MPLS VPLS configuration with Juniper JunOS.
Posting a Juniper VPLS how-to on a couple of J-series routers. Have been pretty SDN focused lately so wanted to get some real stuff in for a post. Docs on JunOS VPLS can be shaky so nothing like a couple real configs to plugin your address in the lab if having problems with L2 VPNs. […]...
The Fabric ERA
“Fabric” is a loosely used term, which today creates more confusion instead of offering direction. What exactly is a Fabric ? What is a Switch Fabric? Greg Ferro did a post here explaining how Ethernet helped the layer 2 switch fabric evolve. Sadly the use of switch fabric did not stop there. And this is […]
Junos Load Balancing – PART 1 – Introduction
I try to explain load balancing on MX. This post does not cover all the cases, but tries to summarize the default behaviour depending on the type of card: ICHIP or TRIO based, to provide which fields can be add or remove to compute the hash and finally...Junos Load Balancing – PART 1 – Introduction
I try to explain load balancing on MX. This post does not cover all the cases, but tries to summarize the default behaviour depending on the type of card: ICHIP or TRIO based, to provide which fields can be add or remove to compute the hash and finally...BigData: Jargon Dictionary and How Hadoop Algorithm Solves Data problem
There is a lot of jargon about BigData. Here is a fast track version (my version) of how Hadoop MapReduce sophisticated algorithm solves the big data issue with an example in each jargon. I have given a use case of aggregating SYSLOG data coming from thousands of Cisco ASA appliance and then perform data analysis […]
The Bufferbloat Bandwidth Death March
Latency much more than bandwidth governs actual internet “speed”, as best expressed in written form by Stuart Chesire’s It’s the Latency, Stupid rant and more formally in Latency and the Quest for Interactivity.
Speed != bandwidth despite all of what an ISP’s marketing department will tell you. This misconception is reflected up to and including FCC Commissioner Julius Genachowski, and is common even among technologists who should know better, and believed by the general public. You pick an airplane to fly across the ocean, rather than a ship, even though the capacity of the ship may be far higher.
The Internet could and should degrade gradually in the face of load; but today’s Internet does not degrade gracefully due to bufferbloat. Instead, performance falls off a cliff. We are lemmings on migration.
The Internet is designed to run as fast as it can, and so will fill any capacity network link as soon as you have any applications that asks to do so. We have more and more such applications, and the buffers get bigger each hardware generation, though usually operated at a small fraction of that possible bandwidth. As soon as a network or network link reaches100% capacity, the usually grossly Continue reading
SDN Business Cases
We have a few problems in the networking construct and as much as I dont want to say, paradigm, ecosystem, abstraction etc. a million times there may be a couple hundred in the following writeup. The following document are some rationalizations that have come up over the past recent months/years for some new abstractions in networking that […]...
Why should a Network Engineer move into an App Space
If you are a “pure” network engineer and still have a mortgage to pay, this post is probably for you!. Those who are preparing for CCIE voice or application firewall or F5 load balancer are on the right track. In short, SDN (Software defined network, aka SDN cat) products are already out of the bag […]
BIGDATA BUBBLE – Infinite Possibilities
If you live in Australia you probably have heard about the Mining Boom, so was the famous “DotCOM bubble” in way back in 199x . Recently, this new buzzword “BigData” in IT data mining space seems to be a new technology trend for many enterprises and Telco’s. They need bigdata to be implemented to solve […]
Five Features of Brocade VCS
Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS) is Brocade's brand of datacenter ethernet switching. VCS allows for the creation of a network fabric that's capable of converging storage and data traffic via standards-based datacenter bridging. It also solves the “Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) problem” by implementing a standards-based TRILL data plane paired with their own control plane in the form of Fabric Shortest Path First (FSPF). This data + control plane enable the “routing” of MAC addresses through the fabric, negates the need for STP, enables the use of all cabled links, and prevents traffic loops. VCS is only (currently) available on the VDX line of switches from Brocade.
In this post I'm going to outline five aspects of VCS that I found particularly interesting or unique. This is a companion article to an earlier one titled Five Functional Facts about FabricPath where I broke down five features of Cisco's fabric technology.
A Milestone Reached: CoDel is in Linux!
The CoDel AQM algorithm by Kathie Nichols and Van Jacobson provides us with an essential missing tool to control queues properly. This work is the culmination of their at three major attempts to solve the problems with AQM algorithms over the last 14 years.
Eric Dumazet wrote the codel queuing discipline (based on a quick prototype by Dave Täht, who spent the last year working 60 hour weeks on bufferbloat) which landed in net-next a week or two ago; yesterday, net-next was merged into the Linux mainline for inclusion in the next Linux release. Eric also implemented a fq_codel queuing discipline, combining fair queuing and CoDel (pronounced “coddle”), and it works very well. The CoDel implementation was dual licensed BSD/GPL to help the *BSD community. Eric and others have tested CoDel on 10G Ethernet interfaces; as expected, CoDel performance is good in what’s been tested to date.
Linux 3.5 will likely release in August. So it was less than a month from first access to the algorithm (which was formally published in the AQM Queue May 6) to Linux mainline; it should be about four total from availability of the algorithm to Linux release. Not bad at all :-).
Felix Fietkau Continue reading
Cisco CUBE v8.5 vs. v8.6 Features
Surprisingly, there is a lot of difference between these 2 CUBE versions. If you are an ITSP and providing SIP trunks to your customer. Make sure you choose the right IOS!! SR# FEATURE CUBE 8.5 CUBE 8.6 1. Support for Updating codecs dynamically X YES 2. Media DO-EO flow around X YES 3. High […]
CUCM and H323 GW: Inbound Calls OK but no Outbound Calls
Is there out anybody who doesn’t like playing with ‘BREAK-FIX” ? I have ran into this issue before but, it was a few year ago! I forgot what I did (I should have boggled it out) and it took me solid 5 hours to troubleshoot one this real world break fix! SCENARIO: PSTN—H323GW—CUCM—PHONESInbound call works […]
Double CCIE Now!
It was way back in 2008 when I passed My Voice LAB In 2011 , I passed my CCIE Security. More on voiceIE.com and SecurityIE.com ! Cheers, Push
Zone-Based Firewall-Part 1 of 2-Basic Configuration
Great 60 minute video on zone-based firewalls by Solarwinds. Instructor Anthony Sequeira walks us through a couple of constructs and demonstrates the configuration.
SDN for Internet Providers Use Case
In the bag of magic tricks that SDN has the potential to add as our networks get decomposed over the next few years is self provisioned provider edge nodes. Forget OpenFlow in this, as that is a wire protocol that is vital, but a small and important component of the bigger picture. OF is extremely […]...
What is a Fabric Extender
In this post I would like to cover the base of what is needed to know about the Cisco Fabric Extender that ships today as the Nexus 2000 series hardware. The Modular Switch The concept is easy to understand referencing existing knowledge. Everybody is familiar with the distributed switch architecture commonly called a modular switch: […]
OpenStack Essex and Quantum Installation using OpenvSwitch from Scratch
Here is a walkthrough for the Quantum Network Manager Plugin for OpenStack. It is still in dev so expect weird things and stability issues. For a guy with a networking bread and butter this is the extremely exciting piece of OpenStack for me. I will do a followup and try and breakdown the OpenvSwitch components […]...
The Next Nightmare is Coming
BitTorrent was NEVER the Performance Nightmare
BitTorrent is a lightning rod on two fronts: it is used to download large files, which the MPAA sees as a nightmare to their business model, and BitTorrent has been a performance nightmare to ISP’s and some users. Bram Cohen has taken infinite grief for BitTorrent over the years, when the end user performance problems are not his fault.
Nor is TCP the performance problem, as Bram Cohen recently flamed about TCP on his blog.
I blogged about this before but several key points seem to have been missed by most: BitTorrent was never the root cause of most of the network speed problems BitTorrent triggered when BitTorrent deployed. The broadband edge of the Internet was already broken when BitTorrent deployed, with vastly too much uncontrolled buffering, which we now call bufferbloat. As my demonstration video shows, even a single simple TCP file copy can cause horrifying speed loss in an overbuffered network. Speed != bandwidth, despite what the ISP’s marketing departments tell you.
But almost anything can induce bufferbloat suffering (filling bloated buffers) too: I can just as easily fill the buffers with UDP or other protocols as with TCP. So long as uncontrolled, single queue Continue reading
Troubleshooting Common OpenStack Errors
##############General Tips############## /*Check all services $nova-manage service list (check for XXX or smiley face) Binary Host Zone Status State Updated_At nova-scheduler openstack1 nova enabled :-) 2012-05-12 22:42:14 nova-compute openstack1 nova enabled :-) 2012-05-12 22:42:12 nova-network openstack1 nova enabled :-) 2012-05-12 22:42:14 $ ps -ea | grep nova 11448 ? 00:02:54 nova-cert 12072 ? 00:02:57 nova-network […]...