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Category Archives for "Networking"

All Of Ethan’s Podcasts And Articles For August 2017

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

Packet Pushers Weekly Podcast

Packet Pushers Priority Queue Podcast

Datanauts Podcast

Packet Pushers Articles

EthanCBanks.com

NetIntro Book

  • In August, I finished my contributions to this book. I ended up with roughly 6 (or 7?) chapters out of 30 or so. That’s a little awkward for me as I would have hoped to have done a more or Continue reading

One way to help Hurricane Harvey victims

IMG_4750

Photo Credit: Texas Military Department (Flickr)

Hurricane Harvey hit Texas last Friday as a Category 4 storm. Although Harvey's category was quickly downgraded, the storm lingered around for days, bringing 50 inches of rain to the greater Houston area.

As someone who was born in Houston, it's hard to see my former city hit with such destruction, and to know that many of my friends and fellow Houstonians are in need of help and assistance. Many families have had their entire house flooded out by the storm. Displaced residents are in a state of stagnation and are seeing their supplies diminishing by the day.

The Hurricane Relief app will allow visitors to your site to donate to one of the charities helping those impacted in Houston:

screenshot of app

The Hurricane Relief App takes two clicks to install and requires no code change. The charities listed are recommended by NPR.

Install Now

If you wanted to add your own custom list of charities for disaster relief or other causes, feel free to fork the source of this app and make your own.

SD-WAN Simplified!

This blog post is going a bit outside my usual “make sense to the C-Level” slant. I wanted to get in the weeds about reviewing SD-WAN products. We all know that’s where the fun really is!I have been doing a bit of evaluation on SD-WAN products and their configurations from the network engineer’s perspective. I have looked at numerous vendors’ products, poured over install guides, and dusted off the CLI.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: SD-WAN Simplified!

This blog post is going a bit outside my usual “make sense to the C-Level” slant. I wanted to get in the weeds about reviewing SD-WAN products. We all know that’s where the fun really is!I have been doing a bit of evaluation on SD-WAN products and their configurations from the network engineer’s perspective. I have looked at numerous vendors’ products, poured over install guides, and dusted off the CLI.Everyone who knows me can tell you I am a Cisco fanatic. Hands down, I would rather implement a Cisco technology rather than any other vendor by a 1000:1 ratio. I have spent a majority of my career as a network engineer, and the best network devices to configure and troubleshoot have been Cisco.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SD-WAN Simplified!

This blog post is going a bit outside my usual “make sense to the C-Level” slant. I wanted to get in the weeds about reviewing SD-WAN products. We all know that’s where the fun really is!I have been doing a bit of evaluation on SD-WAN products and their configurations from the network engineer’s perspective. I have looked at numerous vendors’ products, poured over install guides, and dusted off the CLI.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: SD-WAN Simplified!

This blog post is going a bit outside my usual “make sense to the C-Level” slant. I wanted to get in the weeds about reviewing SD-WAN products. We all know that’s where the fun really is!I have been doing a bit of evaluation on SD-WAN products and their configurations from the network engineer’s perspective. I have looked at numerous vendors’ products, poured over install guides, and dusted off the CLI.Everyone who knows me can tell you I am a Cisco fanatic. Hands down, I would rather implement a Cisco technology rather than any other vendor by a 1000:1 ratio. I have spent a majority of my career as a network engineer, and the best network devices to configure and troubleshoot have been Cisco.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Using FQDN for DMVPN hubs

I've done some testing with specifying DMVPN hubs (NHRP servers, really) using their DNS name, rather than IP address.

This matters to me because of some goofy environments where spoke routers can't predict what network they'll be on (possibly something other than internet), and where I can't leverage multiple hubs per tunnel due to a control plane scaling issue.

The DNS-based configuration includes the following:

 interface Tunnel1  
  ip nhrp nhs dynamic nbma dmvpn-pool.fragmentationneeded.net

There's no longer a requirement for any ip nhrp map or ip nhrp nhs x.x.x.x configuration when using this new capability.

My testing included some tunnels with very short ISAKMP and IPSec re-key intervals. I found that the routers performed the DNS resolution just once. They didn't go back to DNS again for as long as the hub was reachable.

Spoke routers which failed to establish a secure connection for whatever reason would re-resolve the hub address each time the DNS response expired its TTL. But once they succeeded in connecting, I observed no further DNS traffic for as long as the tunnel survived.

The record I published (dmvpn-pool.fragmentationneeded.net above) includes multiple A records. The DNS server randomizes the record Continue reading

Worth Reading: Multiple perspectives on technical problems and solutions

So what was this architecture review meeting all about? It was pretty simple, really. It was just a presentation by the engineer(s) looking for feedback on a solution they came up with, and Kellan and I would ask questions. The meeting was open to anyone in the company who wanted to attend. The hope was that many engineers would attend, actually. The intent here was to help the engineers describe their problem as thoroughly as they can, and by asking questions, we could help draw out any tacit assumptions they made in thinking through the problem. In a nutshell: it was a critical-thinking exercise, and we wanted engineers to want to do this, because it was ideally about providing feedback. —John Allspaw @Kitchen Soap

The post Worth Reading: Multiple perspectives on technical problems and solutions appeared first on rule 11 reader.

Resource Contention In IT – Time Is Never Enough

I’m at Future:NET this week and there’s a lot of talk about the future of what networking is going to look like from the perspective of vendors like Apstra, Veriflow, and Forward Networks. There’s also a great deal of discussion from customers and end users as well. One of the things that I think is being missed in all the talk about resources.

Time Is Not On Your Side

Many of the presenters, like Truman Boyes of Bloomberg and Peyton Maynard-Koran of EA, discussed the idea of building boxes from existing components instead of buying them from established networking vendors like Cisco and Arista. The argument does hold some valid ideas. If you can get your hardware from someone like EdgeCore or Accton and get your software from someone else like Pluribus Networks or Pica8 it looks like a slam dunk. You get 90% to 95% of a solution that you could get from Cisco with much less cost to you overall.

Companies like Facebook and Google have really pioneered this solution. Facebook’s OCP movement is really helping networking professionals understand the development that goes into building their own switches. Facebook’s commitment is also helping reduce the price of the Continue reading

Down to the WireX

Over the course of the last few weeks, a botnet comprised mainly of Android mobile devices has been utilized to launch a high-impact DDoS extortion campaign against multiple organizations in the travel and hospitality sector. This botnet, dubbed ‘WireX’, is only the second mobile botnet […]

Worth Reading: Multitasking without Thrashing

Human context switching is more complicated than computer context switching. Whereas the computer context switch replaces a fixed number of bytes in a few CPU registers, the human has to recall what was “on the mind” at the time of the switch and, if the human was interrupted with no opportunity to choose a “clean break,” the human has to reconstruct lost short term memory. —Peter J. Denning @Communications of the ACM

The post Worth Reading: Multitasking without Thrashing appeared first on rule 11 reader.

30 ways to improve IoT privacy

Much work still must be done before the industrial and municipal Internet of Things (IoT) becomes widely adopted outside of the circle of innovators. One field, privacy, well understood by the public and private sector in the context of the cloud, PCs and mobile, is in the early stage of adaptation for the IoT.The sheer volume of data that will be collected and the new more granular architecture of the IoT present new privacy concerns that need to be resolved on an equal scale as the platform’s forecasted growth.A demonstration of this new aspect of privacy and compliance is the Privacy Guidelines for Internet of Things: Cheat Sheet, Technical Report (pdf) by Charith Perera, researcher at the Newcastle University in the U.K. The nine-page report details 30 points about implementing strong privacy protections. This report is summarized below.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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