Worth Reading: Data Center Vanity

I’ve been noticing a trend recently in enterprise networking where managers and engineers alike are more concerned (obsessed) with the physical appearance of their rack, wires, and network equipment than they are with the actual pragmatic design and stability of said network. -via packet pushers

The post Worth Reading: Data Center Vanity appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Cryptography is Hard

I’m going to try the impossible: I’m going to give an example of how cryptography is really used, and how it can fail. -via circleid

The post Worth Reading: Cryptography is Hard appeared first on 'net work.

Think visually: How graphics skills help engineers

Among all the skills I hear network engineers talk about, two that are often underrated are writing skills and graphics skills. There is some small slice of the networking world that is serious about writing (though I often think we make too big of a production out of writing, getting wrapped around tools and process instead of focusing on actual writing), but graphics is one area the we really don’t talk about a lot. After all, I’m an engineer, not a graphic designer, right? Or maybe — I’ve always heard I should be a master of one skill, rather than a jack of all trades…

Diane, over at Data Center Mix, has a great post up on four ways being an artist has helped her sell data center products. There are some great ideas in there, but as someone with formal training in graphic design (in a distant past I can barely remember any longer), I wanted to add a few thoughts about graphics skills as a network engineer.

She begins with this thought: a picture is worth a thousand words. I’m never quite certain this is actually true in every case (Charles Dickens in cartoon format doesn’t sound very Continue reading

Merry Christmas!

I’m taking a little break from the blog ’til the beginning of the year… See you on the front side of 2016.

The post Merry Christmas! appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: What we should fear in the world of patents

…only rarely are those accused of some patent violation really a bad actor. Rather, the patent system results in bad actors because the system is confusing with little transparency. When patents are unclear, in other words when the boundaries of a patent are vague, then people cannot adequately check whether their innovations infringe. If they have no reliable means of checking then innovators will find it hard, likely impossible, to design around a patent, or even to seek an appropriate patent license. via heartland

The post Worth Reading: What we should fear in the world of patents appeared first on 'net work.

QOTW: Courage as virtue

The post QOTW: Courage as virtue appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Troubleshooting video applications

Maybe it’s another sign of experience, aging, cynicism, and/or ego. Lately, I seem to be doing a lot of troubleshooting of application performance problems. “What on earth was the developer thinking?” is becoming a recurrent refrain, at least in my head. This is (I hope) not ego, just a real question about what appears to be a sub-optimal approach. via network computing

The post Worth Reading: Troubleshooting video applications appeared first on 'net work.

Hidden Mickey: Animal Kingdom

A tradition at the Disney Parks in Orlando is to hide Mickey Mouse symbols throughout. Sometimes they’re hard to find, sometimes they’re easy. This one wasn’t as easy as it looks.

The post Hidden Mickey: Animal Kingdom appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Grumpy old network architects

Let’s define prevailing fashion first. You might define it as Kool-Aid id peddled by snake oil salesmen or cool network designs by people who know what they’re doing. If we stick with the first definition, you’re absolutely right. via ipspace

The post Worth Reading: Grumpy old network architects appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Understanding IPv6

IPv6 and I met back in the early 2000s. I really didn’t see the big deal or know what all the RFCs were about. This stuff was easy. Of course, at the time, my thoughts were barely even scratching at the surface, and I still believed IPv6 was just IPv4 with 128 bits. I was in what I now refer to as the “Checklist IPv6” phase. via network computing

The post Worth Reading: Understanding IPv6 appeared first on 'net work.

Security ‘net

The ‘web has been abuzz with security stuff the last couple of weeks; forthwith a small collection for your edification.

The man in the middle attack is about as overused as the trite slippery slope fallacy in logic and modern political “discourse” (loosely termed — political discourse is the latest term to enter the encyclopedia of oxymorons as it’s mostly been reduced to calling people names and cyberbullying, — but of course, putting the social media mob in charge of stopping bullying will fix all of that). But there are, really, such things as man in the middle attacks, and they are used to gather information that would otherwise be unavailable because of normal security provided by on the wire encryption. An example? There is no way to tell if your cell phone is connecting to a real cell phone tower or a man-in-the-middle device that sucks all your information out and ships it to an unintended recipient before forwarding your information along to its correct destination.

The list of aliases used by the devices that masquerade as a cell phone tower, trick your phone into connecting with them, and suck up your data, seems to grow every day. But Continue reading

Worth Reading: Is your network This Old House?

Many information technology infrastructures are very similar to some of these old houses. Many of our customers have been adding on capability to their infrastructures, as their businesses require more IT capability, including advanced security, network bandwidth, storage, raw computing power, voice, data, and cloud. And many have done this without taking a look at the entire infrastructure to determine if the foundation is stable and can support all of the new capabilities – or whether there might be any cracks. via netcraftsmen

The post Worth Reading: Is your network This Old House? appeared first on 'net work.

Fear itself: Thinking through change and turmoil

Fair warning: this is going to be a controversial post, and it might be considered a bit “off topic.”

Maybe it’s just that time of year. Or maybe it’s several conversations I’ve been involved in recently. Or maybe it’s the result of following over 150 blogs on a daily basis covering everything from religion to politics to technology to philosophy. Whatever it is, there’s one thing I’ve noticed recently.

We’re really afraid.

I don’t mean “concerned about what the future might hold,” but rather — it seems, at least sometimes — sinking into a state of fear bordering on the irrational. Sometimes it feels like the entire world is one long troubleshooting session in the worst designed network I’ve ever encountered. Let me turn to a few completely different areas to illustrate my point. Some of these are going to make people mad, so hold on to your hats — and hear me out before you jump all over me or shut down.

We’re afraid of what the future might hold for us as engineers and as people. Maybe this entire software defined thing is going to destroy my entire career. Maybe I’ll end up like a buggy whip maker Continue reading

Worth Reading: Type 4’s

So, a type-4 asbr-summary LSA is needed to help make the ASBR reachable and, by extension make the associated type-5 prefix valid. The type-4 acts like a glue record, and uses the ABRs well known RID as a care-of address for the ASBR and it’s advertised prefixes. via network sherpa

Continue reading

QOTW: Virtue in Good

The post QOTW: Virtue in Good appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: The Marriage of the Ecosystem

New technology is like dating. You get excited and giddy about where things are going and all the potential you see. You enjoy spending time together just talking or existing. As you start to get more serious you start to see issues crop up the need to be solved. Eventually you take the plunge and make things super serious. What you don’t want to have happen at this point is the trap that some people fall into. via networking nerd

The post Worth Reading: The Marriage of the Ecosystem appeared first on 'net work.

Yokohama

The post Yokohama appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: P4

P4 , the language that could be a successor to OpenFlow , isn’t a sure thing yet, but it’s certainly captured the imagination of certain vendors, particularly on the chip side. via sdn central

The post Worth Reading: P4 appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: What’s Your KPI?

In our quest to make business and work as mechanical and inhuman as possible over the past hundred years, every position in many large organizations has been sliced and diced into tiny pieces so that each piece can be measured and evaluated against a chart posted on the wall. via linkedin

The post Worth Reading: What’s Your KPI? appeared first on 'net work.

New technology watch ‘net

A few thoughts on new technology from around the web over the last week. Is data center software defined networks crossing the chasm? According to the Next Platform, for instance, it is —

And the answer is that it is in Gartner’s slope of enlightenment, that it is crossing Moore’s chasm, and that it is in a period where market share is being set month by month. If you follow the assumptions made in the above analysis, then 2015 will represent at most 1 percent to 3 percent of the total revenue that will occur in the datacenter SDN market over the next five years. It is an exciting time to be in datacenter networking.

This still leaves me with a question, however — what does a “software defined network” really mean? From one perspective, I’ve been working on software defined networks since the mid-1990’s. It is the software based centralized and distributed control planes that have defined the network ever since then; the last hardware defined network I worked on was based on inverse multiplexers and physical interconnects to direct and manage traffic. So what do we mean when we say “software defined network” today? It seems the biggest Continue reading