Learning from Germanwings
On the 24th of March, the pilot of Germanwings flight 4U9525 into a field, killing everyone on board, including himself. This is a human tragedy — beyond what many of us will experience in our lifetimes. But it’s also an important object lesson to those of us who live in the world of engineering. Think through the entire realm of airline safety that has been put into place since the terrorist attacks on the 11th of September in 2001.
- Advanced scanning machines (which are not without their own share of controversy)
- Increased security inside the airplane, including locked cockpit doors
- Stricter regulations on liquids carried onto the airplane
- Removal of electronic items from bags so they can be independently assessed
The list feels almost endless to the person on the receiving end of all these new measures. The pilot, in this case, either bypassed the protection, or used it to his advantage. Advanced scanning machines, liquids restrictions, and laptop inspections can’t prevent someone intent on harming lots of people if they have control of the airplane itself. The locked cockpit door just created a “safe space” in which the co-pilot could work his plan out.
So what’s the point of Continue reading
Getting Ansible to talk to your Cisco devices
As a listener to the podcast you’ve probably heard about Ansible once or twice already. In short Ansible is a simple IT automation tool. It’s often mentioned together with Puppet, however a big difference is that Ansible is agentless. Using Puppet assumes that you have a Puppet agent installed on the nodes that you want […]
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The post Getting Ansible to talk to your Cisco devices appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Patrick Ogenstad.
Article: Is NFV Relevant for Enterprise Networks?
Network Computing recently published my “Yes, NFV Is Important For The Enterprise” article. Short summary: NFV is (like BGP and MPLS) yet another technology that is considered applicable only to service provider networks but makes great sense in some enterprise contexts.
I’ll talk about enterprise aspects of NFV at Interop Las Vegas, and describe some NFV technical details and typical use cases in an upcoming webinar.
HTIRW: Reality at the Mic (2)
Last time we talked about a few things that go wrong in the IETF — this time we’ll talk about a few more things that can go wrong. Boiling the Ocean. Engineers, as a rule, like to solve problems. The problem is we often seem to think the bigger the problem, the better the solution. […]
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The post HTIRW: Reality at the Mic (2) appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.
All About That YANG at the 92nd IETF Meeting
All About That YANG at the 92nd IETF Meeting
by Cengiz Alaettinoglu, CTO - April 7, 2015
I was at the 92nd IETF meeting in Dallas a few weeks ago. I attended 16 sessions, mostly in the routing area, and every single one had a discussion about the YANG data model (indeed most had several such discussions).
YANG is the data modeling language for the NETCONF protocol. NETCONF/YANG was picked by the Interface to Routing System (I2RS) Working Group for an SDN controller to interact with IP/MPLS routers. It makes an IP/MPLS network programmable. There are other IETF protocols in play as well, such as Path Computation Element Protocol (PCEP). To make SDN management and orchestration (MANO) service aware, we need to bind these paths to the services they are intended for. This is where NETCONF/YANG data models come to the rescue. I was very pleased to see the attention NETCONF/YANG data models got at the IETF.
One thing that can hinder quick adoption and implementation for some data models is competing proposals. Indeed, some camps have formed around competing proposals. This is not unusual in the IETF. Different Internet-drafts (documents intended to be adopted by Continue reading
Cisco VIRL Exclude From Launch
One of the few pet-peeves with Cisco’s VIRL has been waiting for a bunch of things to start, when I just needed a couple from that simulation. Not sure if this is a new update though it’s...[[ Summary content only, you can read everything now, just visit the site for full story ]]
EIGRP “FD is Infinity”
Let's take a look at EIGRP and the state a route can get into where EIGRP tells you “FD is Infinity”.