themselves in HTTP responses with

Server: cloudflare-nginx

Of course, NGINX is still a part of our stack, but the code that handles HTTP requests goes well beyond the capabilities of NGINX alone. It’s also not hard to imagine a time where the role of NGINX diminishes further. We currently run four instances of NGINX on each edge machine (one for SSL, one for non-SSL, one for caching and one Continue reading

HP Networking/Comware NETCONF interface quick tutorial (using python’s ncclient and pyhpecw7)

So let’s learn about NETCONF, but first a bit of history and perspective. Everyone in networking business at least once heard about SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), which is the goto protocol for monitoring your network devices, and wondered how cool it would be if you could not only monitor your network with it, but actively configure it (sort of like “SDN wannabe”). But for that purpose the SNMP  was not really useful, it supported some write operations but they were so generic and incomplete that it was not really feasible. That is where NETCONF came around 2011 as a standard (it was here before but its RFC 6241 was ratified then) and changed the game in favor of configuring any device, while not restricting vendors from declaring their own NETCONF data structures to fit their features, but lets first check the protocol first before diving into the data structures.

NETCONF is a RCP (remote procedure call) based protocol, using XML formating as payload and YAML language as data modeling (the part that explains to you what XML to send to configure something).

LAB TOPOLOGY

Ok, lets get to the point, in our excercise I will be focused on the Continue reading

MANRS, Routing Security, and the Brazilian ISP Community

Last week, I presented MANRS to the IX.BR community. My presentation was part of a bigger theme – the launch of an ambitious program in Brazil to make the Internet safer.

While there are many threats to the Internet that must be mitigated, one common point and a challenge for many of them is that the efficacy of the approaches relies on collaboration between independent and sometimes competing parties. And, therefore, finding ways to incentivize and reward such collaboration is at the core of the solutions.

MANRS tries to do that by increasing the transparency of a network operator’s security posture and its commitment to a more secure and resilient Internet. Subsequently, the operator can leverage its increased security posture, signaling it to potential customers and thus differentiating from their competitors.

MANRS also helps build a community of security-minded operators with a common purpose – an important factor that improves accountability, facilitates better peering relationships, and improves coordination in preventing and mitigating incidents.

So, what does the Brazilian ISP community think about routing security and MANRS?

I ran an interactive poll with four questions to provide a more quantitative answer. More than 100 people participated, which makes the results Continue reading

First Speakers in the Spring 2018 Automation Online Course

For the first two sessions of the Building Network Automation Solutions online course I got awesome guest speakers, and it seems we’ll have another fantastic lineup in the Spring 2018 course:

Most network automation solutions focus on device configuration based on user request – service creation or change of data model describing the network. Another very important but often ignored aspect is automatic response to external events, and that’s what David Gee will describe in his presentation.

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Configuring InterVLAN Routing- Router on Stick

Today I am going to talk about the configurational part of the Inter-VLAN scenario with the Router on stick which is used earlier in many of the enterprise LAN networks to have the inter-VLAN communication through the Router.

Most of the Routing and Switching experts already knew how to configure the Router on Stick configuration in order to have the inter-VLAN communications. Although now a days enterprises uses SVI instead if Router on stick as SVI is the better way to have the communication on the Core Switches.

Before i started with one of the scenario of the Inter-VLAN router on stick followed by the configuration part, I would like to tell you guys that we have our own youtube channel for various network videos that can further help you guys to study further. I will going to add many more videos soon on the channel, Please subscribe to the channel for the study network related videos.

Subscribe us on Youtube: http://y2u.be/0c4lMYVp9go

Thanks who already subscribed to our Youtube Channel. We will soon going to have so many videos on the networking basics, essentials and advance case studies in order to educate everybody in the networking space. Once again Continue reading