Career Advice I’d Give To 20, 30 and 40-Something Year Old Me
Career Advice To 20-Something Year Old Me
Start that business. You have sufficient technical & business skills, and you can figure out what you don’t know. Take the chance now while you have little at risk.
You’re not the standard everyone else is supposed to live up to. Work on your own faults. They are legion.
Your boss is your boss for a reason. You’re not the boss for a reason, too. When you understand and accept those reasons, you’ll reduce the workplace friction you keep experiencing.
Meritocracy doesn’t mean what you think it means. Being good at your job doesn’t mean you deserve a promotion.
More responsibility comes easy, because no one wants it. More compensation comes hard, because everyone wants it.
Business owners who cheat their partners & customers will cheat their employees, too. Run at the first sign of dishonest business dealings.
Career Advice To 30-Something Year Old Me
Define your goals so you know when you’ve reached them. Otherwise, you’ll exhaust yourself with endless effort.
You are your own worst critic. Take yourself less seriously.
When you work for someone else, you are a replaceable component in a larger machine. This is by design.
You don’t Continue reading
Network Break 375: Aruba Networks Dives Into GreenLake; Okta Pins Incident On Outsourcer
Today's Network Break discusses Aruba Networks moving closer to HPE GreenLake with a new reseller-focused way to sell network gear, how data center design hampered fire fighting at an OVHcloud facility, Okta's response to a January security incident, Intel's request for US government dollars, and more IT news.Understanding Data Center Fabrics 08: Advanced Underlay Control Planes – Video
In this video, Russ White examines two advanced options for your underlay control plane: distoptflood and RIFT. He explores the basics of distopflood and RIFT, optimizations in distoptflood, centralized flooding, how RIFT works, and more. You can subscribe to the Packet Pushers’ YouTube channel for more videos as they are published. It’s a diverse a […]
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Combining BGP and IGP in an Enterprise Network
Syed Khalid Ali left the following question on an old blog post describing the use of IBGP and EBGP in an enterprise network:
From an enterprise customer perspective, should I run iBGP or iBGP+IGP (OSPF/ISIS/EIGRP) or IGP while doing mutual redistribution on the edge routers. I was hoping if you could share some thoughtful insight on when to select one over the another?
We covered tons of relevant details in the January 2022 Design Clinic, here’s the CliffNotes version. Keep in mind that the road to hell (and broken designs) is paved with great recipes and best practices, and that I’m presenting a black-and-white picture because I don’t feel like transcribing the discussion we had into an oversized blog post. People wrote books on this topic; I’m pretty sure you can search for Russ White and find a few of them.
Finally, there’s no good substitute for understanding how things work (which brings me to another webinar ;).
Automation 13. Real-life Example of a Python Automation for a Network Audit with Nornir and Scrapli
Hello my friend,
Today we are going to discuss a real-life experience, how network automation helped us to save a lot of time and significantly improve a quality of the medium size data centre. You will learn about the problem, which audit was to solve and how Python leveraging Nornir and Scrapli solved it.
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means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the
prior permission of the author.
Can Automation Help with Audits?
We, humans, are incredible creatures. We can create. We can write songs and compose music; we can invent new drugs and find new materials. We can develop new software and tools. However, in order to be able to do that, we need to have a free time and not to worry about anything. That’s why we need to rely on different tools, which can do routine tasks requiring a lot of concentration at least as good as we, humans, can. Probably, even better than we. Audit is one of such tasks, and in IT world it definitely Continue reading
Understanding Data Center Fabrics 07: Link State Protocol In The Underlay – Video
Episode seven continues a discussion of fabric underlays by looking at the use of link-state protocols instead of BGP. Network architect and author Russ White covers: -Which link state protocol (IS-IS or OSPF) to choose -Russ’s reasons for preferring IS-IS -IS-IS efficiencies for packet formats and autoconfiguration -Resource recommendations for learning IS-IS -Scale and flooding […]
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VPP Configuration – Part1
About this series
I use VPP - Vector Packet Processor - extensively at IPng Networks. Earlier this year, the VPP community merged the Linux Control Plane plugin. I wrote about its deployment to both regular servers like the Supermicro routers that run on our AS8298, as well as virtual machines running in KVM/Qemu.
Now that I’ve been running VPP in production for about half a year, I can’t help but notice one specific
drawback: VPP is a programmable dataplane, and by design it does not include any configuration or
controlplane management stack. It’s meant to be integrated into a full stack by operators. For end-users,
this unfortunately means that typing on the CLI won’t persist any configuration, and if VPP is restarted,
it will not pick up where it left off. There’s one developer convenience in the form of the exec
command-line (and startup.conf!) option, which will read a file and apply the contents to the CLI line
by line. However, if any typo is made in the file, processing immediately stops. It’s meant as a convenience
for VPP developers, and is certainly not a useful configuration method for all but the simplest topologies.
Luckily, VPP comes Continue reading
Worth Reading: VMware Operations Guide
Iwan Rahabok’s open-source VMware Operations Guide is now also available in Markdown-on-GitHub format. Networking engineers support vSphere/NSX infrastructure might be particularly interested in the Network Metrics chapter.
Continuing – Bird Project and Extensions
I will keep this post very short, In order to fuel and make the model sustain, https://r2079.wordpress.com/2022/03/18/capturing-bird-photos/, I have thought about including a solar panel and powering the system with a Lithium Ion battery.
I have installed the system and it’s been working fine, I understood I was very bad at Soldering.
- TP4056 -> This takes energy from solar panel and feeds to Li Battery.
- Solar Panel -> I have a small panel which fits on the hosting box
- Lithium Ion Batteries and charger (4x2500mAH)
I hope this runs continuously using solar power.
-Rakesh
ExtraHop Discover Appliance GCP Deployment With Terraform
I was recently working with a customer to deploy an ExtraHop Cloud Sensor (EDA) in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with Terraform. Deploying in the cloud is not as straight forward as deploying in other virtualized environments such as VMware. Thankfully, Terraform helps us complete this...continue reading
Understanding Data Center Fabrics 06: BGP Underlay – Video
The sixth video in this series examines the underlay component of a data center fabric, touches on a theoretical discussion of network layers, and reviews the use of BGP as your underlay protocol. Russ White covers: -The notion of abstractions in a network and how they limit failure domains -Tradeoffs among surface, state, and optimization […]
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Draw a Network Diagram from Excel Spreadsheet
Would you happen to have your network connectivity data in a tabular format (Excel or similar)? Would you like to make a graph out of that?
Look at the Excel-to-Graphviz solution created by and Salman Naqvi and Roman Urchin. It might not be exactly what you’re looking for, but you might get a few ideas and an inspiration to do something similar.
SQLModel For Network Engineers
Introduction I published a blog introducing relational databases for network engineers (linked below and here) on Packet Pushers. I would highly encourage readers unfamiliar with SQL and databases in general to take a look at that post before moving on. In this post we will focus on SQLModel and interacting with databases using the python […]
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A Modest Proposal for Cisco Interface Naming
If you’re going to be configuring an interface in a switch, which one are you going to use? The interface has a name and a number based on where it is on the device. The numbering part is fairly easy to figure out. The module number comes first, followed by the slot, and finally the port. In the world of Cisco, which is the one I’m the most familiar with, that means a fixed configuration switch usually has interfaces labeled 0/24, with no module and the slot almost always being zero. With a modular switch the interface would be labeled 2/0/28 to indicate the 28th port on the second line card.
The issue arises when you factor in the first part of the interface naming convention. The nomenclature used in the Cisco world since the beginning of time has been the interface speed. If your interface is a 100Mbit Ethernet interface then the interface name is FastEthernet0/48. If you’re using a 1Gbit interface it’s GigabitEthernet0/48. If it’s a 10Gbit interface it becomes TenGigabitEthernet0/48. It’s a progression of interface speeds. Even if the port is capable of using 10/100/1000 the port is referred to at the highest speed. The 10Gbit ports Continue reading