A Dummy Light for My Network

I’ve always heard the red lights in car dashboard referred to as Dummy Lights. One example might be the use of a light to indicate high temperature in lieu of a temperature gauge. Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent more time doing unique things with hardware and software. Yesterday I challenged myself to build an indicator light to show health issues with my Meraki MX.

Before I get into this, the cool factor here is not what I have built. The cool factor is that someone with very little experience, driven by curiosity, can build this in a very short period of time. I’m neither a professional developer nor someone with deep knowledge around hardware hacking. So I want to solicit thoughts, feedback, and recommendations.

The Trigger

After a little research, I found that the Meraki Dashboard provides a “Load Monitor” that is returned via a perfScore value. This feature is in beta and there’s not a lot of information on it. Therefore, consider your own data source that you would like to use as a trigger value. The following python code will store a numeric value (score) between 1 and 100 (with a lower number being a better score).

import  Continue reading

A Dummy Light for My Network

I’ve always heard the red lights in car dashboard referred to as Dummy Lights. One example might be the use of a light to indicate high temperature in lieu of a temperature gauge. Over the past few weeks, I’ve spent more time doing unique things with hardware and software. Yesterday I challenged myself to build an indicator light to show health issues with my Meraki MX.

Before I get into this, the cool factor here is not what I have built. The cool factor is that someone with very little experience, driven by curiosity, can build this in a very short period of time. I’m neither a professional developer nor someone with deep knowledge around hardware hacking. So before I get too deep into this, I want to solicit thoughts, feedback, and recommendations.

The Trigger

After a little research, I found that the Meraki Dashboard provides a “Load Monitor” that is returned via a perfScore value. This feature is in beta and there’s not a lot of information on it. Therefore, consider your own data source that you would like to use as a trigger value. The following python code will store a numeric value (score) between 1 and 100 (with a Continue reading

Interoperability between Dell and Cisco: Rapid-PVST+

Today I am going to talk about the PVST+ as many of you already know. PVST+ is the advance version of PVST and stands for the Per VLAN spanning Tree Plus. As the name suggest you can have the you are creating STP for the VLANs. So if you have 3 VLANs in your network you have 3 different STP instances per VLAN in your LAN network.

Before I start with the PVST+ ,I would like to tell you guys that we have our own youtube channel for various network videos that can further help you guys to study further. I will going to add many more videos soon on the channel, Please subscribe to the channel for the study network related videos
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Here today I am taking an example where i am taking Cisco and Dell switches in a LAN network and we are going to check the interoperability between the Cisco and Dell. 

Below is the sample network topology showing the Cisco and Dell switches 
Fig 1.1- LAN network STP topology
So in the above mentioned topology, we have 2 Cisco 3550 switches and connected with the Dell Force10 S60 switch Continue reading

The Booming Server Market In The Wake Of Skylake

The slowdown in server sales ahead of Intel’s July launch of the “Skylake” Xeon SP was real, and if the figures from the third quarter of this year are any guide, then it looks like that slump is over. Plenty of customers wanted the shiny new Skylake gear, and we think a fair number of them also wanted to buy older-generation “Broadwell” Xeons and the “Grantley” server platform given the premium that Intel is charging for Skylake processors and their “Purley” platform.

Server makers with older Broadwell machinery in the barn were no doubt happy to oblige customers and clear …

The Booming Server Market In The Wake Of Skylake was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Getting Hyper And Converged About Storage

Hyperconverged infrastructure is a relatively small but fast-growing part of the datacenter market, driving in large part by enterprises looking to simplify and streamline their environments as they tackle increasingly complex workloads.

Like converged infrastructure, hyperconverged offerings are modular in nature, converging compute, storage, networking, virtualization and management software into a tightly integrated single solution that drives greater datacenter densities, smaller footprints, rapid deployment and lower costs. They are pre-built, pre-validated before shipping from the factory, eliminating the need for the user to do the necessary and time-consuming integration. Hyperconverged merges the compute and storage into a single unit, and …

Getting Hyper And Converged About Storage was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Weekend Reads 120117

There’s an “automation meteor” headed right at us, according to financial adviser and Reformed Broker blogger Josh Brown, who used this troubling “chart o’ the day” from Wharton to show just “how quickly things have changed” over the past decade. And how they’re going to keep on changing. —Shawn Langlois @ MarketWatchThere’s an “automation meteor” headed right at us, according to financial adviser and Reformed Broker blogger Josh Brown, who used this troubling “chart o’ the day” from Wharton to show just “how quickly things have changed” over the past decade. And how they’re going to keep on changing. —Shawn Langlois @ MarketWatch

Andrew Ng, formerly the head of AI for Chinese search giant Baidu and, before that, creator of Google’s deep-learning Brain project, knows as well as anyone that artificial intelligence is coming for plenty of jobs. And many of us don’t even know it. —Rachel Metz @ MIT Technology Review

Many historians believe that one of the main reasons why the U.S. won the Cold War was its decisive lead over the Soviet Union in computer and telecommunications technology, which, by the 1980s, made it virtually impossible for the Soviets to compete, either economically or militarily. Continue reading

Enterprise Network on GNS3 – Part 4 – Cisco ASAv-I

This is the fourth from the series of the articles that discuss configuration of the enterprise network. The article explains configuration of the device ASAv-I. The device is a Cisco Adaptive Security Virtual Appliance (ASAv) version 9.6(1) installed on qcow2 Qemu disk. The ASAv-I provides traffic filtering and inspection services for the campus network and Data Center (DC). It also connects the campus network and DC to the vIOS-EDGE-I edge router.

Picture 1 -  ASAv-I,  Campus, DC and  Edge Connection

Note: The recommended RAM size for ASAv instance is 2048 MB. In order to lower memory consumption,  GNS3 is configured to assign 1536 MB to the ASAv.

Note: The interface eth0 on the ASAv-I is referred as the interface Management0/0 in ASAv configuration. The interface eth0  is not connected as we use the inside interfaces for management instead. The first connected interface is then the interface eth1 that is referred as the interface GigabitEthernet0/0 in ASAv CLI. Similarly, the second connected interface eth2 is referred as the GigabitEthernet0/1 and so on.

Note: Here is the configuration file of vASA-I.

ASAv-I Configuration

Once we start ASAv, the Qemu window is launched. However we want to use GNS3 Continue reading

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