Show 149 – Questions on the Sweet Spot for the Network Engineer Career
A common discussion in the Packet Pushers Forums and on the #packetpushers IRC channel is questions about career development, focus and doing a good job. These are always good discussions so Greg invited Giulio Chiappini - @its_gcand Jon Garrison – @jpwgarrison to bring their questions & Greg’s does his best to give a perspective, opinions and ideas on worklife as a […]
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The post Show 149 – Questions on the Sweet Spot for the Network Engineer Career appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.
MAC address tracking with NMS
Let’s assume that I have a port open in my Cisco switch for guest users and I would like to keep track of the new mac-addresses that are added or existing mac-addresses that are removed from that port. I have a NMS (Network Management System), capable of receiving SNMP, traps that will send me an […]Let’s 6rd!
6rd mechanism belongs to the same family as automatic 6to4, in which IPv6 traffic is encapsulated inside IPv4. The key difference is that with 6rd, Service Providers use their own 6rd prefix and control the transition of their access-aggregation IPv4-only part of their networks to native IPv6. In the same time, SPs transparently provide IPv6 availability service […]
Information Hoarders
I make no secret of my love for Seth Godin and his amazing insight into the world. Besides being a marketing genius, he’s like Ockham’s Razor in getting to the essence of a problem. Take today’s posting, which really resonated with me, because it seems to reflect my own frustration with a common problem in […]
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The post Information Hoarders appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Mrs. Y.
Salary Negotiation For Technical Jobs
I wanted to take just a moment and share a video that one of my twitter friends shared with me. This video is of the final stage of the interview process and outlines the negotiation required to come to a mutually agreeable compensation level. Of key importance, it highlights several items that should be understood […]
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The post Salary Negotiation For Technical Jobs appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Paul Stewart.
How to Become CCDE
Wow. I still can't believe it.The moment I clicked Next at the end of the CCDE practical exam today in London, and it showed Congratulations word, I was literally jumping out my chair. It was a bad move, I admit, because it was really distracting and it made many other candidates in the room to look at me furiously since we still had more than an hour to complete this 352-011 exam. But I couldn't help it. I passed!
I'm a CCDE now. Part of the group consists around 100 people only, in the world. Wow. Thank God.
(I haven't received my number yet. So I hope CCDE team don't change their mind)
How did I prepare for CCDE exam?
Well, it's been a long journey. I passed my first CCDE written exam four years ago. I have taken the practical exam when it was version v1.0. And now I passed with v2.0.
Before I took the exam today I thought I would have lots of things to write about my preparation for CCDE exam. But I'm typing this while having my "CCDE dinner" at Hard Rock Cafe in London, and I can only came up with Continue reading
Scale, SDN, and Network Virtualization
[This post was put together by Teemu Koponen, Andrew Lambeth, Rajiv Ramanathan, and Martin Casado]
Scale has been an active (and often contentious) topic in the discourse around SDN (and by SDN we refer to the traditional definition) long before the term was coined. Criticism of the work that lead to SDN argued that changing the model of the control plane from anything but full distribution would lead to scalability challenges. Later arguments reasoned that SDN results in *more* scalable network designs because there is no longer the need to flood the entire network state in order to create a global view at each switch. Finally, there is the common concern that calls into question the scalability of using traditional SDN (a la OpenFlow) to control physical switches due to forwarding table limits.
However, while there has been a lot of talk, there have been relatively few real-world examples to back up the rhetoric. Most arguments appeal to reason, argue (sometimes convincingly) from first principles, or point to related but ultimately different systems.
The goal of this post is to add to the discourse by presenting some scaling data, taken over a two-year period, from a production network virtualization Continue reading
How much are you worth per hour
[This content was originally published on thenetworksherpa.com] Have you ever sat at your desk repeating the same task again and again, getting that groundhog day feeling. Arrrghhh, this is so inefficient someone should automate this. I could even do it myself with five days of focussed work. Sadly, you don’t have five days and the […]
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The post How much are you worth per hour appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by John Harrington.
Teamwork in a Disconnected Environment
As an introvert, I don’t like ice breakers or team building exercises at team meetings. Building the team camaraderie is done slowly over time with peers you work with. Daily interactions during work help build that as engineers learn to trust each other. What about for a team that does not interact with each other […]
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The post Teamwork in a Disconnected Environment appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Charles Galler.
Your Company Doesn’t Care About You
Companies are Systems for Making Money We’ve all heard corporate leadership speak about ‘human resources’ and that ‘people are our most important asset’. This is true but the words ‘resource’ and ‘asset’ were carefully chosen. A resource is something to be mined for value. Please don’t be fooled into thinking that your company cares […]
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The post Your Company Doesn’t Care About You appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by John Harrington.
[Code] PowerTool: PowerOnUCSBlades
———————————————————————- # Name: PowerOnUCSBlades.ps1 # Author: Matthew Oswalt # Created: 3/30/2012 # Revision: v0.2 - BETA # Rev. Date: 4/30/2013 # Description: A script that powers on blades in a UCS system. # Can be configured to boot all blades, or # only those associated to service profiles in a # given sub-organization. # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Import the Cisco UCS PowerTool module Import-Module CiscoUcsPs #Enable Multiple System Config Mode Set-UcsPowerToolConfiguration -SupportMultipleDefaultUcs $true ##################################################################################################################### # AUTHENTICATION # #################################### #Stored method of authentication - change the two values shown below $user = "admin" $password = "password" | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force $cred = New-Object system.[Code] PowerTool: PowerOnUCSBlades
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Name: PowerOnUCSBlades.ps1 # Author: Matthew Oswalt # Created: 3/30/2012 # Revision: v0.2 - BETA # Rev. Date: 4/30/2013 # Description: A script that powers on blades in a UCS system. # Can be configured to boot all blades, or # only those associated to service profiles in a # given sub-organization. # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Import the Cisco UCS PowerTool module Import-Module CiscoUcsPs #Enable Multiple System Config Mode Set-UcsPowerToolConfiguration -SupportMultipleDefaultUcs $true ##################################################################################################################### # AUTHENTICATION # #################################### #Stored method of authentication - change the two values shown below $user = "admin" $password = "password" | ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force $cred = New-Object system.SDN: Stop Differentiating by Names
Why does it happen with every technology cycle? First, there’s a period of great innovation, followed by the introduction of new terms and categories, which is always followed by a frenzy of differentiation-by-acronym. Everyone gets caught up in talking to each other and one-upping each other, instead of remembering why there was innovation in the first place. I call it “the yearbook effect,” and the networking industry and those who work in it, watch it and write about it are fully entrenched in it right now.
Think about it. SDN, NFV, OpenFlow, controllers, consortiums to build controllers, control plane separation, overlays, blah blah blah.
The industry has gotten so wrapped up in talking about definitions of SDN, the various technologies and how they get implemented, we actually may help delay adoption. We are supposed to be trying to help customers, but we are focusing on the wrong things and it’s confusing them.
I may get kicked out of the SDN fan club for saying this, but I’ve come to the conclusion after speaking to dozens of customers and participating in various industry discussions, any delay in widespread adoption of SDN is our own fault.
People are rarely, if ever, talking Continue reading
Show 148 – Talking With OpenDaylight Leadership
The Packet Pushers are joined by Brent Salisbury of networkstatic.net for a chat with some of the top brass on the OpenDaylight project’s Technical Steering Committee, Dave Meyer and Inder Gopal. “What’s OpenDaylight?” you ask. Why, it’s a consortium of vendors working together under the Linux Foundation umbrella to make an open source reference framework […]
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The post Show 148 – Talking With OpenDaylight Leadership appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.
Outgoing Interface Determination
I received a comment on an old post regarding the identification of outgoing interface for learned routes through BGP. In fact, it’s not the first time I’ve had a discussion in the comment section regarding the interaction between the control plane and the forwarding plane. So, let’s work backwards from the point where our packet leaves some interface on a router, which would be considered purely an act of the forwarding plane.Outgoing Interface Determination
I received a comment on an old post regarding the identification of outgoing interface for learned routes through BGP. In fact, it’s not the first time I’ve had a discussion in the comment section regarding the interaction between the control plane and the forwarding plane. So, let’s work backwards from the point where our packet leaves some interface on a router, which would be considered purely an act of the forwarding plane.OSPF – Understanding the Forwarding Address (FA)
Here I come with the solution for quiz-12, that I consider to be one of the most difficult quizes published on this blog, until now. Forwarding Address (FA) is not quite a common nor easy to understand topic. Read to find out more.
Apply-path in Junos
How did I not know this until just now? A really nice way to use wildcards in prefix lists that reference other parts of Junos to save you time. And nicely written up too – here.
Making sense of Broadband networks – Part 1
Broadband is a hot topic in the telecommunications industry nowadays; it is becoming the bread and butter for so many service providers and mobile carriers with the big growth and penetration rates in these technologies in the recent years. ( Check this report about the EOCD countries). Although it is that important, broadband topics probably [...] No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.Network Design Challenge – Small Little Clouds
At work, we’ve been getting ready to deploy a few different cluster technologies. One is a set of KVM hosts to offer VMaaS functionality to end users. Another is a CEPH cluster (http://ceph.com/) which is smart distributed storage. The third is a Hadoop cluster. Each of these initiatives popped up around the same time and […]
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The post Network Design Challenge – Small Little Clouds appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Mike Kantowski.