5 Dev Tools for Network Engineers
I’d like to write about five things that you as a hardcore, operations-focused network engineer can do to evolve your skillsets, and take advantage of some of the methodologies that have for so long given huge benefits to the software development community. I won’t be showing you how to write code - this is less about programming, and more about the tools that software developers use every day to work more efficiently.Secret Sunday – Jason Edelman
That handsome visage is owned by Jason Edelman, the subject of today’s Secret Sunday. I’ve met Jason a few times through some Tech Field Day events like Networking Field Day, and most recently, at Tech Field Day Extra at Interop NYC 2014, … Continue reading
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SYDI-Server 2.4
It’s now over 10 years since I released the first version of SYDI-Server, back in August 2004. During the first years I wrote quite a bit of code and kept adding features to the different scripts. However, the last version SYDI-Server 2.3 was released in 2009. So one could say that development has slowed down a bit. However even today it gets a few hundred downloads every week. Even today I keep getting emails from people who’ve just found SYDI for the first time and are loving it. Continue reading
Google and Cloudflare: Encrypting the WWW
A couple of months ago, Google announced that it had started using SSL as a factor in SEO ranking. Since the search giant is the referrer for most website traffic, this is the type of announcement that gets the attention of website owners.
Cloudflare, a popular and easy to implement Content Delivery Network, seems to be stepping up to this challenge. Even their free offering has an option to provide forward facing SSL services. As discussed on Packet Pushsers Priority Queue show 34, they are also modifying SSL in ways that allow them to provide services to organizations without the need to obtain the site owner’s private keys. The likely result of the offering is that many existing and many new Cloudflare customers will take advantage of their SSL services.
Paul’s Take–I think Google’s announcement, combined with Cloudflare’s SSL offerings, will result in a significant increase of SSL encrypted traffic. This will have an interesting effect on how organizations do security. Traditionally, there has been a lower (but increasing) ratio of https to http traffic. Scanning SSL traffic, for troubleshooting or security, is significantly more challenging than its clear text counterpart.
Disclaimer: This article includes the independent thoughts, opinions, commentary or technical detail of Paul Stewart. Continue reading
Show Me The Route: FWSM Grumbles
Time for a quick rant. It’s possible that I am forgetting some trick I learned in the past (in which case I’m sure somebody can help me out in the comments), but why, on a Cisco Firewall Services Module (FWSM), … Continue reading
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Network Break 18
This week we round up the news and talk about latest vendor happenings.
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The post Network Break 18 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.
JNCIE Ent Workbook
Over the past few months I have been preparing to take the JNCIE-ENT lab exam. As part of my studies I adopted the plan of “Teaching What I Am Studying.” The culmination of all the study, over 500 pages of text, will be for sale via Leanpub shortly. The reason I have chosen Leanpub is […]Plexxi Pulse—Challenging the Value of the Public Cloud + DemoFriday
Plexxi recently teamed up with Colovore, Piston Cloud Computing and King Star Computers to publish a whitepaper that challenges the assumption that the public cloud is inherently cheaper than the private cloud. Though the rapid speed of deployment and reduced capital expenditure has made services such as Amazon EC2 very attractive, the study shows that the rate of cost increase is often higher than that of a self-hosted private cloud solution. Brandon Butler recently reported on the paper’s findings for Network World.
We hope you were able to tune into DemoFriday today on SDNCentral. Our own Ed Henry and Nils Stewart did an excellent job of explaining how to construct Big Data fabrics that easily integrate with systems like OpenStack and Cloudera. We’ll share the full webinar once it’s live on SDNCentral’s site.
In this week’s PlexxiTube of the week, Dan Backman explains how Plexxi’s datacenter transport fabric can light up dark fiber between buildings on university campuses.
We’ve had a busy October! Check out what we’ve been up to on social media this month below. Have a great weekend!
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Response: Cisco Announces Membership of Open Compute Project
A blog post on the Cisco’s website announces Cisco joins Open Compute Project as a Gold member: To that list, I am pleased to announce that we recently joined the Open Compute Project as a Gold member. The motivation behind our membership is similar to our involvement in the aforementioned open networking projects: we see […]
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The A10 Health Monitor You Didn’t Know About
If you’re used to configuring f5 LTM load balancers, you’re probably used to the idea that you normally set two health checks for each VIP you have. The first is at the node level, often just an ICMP ping, which … Continue reading
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INE v5 Full-Scale Practice Lab1 TS GNS3 topology
How does the internet work - We know what is networking
Few days ago I added an article with Config GNS3 topology for newly published INE Routing and Switching Workbook v5 Full-Scale LAB1. Here’s now the topology with starting config of TS section for LAB1. I will not insert here any of my stories today as the same article was published before but with other topology files so if you would like more info, just go to previous post INE R&Sv5 Workbook Full-Scale Practice Lab1 made in GNS3 DOWNLOAD Everything should work fine in this lab except OSPF Loop-Free Alternate Fast Reroute which is not supported so you will be unable
Tech Talks: Introduction to Label Distribution Protocol (LDP)
In the third part of MPLS Tech Talks we focused on the role of label distribution protocol (LDP) and its operation in frame-mode MPLS. You can watch the video on the ipSpace.net Tech Talks web page.
Docker networking
When docker launches a linux container it will, by default, assign it a private IP address out of RFC 1918 space. It connects this container to the host OS using a bridged interface (docker0). Connectivity between the outside world and the container depends on NAT.
Outbound traffic is NATed using the host’s IP address. Inbound traffic requires explicit port mapping rules that map a port on the host to a port in the container. Given that typically one runs multiple containers in the same host there needs to be a map between a host port (in the dynamic port range) and a service port on the container.
For example, the HTTP service port (80) in container-1 will be mapped to port 49153 while container-2 would see its HTTP port mapped to host port 49154. Ports that are not explicitly mapped cannot receive incoming traffic. Also containers within the same host will see different IP address ports than containers across different hosts (not very ‘cloudy’).
This is the reason why using a network virtualization solution such as OpenContrail is so appealing. OpenContrail, replaces docker’s networking implementation which can be disabled by using –net=none. It provides each container its own IP address in Continue reading
Tech Notes: Ping Sweep an IP Subnet
This is my current goto code snippet for using the BASH command line to perform a ping sweep through an IPv4 subnet. for i in `seq 1 255`; do ping -c 1 192.168.1.$i | tr \n ' ' | awk '/1 received/ {print $2}'; done This script is deliberately simple, only works for /24 subnets but […]
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A10 – That Global Health Monitor Warning
In a previous post I whined that the A10 load balancers by default only need to see a single successful health check from a service in order to mark it as up. I argued that that’s not a good idea, … Continue reading
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Network Engineers, Pay Attention to Big Data
You have probably realized we are having a Big Data kind of week here at the Plexxi blog. And for good reason. The amount of development and change in this big bucket of applications we conveniently label “Big Data”, is astonishing.
Walking around at Hadoopworld in New York last week, I initially felt somewhat lost as a “networking guy”. But that feeling of “not belonging” is only superficial, the network has a tremendously important role in these applications. The challenge is that many “networking” folks don’t quite understand or realize that yet, but contrary to what I believed not too long ago, Big Data Application folks have a pretty good understanding of the role of the network in their overall application and its performance.
As an industry we have been talking about the increase in east-west traffic for quite a few years now. For your typical datacenter infrastructure today this is based on loosely coupled applications and semi-distributed storage. A web based application has many components that together make up the application we see as users. There are application load balancers, web server front ends, application back ends that in turn have databases for their data storage. And those databases Continue reading
Thoughts of My Day: VCE Always Was An EMC Property
EMC announced during it’s quarterly results that it was taking a larger position in VCE. VCE was always an EMC asset, co-operation with partners Cisco, Intel and VMware has never been strong and this simply closes out the current chapter. The end result positions EMC to also be a “IBM style” company with a full […]
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IPv6 in a Global Company – a Real-World Example
More than a year ago I wrote a response to a comment Pascal wrote on my Predicting the IPv6 BGP table size blog post. I recently rediscovered it and figured out that it’s (unfortunately) as relevant as it was almost 18 months ago.
Other people have realized we have this problem in the meantime, and are still being told to stop yammering because the problem is not real. Let’s see what happens in a few years.
Read more ...Show 209 – HP Networks and Network Management – Sponsored
Talking about Network Management get mixed reactions in the network industry with a rich history of products that didn't match our expectations or needs. In today's sponsored podcast, HP Networking continues their mission to change the way network engineers feel about their NMS's through the HP Intelligent Management Center.
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The post Show 209 – HP Networks and Network Management – Sponsored appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.
New CCIE RSv5 Troubleshooting/Full Scale Rack Rentals & Labs
Rack Rentals for INE’s CCIE RSv5 Workbook’s Troubleshooting Labs and Full Scale Labs are now available via the Members Site. To access them login to http://members.ine.com, click “Rack Rentals” on the dashboard on the left, and then click “Schedule” under “CCIE Routing & Switching v5 Full Scale.”
This topology uses 20 routers and 4 switches and is for both Troubleshooting and Full Scale Labs. The topology above it, “CCIE Routing & Switching v5″, uses 10 routers and 4 switches, and supports all the Advanced Technology Labs and Foundation Labs.
The loading and saving of initial configs is supported through the Rack Control Panel, which can greatly save you time in your studies, especially with very large topologies such as those used in the Troubleshooting and Full Scale Labs.
Additionally, Full Scale Lab 2 and Troubleshooting Lab 2 have been posted to the CCIE RSv5 Workbook. More Foundation, Troubleshooting, and Full Scale Labs are currently in development and will be posted soon. For discussion on these new labs please visit the CCIE RSv5 Workbook section of IEOC, our online community.