Musing: Who Cares About FCoE in 2015 ?
While I continue to scratch my head about who is foolish enough to actually deploy FCoE, perhaps a more important question is which vendors care about it ?
The post Musing: Who Cares About FCoE in 2015 ? appeared first on EtherealMind.
Birth of the virtual mainframe?
For this week’s blog, I wanted to share some perspective on technology transformation, over a time span of 20+ years – thisExperimenting with the CSR1000v REST API
This all started because we occasionally want to block traffic from an IP address or two for a short time. Our firewall is a pain to configure for this sort of thing: adding a drop for a single IP address literally takes 10 minutes. You have to open a fat client, create an object, add the object to a group, save the config, verify the config, push the config, etc.I thought that SRTBH (Source-based Real-Time Black Hole) implemented by BGP would be the ticket: fast, easy, and theoretically easy to automate with the REST API in the Cisco Cloud Services Router 1000v. SRTBH is a simple and elegant way of dropping selected traffic on BGP speaking routers. In a nutshell:
- You configure a "trigger router" that speaks iBGP with the rest of your BGP-speaking routers (usually your Internet edge or transit routers), but doesn't participate in traffic forwarding.
- On each edge/transit router you configure a static route to null0 for an unused /32, usually 192.0.2.1: ip route 192.0.2.1 255.255.255.255 null0
- On each edge/transit router you configure loose-mode unicast RPF filtering on your outside interfaces: ip verify source reachable-via any. Continue reading
Experimenting with the CSR1000v REST API
This all started because we occasionally want to block traffic from an IP address or two for a short time. Our firewall is a pain to configure for this sort of thing: adding a drop for a single IP address literally takes 10 minutes. You have to open a fat client, create an object, add the object to a group, save the config, verify the config, push the config, etc.I thought that SRTBH (Source-based Real-Time Black Hole) implemented by BGP would be the ticket: fast, easy, and theoretically easy to automate with the REST API in the Cisco Cloud Services Router 1000v. SRTBH is a simple and elegant way of dropping selected traffic on BGP speaking routers. In a nutshell:
- You configure a "trigger router" that speaks iBGP with the rest of your BGP-speaking routers (usually your Internet edge or transit routers), but doesn't participate in traffic forwarding.
- On each edge/transit router you configure a static route to null0 for an unused /32, usually 192.0.2.1: ip route 192.0.2.1 255.255.255.255 null0
- On each edge/transit router you configure loose-mode unicast RPF filtering on your outside interfaces: ip verify source reachable-via any. Continue reading
Five Next-Gen Networker Skills
With all the flux that is going on in the networking space, it’s hard to figure out what to do next. You may want to add to your skillset, but you’re not sure where to throw your effort. I’d like to focus on five different areas you can focus on, without talking about a specific product – at the end of the day, that’s just implementation details. These areas are going to be increasingly more valuable and will help you be more marketable when added to your existing network knowledge and experience.
This isn’t meant to say that all of these skills are required to move your career forward; indeed, everyone’s situation is unique. These are just ideas – the way you implement these skillsets in your own life is up to you.
1. Software Skills
Here, I’m not necessarily talking about full-fledged code knowledge. This section isn’t about going and getting a 4 year CS degree. This is mostly about tools, methodologies, and workflows. For some, this will include some kind of interpreted language like Python, but will vary in degree greatly from person to person.
To help get more detailed with this point, I’d like to drill down on four very Continue reading
Five Next-Gen Networker Skills
With all the flux that is going on in the networking space, it’s hard to figure out what to do next. You may want to add to your skillset, but you’re not sure where to throw your effort. I’d like to focus on five different areas you can focus on, without talking about a specific product - at the end of the day, that’s just implementation details. These areas are going to be increasingly more valuable and will help you be more marketable when added to your existing network knowledge and experience.
This isn’t meant to say that all of these skills are required to move your career forward; indeed, everyone’s situation is unique. These are just ideas - the way you implement these skillsets in your own life is up to you.
1. Software Skills
Here, I’m not necessarily talking about full-fledged code knowledge. This section isn’t about going and getting a 4 year CS degree. This is mostly about tools, methodologies, and workflows. For some, this will include some kind of interpreted language like Python, but will vary in degree greatly from person to person.
To help get more detailed with this point, I’d like to drill down on four very Continue reading
Testing Cumulus Linux with Serverspec
As configuration management software has matured, engineers have recognized the importance of testing and validation. A comprehensive set of tools has been been developed around configuration management software such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible and others that allow you to test your configuration management scripts.
One of these tools is Serverspec, which is an RSpec testing framework for checking that servers are configured correctly by testing their actual state.
Serverspec can execute its tests on a remote host (such as a Cumulus Linux switch) via. SSH. The tests express how the system should be configured and Serverspec will test that the current system configuration meets those expectations.
Using Serverspec to validate your switch configuration means that you can make changes to your configuration management scripts and be confident that the changes have been applied correctly and worked as intended.
Getting started
Because Serverspec natively supports Cumulus Linux, all you have to do is install Serverspec and create your tests. If you’ve never used Serverspec before, the serverspec-init command will create an example called sample_spec.rb. Adding your own files is very simple; just make sure the filename ends in _spec.rb and the first line of the file is require 'spec_helper'
Writing tests
Individual Serverspec tests are Continue reading