Thoughts on Two Years of Working from Home
I've spent the past two years working from home as a network engineer for two different companies. At first, I wasn't sure how well the remote lifestyle would suit me, but after a short time I settled into a very comfortable routine. And to my surprise, I discovered that I was much more productive working from the serenity of my home office than I ever was in a cubicle. I'd like to share my observations with the hope of convincing others to try ditching the office as well.
Why Work Remote?
No More Commute
This is the most obvious benefit to working remote. No more sitting in rush hour traffic twice a day. Even if you take public transit and are able to play on your laptop for most of the trip, commuting is a major time sink. Most people will instantly gain back at least an hour of time by foregoing the daily drive to and from the office. What could you do with an extra hour each day?
And beyond time, there are ample corollary benefits. You (or your company) are no longer paying for as much fuel or fare. You're greatly reducing your risk of being injured Continue reading
CenturyLink Picks Nuage Networks’ SDN Overlay
Nuage unifies virtualized network services on CenturyLink's Programmable Services Backbone.
Anycast For DMVPN Hubs
Dynamic assignment of DMVPN spoke tunnel addresses isn't just a matter of convenience. It provided the foundation for a recent design which included the following fun requirements:The underlay topology in this environment1 made it safe for me to anycast the DMVPN hubs, so that's what I did. This made the "connect to the nearest hub" problem easy to solve, but introduced some new complexity.
- There are many hub sites.
- Spokes will be network-near exactly one hub site.
- Latency between hub sites is high.
- Bandwidth between hub sites is low.
- Spoke routers don't know where they are in the network.
- Spoke routers must connect only to the nearest hub.
Hub Anycast Interface
Each DMVPN router has a loopback interface with address 192.0.2.0/32 assigned to the front-door VRF. It's configured something like this:
interface loopback 192020
description DMVPN hub anycast target
ip vrf forwarding LTE_TRANSIT
ip address 192.0.2.0 255.255.255.255
The 192.0.2.0 /32 prefix was redistributed into the IP backbone. If this device were to fail, then the next-nearest instance of 192.0.2.0 would be selected by the IGP.
Spoke Configuration
Spokes look pretty much exactly like Continue reading
CCIE Three Months Later
A short take on my journey to becoming CCIE #49800. This wouldn't be possible without the so very important people in my life. Thank You!...[[ Summary content only, you can read everything now, just visit the site for full story ]]
The NCM Connector for Cisco Devices
post by: matt.raio Greetings fellow GNS3ers and SolarWinds Gurus! This guide is to present to you a new feature that utilizesStartup Radar: Niara Uses Machine Learning To Spot Malicious Activity
Startup Niara applies machine learning to security logs and network packets and flows to find anomalous behavior that may indicate malicious activity.
The post Startup Radar: Niara Uses Machine Learning To Spot Malicious Activity appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Nerd Knobs Are Career Limiting
Redefining the term Nerd Knobs as Wanker Knobs
The post Nerd Knobs Are Career Limiting appeared first on EtherealMind.
HL: The Art of Network Architecture
The post HL: The Art of Network Architecture appeared first on 'net work.
Stay tuned for important news in December!!
I’ve got some important news which I will reveal in the beginning of December!
So stay tuned 
Gathering No MOS
If you work in the voice or video world, you’ve undoubtedly heard about Mean Opinion Scores (MOS). MOS is a rough way of ranking the quality of the sound on a call. It’s widely used to determine the over experience for the user on the other end of the phone. MOS represents something important in the grand scheme of communications. However, MOS is quickly becoming a crutch that needs some explanation.
That’s Just Like Your Opinion
The first think to keep in mind when you look at MOS data is that the second word in the term is opinion. Originally, MOS was derived by having selected people listen to calls and rank them on a scale of 1 (I can’t hear you) to 5 (We’re sitting next to each other). The idea was to see if listeners could distinguish when certain aspects of the call were changed, such as pathing or exchange equipment. It was an all-or-nothing ranking. Good calls got a 4 or even rarely a 5. Most terrible calls got 2 or 3. You take the average of all your subjects and that gives your the overall MOS for your system.
When digital systems came along, MOS took Continue reading
Five Functional Facts about TACACS+ in ISE 2.0
The oft-requested and long awaited arrival of TACACS+ support in Cisco’s Identity Services Engine (ISE) is finally here starting in version 2.0. I’ve been able to play with this feature in the lab and wanted to blog about it so that existing ISE and ACS (Cisco’s Access Control Server, the long-time defacto TACACS+ server) users know what to expect.
Below are five facts about how TACACS+ works in ISE 2.0.
Announcing Universal DNSSEC: Secure DNS for Every Domain
CloudFlare launched just five years ago with the goal of building a better Internet. That’s why we are excited to announce that beginning today, anyone on CloudFlare can secure their traffic with DNSSEC in just one simple step.
This follows one year after we made SSL available for free, and in one week, more than doubled the size of the encrypted web. Today we will do the same with DNSSEC, and this year, we’ll double the size of the DNSSEC-enabled web, bringing DNSSEC to millions of websites, for free.
If DNS is the phone book of the Internet, DNSSEC is the unspoofable caller ID. DNSSEC ensures that a website’s traffic is safely directed to the correct servers, so that a connection to a website is not intercepted by a man-in-the-middle.
Solving A Decades-Old Vulnerability In DNS
Every website visit begins with a DNS query. When I visit cloudflare.com, my browser first needs to find the IP address:
cloudflare.com. 272 IN A 198.41.215.163
When DNS was invented in 1983, the Internet was used by only a handful of professors and researchers, and no one imagined that there could be foul play. Thus, DNS relies on Continue reading
Versa Decouples Hardware from Software for SD-WAN, vCPE, & Security
Decoupling like Juniper? No comparison, say Versa's founders.