Today’s Tech Bytes dives into the Aruba Fabric Composer. This is data center software that can automate the provisioning of your network underlay and overlay, plus capabilities for orchestration, visibility, and troubleshooting. Aruba Networks is our sponsor. We're joined by Simon McCormack, Senior Manager, Product Management, at Aruba Networks.
The post Tech Bytes: Aruba Fabric Composer Automates And Orchestrates Leaf-Spine Network Provisioning (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Everyone uses BGP for DC underlays now because … well, just because everyone does. After all, there’s an RFC explaining the idea, every tool in the world supports BGP for the underlay, and every vendor out there recommends some form of BGP in their design documents.
I’m going to swim against the current for the moment and spend a couple of weeks here discussing the case against BGP as a DC underlay protocol. I’m not the only one swimming against this particular current, of course—there are at least three proposals in the IETF (more, if you count things that will probably never be deployed) proposing link-state alternatives to BGP. If BGP is so ideal for DC fabric underlays, then why are so many smart people (at least they seem to be smart) working on finding another solution?
But before I get into my reasoning, it’s probably best to define a few things.
In a properly design data center, there are at least three control planes. The first of these I’ll call the application overlay. This control plane generally runs host-to-host, providing routing between applications, containers, or virtual machines. Kubernetes networking would be an example of an application overlay control plane.
Disinformation bots: Apple CEO Tim Cook raised concerns about social media algorithms promoting disinformation during a speech at an international privacy conference, ZDNet reports. “At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement – the longer the better – and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible,” he said.
Gaming the stock market: In a rebellion against large Wall Street short sellers, a group of individual investors centered around a Reddit forum have been driving up the price of GameStop stock, even as the company faces questions about its long-term viability. One founder of the Reddit community called the effort “a train wreck happening in real time,” CNet reports. GameStop’s stock has shot up by more than 2700 percent since the beginning of the year, even as the bricks-and-mortar game software vendor is facing business challenges.
The power of Big Tech: The head of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is raising concerns about the huge influence of large tech firms, Arabian Business says. The fund is worried about “how some of these technology Continue reading
Today's Network Break explores new Catalyst hardware and micro switches from Cisco, a new security offering from Fortinet that combines endpoint security with cloud analytics, an Internet sleuth tracking IPv4 shenanigans, financial results from Juniper and F5, and a whopping big investment for routing startup DriveNets.
The post Network Break 318: Cisco Unveils New Catalyst Hardware; Internet Sleuth Uncovers Global IPv4 Misuse appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Wojciech explains what Quantum Networking/Internet is and what it’s not. Rick and Melchior ask Wojciech all about entanglement, fidelity, qubits, Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), spooky action at a distance and his work in the IETF Quantum Internet Research Group (QIRG).
Almost exactly a year ago Miha Markočič joined the ipSpace.net team. He was fresh out of university, fluent in Python, but with no networking or automation background… so I decided to try my traditional method of getting new team members up to speed: throw them into the deep water, observe how quickly they learn to swim, and give them a few tips if it seems like they might be drowning.
It worked out amazingly well. Miha quickly mastered the intricacies of AWS and Azure, and created full-stack automation solutions in Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager to support the AWS and Azure webinars, and the public cloud networking online course.
Almost exactly a year ago Miha Markočič joined the ipSpace.net team. He was fresh out of university, fluent in Python, but with no networking or automation background… so I decided to try my traditional method of getting new team members up to speed: throw them into the deep water, observe how quickly they learn to swim, and give them a few tips if it seems like they might be drowning.
It worked out amazingly well. Miha quickly mastered the intricacies of AWS and Azure, and created full-stack automation solutions in Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager to support the AWS and Azure webinars, and the public cloud networking online course.
In the world of network engineering, learning a new syntax for a NOS can be daunting if you need a specific config quickly. Juniper is a popular option for service providers/data centers and is widely deployed across the world.
This is a continuation of the Rosetta stone for network operating systems series. In this portion of the series we will be covering Open Shortest Path First, OSPF, version 2 which is a popular interior gateway protocol (IGP).
You can find the first article of the series Juniper to Mikrotik – BGP Commands here.
While many commands have almost the exact same information, others are as close as possible. Since there isn’t always an exact match, sometimes you may have to run two or three commands to get the information needed.
We conducted all testing on EVE-NG utilizing the topology seen below.
JunOS Command | MikroTik Command |
---|---|
show ospf neighbor | routing ospf neighbor print |
show ospf interface | routing ospf interface print |
show ospf overview brief | routing ospf instance print detail |
show ospf database | routing ospf lsa print |
show route protocol ospf | ip route print where ospf=yes |
show Continue reading |
Arista published a blog post describing the details of forwarding table sizes on 7050QX-series switches. The description includes the base mode (fixed tables), unified forwarding tables and even the IPv6 LPM details, and dives deep into what happens when the switch runs out of forwarding table entries.
Too bad they’re describing an ancient Trident-2 ASIC (I last mentioned switches using it in 2017 Data Center Fabrics update). Did NDA expire on that one?
Arista published a blog post describing the details of forwarding table sizes on 7050QX-series switches. The description includes the base mode (fixed tables), unified forwarding tables and even the IPv6 LPM details, and dives deep into what happens when the switch runs out of forwarding table entries.
Too bad they’re describing an ancient Trident-2 ASIC (I last mentioned switches using it in 2017 Data Center Fabrics update). Did NDA expire on that one?
This series of posts will describe the process of deploying a NXOS Leaf and spine fabric in a declarative manner using Ansible. This came from my project for the IPSpace Building Network Automation Solutions course and was used in part when we were deploying leaf and spine fabrics in our Data Centers. I originally only planned to build tenants and do fabric validation but over time this has morphed into a full blown fabric deployment.
In the past, I have blended links of a more controversial nature about culture, technology, and governance into my weekend reads posts. There has been so much, however, on the situation with social media platforms blocking prominent people, and the Parler takedown, that it seemed worth setting aside an entire post containing some of the interesting things I’ve run across on these topics. I may, from time to time, gather up more controversial sets of reading into separate posts in the future, so people can skip (or read) them if they want to.
Infrastructure companies much closer to the bottom of the technical “stack”— including Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS app stores—decided to cut off service not just to an individual but to Continue reading
Decades ago I understood the intricacies of AAA on Cisco IOS. These days I wing it and keep throwing spaghetti at the virtual wall until something sticks and I can log in (after all, it’s all in a lab, and I’m interested in routing protocols not interactions with TACACS+ server).
If you’re experiencing similar challenges you might appreciate AAA Deep Dive on Cisco Devices by the one and only Daniel Dib.