DC 14. Real case of using ZTP to setup Mellanox SN 2010 with Cumulus Linux.

Hello my friend,

Earlier in this year we’ve discussed zero touch provisioning using the Data Centre Fabric Enabler Infrastructure. As always in my articles, I’ve used wonderful VM images, which are freely available on the Internet. Nevertheless, when you deal with real boxes, various caveats might arise. Today we’ll review how to bring Mellanox switch SN 2010 to the operational state running Cumulus Linux using the ZTP framework I’ve already created.

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Thanks

Special thanks for Avi Alkobi from Mellanox and Pete Crocker and Attilla de Groot from Cumulus for providing me the Mellanox switch and Cumulus license for the tests.

Disclaimer

It is always exciting to do something for the first time. I have never written about any particular network device. Mostly because I always separate, as far as it is possible, the relationship between my current employer, which is The Hut Group as of today, and my blog. And this is the justification, why Continue reading

Worth Reading: TCP MSS Values in the Wild

In Never-Ending Story of IP Fragmentation I described how you could use TCP Maximum Segment Size to minimize the impact of IP fragmentation and PMTUD blackholes (more details on TCP MSS clamping)… but one has to wonder how people use TCP MSS in the wild and what values you might see.

As is often the case, Geoff Houston found a way to measure them, and published the answer: TCP MSS Values

Updating graph databases with Cypher

Updating graph databases with Cypher Green et al., VLDB’19

This is the story of a great collaboration between academia, industry, and users of the Cypher graph querying language as created by Neo4j. Beyond Neo4j, Cypher is also supported in SAP HANA Graph, RedisGraph, Agnes Graph, and Memgraph. Cypher for Apache Spark, and Cypher over Gremlin projects are also both available in open source. The openCypher project brings together Cypher implementors across different projects and products, and aims to produce a full and open specification of the language. There is also a Graph Query Language (GQL) standards organisation.

Cypher is used in hundreds of production applications across many industry vertical domains, such as financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing and retails, logistics, government, and healthcare.

Personally I would have expected that number to be in the thousands by now and there are some suggestions that it is, however Neo4j are still only claiming ‘hundreds of customers’ on their own website.

The read-only core of the Cypher language has already been fully formalised. But when it came time to extend that formalism to include the update mechanisms, the authors ran into difficulties.

Our understanding of updates in the popular graph Continue reading

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Now that the technology has been with us for some time, interest in and adoption of software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN) is heating up. It’s a good time to look at what’s driving organizations to implement SD-WAN and what type of organizations the technology is best suited for.  The technology has clearly taken off. A 2018 survey of 225 IT professionals by SevOne found 66% of respondents already had at least some percentage of their WAN software-defined, and nearly 50% had active SD-WAN projects. Perhaps most impressive, 17% of respondents said they’d connect 100 or more remote sites within 12 to 18 months.To read this article in full, please click here

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[mini-update] Network Topology Visualization #2 – Using SNMP as data source and enhanced visuals

After a longer break, I managed to get back to my small visualization experiment from last time, and improve it a little. Firstly, the NETCONF interface was switched for a more standard SNMP one, even if that is not as cutting edge anymore. 

So without keeping you waiting, here is firs the visualization example, as you can see I was playing here a little and got inspired by the Mischief-makers map from Harry Potter. Of course if you do not like the visuals just re-do the CSS to get rid of it. 

Also, this time I made the code public using the much more common github.com here. 

Usage/Tutorial

Once you download this project from github, you will find several files in the directory, your starting point are the two configuration files called:

• config.ini  – holds SNMP configuration like community string and a list of IPs for each network device to be SNMP queried
• pyconfig.py – holds low level configuration on how to visualize the data recieved and how to order the devices detected into layers

Lets start with the config.ini, which is much smaller. Here is an example.

[DEFAULT]
SnmpVersion = 2c
SnmpCommunityString  Continue reading

VMworld US 2019: Networking and Security Recap

VMworld US 2019 has come to a close. If you didn’t attend, don’t worry as we still have VMworld Europe right around the corner. Join us November 4-7, 2019 to hear experts discuss cloud, networking and security, digital workspace, digital trends and more!  Register for VMworld Europe now.

Below is a quick recap and resources to check out from VMworld US 2019.

Stats from VMworld US 2019

• For networking and security we delivered 91 Breakout Sessions + 2 Showcase Keynotes
  • VMware NSX-T – Getting Started was the second most played video post-VMworld!
• VMware NSX was the #1 attended Hands-On-Lab (HOL), and there was a total of 1,922 labs taken on NSX
  • 17,277 NSX networks were created at HOL
• VMware NSX Intelligence won TechTarget’s Best of Show award – Judge’s Choice for Disruptive Technology

Congratulations to our NSX Intelligence team: Anirban Sengupta, Umesh Mahajan, Farzad Ghannadian, Kausum Kumar, Catherine Fan and Ray Budavari.

Surprise guest Michael Dell stopped by the Solutions Exchange to check out demos of what’s new from the networking and security business unit demoed by Chris McCain.

Technical Networking and Security Sessions from VMworld US 2019

Below is a list of sessions that jump into the NSX Continue reading

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When Microsoft launched Azure as a cloud-based version of its Windows Server operating system, it didn't make it exclusively Windows. It also included Linux support, and in just a few years, the number of Linux instances now outnumbers Windows instances.It's nice to see Microsoft finally shed that not-invented-here attitude that was so toxic for so long, but the company's latest move is really surprising.Microsoft has partnered with a company called Skytap to offer IBM Power9 instances on its Azure cloud service to run Power-based systems inside of the Azure cloud, which will be offered as Azure virtual machines (VM) along with the Xeon and Epyc server instances that it already offers.To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft brings IBM iron to Azure for on-premises migrations

When Microsoft launched Azure as a cloud-based version of its Windows Server operating system, it didn't make it exclusively Windows. It also included Linux support, and in just a few years, the number of Linux instances now outnumbers Windows instances.It's nice to see Microsoft finally shed that not-invented-here attitude that was so toxic for so long, but the company's latest move is really surprising.Microsoft has partnered with a company called Skytap to offer IBM Power9 instances on its Azure cloud service to run Power-based systems inside of the Azure cloud, which will be offered as Azure virtual machines (VM) along with the Xeon and Epyc server instances that it already offers.To read this article in full, please click here

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Sri Lanka Chapter Tackles Internet Restrictions and Cybersecurity Threats

Since its establishment nine years ago, the Internet Society Sri Lanka Chapter has been a key stakeholder in ensuring a free, open, and safe Internet in Sri Lanka.

During the 2018 religious riots and the 2019 Easter bombings in Sri Lanka, when access to social media networks and messaging services was blocked, the Sri Lanka Chapter worked closely with government, media, academia, the private sector, and the general public to inform them about the impact of such restrictions on the Internet. In the aftermath of the 2018 religious riots, the Sri Lanka Chapter issued an appeal letter to the Presidential Secretariat on behalf of Internet Society members in Sri Lanka to lift the social media ban. Earlier this year, after the Easter bombings, the Sri Lanka Chapter organized an online meeting to engage in dialogue with different groups, including government and media agencies, informing them about the wide-ranging economic and social consequences of Internet restrictions, and raising the awareness that preventing online access is rarely an effective solution to conflicts and unrest.

In the attempt to control the spread of misinformation and hate speech, and cut off communications between organizers of attacks, the Internet restrictions also prevented people from connecting Continue reading

Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On – danah boyd – Medium

Searing speech from dana boyd. How she keeps on going is amazing to me.

The post Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On – danah boyd – Medium appeared first on EtherealMind.

How We Design Features for Wrangler, the Cloudflare Workers CLI

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As part of the 1.3.1 release, the folks on the Workers Developer Experience team dove into the thought process that goes into building out features for a CLI and thinking like users. Because while we wish building a CLI were as easy as our teammate Avery tweeted...

… it brings design challenges that many of us have never encountered. To overcome these challenges successfully requires deep empathy for users across the entire team, as well as the ability to address ambiguous questions related to how developers write Workers.

Wrangler, meet Workers KV

Our new KV functionality introduced a host of new features, from creating KV Continue reading

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BrandPost: A great SD-WAN orchestrator makes the network simpler to manage

Keeping an SD-WAN in Harmony with the Business Requires a Great Orchestrator According to Merriam-Webster, orchestration is defined as 1: the arrangement of a musical composition for performance by an orchestra (a group of musicians including especially string players organized to perform ensemble music); 2: harmonious organizationIf you’ve ever attended the symphony, you have probably noticed the vibrant movement of the conductor waving his baton in front of the orchestra. The conductor has one of the most visible jobs in the music world, but despite this, many concertgoers are likely unclear about what the conductor is really doing. The conductor’s job is to assign different instruments to the musicians that play the different elements that make up the musical composition. The primary goal of the conductor is to orchestrate harmony across all of the instruments so that every instrument is audible. However, the conductor doesn’t simply keep the orchestra in time or harmony, most importantly, he serves as a messenger for the composer. The conductor intrinsically understands the music and communicates it to the musicians using his baton so that the orchestra can transmit a cohesive view of the music to the audience.To read this article in full, Continue reading