Data-center network automation: Its pitfalls and how to avoid them

(Enterprise Management Associates has published “The Future of Data Center Network Automation” based on a survey of enterprises, cloud providers and network service providers. This article by EMA Vice President of Research Networking Shamus McGillicuddy details some of its major findings.)More than 86% of companies expect their budgets for data-center network automation to increase over the next two years, and with spending ramping up, network teams need to plan carefully. Network automation is notoriously difficult to implement due to the complexity of networks in general, and only 23% of the people surveyed were fully confident in their data-center network-automation strategies.To read this article in full, please click here

Data-center network automation: Its pitfalls and how to avoid them

(Enterprise Management Associates has published “The Future of Data Center Network Automation” based on a survey of enterprises, cloud providers and network service providers. This article by EMA Vice President of Research Networking Shamus McGillicuddy details some of its major findings.)More than 86% of companies expect their budgets for data-center network automation to increase over the next two years, and with spending ramping up, network teams need to plan carefully. Network automation is notoriously difficult to implement due to the complexity of networks in general, and only 23% of the people surveyed were fully confident in their data-center network-automation strategies.To read this article in full, please click here

ICMP Redirects Considered Harmful

One of my readers sent me an intriguing challenge based on the following design:

• He has a data center with two core switches (C1 and C2) and two Cisco Nexus edge switches (E1 and E2).
• He’s using static default routing from core to edge switches with HSRP on the edge switches.
• E1 is the active HSRP gateway connected to the primary WAN link.

The following picture shows the simplified network diagram:

I Quit: Where the Top Performers’ Cloning Machine Fails?

Sometime in July 2021: It was a quiet Friday afternoon when Tim finally got a chance to sit down and evaluate his first week as a team manager. Mostly grim. It was such an eye-opener and bitter more than sweet week. Not that he didn’t know the group of ten people he was asked to […]

The post I Quit: Where the Top Performers’ Cloning Machine Fails? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Another year of the Transition to IPv6

DNS OARC 37

SD-WAN service-side MPLS VPN

This post goes through how to configure MPLS VPN on the service-side of a Cisco SD-WAN edge device, so the south-side towards non-SD-WAN devices. What I am trying to achieve is to advertise the differing SD-WAN VPN (VRF, why Cisco have to call these VPNs beats me) prefixes to a core switch (using a ASR in the lab) directly connected to the SD-WAN router. This could be accomplished using per-VRF interfaces (or sub-interfaces) and BGP peerings, but a neater solution is to pass all the routing information over one the BGP MPLS VPNv4 peering.

AX.25 over D-Star

Setting up AX.25 over 1200bps was easy enough. For 9600 I got kernel panics on the raspberry pi, so I wrote my own AX.25 stack.

But I also want to try to run AX.25 over D-Star. Why? Because then I can use radios not capable of 9600 AX.25, and because it’s fun.

It seems that radios (at least the two I’ve been working with) expose the D-Star data channel as a byte stream coming over a serial connection. Unlike working with a TNC you don’t have to talk KISS to turn the byte stream into packets, and vice versa.

IC9700 setup

The first hurdle to overcome, because we want to send binary data, is to escape the XON/XOFF flow control characters that the IC9700 mandates. Otherwise we won’t be able to send 0x13 or 0x11. Other bytes seem to go through just fine.

So I wrote a wrapper for that, taking /dev/ttyUSB1 on one side, and turning it into (e.g.) /dev/pts/20 for use with kissattach.

$ ./dsax /dev/ttyUSB1
/dev/pts/20

$ kissattach /dev/pts/20 radio
$ kissattach -p radio -c 2     # See below

Set Menu>Set>DV/DD Set>DV Data TX to Auto, for “automatic PTT”. As Continue reading

How to Pass CCNP ENARSI – Exam Review

AWS Ride Along Blog & YouTube Series

So as many of you know, I decided in 2021 that in my “spare time” I was going to start learning more about AWS. Well that didn’t go so well… lol… so I decided to give myself a “goal” and... Read More ›

The post AWS Ride Along Blog & YouTube Series appeared first on Networking with FISH.

The 7 Requirements of Highly Effective Load Balancers 

As Stephen R. Covey stated in his popular book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “True effectiveness requires balance.” VMware agrees. And when it comes to accelerating modern application delivery, true application effectiveness requires a modern load balancer. So, with a respectful nod to Stephen R. Covey, here are the seven requirements of highly effective load balancers.  

1. Be proactive with self-service. Move away from “create a ticket and wait” developer experiences to self-service, role-based access control for owners to provision, troubleshoot, and monitor their own apps.
2. Begin with the end in mind with on-demand autoscaling. Automation drives great user experiences. Plan for peak usage times without causing overprovisioning and idle capacity.
3. Put things first with a 100 percent software solution. The need to support on-premises data center and multi-cloud deployments means that enterprises need to choose applications that work consistently across different environments with a single point of orchestration.
4. Think win-win with real-time insights and visibility into application traffic. A modern load balancer should collect real-time application telemetry and provide insights into each transaction and end-user patterns.
5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood with security insights. App vulnerabilities stem from incorrect access control policies Continue reading

Real-time telemetry from a 5 stage Clos fabric

docker run --rm -it --privileged --network host --pid="host" \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v /run/netns:/run/netns \
  -v ~/clab:/home/clab -w /home/clab \
  ghcr.io/srl-labs/clab bash

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sflow-rt/containerlab/master/clos5.yml

containerlab deploy -t clos5.yml

Note: The 3 stage Clos topology, clos3.yml, described in the previous article is also available.

What is CCNP ENARSI

How to Make the Most of Kubernetes Environment Variables

In traditional systems, environment variables play an important role, but not always a crucial one. Some applications make more use of environment variables than others. Some prefer configuration files over environment variables. However, when it comes to Kubernetes, environment variables are more important than you might think. It’s partially due to the way containers work in general and partially due to the specifics of Kubernetes. In this post, you’ll learn all about environment variables in Kubernetes. Traditionally, environment variables are dynamic key-value variables that are accessible to any process running on the system. The Basics Let’s start with the basics. What are environment variables and why do they exist? Traditionally, environment variables are dynamic key-value variables that are accessible to any process running on the system. The operating system itself will set many environment variables that help running processes understand the specifics of the system. Thanks to this, software developers can include logic in their software that makes the programs adjustable to a specific operating system. Environment variables also hold a lot of important information about the user, things like username, preferred language, user home directory path and many other useful bits of information. User-Defined Environment Variables Dawid Ziolkowski Dawid Continue reading

The Post-Quantum State: a taxonomy of challenges

At Cloudflare, we help to build a better Internet. In the face of quantum computers and their threat to cryptography, we want to provide protections for this future challenge. The only way that we can change the future is by analyzing and perusing the past. Only in the present, with the past in mind and the future in sight, can we categorize and unfold events. Predicting, understanding and anticipating quantum computers (with the opportunities and challenges they bring) is a daunting task. We can, though, create a taxonomy of these challenges, so the future can be better unrolled.

This is the first blog post in a post-quantum series, where we talk about our past, present and future “adventures in the Post-Quantum land”. We have written about previous post-quantum efforts at Cloudflare, but we think that here first we need to understand and categorize the problem by looking at what we have done and what lies ahead. So, welcome to our adventures!

A taxonomy of the challenges ahead that quantum computers and their threat to cryptography bring (for more information about it, read our other blog posts) could be a good way to approach this problem. This taxonomy should Continue reading

The quantum solace and spectre

Not only is the universe stranger than we think, but it is stranger than we can think of
— Werner Heisenberg

Even for a physicist as renowned as Heisenberg, the universe was strange. And it was strange because several phenomena could only be explained through the lens of quantum mechanics. This field changed the way we understood the world, challenged our imagination, and, since the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927, has been integrated into every explanation of the physical world (it is, to this day, our best description of the inner workings of nature). Quantum mechanics created a rift: every physical phenomena (even the most micro and macro ones) stopped being explained only by classical physics and started to be explained by quantum mechanics. There is another world in which quantum mechanics has not yet created this rift: the realm of computers (note, though, that manufacturers have been affected by quantum effects for a long time). That is about to change.

In the 80s, several physicists (including, for example, Richard Feynman and Yuri Manin) asked themselves these questions: are there computers that can, with high accuracy and in a reasonable amount of time, simulate physics? And, specifically, can they Continue reading

Top 7 next-generation firewall vendors

With more employees accessing network resources remotely, the increase in companies deploying hybrid cloud architectures, and the overall escalation of security threats, firewall technology is critical to the integrity, security and the very lifeblood of any enterprise.  Traditional firewalls are security devices which inspect traffic at the point of network ingress/egress, as well as provide Virtual Private Network (VPN) and encryption capabilities. Firewalls watch traffic by state, port and protocol, and control the flow of the traffic passing through. In a traditional firewall, advanced security features are typically provided by external appliances and services that live outside the firewall platform.To read this article in full, please click here

Feedback: DMVPN Webinars

Some webinars on ipSpace.net are ancient (= more than a decade old). I’m refreshing some of them (the overhaul of Introduction to Virtualized Networking was completed earlier this month); others will stay as they are because the technology hasn’t changed in a long while, and it’s always nice to hear someone still finds them useful. This is a recent feedback I got on the DMVPN webinars:

As with any other webinar I have viewed on ipspace.net, this one provides the background as to why you may or may not want to do certain things and what impact that may have (positive or negative) on your network. Then it digs into the how of actually doing something. Brilliant content as always.

IPSpace.net is my go-to for deep dives on existing and emerging technologies in the networking industry. No unnecessary preamble. Gets straight to the point of why you are looking at a specific technology and explains the what and the why before getting into the how.

Data Center Network Automation has a Data Problem

Localisation isn’t translation

If you only have your app in English then you’ll still be understood[1] by the new market whose official language isn’t English.

If you show farenheit (a word I can’t even spell), then 96% of the world cannot understand your app. At all.

For most of the west I would argue that translation doesn’t even matter at all, but you cannot have your app start your weeks on Sunday, you cannot show fahrenheit, or feet, or furlongs, or cubits or whatever US-only units exist. And you cannot use MM/DD/YY.

NONE of these things are tied to language. Most users of English don’t want any of this US-only failure to communicate.

[1] While most of the world doesn’t speak English fluently, they may know words. And they can look up words. You cannot “look up” understanding fahrenheit or US-only date formats.