WISP Design – Migrating from Bridged to Routed

TFW adding the 301st subscriber to your bridged WISP….

Why are bridged networks so popular?

• Getting an ISP network started can be a daunting task. Especially, if you don’t have a networking background.
• Understanding L1/L2/L3 is not easy – I spent a number of years working in IT before I really started to grasp concepts like subnetting, the OSI model and Layer 2 vs. Layer 3. It takes a while.
• Bridged networks are very attractive when first starting out. No subnetting is required and the entire network can be NATted out an upstream router with minimal configuration.

What does a “bridged” network look like?

• Bridged networks use a single Layer 3 subnet across the same Layer 2 broadcast domain (typically over switches and software/hardware bridges) which is extended to all towers in the WISP
• Bridging can be done with or without VLANs but they are most commonly untagged.
• The diagram below is a very common example of a bridged WISP network.

What is the difference between switching and bridging?

These days, there isn’t much difference between the two terms, switch is a marketing term for a multiport hardware-accelerated bridge that became popular in the 1990s to Continue reading

Server Update

Ahh, the pains of neglecting certain aspects of your life ( like your webserver). Well, I finally showed it some …

Continue reading →

The post Server Update appeared first on Fryguy's Blog.

Deutsche Telekom Expands SD-WAN With VMware VeloCloud

How Cloudflare and Wall Street Are Helping Encrypt the Internet Today

Today has been a big day for Cloudflare, as we became a public company on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: NET). To mark the occasion, we decided to bring our favorite entropy machines to the floor of the NYSE. Footage of these lava lamps is being used as an additional seed to our entropy-generation system LavaRand — bolstering Internet encryption for over 20 million Internet properties worldwide.

(This is mostly for fun. But when’s the last time you saw a lava lamp on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange?)

A little context: generating truly random numbers using computers is impossible, because code is inherently deterministic (i.e. predictable). To compensate for this, engineers draw from pools of randomness created by entropy generators, which is a fancy term for "things that are truly unpredictable".

It turns out that lava lamps are fantastic sources of entropy, as was first shown by Silicon Graphics in the 1990s. It’s a torch we’ve been proud to carry forward: today, Cloudflare uses lava lamps to generate entropy that helps make millions of Internet properties more secure.

Housed in our San Francisco headquarters is a wall filled with dozens of lava lamps, Continue reading

Shining light on dark data, shadow IT and shadow IoT

What's lurking in the shadows of YOUR organization? What you don't know can hurt you. Insider Pro columnist Mike Elgan looks at how your business is at risk and offers six steps to minimize it.

Shining light on dark data, shadow IT and shadow IoT

What's lurking in the shadows of YOUR organization? What you don't know can hurt you. Insider Pro columnist Mike Elgan looks at how your business is at risk and offers six steps to minimize it.

Heavy Networking 471: Routing-Centric Transformation With Arrcus’s ArcOS (Sponsored)

Today's Heavy Networking welcomes back sponsor Arrcus to discuss the latest advancements in its ArcOS NOS, including support for Jericho2 ASICs, the new ArcIQ Analytics platform, and the vote of confidence from investors in the form of a $30 million funding round. Our guests are Keyur Patel, CTO and founder; and Murali Gandluru, VP of Product Management.

The post Heavy Networking 471: Routing-Centric Transformation With Arrcus’s ArcOS (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Istio Routing Basics

When learning a new technology like Istio, it’s always a good idea to take a look at sample apps. Istio repo has a few sample apps but they fall short in various ways. BookInfo is covered in the docs and it is a good first step. However, it is too verbose with too many services for me and the docs seem to focus on managing the BookInfo app, rather than building it from ground up. There’s a smaller helloworld sample but it’s more about autoscaling than anything else.

In this post, I’d like to get to the basics and show you what it takes to build an Istio enabled ‘HelloWorld’ app from ground up. One thing to keep in mind is that Istio only manages the traffic of your app. The app lifecycle is managed by the underlying platform, Kubernetes in this case. Therefore, you need to understand containers and Kubernetes basics and you need to know about Istio Routing primitives such as Gateway, VirtualService, DestinationRuleupfront. I’m assuming that most people know containers and Kubernetes basics at this point. I will focus on Istio Routing instead in this post.

Basic Steps

These are roughly the steps Continue reading

VMware CEO: IBM Paid Too Much for Red Hat

Dell EMC updates PowerMax storage systems

Dell EMC has updated its PowerMax line of enterprise storage systems to offer Intel’s Optane persistent storage and NVMe-over-Fabric, both of which will give the PowerMax a big boost in performance.Last year, Dell launched the PowerMax line with high-performance storage, specifically targeting industries that need very low latency and high resiliency, such as banking, healthcare, and cloud service providers.The company claims the new PowerMax is the first-to-market with dual port Intel Optane SSDs and the use of storage-class memory (SCM) as persistent storage. The Optane is a new type of non-volatile storage that sits between SSDs and memory. It has the persistence of a SSD but almost the speed of a DRAM. Optane storage also has a ridiculous price tag. For example, a 512 GB stick costs nearly $8,000.To read this article in full, please click here

Dell EMC updates PowerMax storage systems

Dell EMC has updated its PowerMax line of enterprise storage systems to offer Intel’s Optane persistent storage and NVMe-over-Fabric, both of which will give the PowerMax a big boost in performance.Last year, Dell launched the PowerMax line with high-performance storage, specifically targeting industries that need very low latency and high resiliency, such as banking, healthcare, and cloud service providers.The company claims the new PowerMax is the first-to-market with dual port Intel Optane SSDs and the use of storage-class memory (SCM) as persistent storage. The Optane is a new type of non-volatile storage that sits between SSDs and memory. It has the persistence of a SSD but almost the speed of a DRAM. Optane storage also has a ridiculous price tag. For example, a 512 GB stick costs nearly $8,000.To read this article in full, please click here

Huawei Offers 5G Technology License Up for Bid to the West

SD-WAN Vendors Gain Ground, Bolster Security

Keynote Hate – Celebrity Edition

We all know by now that I’m not a huge fan of keynotes. While I’ve pulled back in recent years from the all out snark during industry keynotes, it’s nice to see that friends like Justin Warren (@JPWarren) and Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) have stepped up their game. Instead, I try to pull nuggets of importance from a speech designed to rally investors instead of the users. However, there is one thing I really have to stand my ground against.

Celebrity Keynotes.

We’ve seen these a hundred times at dozens of events. After the cheers and adulation of the CEO giving a big speech and again after the technical stuff happens with the CTO or product teams, it’s time to talk about…nothing.

Celebrity keynotes break down into two distinct categories. The first is when your celebrity is actually well-spoken and can write a speech that enthralls the audience. This means they get the stage to talk about whatever they want, like their accomplishments in their career or the charity work their pushing this week. I don’t mind these as much because they feel like a real talk that I might want to attend. Generally the celebrity talking Continue reading

Comcast Deploys Open Source Trellis in ‘Multiple Markets’

Lessons Learned – Asking For Help – Kevin Myers

The post Lessons Learned – Asking For Help – Kevin Myers appeared first on Network Collective.

A Letter from Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn

To our potential shareholders:

Cloudflare launched on September 27, 2010. Many great startups pivot over time. We have not. We had a plan and have been purposeful in executing it since our earliest days. While we are still in its early innings, that plan remains clear: we are helping to build a better Internet. Understanding the path we’ve taken to date will help you understand how we plan to operate going forward, and to determine whether Cloudflare is the right investment for you.

Cloudflare was formed to take advantage of a paradigm shift: the world was moving from on-premise hardware and software that you buy to services in the cloud that you rent. Paradigm shifts in technology always create significant opportunities, and we built Cloudflare to take advantage of the opportunities that arose as the world shifted to the cloud.

As we watched packaged software turn into SaaS applications, and physical servers migrate to instances in the public cloud, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before the same happened to network appliances. Firewalls, network optimizers, load balancers, and the myriad of other hardware appliances that Continue reading

How 6G will work: Terahertz-to-fiber conversion

Upcoming 6G wireless, superseding 5G and arriving possibly by 2030, is envisaged to function at hundreds of gigabits per second. Slowly, the technical advances needed are being made.A hole in the tech development thus far has been at the interface between terahertz spectrum and hard, optical transmission lines. How does one connect terahertz (THz), which is basically through-the-air spectrum found between microwave and infrared, to the transmission lines that will be needed for the longer-distance data sends? The curvature of the Earth, for one thing, limits line of sight, so hard-wiring is necessary for distances. Short distances, too, can be impeded by environmental obstructions: blocking by objects, even rain or fog, becomes more apparent the higher in spectrum one goes, as wavelengths get shorter.To read this article in full, please click here

Video: Beyond Two Nodes

In the introductory videos of How Networks Really Work webinar I described the mandatory elements of any networking solution and additional challenges you have to solve when you can’t pull a cable between the adjacent nodes.

It’s time for the next bit of complexity: what if we have more than two nodes connected to the same network segment? Welcome to the world of multi-access networks and data link control.

You need free ipSpace.net subscription to watch the videos in Overview of Networking Challenges section, or a paid ipSpace.net subscriptions to watch the rest of the webinar.

ClearOS Gateway on GNS3

In a previous tutorial we have successfully installed ClearOS on QEMU VM in a gateway mode. At the end of the tutorial we have installed several apps from ClearOS marketplace. These apps enhance gateway functionality, however  we have not tested  them yet. Therefore, this tutorial goes further and we are going to test some services offered by ClearOS apps. In order to do it, we will connect ClearOS QEMU appliance into a GNS3 topology.

Our ClearOS QEMU instance is configured with two guest network cards (Picture 1). The first guest interface ens3 has assigned the LAN role and it is configured with the IP address 192.168.1.254/24. This is the IP address a web server is listening on, the port 81. The entire ClearOS management will be done via web browser using the url https://192.168.1.254:81.

Picture 1 - Network Interfaces Configuration During ClearOS Installation

The second guest interface ens4 has assigned External role and its IP address is assigned from DHCP server. DHCP server is running on SOHO router with the IP address 172.17.100.1/16 (Picture 2).

Picture 2 - Network Topology

GNS3 itself connects the second guest interface ens4 of ClearOS gateway Continue reading