In this post I’ll show how to build a dockerized OpenStack and OpenContrail lab, integrate it with Juniper MX80 DC-GW and demonstrate one of Contrail’s most interesting and unique features called BGP-as-a-Service.
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Here we are – the first day of 2018 and Im anxious and excited to get 2018 off to a good start. Looking back – it just occurred to me that I didn’t write one of these for last year. Not sure what happened there, but Im glad to be getting back on track. So let’s start with 2017…
2017 was a great year for me. I started the year continuing my work at IBM with the Watson group. About half way through the year (I think) I was offered the opportunity to transition to a role in the Cloud Networking group. It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up to work with folks whom I had an incredible amount of respect for. So I began the transition and within 3 months had fully transitioned to the new team. Since then, I’ve been heads down working (the reason for the lack of blog posts recently (sorry!)). But being busy at work is a good thing for me. For those of you that know me well you know that “bored Jon” is “not happy Jon” so Im in my own Continue reading
The article is the fifth of the series of the articles discussing the enterprise network configuration. The article focus on the Data Center (DC) configuration. DC consists of the two devices - Server1 and the switch vIOS-Ser-I. Of course, the DC network with a single switch and the server is far away from any known DC network design. Typically, modern horizontally scaled large-size Layer 3 DCs consist of thousands of servers connected to the Top of Rack (ToR) l3 switches and they follow leaf and spine design. The DC of this size can be hardly emulated on a single PC. For this reason I only share the configuration of the Cisco L3 switch that is located in our DC. The switch is running Cisco vIOS-L2, version 15.2 and it has assigned 768MB RAM by GNS3.
The switch vIOS-Ser-I connects Ubuntu Linux Server to DC network. The configuration of the services such as bonding, NTP, DHCP, Syslog-ng, DNS and RADIUS running on the server is explained in more details later.
Picture 1 - Data Center
Note: The configuration file of the device vIOS-Serv-I is attached here.
1. Switch vIOS-Ser-I Configuration
Rather than explaining every line of the configuration, we Continue reading
As we start the new year, I started thinking about something. Why do people think it’s acceptable to take shortcuts in their IT career? Is it because people don’t see the true effect of their work? Or is the cheating as prevalent in law and medicine but we working in IT aren’t aware of it?
Trust me, I understand that some people live really tough lives, they want to put food on the table for their family, find a better living, perhaps start a new life in a new country. The competition is fierce. Some countries have more engineers coming out of universities every year than we have people living in Sweden.
The thing is though, if you cheat your way to a CCIE, sooner or later you will be caught. But regardless of that. How would you feel if a power plant goes down due to your mistake? Having a heart monitoring unit fail because of your mistake? Having people’s private information leaked due to your mistake? We all make mistakes but we shouldn’t be making them because we pretend that we are something that we aren’t, experts. Networking is a critical part of everyones life now. Most of Continue reading
Welcome back to a year divisible by 2! 2018 is going to be a good year through the power of positive thinking. It’s going to be a fun year for everyone. And I’m going to do my best to have fun in 2018 as well.
Per my tradition, today is a day to look at what is going to be coming in 2018. I don’t make predictions, even if I take some shots at people that do. I also try not to look back to heavily on the things I’ve done over the past year. Google and blog searches are your friend there. Likely as not, you’ve read what I wrote this year and found one or two things useful, insightful, or amusing. What I want to do is set up what the next 52 weeks are going to look like for everyone that comes to this blog to find content.
The past couple of years has shown me that the written word is starting to lose a bit of luster for content consumers. There’s been a bit push to video. Friends like Keith Townsend, Robb Boardman, and Rowell Dionicio have started making more video Continue reading
U.S. Air Force soars to the cloud for $1B; Dell EMC bests Nutanix; Machine learning for networks.
Some New Year's resolutions are hard to keep, especially when it comes to the network.
Here’s a catalog of all the media I produced (or helped produce) in December 2017.
Here’s a catalog of all the media I produced (or helped produce) in December 2017.
Didn’t I just write the 2016 statistics post like…. last week? Another year has flown by and with it another year of attempting to prioritize my writing. I’ll be honest, I’m not optimistic about what I’m going to find when I compare 2017 to 2016. It was a year filled with a lot of change and opportunity so I’ll use that as my excuse as to why I didn’t write as much or as often as I had planned.
I was thinking though: every year I set a goal of writing more posts than the previous year, but that’s only 1 metric to go by. Most of my posts are very detailed and fleshed out. It’s nothing to write a post that’s 1000 words. I regularly eclipse 2000 words and have even hit 3000 words. Perhaps I should be thinking more about word count and not post count? Certainly a 2000 word post takes more effort than a 1000 word post. On the other hand, word count says nothing about quality and could easily lead to excessive wordiness and run-on posts just to tilt the metrics.
Enough musing. Let’s review the data!
Ack. Yep, Continue reading
Continuing in a tradition I started early this year where I take a look back at the year that just passed, I’ve again been very fortunate to have had an amazing year, both in my professional and personal lives. Writing this post is my way of forcing myself to stop and take notice of what I was involved in (something I’m not very good at letting myself do in the moment) and also give readers a chance to see the “me” behind the scenes.
Let’s go through the list!
In January, I joined the CPOC team at Cisco based in Raleigh, North Carolina. This was 
something I worked towards over the course of many months in 2016 and was offered the position in late 2016. Come January of 2017, I had fully transitioned from my prior role and was working full time for CPOC. This change set the stage for everything that happened in my professional life during 2017 and if my gut can be trusted, will end up being a major turning point in my career.
The first thing that we had to do as a result of this new job…
…was planning to uproot Continue reading
Continuing in a tradition I started early this year where I take a look back at the year that just passed, I've again been very fortunate to have had an amazing year, both in my professional and personal lives. Writing this post is my way of forcing myself to stop and take notice of what I was involved in (something I'm not very good at letting myself do in the moment) and also give readers a chance to see the “me” behind the scenes.
Let's go through the list!
Didn't I just write the 2016 statistics post like… last week? Another year has flown by and with it another year of attempting to prioritize my writing. I'll be honest, I'm not optimistic about what I'm going to find when I compare 2017 to 2016. It was a year filled with a lot of change and opportunity so I'll use that as my excuse as to why I didn't write as much or as often as I had planned.
I was thinking though: every year I set a goal of writing more posts than the previous year, but that's only 1 metric to go by. Most of my posts are very detailed and fleshed out. It's nothing to write a post that's 1000 words. I regularly eclipse 2000 words and have even hit 3000 words. Perhaps I should be thinking more about word count and not post count? Certainly a 2000 word post takes more effort than a 1000 word post. On the other hand, word count says nothing about quality and could easily lead to excessive wordiness and run-on posts just to tilt the metrics.
Enough musing. Let's review the data!
Recently, I have been asked to get working Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestria (DVB-T) tunner on Raspberry PI 3. The tunner is Cinergy DVB-T stick from Terratec. Below are my notes describing installation of the stick on Raspbian Linux 9.1 Stretch. I hope someone find them useful.
1. Copy Raspbian to SD CARD (on Ubuntu)
First, we need to copy Raspbian installation image to SD card. Below is the example using dd command on Linux.
$ sudo dd bs=4M if=2017-09-07-raspbian-stretch.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 status=progress conv=fsync
Insert SD card to Raspberry and power on the box. The default user is pi with the password raspberry. Enable SSH and VNC server for remote box administration. Navigate to Menu-> Preferences-> Raspberry PI Configuration.
2. Install Firmware
Inspect kernel for any error message connected with DVB-T tunner.
$ dmesg
Picture 1 - Missing firmware isdbt_rio.imp
Download firmware file isdbt_rio.imp (md5 - 9b762c1808fd8da81bbec3e24ddb04a3) from here. I have also uploaded it to Google disk. You can download and copy the file to the directory /lib/firmware with the command below.
$ sudo wget https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1MwDGSG4ZEm3eeJuf0gS686Be-ngx4rKR -O /lib/firmware/isdbt_rio.inp
Reboot PI and check kernel for any other kernel error messages.
Picture 2 - Continue reading