On Tuesday, I was boarding a flight heading to the west coast and realized I had 3 switches powered down in the colo that I needed for a presentation and demo on Wednesday. Not a good feeling.
We have an IP enabled PDU that I usually connect to with no issues from the office and home office since we also have an SD-WAN deployed using Viptela. The only issue — there is not a way to VPN into the colo (yes, that’s my fault).
As it turns out, I had exposed the Opengear console server, that we used for all out of band access, to the Internet a few months prior. On a flight that I was only planning to do offline work, I was forced to purchase Wifi…from there, the fix was pretty simple.
I SSH’d into the Opengear console server, got access to the Juniper SRX perimeter FW, and then added a temporary NAT configuration that exposed the PDU to the Internet. I was able to now access the PDU directly from 35K feet in the air, get the devices powered up, and have some peace that they could be used in the demo. Sure, I could have Continue reading
The intent-based Boulder & Aspen projects are designed to open up networking.
A couple of recent analyst reports tout significant growth in the information security market. But More security spending on products doesn’t necessarily mean better outcomes for customers.
The post Increased Security Spending: Good Money After Bad? appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Citrix is reportedly mulling a selloff of its entire business, or certain assets. Dell is a possible suitor.
Join the Cisco DemoFriday on September 25th and learn how you can benefit from network programmability as you transition from legacy systems to open standard interfaces.
A five-year-old upstart garners investments from Google, Microsoft, Baidu, and Qualcomm and sets its sights on competing with Amazon Web Services.
Datiphy watches how data is being used — a managed service that's being turned into a software product for the U.S. market.

Ethan has an excellent post up on Interoperate or Die. Herewith, a few thoughts in response.
From my perspective, the importance of open standards in the world of network engineering can hardly be overstated. As networks become more complicated (or complex, depending on what word you want to use), having consistent interfaces will become increasingly important. Think of the old IP model — every transport runs on top of IP, and IP runs on top of every physical/link layer. Using IP as a “choke point” built a “wasp waist,” a single API everyone on both sides of the narrow point in the protocol layer could talk to.
in recent years, we’ve forgotten the wasp waist. We’ve built everything over HTTP, and everything over Ethernet over IP, and everything over GRE over IP, and… The entire stack, above IP, is a hornet’s nest of convoluted caverns and side halls pointing, apparently, everywhere at once (like the guy from the forest in The Point, above).
If you think of IP as an API (which is really what it is), the point is to have a single layer API between any two interacting systems. This creates a clean interaction surface that helps you to Continue reading
When I wrote my stretched VSAN post, I thought VSAN uses asynchronous replication across WAN. Duncan Epping quickly pointed out that it uses synchronous replication, and I fixed the blog post.
The “What about latency?” question immediately arose somewhere in my subconscious, but before I could add that thought to the blog post (because travel), Anders Henke wrote a lengthy comment that totally captured what I was thinking, so I’m including it in its entirety:
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