The Inner Ring
An avid reader of C.S. Lewis, I often find his thoughts and statements applicable far outside his original intent. For instance, in 1944 (at least a few years before I was born I feel safe to say), he gave an amazing lecture at the Memorial Lecture of King’s College, University of London. The entire speech can be found here, but to gain a sense of his statement, consider the following quote:
And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders Continue reading
Networking’s atomic unit: Going small to scale up
The major IT trends are all being driven by what can probably best be summarized as more. Some of the stats are actually fairly eye-popping:
- 40% of the world’s 7 billion people connected in 2014
- 3 devices per person by 2018
- Traffic will triple by 2018
- 100 hours of Youtube video are uploaded every minute
- Datacenter traffic alone will grow with a 25% CAGR
The point is not that things are growing, but that they are growing exceedingly fast. And trends like the Internet of Things and Big Data, along with the continued proliferation of media-heavy communications, are acting as further accelerant.
So how do we scale?
Taking a page out of the storage and compute play books
Storage and compute have gone through architectural changes to alleviate their initial limitations. While networking is not the same as storage or compute, there are interesting lessons to be learned. So what did they do?
The history lesson here is probably largely unnecessary, but the punch lines are fairly meaningful. From a storage perspective, the atomic unit shifted from the spinning disk down to a block. Ultimately, to scale up, what storage did was reduce the size of the useful atomic unit Continue reading
Cumulus Linux in Real Life on Software Gone Wild
A year ago Matthew Stone first heard about Cumulus Linux when I ranted about it on a Packet Pushers podcast (which only proves that any publicity is good publicity even though some people thought otherwise at that time), and when his cloud service provider company started selecting ToR switches he considered Cumulus together with Cisco and Arista… and chose Cumulus.
Read more ...HTIRW: Provider Peering and Revenue Streams (Part 1)
In the last post in this series, I described several types of providers — and even how those descriptions are no longer really “pure,” for the most part (although NTT, for instance, is a pure transit provider that only offers a few services throughout the world). For each piece of a provider’s business, then — […]
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Stretching the friendship
It has been nine months now since I hung up the console cable and embarked on my PhD. I seem to be unusual in the 21st-century IT world in that I have only had a couple of employers over the twenty or so years in the industry. I left each of those jobs on (I […]
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The post Stretching the friendship appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Matthew Mengel.
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.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!
The post Plexxi Pulse—Challenging the Value of the Continue reading
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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