Introduction to Arista Networks High End Switches : Arista 7500 E Switches

Worth Reading: Postpone Inbox Procrastination

This blog post by Ethan Bank totally describes my (bad) Inbox habits. If you're anything like me, you might find Ethan's ideas useful (I do... following them is a different story though).

Computer Networking Problems and Solutions on Sale

For anyone who would like to pick up a copy of Ethan and I’s latest work, it’s currently on prepublication special over at InformIT. Click on the image below for the sale price.

Pre-Order My Computer Networking Problems & Solutions Book And Save 40%

I co-authored Computer Networking Problems And Solutions with Russ White. The nice folks at InformIT.com are accepting pre-orders of the book and ebook at 40% off until December 16, 2017. Go get yourself a copy of this short 832 page read via this link containing all of InformIT’s titles coming soon.

Or, if you use the book’s product page instead of the “coming soon” link above, use code PREORDER to get the discount.

All “coming soon” titles on sale at InformIT: http://informit.com/comingsoon

Product Page for Computer Networking Problems & Solutions: http://www.informit.com/store/computer-networking-problems-and-solutions-an-innovative-9781587145049

Pre-Order My Computer Networking Problems & Solutions Book And Save 40%

I co-authored Computer Networking Problems And Solutions with Russ White. The nice folks at InformIT.com are accepting pre-orders of the book and ebook at 40% off until December 16, 2017. Go get yourself a copy of this short 832 page read via this link containing all of InformIT’s titles coming soon.

Or, if you use the book’s product page instead of the “coming soon” link above, use code PREORDER to get the discount.

All “coming soon” titles on sale at InformIT: http://informit.com/comingsoon

Product Page for Computer Networking Problems & Solutions: http://www.informit.com/store/computer-networking-problems-and-solutions-an-innovative-9781587145049

Show 369: Work/Life Balance In IT

Weekend Reads: The Relay Box Attack

West Midlands Police believe it is the first time the high-tech crime has been caught on camera. Relay boxes can receive signals through walls, doors and windows but not metal. The theft took just one minute and the Mercedes car, stolen from the Elmdon area of Solihull on 24 September, has not been recovered. @BBCWest Midlands Police believe it is the first time the high-tech crime has been caught on camera. Relay boxes can receive signals through walls, doors and windows but not metal. The theft took just one minute and the Mercedes car, stolen from the Elmdon area of Solihull on 24 September, has not been recovered. @BBC

There’s rising worry that corporations are taking over America. But after reviewing a slew of the bids by cities and states wooing Amazon’s massive second headquarters, I don’t think “takeover” quite captures what’s going on. More like “surrender.” Last month Amazon announced it got 238 offers for its new, proposed 50,000-employee HQ2. I set out to see what’s in them, but only about 30 have been released so far under public-record acts. @The Seattle Times

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Carpenter v. United States on November Continue reading

Verizon Says its Intelligent Edge Will Reduce Network Costs

Putting compute and storage at the edge reduces latency.

SDxCentral’s Weekly Roundup — December 8, 2017

ETSI launches AR group; Canonical and Rancher Labs build joint platform; VeloCloud extends to AWS.

No Slowdown in Sight for Kubernetes

Kubernetes has quickly become a key technology in the emerging containerized application environment since it was first announced by Google engineers just more than three years ago, catching hold as the primary container orchestration tool used by hyperscalers, HPC organizations and enterprises and overshadowing similar tools like Docker Swarm, Mesos and OpenStack.

Born from earlier internal Google projects Borg and Omega, the open-source Kubernetes has been embraced by top cloud providers and growing numbers of enterprises, and support is growing among datacenter infrastructure software vendors.

Red Hat has built out its OpenShift cloud application platform based on both …

No Slowdown in Sight for Kubernetes was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Church

Cisco to Buy Cmpute.io, Acquiring Yet Another Cloud Cost Comparison Tool

CloudCenter also compares costs of running applications in public and private clouds.

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For December 8th, 2017

Hey, it's HighScalability time: 

AWS Geek creates spectacular visual summaries.

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. And please recommend my new book—Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10—to those looking to understand the cloud. I think they'll like it.

• 127 terabytes: per year growth in blockchain if bitcoin wins; 4: hours from tabula rasa to chess god; 1.4 billion: Slack jobs per day; 400: hyperscale data centers worldwide by 2018; 9.8X: Machine Learning Engineer job growth; 14%: Ethereum transactions are for Cryptokitties; 80: seconds per hash on 55 year old IBM 1401 mainframe; $110 billion: app stores spending in 2018; 25: years since first text message; 4,000: AWS code pushes per day; two elephants: of space dust hits earth every day; 


• Quotable Quotes:
  • @DavidBrin: Now that's what I call engineering! [Voyager 1] Thrusters that haven't been used in 37 years - still reliable!
  • drkoalaman: So despite not supporting other cryptos the majority of my time on the DNM's I think its officially time to step away from bitcoin, at least for the time being. Went to do a direct deal today with Continue reading

Arista’s Got its Eye on the Router Market With Its EOS 4.20

The Extensible Operating System runs across all of Arista’s products.

Worth Reading: Are you a genius or a fraud?

One time, when I was a small child, I saw Hank Aaron go to bat. He had already hit his 500th home run. I was looking forward to seeing this genius do his thing. I was devastated when he struck out. Some genius, I recall thinking. As an eight-year-old, my first thought was that I could have done exactly what he did. Of course, Hank knew something that I, at the time, did not. Genius is about averages, not every time at bat. If every time you strike out, you imagine that you might be a fraud, you will make yourself insane. —Jeffery Tucker @ The Stream

oVirt roles Ansible Galaxy integration

In 4.2 release we have splitted our oVirt Ansible roles into separate RPM packages and also separate git repositories, so it is possible for user to install specific role either from Ansible Galaxy or as RPM package.

The reason

The reason to split the roles into separate packages and git repositories was mainly the usage from the AWX/Ansible Tower. Since Ansible Galaxy is only integrated with github you need to store your Ansible role in single git repostiory in order to have separate Ansible role in Galaxy. Previously we used one single repository where we have stored all the roles, but because of that manual configuration was required to make those roles usable in AWX/Ansible Tower. So as you can see on image below we now have many roles in Ansible Galaxy under oVirt user:

How to install the roles

There are still two ways how to install the roles: either using Ansible Galaxy or using RPM package available from oVirt repositories.

Ansible Galaxy

You are now able to install just a single role and not necessarily all of them at once like in previous versions For example to install just oVirt cluster upgrade role, you have to run Continue reading

oVirt roles Ansible Galaxy integration

In 4.2 release we have splitted our oVirt Ansible roles into separate RPM packages and also separate git repositories, so it is possible for user to install specific role either from Ansible Galaxy or as RPM package.

The reason

The reason to split the roles into separate packages and git repositories was mainly the usage from the AWX/Ansible Tower. Since Ansible Galaxy is only integrated with github you need to store your Ansible role in single git repostiory in order to have separate Ansible role in Galaxy. Previously we used one single repository where we have stored all the roles, but because of that manual configuration was required to make those roles usable in AWX/Ansible Tower. So as you can see on image below we now have many roles in Ansible Galaxy under oVirt user:

How to install the roles

There are still two ways how to install the roles: either using Ansible Galaxy or using RPM package available from oVirt repositories.

Ansible Galaxy

You are now able to install just a single role and not necessarily all of them at once like in previous versions For example to install just oVirt cluster upgrade role, you have to run Continue reading

Customizing the host deploy process

In 4.2 release we have introduced a possibility to customize the host-deploy process by running the Ansible post-tasks after the host-deploy process successfully finishes.

The reason

Prior to oVirt 4.2 release administrators could customize host's firewall rules using engine-config option IPTablesConfigSiteCustom. Unfortunately writing custom iptables rules into string value to be used in engine-config was very user unfriendly and using engine-config to provide custom firewalld rules would be even much worse. Because of above we have introduced Ansible integration as a part of host deploy flow, which allows administrators to add any custom actions executed on the host during host deploy flow.

Special tasks file

As part of this role we also include additional tasks, which could be written by the user, to modify the host-deploy process for example to open some more FirewallD ports.

Those additional tasks can be added to following file:

/etc/ovirt-engine/ansible/ovirt-host-deploy-post-tasks.yml

This post-task file is executed as part of host-deploy process just before setup network invocation.

Example

An example post-tasks file is provided by ovirt-engine installation, at following location:

/etc/ovirt-engine/ansible/ovirt-host-deploy-post-tasks.yml.example

This is just an example file, to add some task into host deploy flow, you need to create below mentioned file Continue reading

Building a new IMDB: Internet Mince Pie Database

CC-BY-SA 2.0 image by Phil! Gold

Since joining Cloudflare I’ve always known that as we grew, incredible things would be possible. It’s been a long held ambition to work in an organisation with the scale to answer a very controversial and difficult question. To do so would require a collection of individuals with a depth of experience, passion, dedication & above all collaborative spirit.

As Cloudflare’s London office has grown in the last 4 years I believe 2017 is the year we reach the tipping point where this is possible. A paradigm-shift in the type of challenges Cloudflare is able to tackle. We could finally sample every commercially available mince pie in existence before the 1st of December. In doing so, we would know conclusively which mince pie we should all be buying over Christmas to share with our friends & families.

What is a mince pie?

For the uninitiated, a Mince Pie is “a sweet pie of British origin, filled with a mixture of dried fruits and spices called mincemeat, that is traditionally served during the Christmas season in the English world.” - Wikipedia for Mince Pie

The original Mince Pie was typically filled with a mixture Continue reading

Network Visibility with Barefoot Deep Insight

As you may have heard this week, Barefoot Networks is back in the news with the release of their newest product, Barefoot Deep Insight. Choosing to go down the road of naming a thing after what it actually does, Barefoot has created a solution to finding out why network packets are behaving the way they are.

Observer Problem

It’s no secret that modern network monitoring is coming out of the Dark Ages. ping, traceroute, and SNMP aren’t exactly the best tools to be giving any kind of real information about things. They were designed for a different time with much less packet flow. Even Netflow can’t keep up with modern networks running at multi-gigabit speeds. And even if it could, it’s still missing in-flight data about network paths and packet delays.

Imagine standing outside of the Holland Tunnel. You know that a car entered at a specific time. And you see the car exit. But you don’t know what happened to the car in between. If the car takes 5 minutes to traverse the tunnel you have no way of knowing if that’s normal or not. Likewise, if a car is delayed and takes 7-8 minutes to exit Continue reading