What’s Next for Cuba?
Nearly two years ago, we broke the story about the activation of the first submarine cable connecting Cuba to the global Internet – a cable that, prior to its activation in January 2013, mysteriously lay dormant on the ocean floor for nearly two years. When the Cuban government issued a confirmation in the days following our report, it contained the following statement:
|
|
In other words, Cubans should not expect greater access to the Internet just because the ALBA-1 submarine cable was now in operation. Yesterday’s historic agreement to begin normalizing relations between Cuba and the United States contains a pledge by the Cuban government to “greatly expand its citizens’ access to the Internet.” What exactly this pledge entails will determine how the Internet evolves in Cuba in the near term. Decision makers in Cuba should look at another country that recently opened up its telecom sector and is presently experiencing an explosion in Internet growth: Myanmar.
Cuban Isolation
The isolation of Cuba is plainly evident when looking at a map of the submarine cables in the Continue reading
Cisco BGP soft-reconfiguration and received-routes relation
A while ago I received the following question:
“Why I’m not seeing the prefixes received from the BGP peer when using the show ip bgp neighbors x.x.x.x received-routes while the soft-reconfiguration inbound is not enabled?”
Read more on Cisco BGP soft-reconfiguration and received-routes relation…
Alcatel-Lucent Virtualized Simulator on GNS3
http://brezular.com/2014/12/18/alcatel-lucent-virtualized-simulator-on-gns3/ Enjoy! "The Alcatel-Lucent virtualized SimulatorMPLS Tech Talks: RSVP-TE 101
After discussing the basics of MPLS, MPLS-TE and LDP, and the relationship between FECs, LDP and BGP, Seamus and myself focused on another interesting topic: how MPLS protocol stack uses RSVP to implement traffic engineering.
Alcatel-Lucent Virtualized Simulator on GNS3
The Alcatel-Lucent virtualized Simulator (vSim) is a virtualization-ready version of SR OS called SR OS-VM. This new operating system is designed to run in a virtual machine (VM) on a generic Intel x86 server. In control and management plane aspects, the vSim is functionally and operationally equivalent to an Alcatel-Lucent hardware-based SR OS router.The vSim is intended to be used as a laboratory tool to fully simulate the control and management plane of an SR OS node. The vSim is not intended to be used in a production network environment and the forwarding plane is limited to 250 pps per interface. Furthermore, without a license file it will run for 1 hour before reloading.
Host Software and Hardware Requirements
- Linux x86-64
- Qemu emulator version 2.1.2 (qemu-system-x86_64 or i386)
- GNS3 version 1.2 or later
- RAM - at least 4 GB
- CPU with hardware virtualization support (VT-x or AMD-V)
Virtual Machines Software and Hardware Requirements
- TiMOS-B-12.0.R6 ALCATEL SR 7750, TiMOS-SR-12.0.R6-vm.zip
- RAM 2048 MB, CPU x86-32
- Qemu additional parameters: -nographic -enable-kvm
1. Installation Steps
Extract image from the zip file.
$ unzip TiMOS-SR-12.0.R6-vm.zip
$ cd vm/7xxx-i386/
Now a virtual disk sros-vm.qcow2 is extracted. To start Qemu virtual Continue reading
HTIRW: Standards Bodies
(yes, I know, it’s been a while… But it’s time to get back to this series) Up to this point in this series, we’ve been discussing the more technical aspects of how the Internet really works. Now I want to shift gears a little, and talk about some of the more political aspects — standards […]
Author information
The post HTIRW: Standards Bodies appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.
What does “scale out” vs. “scale up” mean?
When researching data center network architectures, you will find the terms “scale out” and — rather less frequently — “scale up” used. What do these terms mean? I’m going to discuss these terms in a networking sense. If you search, you’ll find that applications and storage also have concepts of scaling out vs. […]Show 217 – IETF, YANG Proliferation and the Lack of Cooperation and Co-ordination
This week are talking about the IETF and it's inability to cope with massive change in networking around SDN and NFV. For example, there are more than 70 drafts on NETCONF models for common networking tasks that often overlap or repeat the same work. What does this means for standards development ?
Author information
The post Show 217 – IETF, YANG Proliferation and the Lack of Cooperation and Co-ordination appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.
How Many Hosts In An VLAN or IP Subnet and Why ?
It is common to allocate /24 or /22 subnets to a single VLAN but William writes to ask why and whether is related to broadcasts. What is the best subnet size for VLAN allocation and why ? The answer isn't what you think.
The post How Many Hosts In An VLAN or IP Subnet and Why ? appeared first on EtherealMind.
5 Great Reasons to Store and Analyze Centralized Logs
by Rod Lewis, originally published on the Auvik blog More than that, not logging or ignoring your logs is like not checking your blindspotI (don’t) like Big Buffers.
Recently Arista released a white paper surrounding the idea that having deeper buffers running within the network can help to alleviate the incast congestion patterns that can present when a large number of many-to-one connections are happening within a network. Also known as the TCP incast problem. They pointedly targeted Hadoop clusters, as the incast problem can rear its ugly head when utilizing the Hadoop Cluster for MapReduce functions. The study used an example of 20 servers hanging off of a single ToR switch that has 40Gbps of uplink capacity within a Leaf/Spine network, presenting a 5:1 oversubscription ratio. This type of oversubscription was just seen in the recent release of the Facebook network that is used within their data centers. So its safe to assume that these types of oversubscription ratios are seen in the wild. I know I’ve run my fair share of oversubscribed networks in the past.
Treating the Symptom
This particular study actually prods at what is the achilles heel of the traditional leaf/spine network design. All nodes being within 3 switch hops, (ToR <-> Spine <-> ToR), does provide a predictable pathing within the minds of the network operators of today, but I posit that Continue reading
IKEv2 VPN – ASA/IOS
In our next blog post, we will focus on configuring an IKEv2 VPN between the ASA and IOS.
Is there anything special about that configuration? Yes and no. It is still “just” IKEv2 that will take care of negotiating our tunnels, but there will definitely be a difference in how we configure one platform versus another. Remember – tunnel interfaces are not supported on the ASA, at least as of 8.6, and this generally means that we will not be able to use tunnels (FlexVPNs) on IOS, too (there is actually one small exception to this rule, but it will not be discussed in this article).
Let’s take a look at our simple network:
We’ll try to build a VPN tunnel between R10 and ASA3 that we will then use to protect traffic flowing between VLANs 10 and 8. I am going to start with the ASA configuration.
First and foremost – the Policy. Note that PRF must generally be the same as what you have selected for Integrity/Hashing:
crypto ikev2 policy 10
encryption aes-256
integrity sha384
prf sha384
group 14
We will authenticate the tunnel using pre-shared-keys, and since authentication method is no longer negotiated in IKEv2 we Continue reading
Python paths and Cron logging
I created two new twitter accounts yesterday and the amount of followers in such a short time is great to see. Feel free to follow them here – @bgp4_table and @bgp6_table The accounts get updated through Python, and that Python script is run via a cron job once every six hours. I noticed that when […]VRF Lite on Nexus 5600
One of the networking engineers using my ExpertExpress to validate their network design had an interesting problem: he was building a multi-tenant VLAN-based private cloud architecture with each tenant having multiple subnets, and wanted to route within the tenant network as close to the VMs as possible (in the ToR switch).
He was using Nexus 5600 as the ToR switch, and although there’s conflicting information on the number of VRFs supported by that switch (verified topology: 25 VRFs, verified maximum: 1000 VRFs, configuration guide: 64 VRFs), he thought 25 VRFs (tenant routing domains) might be enough.
Read more ...New CCIE RSv5 Workbook Labs & Enhancements
Foundation Lab 2 has now been added to the CCIE RSv5 Workbook. This lab is great for working on your configuration speed and accuracy when combining multiple technologies together. It also has a great redistribution section that I hope you’ll all enjoy 
More Full Scale, Troubleshooting, and Foundation labs are in progress and will be posted soon. I’ll post another update about them when they are available.
In addition to this we’ve added some feature enhancements to the workbook in response to customer requests and feedback. First, there is a new Table of Contents for the workbook that allows you to view all tasks, and to check off tasks that you’ve already completed. This will help you track your progress as you’re going through the workbook.
You can additionally check off the progress of a task in the upper right hand portion of the individual lab page.
Multiple bookmarks are now supported, and will be added to a section under the Table of Contents. When you open the workbook it will now also prompt you to load your latest bookmark.
Lastly, configuration solutions are now hidden by default when you open a lab. This will help prevent “spoilers” in the Continue reading
Know Your ASIC Inside!
We all tend to want to position a new idea and compare it to an old or familiar reference point. As the industry learns how to internalizeIPsec VPN Mikrotik to Linux
After writing the Mikrotik IPsec VPN article and I got some questions about how Mikrotik will work with a Linux device to build an IPsec VPN. I did notice that the questions were more oriented for a copy / paste solution, so I’ll provide one that it’s working. If you need more details about why the solution is like it this, please let me know.
Also don’t forget to customize the solution as you need.