Happy Holidays from Packet Design
Happy Holidays from Packet Design
by Patrick Kilgore, Interactive Marketing Manager - December 23, 2014
It is that time of year again… and what a difference a year makes! We grew leaps and bounds in 2014, increasing our headcount as an organization and working hard to provide our customers with the best in route analytics technology.
To give back for all our good fortune in 2014, we adopted two families in the Austin area and provided additional "cheer" to make their holidays bright. Everyone at Packet Design came together to donate gifts and their time, and we could not have been happier at the participation in such a worthy endeavor. Packet Design would like to extend a special thanks to Angela Reyna, a key member of our marketing team, for putting it all together. It is moments like these that give us pause to remember that people, working as a team, make our organization a success. So from our Packet Design family to yours, we wish you Happy Holidays and a spirited New Year!
Below are photos from our wrapping party, where the Packet Design elves showed off their gift-wrapping and logistics skills:
Automating Cisco Nexus Switches with Ansible
In previous posts, I’ve written about using Ansible for network automation. Few of them can be found here, here, here, and here. In one of the posts, I had a video that was automating Cisco routers with Ansible, and was using onePK as the API to communicate to the device. In this post, I’ll be focusing on automating Nexus switches – this means each of the Ansible modules will be using NX-API to communicate with the device. This also eliminates the need for the users of these modules to know Python as they’ll be using the Ansible platform for their specific automation needs.
While the demo below is for configuration automation and shows what can be done in just a few seconds, it needs to be understood that automation is much more than pushing configurations. I hope to show some of this first hand by doing more interesting things as it pertains to data gathering, verification, troubleshooting, that do increase speed and agility, but also predictability.
The following video shows how Ansible can be used to automate interfaces and VLANs on Nexus switches. This will be the first in a Continue reading
The following video shows how Ansible can be used to automate interfaces and VLANs on Nexus switches. This will be the first in a Continue reading
PQ Show 38 – HP Networking, Helion, OpenStack and Cloud Networking
HP Helion is the cloud platform HP is bringing to Enterprise for private cloud and used by HP to build their Helion public cloud. In this show, recorded at HP Discover as part of our show coverege, we talk about Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) for OpenStack that uses OpenFlow and OVSDB as a basis for implementing features in the physical network in OpenStack and Helion.
Author information
The post PQ Show 38 – HP Networking, Helion, OpenStack and Cloud Networking appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.
Merry Christmas to the PacketU Community
I wanted to take a moment to wish all PacketU readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. With that, I leave you with a short video clip of my son playing Silent Night at a church program last week. Longtime friends know that we had a pretty serious health scare with him 5 years ago and we count ourselves very blessed to have him in our lives.
The post Merry Christmas to the PacketU Community appeared first on PacketU.
Someone Disconnects North Korea – Who?
North Korea went off the Internet Monday, 22 December 2014, at 16:15 UTC (01:15 UTC Tuesday in Pyongyang) after more than 24 hours of sustained weekend instability. Dyn continually measures the connectivity and performance of more than 510,000 individual networks worldwide, identifying impairments to Internet commerce. It’s a rare event these days when an entire country leaves the Internet (as Egypt did, or Syria). Even so, when North Korea’s four networks went dark, we were not entirely surprised, based on the fragility of their national connectivity to the global Internet.
Who caused this, and how? A long pattern of up-and-down connectivity, followed by a total outage, seems consistent with a fragile network under external attack. But it’s also consistent with more common causes, such as power problems. Point causes such as breaks in fiberoptic cables, or deliberate upstream provider disconnections, seem less likely because they don’t generate prolonged instability before a total failure. We can only guess. The data themselves don’t speak to motivations, or distinguish human factors from physical infrastructure problems.
As the sun rises in Pyongyang, the national Internet disconnection continues. An outage of this duration is not without precedent for North Korea. As we’ve written before, Continue reading
Automating Cisco Nexus Switches with Ansible
For the past several years, the open source [network] community has been rallying around Ansible as a platform for network automation. Just over a year ago, Ansible recognized the importance of embracing the network community and since then, has made significant additions to offer network automation out of the box. In this post, we’ll look at two distinct models you can use when automating network devices with Ansible, specifically focusing on Cisco Nexus switches. I’ll refer to these models as CLI-Driven and Abstraction-Driven Automation.
Note: We’ll see in later posts how we can use these models and a third model to accomplish intent-driven automation as well.
For this post, we’ve chosen to highlight Nexus as there are more Nexus Ansible modules than any other network operating system as of Ansible 2.2 making it extremely easy to highlight these two models.
CLI-Driven Automation
The first way to manage network devices with Ansible is to use the Ansible modules that are supported by a diverse number of operating systems including NX-OS, EOS, Junos, IOS, IOS-XR, and many more. These modules can be considered the lowest common denominator as they work the same way across operating systems requiring you to define the Continue reading
North Korea Goes Offline
It was reported earlier today that North Korea was having Internet connectivity issues.
Now obviously given recent events with Sony, this sort of report is far more fascinating than it normally would be. The first question when you see this type of report is whether it’s purely a connectivity issue or whether an attack is behind it. While visibility into North Korean Internet is quite difficult, we are able to see quite a few attacks over the last few days.
1.) All targets are in this netblock:
inetnum: 175.45.176.0 – 175.45.179.255
netname: STAR-KP
descr: Ryugyong-dong
descr: Potong-gang District
country: KP
admin-c: SJVC1-AP
tech-c: SJVC1-AP
status: ALLOCATED PORTABLE
2.) pDNS Data on the specific targets
175.45.176.8 – This appears to be primary DNS
175.45.176.9 – This appears to be secondary DNS
175.45.176.10 – smtp.star-co.net.kp
175.45.176.67 – naenara.com.kp
175.45.176.77 – Unknown
175.45.176.79 – www.ryongnamsan.edu.kp
3.) Port Analysis
– All attacks on the 18th, 19th and 20th target port 80
– All attacks (except for one) on the 21st Continue reading
iPexpert Introduces Jarrod Mills, as CTO and Sr. Routing and Switching Product Portfolio Director / Instructor
As a former attorney, I often found myself drawn to the comfort and familiarity of my office computer. While the thought of spending countless hours toiling over legal briefs caused me much discomfort, spending that same amount of time on a computer was therapeutic. Now, many years later, I can see how my transition into IT was a natural progression, but at the time it seemed crazy to those close to me.
From my formative years on the competitive math team in middle school and high school, to attending college, graduate school and law school on full academic scholarships, I have always striven to excel. What I lacked in career path clarity, I made up for in sheer determination.
Over the past 20 years, I have been fortunate enough to pursue my passion in networking, designing and building world-class networks for Fortune 50 companies throughout the world. Through hard work and perseverance, I have been able to attain 4 CCIE’s (Routing and Switching, Security, Service Provider, Data Center – AND – Wayne has already given me a deadline for #5! ;-). I’ve also been able to amass countless other IT certifications, while simultaneously mentoring and teaching numerous friends and colleagues in Continue reading
Kyoto Tycoon Secure Replication
Kyoto Tycoon is a distributed key-value store written by FAL Labs, and it is used extensively at CloudFlare. Like many popular key-value stores, Kyoto Tycoon uses timestamp-based replication to ensure eventual consistency and guarantee ordering. Kyoto Tycoon is an open source project, and in the spirit of the holidays, we’re contributing our internal changes back to the open source project.
CC BY-ND 2.0 image by Moyan Brenn
CloudFlare uses Kyoto Tycoon to replicate data from a Postgres Database to our 30 data centers around the world. In practice, it takes around 3 seconds for full propagation in normal conditions. This is our pipeline for distributing sensitive data like our session ticket keys and DNS data to the CloudFlare edge.
Protecting data in transit
If the Internet is not a dangerous place, it at least has dangerous neighborhoods. To move from one datacenter to another, data has to pass through the public Internet. Data could end up going though some network with a wire-tap in place, or through a network with an unscrupulous network operator.
Datacenter-to-datacenter encryption has been brought into the international spotlight since the surveillance revelations. One of the leaked slides contained the expression “SSL added Continue reading
Fabric visibility with Cumulus Linux
A leaf and spine fabric is challenging to monitor. The fabric spreads traffic across all the switches and links in order to maximize bandwidth. Unlike traditional hierarchical network designs, where a small number of links can be monitored to provide visibility, a leaf and spine network has no special links or switches where running CLI commands or attaching a probe would provide visibility. Even if it were possible to attach probes, the effective bandwidth of a leaf and spine network can be as high as a Petabit/second, well beyond the capabilities of current generation monitoring tools.The 2 minute video provides an overview of some of the performance challenges with leaf and spine fabrics and demonstrates Fabric View - a monitoring solution that leverages industry standard sFlow instrumentation in commodity data center switches to provide real-time visibility into fabric performance.
Fabric View is free to try, just register at http://www.myinmon.com/ and request an evaluation. The software requires an accurate network topology in order to characterize performance and this article will describe how to obtain the topology from a Cumulus Networks fabric.
Complex Topology and Wiring Validation in Data Centers describes how Cumulus Networks' prescriptive topology manager (PTM) provides Continue reading
Automation Isn’t Just About Speed
In talking with folks about automation, the conversation almost always come around to “speed, speed, speed”. It’s easy to see why this is the first benefit that pops into mind – we’ve all spent gratuitous amounts of time doing repetitive, time-consuming tasks. It’s obvious why the prospect of automating these tasks and getting the time back is such an attractive one, even though most of us that have tried know that this is an absolute reality:
All kidding (but some…..seriousing?) aside, is speed the only benefit? In the realm of IT infrastructure, should we pursue automation only when this other piece of brilliance tells us it’s worth it?
Consider a small deployment of a few switches, a router, maybe some servers. Using manual methods to configure the relatively small amount of infrastructure isn’t really sexy, but it’s also not a huge time suck either. There’s just not a lot of infrastructure in these small deployments, and manual configuration doesn’t really impact the rate of change.
As a result, when discussing automation concepts with small, and even medium-size shops, I’m usually met with understandable skepticism. There’s a huge part of IT industry that assumes that all of our Continue reading
Check your Control Plane
Here it's a short post to explain how you can monitor the control plane activity with ddos-protection's statistics and a simple op-script. ddos-protection is a default feature only available on MPC cards which allows to secure the linecard's CPU and the...Check your Control Plane
Here it's a short post to explain how you can monitor the control plane activity with ddos-protection's statistics and a simple op-script. ddos-protection is a default feature only available on MPC cards which allows to secure the linecard's CPU and the...Automation Isn’t Just About Speed
In talking with folks about automation, the conversation almost always come around to “speed, speed, speed”. It’s easy to see why this is the first benefit that pops into mind - we’ve all spent gratuitous amounts of time doing repetitive, time-consuming tasks. It’s obvious why the prospect of automating these tasks and getting the time back is such an attractive one, even though most of us that have tried know that this is an absolute reality:Automation Isn’t Just About Speed
In talking with folks about automation, the conversation almost always come around to “speed, speed, speed”. It’s easy to see why this is the first benefit that pops into mind - we’ve all spent gratuitous amounts of time doing repetitive, time-consuming tasks. It’s obvious why the prospect of automating these tasks and getting the time back is such an attractive one, even though most of us that have tried know that this is an absolute reality:Making the Most of Wi-Fi Calling
I n the time since Apple’s revelation that iOS 8 would support a form of Wi-Fi calling, the industry has seen a barrage of announcements, even TV commercials, around Wi-Fi calling. Come to find out that many of them are...Facebook’s AIs want you to stop you making a fool of yourself
I’ve always found the tendency of Facebook users to over-share a little strange. You see people exposing their lives in ways that are occasionally charming, often inexplicable, and frequently downright ridiculous or ill-advised (or often both of the latter at the same time).
Gregg O'Connell / Flickr Probably shouldn't be posted on Facebook.
In the latter category are the posts of people who are obviously in advanced states of inebriation doing things that don’t require a caption to reveal that they are being idiots. These kind of posts are the sort of thing that, once sober, will be regretted and will never, ever disappear becoming fodder for the poster’s mother’s disapproval and unwanted attention from employers both current and future.
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My Podcasts
Since taking a new role at Cisco, my drive time is less consistent. As a result, finding opportunities to listen to podcasts is more of a challenge. Earlier this week, a road trip I took provided some time to start getting caught up on my listening. Using iCatcher allows me to easily tweet what I’m listening too. As a result of sharing what I listened to, I received some requests regarding the podcasts I listen to. I wanted to share this ever changing list with the PacketU community.
Technology Podcasts
- Cisco Champion Radio
- Cisco TAC Security Podcast Series
- No Strings Attached Show
- Packet Pushers Podcast
- Risky Business
- Software Gone Wild by ipSpace.net
- The Class-C Block
- The IPv6 Show
- The Southern Fried Security Podcast
- VUPaaS – Virtualization as a Service
Business and Leadership
- Freakonomics Radio
- Home Work
- The EntreLeadership Podcast
Also beyond the technology focus of this audience, I often listen to Cold Case Christianity–a Christian Apologetics podcast and Focus on the Family–a faith based podcast focused on strengthening families.
I’m always looking for new sources for good information. If you have podcasts that you enjoy listening to, please share them by sending them to @packetu or commenting below.
Disclaimer: This Continue reading