Create Network Diagram from LLDP Neighbor Information

One of the sample Ansible playbooks I published to help the attendees of my Building Network Automation Solutions course get started collects LLDP neighbor information on all managed devices and converts that information into a network diagram.

Here’s the graph I got from it when I ran it on my 6-node OSPF network (the Inter-AS VIRL topology from this repository). Please note I spent zero time tweaking the graph description (it shows).

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Introduction to Port Channels and LACP

Today I am going to talk about the LACP protocol or people also knew this as port-channel or ether-channel. This topic is basically based on the Arista Networks switches. I will discuss the basics of port channel and then we will have the configurations on the switches.

What is Port Channel ? when and where it is used ?
A port channel is a communication link between two switches that consists of matching channel group interfaces on each switch. A port channel is also referred to as a Link Aggregation Group (LAG). Port channels combine the bandwidth of multiple Ethernet ports into a single logical link. 
A channel group is a collection of Ethernet interfaces on a single switch. 

Fig 1.1- LACP between Cisco and HP Switches
A port channel interface is a virtual interface that consists of a corresponding channel group and connects to a compatible interface on another switch to form a port channel. Port channel interfaces can be configured and used in a manner similar to Ethernet interfaces. Port channel interfaces are configurable as layer 2 interfaces, layer 3 (routable) interfaces, and VLAN members. Most Ethernet interface configuration options are available to port channel interfaces. 

Encryption and law enforcement can work together

The Internet Society and Chatham House will be hosting a roundtable of experts to deconstruct the debate on encryption and law enforcement access this week. I am not under any illusion that we will walk away with the solution. This is a complex problem: one that many have tried to solve, often with limited success. However, I am optimistic that the people in the room have the potential to look beyond their own positions, to consider the impact of decisions they may make concerning encryption, and to work together to unite two important societal objectives: the security of infrastructure, devices, data and communications; and the needs of law enforcement.

Perhaps the biggest dilemma facing both law enforcement and companies that provide digital services is – how much encryption is “enough” and who gets to decide?

There is an “encryption dichotomy” in the market: some services are more “law enforcement access friendly” than others. This dichotomy is not new. But, in the last four years, a number of leading tech companies with substantial customers bases have added more encryption and removed their ability to decrypt their customers’ content, to increase the privacy and security of their services. A side-effect of these Continue reading

Internet in China

In this post I’ll describe some experiences I had with the Internet in China, and what it means for people making websites in the west in order to reach expats, visitors, and anyone else in China. So this should be useful information even if you don’t care about China as a market at all.

This blog post may be updated, as I have more thoughts on Internet in China.

My subjective experience is that “Internet in China” is an oxymoron. How exactly is there “Internet” without Google, Facebook, and Twitter? When attaching an Android phone to a WiFi in China it even says “Wi-Fi has no Internet access”.

OK, that’s not entirely serious. Especially since I’m obviously not aware of what the Chinese language Internet looks like, not speaking or reading Chinese. Baidu looks like it largely provides the services Google does (search, maps, …), but they’re pretty much not translated. The Baidu Map app seems fine, but is almost useless if you don’t speak Chinese. The one thing it’s good for is that unlike Google Maps (if you can even get to it. see below) it actually shows you a correct location within China.

But more importantly it’s not Continue reading

Google And Cisco Cross Pollenate A Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid clouds may be the direction many enterprises are heading in, but it is a path fraught with challenges.

Organizations may want to run some workloads in public clouds like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or IBM while keeping others in house on public clouds for such reasons ranging from security and privacy to protecting datacenter investments and regulatory compliance. The complexity and difficulty come in being able to easily and securely move workloads between the two environments and managing both in a streamlined way.

However, that is the direction many enterprises are going. IDC analysts found …

Google And Cisco Cross Pollenate A Hybrid Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

The Dream Of Software Only Shared Memory Clusters

It is hard to quantify the amount of effort in systems and application software development that has been done precisely because there is no easy, efficient, and cheap way to make a bunch of cheap commodity servers look like one wonking system with a big ole flat memory space that is as easy to program as a PC but which brings to bear all that compute, memory, and I/O of a cluster as a single system image.

We have SMP and NUMA glue chips to do such shared memory clustering in hardware, scaling from two to four and sometimes eight, …

The Dream Of Software Only Shared Memory Clusters was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

8 free Wi-Fi stumbling and surveying tools for Windows and Mac

There is enterprise-level software for surveying Wi-Fi networks, but even in large wireless networks, simple freeware tools are handy for a quick peek at the airwaves during design, deployment or troubleshooting.Here is a look at eight free tools – some for Windows and some for Mac OS X – that provide basic details about nearby Wi-Fi signals: SSIDs, signal strength, channels, MAC addresses and security status. Some can even reveal “hidden” or non-broadcasted SSIDs, display the noise levels, or display statistics on successful and failed packets of your wireless connection. One of them includes Wi-Fi password-cracking tools that are useful for educational or penetration testing purposes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

8 free Wi-Fi stumbling and surveying tools

Stumbling and surveyingHere are 9 tools that provide important details on known and unknown aspects of your Wi-Fi network. Each of these tools gives you the basic wireless details: SSIDs, signal strength, channels, MAC addresses and security status. Some can even reveal “hidden” or non-broadcasted SSIDs, display the noise levels, or display statistics on successful and failed packets of your wireless connection. Two of the tools include Wi-Fi password cracking tools as well, useful for educational or penetration testing purposes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco, Google partner to simplify hybrid cloud deployments

There should be no question that for most organizations, hybrid clouds are the way of the future. My research shows that over 80 percent of organizations either use or plant to use a hybrid cloud strategy, so it’s coming and coming fast. However, the path to hybrid clouds won’t be the same for all companies. Some will be aggressive and migrate to a cloud-native strategy today. Others will be more conservative and will “lift and shift” a few applications at a time before rewriting them. There’s no right answer when it comes to creating a hybrid cloud world; the key is to get there. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Some notes about the Kaspersky affair

I thought I'd write up some notes about Kaspersky, the Russian anti-virus vendor that many believe has ties to Russian intelligence.

There's two angles to this story. One is whether the accusations are true. The second is the poor way the press has handled the story, with mainstream outlets like the New York Times more intent on pushing government propaganda than informing us what's going on.


The press

Before we address Kaspersky, we need to talk about how the press covers this.

The mainstream media's stories have been pure government propaganda, like this one from the New York Times. It garbles the facts of what happened, and relies primarily on anonymous government sources that cannot be held accountable. It's so messed up that we can't easily challenge it because we aren't even sure exactly what it's claiming.

The Society of Professional Journalists have a name for this abuse of anonymous sources, the "Washington Game". Journalists can identify this as bad journalism, but the big newspapers like The New York Times continues to do it anyway, because how dare anybody criticize them?

For all that I hate the anti-American bias of The Intercept, at least they've had stories Continue reading

SnatchLoader Reloaded

Executive Summary SnatchLoader is a “downloader” malware—a type of malware that specializes in distributing (or loading) other malware onto infected computers. We first started seeing it in the wild around January 2017, but after a few months it went dormant. Recently, development of the malware […]

What’s really behind the Cisco-Google hybrid cloud partnership

Cisco and Google have teamed up on a hybrid cloud partnership that will allow IT managers and application developers to use Cisco tools to manage their on-premises environments and link it up with Google’s public IaaS cloud.It’s the latest partnership for Google’s cloud since former VMware CEO Diane Greene took over management of the company’s cloud operations. Google has inked similar pacts with VMware and hyperconverged infrastructure vendor Nutanix.For Cisco though, the deal with Google marks an evolution in the company’s cloud strategy, one that has gone through many iterations in recent years.A closer look   Since the dawn of the hyper-scale IaaS public cloud movement, Cisco has pivoted its cloud strategy a handful of times. The company initially made an effort to build an Intercloud, a network of its partner providers running Cisco gear that would be interconnected and allow customers to shift workloads around. In the face of massive growth from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, that strategy went by the wayside.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What’s really behind the Cisco-Google hybrid cloud partnership

Cisco and Google have teamed up on a hybrid cloud partnership that will allow IT managers and application developers to use Cisco tools to manage their on-premises environments and link it up with Google’s public IaaS cloud.It’s the latest partnership for Google’s cloud since former VMware CEO Diane Greene took over management of the company’s cloud operations. Google has inked similar pacts with VMware and hyperconverged infrastructure vendor Nutanix.For Cisco though, the deal with Google marks an evolution in the company’s cloud strategy, one that has gone through many iterations in recent years.A closer look   Since the dawn of the hyper-scale IaaS public cloud movement, Cisco has pivoted its cloud strategy a handful of times. The company initially made an effort to build an Intercloud, a network of its partner providers running Cisco gear that would be interconnected and allow customers to shift workloads around. In the face of massive growth from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, that strategy went by the wayside.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What’s really behind the Cisco-Google cloud partnership

Cisco and Google have teamed up on a hybrid cloud partnership that will allow IT managers and application developers to use Cisco tools to manage their on-premises environments and link it up with Google’s public IaaS cloud.It’s the latest partnership for Google’s cloud since former VMware CEO Diane Greene took over management of the company’s cloud operations. Google has inked similar pacts with VMware and hyperconverged infrastructure vendor Nutanix.For Cisco though, the deal with Google marks an evolution in the company’s cloud strategy, one that has gone through many iterations in recent years.A closer look   Since the dawn of the hyper-scale IaaS public cloud movement, Cisco has pivoted its cloud strategy a handful of times. The company initially made an effort to build an Intercloud, a network of its partner providers running Cisco gear that would be interconnected and allow customers to shift workloads around. In the face of massive growth from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, that strategy went by the wayside.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Qualcomm Builds Momentum For Centriq ARM Server Chip

The talk about ARM-based servers pushing their way into the datacenter has been going for almost a decade now, during which time we have seen companies like Samsung drop their interest before they really got going on it and others like AMD getting an ARM-based chip out but then turning their attention to other initiatives.

We have also seen vendors like Cavium and Applied Micro get chips to market with some levels of adoption. Top system OEMs like Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, and Cray are using these chips to various degrees in commercially available or test servers. And the …

Qualcomm Builds Momentum For Centriq ARM Server Chip was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

HPE Demystifies Deep Learning For Faster Intelligence

Today’s enterprises need deep learning, but most don’t know how to get started. As rising data volumes and evolving industry trends push the limits of traditional IT, the latest innovations are helping them operate faster and smarter—and high performance computing is just the beginning.

Enterprises are deploying robust server platforms to power HPC applications, leveraging optimal performance, reliability, and flexibility to handle increasingly dense workloads. And with these industry-leading tools, modeling and simulation capabilities are rapidly evolving. Artificial intelligence is transforming how we operate and relate to technology. AI allows machines to think and learn like the human brain, while …

HPE Demystifies Deep Learning For Faster Intelligence was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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