MPLS and VRFs – Filling the Gaps

A few years ago, I took an SE role covering Higher Education accounts. I quickly realized one of the deficits Cisco has in the CCNA program as it pertains to networks with a certain set of requirements. While the program is jam-packed with great information, there are a few concepts that an administrator may have to deal with that catch them by surprise. Three related topics that aren’t covered in CCNA Routing and Switching are shown below.

This article is meant to serve as a starting point for those who may be very strong with routing and switching but lack the exposure to VRFs, Layer 3 Segmentation, and MPLS. It is a good starting point for new employees that might face this challenge and it will certainly help them gain perspective on these topics.

Introduction to VRFs

• Where to Use a VRF
• VRFing 101, Understing VRF Basics
• VRFing 102, Providing Internet Access With Dynamic PAT
• VRFing 103, Using NAT Virtual Interfaces for Global Reachability

Segmenting Layer 3 Networks with VRFs

• Article 1 – Basic L3 Segmentation with VRFs
• Article 2 – Extending L3 Segmentation with VRF-lite
• Article 3 – Creating a Shared Services VRF
• Article 4 – VRF-lite in a DMVPN Network
• Continue reading

Going Proactive on Security: Driving Encryption Adoption Intelligently

It's no secret that Cloudflare operates at a huge scale. Cloudflare provides security and performance to over 9 million websites all around the world, from small businesses and WordPress blogs to Fortune 500 companies. That means one in every 10 web requests goes through our network.

However, hidden behind the scenes, we offer support in using our platform to all our customers - whether they're on our free plan or on our Enterprise offering. This blog post dives into some of the technology that helps make this possible and how we're using it to drive encryption and build a better web.

Why Now?

Recently web browser vendors have been working on extending encryption on the internet. Traditionally they would use positive indicators to mark encrypted traffic as secure; when traffic was served securely over HTTPS, a green padlock would indicate in your browser that this was the case. In moving to standardise encryption online, Google Chrome have been leading the charge in marking insecure page loads as "Not Secure". Today, this UI change has been pushed out to all Google Chrome users globally for all websites: any website loaded over HTTP will be marked as insecure.

That's not all though; Continue reading

MPLS Intro Series – Route Reflectors

This is the final article in the MPLS Intro Series and will quickly mention the need for route reflectors. This need is driven by the iBGP requirement for a full mesh of peers. This means that a network with only 4 PE nodes would have 6 iBGP peering sessions. This is calculated as n(n-1)/2 where n is the number of PE nodes required for a given topology.

As the scale grows, the need for a centralized peering point becomes obvious. For example, a network with 10 PE nodes would have 45 iBGP sessions to meet the full mesh requirement. Route reflectors overcome this rule by becoming a central point that can advertise routes between iBGP “route reflector clients”. The diagram below actually has more peering sessions than the one above (without RR). However, as a network continues to grow, the full mesh becomes quite challenging.

This is the extent of what I really wanted to cover in this introductory level article and this article concludes the MPLS Intro Series.  If you want to learn more about VPNv4 and route reflectors, you can check out this video below.

LabMinutes# SP0015 – Cisco MPLS VPN with BGP Route Reflector (Part 1)

Disclaimer: Continue reading

History of Networking: The RFC Series

James Feger Ditches CenturyLink for F5 Networks

Adding Feger is the latest in a number of hires by F5 as it shifts its business model to prepare for 5G, IoT, and the cloud.

Verizon, AT&T Reveal Additional 5G Launch Markets

Verizon will have four 5G markets launched in 2018. AT&T says it will have a dozen.

On the ‘net: Understanding the Exploit Market

How do attackers find a vulnerability, write a piece of code to take advantage of that vulnerability — i.e., build an exploit — build a software delivery system around the exploit and then deliver the attack itself? The key point to recognize in this process is that no single person undertakes all of this work. @Search Networking

CableLabs Snaps Kubernetes Into Its NFV, SDN Platform Stack

The SNAPS-Kubernetes platform helps to deliver virtual network functions that use fewer resources, are more fault-tolerant, and can scale quickly to meet demand.

Open Source: Not Just About AI, Blockchains, and Kubernetes

OSCON 2018 did a great job of highlighting women and people of color in their programming.

Cloudflare Access: Now teams of any size can turn off their VPN

Using a VPN is painful. Logging-in interrupts your workflow. You have to remember a separate set of credentials, which your administrator has to manage. The VPN slows you down when you're away from the office. Beyond just inconvenience, a VPN can pose a real security risk. A single infected device or malicious user can compromise your network once inside the perimeter.

In response, large enterprises have deployed expensive zero trust solutions. The name sounds counterintuitive - don’t we want to add trust to our network security? Zero trust refers to the default state of these tools. They trust no one; each request has to prove that itself. This architecture, most notably demonstrated at Google with Beyondcorp, has allowed teams to start to migrate to a more secure method of access control.

However, users of zero trust tools still suffer from the same latency problems they endured with old-school VPNs. Even worse, the price tag puts these tools out of reach for most teams.

Here at Cloudflare, we shared those same frustrations with VPNs. After evaluating our options, we realized we could build a better zero trust solution by leveraging some of the unique capabilities we have here at Cloudflare:

Our Continue reading

Google Takes On Public Cloud Rivals With Private Kubernetes Service

As the underdog in cloud computing, Google has to take a slightly different tack from industry pioneer and juggernaut Amazon Web Services, which simply believes that all applications should, in the fullness of time, move to the public cloud. …

Google Takes On Public Cloud Rivals With Private Kubernetes Service was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Gigamon Dives Deeper Into Security Space With Icebrg Acquisition

Gigamon will combine its network traffic visibility capabilities with Icebrg’s security platform and allow SOC teams to deploy new security technologies as “security applications” on top of it.

How to Get Your Apps off Windows 2003 and Into the Cloud with Docker Enterprise

Docker Windows Containers with Docker Enterprise

A huge number of companies are still running apps on Windows Server 2003 and 2008 in the data center. They want to move to a modern, secure, supported platform which gives them the flexibility to run in the data center today – and in any cloud tomorrow. Docker gives them that flexibility, and you can move your apps to Docker without changing any code.

That was the focus of our recent webinar, where we showed several apps currently running on Windows Server 2003, and packaged them to run as Docker Windows containers. We showed all the steps to migrate the apps with no code changes, and then we ran them in Docker Enterprise on a Windows Server 2016 VM running in Azure.

You can watch the full video of the webinar here – it comes in at just over 60 minutes:

In the webinar, you see the portability that Docker Enterprise gives you. The applications we move are a mixture of older web technologies – static HTML, classic ASP and ASP.NET WebForms. The apps from the demo and the Dockerfiles are on GitHub here. They could be 15-year old apps and you Continue reading

Today, Chrome Takes Another Step Forward in Addressing the Design Flaw That is an Unencrypted Web

The following is a guest post by Troy Hunt, awarded Security expert, blogger, and Pluralsight author. He’s also the creator of the popular Have I been pwned?, the free aggregation service that helps the owners of over 5 billion accounts impacted by data breaches.

Tweet

I still clearly remember my first foray onto the internet as a university student back in the mid 90's. It was a simpler online time back then, of course; we weren't doing our personal banking or our tax returns or handling our medical records so the whole premise of encrypting the transport layer wasn't exactly a high priority. In time, those services came along and so did the need to have some assurances about the confidentiality of the material we were sending around over other people's networks and computers. SSL as it was at the time was costly, but hey, banks and the like could absorb that given the nature of their businesses. However, at the time, there were all sorts of problems with the premise of serving traffic securely ranging from the cost of certs to the effort involved in obtaining and configuring them through to the performance hit on the Continue reading

Worth Reading: I can’t stop wasting time

There are so many distractions when you are a freelancer. From kids coming into your home office or time sucks like Facebook, you need to focus and be more efficient. The key is arming yourself with the right tools for the job. —Carrie Cousins @WebDesignerDepot

Cumulus content roundup: July

Time for another Cumulus content roundup! We’ve been really busy this summer, so there’s a little bit of everything in this post: videos, industry news articles, new podcast episodes and even an entire book! So if you’ve got room on your summer reading list, be sure to add EVPN in the Data Center. Or, if you’ve got too much to do and can’t find time to sit down and read, grab a pair of headphones and listen to the latest episode of Kernel of Truth while you work. The choice is yours!

New from Cumulus

Kernel of Truth episode 03 — Linux: the kernel, the community & beyond: You can’t name an open networking podcast “Kernel of Truth,” and NOT have an episode dedicated to the Linux kernel! Listen to our discussion about the Linux community and why Linux belongs in the data center.

EVPN in the Data Center: This eBook cuts through the fog and explains how you can deploy this technology seamlessly in your data center. You’ll discover why EVPN can be simpler to use in data centers than in service provider networks.

Vault Systems customer video: As a cloud provider for the Australian government, Continue reading

BrandPost: Converging IT and Network Teams: A Cloud Native Automation Platform is the Catalyst for Successful Operations

Executive summaryNetwork automation is an imperative if operators are to deliver services with sustainable levels of agility and profitability. Automation enables the network to adapt to events and demands rapidly and efficiently, and supports a new speed of digital business. However, operators cannot buy all the automation they need off-the-shelf: they need to build and/or customize it for their own purposes and environments. This means overcoming cultural, organizational and technical barriers, bridging the separate and often antagonistic roles IT and network departments play today in managing the physical network.Network virtualization and its emphasis on automation has started to break down technical barriers as IT, and network organizations increasingly need to work in each other’s domains. Network organizations are investigating software-defined networking (SDN) as a means of automating key manual interactions with network elements, and IT organizations are being asked to support network functions directly with data center/cloud components and associated automation. It is clearly desirable for the two departments to start sharing tools, knowledge, best practices, cloud-native software development and operations (DevOps) approaches as their roles converge. Operators that encourage this cross-domain fertilization accelerate the cultural change necessary to build an automated and adaptive network.To read this Continue reading

MPLS Intro Series – VPNv4 Packet Walk

In our last article, we configured and tested a basic VPNv4 configuration. In this article, we will do a hop by hop analysis of each device and look at a packet capture for a couple of the steps in the label switched path. We are using the exact same topology and router names. For the example, I have shut down the connection between P4 and PE2 so no load balancing will occur and we have a deterministic path to analyze.

For the analysis, we will examine the path from CE_Site_1 to 20.2.2.2 at CE_Site_2. For each device, we want to determine the egress interface, the next hop and any MPLS labels that should be present.

CE_Site_1 – forwarding a packet to destination 20.2.2.2

CE_Site_1#show ip cef 20.2.2.2
0.0.0.0/0
  nexthop 10.1.1.1 GigabitEthernet2

CE_Site_1 is using the default route with a next-hop of 10.1.1.1

PE1 – receive a packet on Gi4 (vrf RED), forwarding for destination 20.2.2.2

//based on physical topology, we know this will arrive on Gi4 of PE1
PE1#show vrf brief
  Name                             Default RD            Protocols   Interfaces
  BLUE                             110:210               ipv4        Gi5
  Mgmt-intf                                      Continue reading

MPLS Intro Series – Introduction to VPNv4

In the previous article, we took a look at building a simple label switched path (LSP) through an MPLS network. This article takes the configuration a step further and leverages multiple labels to connect and isolate VRFs over an MPLS core. This is known as MPLS VPNv4. My goal is to introduce a method to bring together VRF segmentation concepts and provide a framework for a scalable deployment.

Before we get started, I am going to rename the routers once again based on their target function. An LER in a VPNv4 configuration is known as a PE node. An LSR router is known as a P node. I am also introducing CE (customer edge) nodes into the topology.

Desired End State

In this example, we will allow CE_Site_1 to communicate with CE_Site_2. Likewise, we want CE_Site_3 to communicate with CE_Site_4.

Terms

• P Router – provider router, is considered transit in a label switched path, the term is often used interchangeably with LSR
• PE Router – provider edge router and sits on the provider side of the provider/customer interconnection. Has most of the intelligence and configuration for an LSP and allows a scale-out architecture. The term PE is more common Continue reading

2018 Internet Society Asia-Pacific & Middle East Chapters Meeting

The APAC & Middle East Chapters joined hands to organize their combined Regional Chapters Meeting from 11 to 12 May in Kathmandu, Nepal. 23 Fellows representing 18 regional Chapters and Women SIG were nominated by their respective Chapters/SIGs to participate in this meeting. Half of the meeting focused on collaboratively developing action plans that are aligned with the Internet Society’s 2018 campaigns, while the other half was to discuss and address regional and governance-related issues.

At the end of the workshop, 18 concrete plans were ready for implementation:

• 3 Community Networks plans (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Philippines)
• 5 Internet of Things plans (Bangladesh, India Mumbai, Sri Lanka, UAE, Yemen)
• 9 Collaborative Governance plans (India Trivandrum, India Delhi, Indonesia, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nepal, Palestine, PICISOC, Women SIG)
• 1 Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security plan (India Kolkata)

During the regional breakout sessions, Fellows from the APAC region voted for and discussed three major regional issues: 1) Cybersecurity, 2) Transition [of the Internet] to the younger generation, 3) Digital Literacy. They engaged in an open discussion and highlighted some of the specific issues under these topics, what is needed in the context of their region, and shared their plans to address them.

The regional Continue reading