Response: Vendor Network Automation Tools

Drew Conry-Murray published a excellent summary of his takeaways from the AutoCon0 event, including this one:

Most companies want vendor-supported tools that will actually help them be more efficient, reduce human error, and increase the velocity at which the network team can support new apps and services.

Yeah, that’s nothing new. Most Service Providers wanted vendors to add tons of nerd knobs to their products to adapt them to existing network designs. Obviously, it must be done for free because a vast purchase order1 is dangling in the air. We’ve seen how well that worked, yet learned nothing from that experience.

Read more …

OpenSpeedTest: Check the Speed of your LAN via Web Browser

Imagine you’re developing an application for your internal network that requires a certain network speed to function properly. You could open a web browser and point it to one of the many network speed tests on the market but I’m sure you know what that does… it tests your connection to the outside world. What if you’re looking to test the speed of your LAN itself? OpenSpeedTest comes in. OpenSpeedTest is a free, open source HTML5 network performance estimation tool that doesn’t require any client-side software or plugin to function. Once deployed, the tool can be accessed from a standard, modern web browser. Even better, OpenSpeedTest can be deployed with Docker. It uses a combination of NGINX and Alpine Linux to use very little resources on your Docker server. You can run OpenSpeedTest with or without

Trunk to Access – Will It Work?

Recently a posted a question to Twitter about connecting two Cisco Catalyst switches. One switch has already booted and has the following configuration:

interface GigabitEthernet0/0
 description SW02
 switchport mode trunk
 switchport trunk allowed vlan 1,10,20,30
 switchport nonegotiate

The other switch is connected to Gi1/0/48 and has just been powered on. It has no configuration so it is booting with the default configuration. The intention is to onboard a new switch via Catalyst Center using Plug and Play (PNP).

Based on the responses not many people were able to describe what would happen and why or why not this scenario would work. There are some interesting details here and before running into this scenario myself I thought that it might work. Before we can answer if it will work, let’s list what we know at this point in time about the two switches, SW01, and SW02. For SW01 we know that:

  • The port is configured as a trunk.
  • The VLANs allowed on the trunk are 1,10,20, and 30.
  • DTP has been disabled.
  • The native VLAN is 1.

For SW02 we know that:

  • It will boot with all ports enabled.
  • Those ports will be in VLAN 1.
  • DTP is enabled on the Continue reading

Technology Short Take 171

Welcome to Technology Short Take #171! This is the next installation in my semi-regular series that shares links and articles from around the interwebs on various technology areas of interest. Let the linking begin!

Networking

The networking section this time around is focused on application level protocols…but hey, they’re still networking protocols, right?

Security

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

HN713: Network Automation: Where Are We, And Where Can We Go?

Today’s show is roundtable conversation on the state of automation in the networking industry. We discuss takeaways from the recent AutoCon event on network automation, and get into issues such as sources of truth and the role of abstractions in automation. We also talk about the learning, cultural, and business challenges of network automation--and how to get beyond them.

The post HN713: Network Automation: Where Are We, And Where Can We Go? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Weekend Reads 120923


Google has revealed a new multilingual text vectorizer called RETVec (short for Resilient and Efficient Text Vectorizer) to help detect potentially harmful content such as spam and malicious emails in Gmail.


Carding has been around since the 1980s but has evolved to the point that even less experienced cybercriminals can now launch campaigns.


Enter Cilium’s advanced Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) implementation, powered by the GoBGP control plane, a solution that not only addresses these challenges but also adds unprecedented flexibility to your network configurations.


The most curious part of this is how people working inside the macroculture are the only folks who don’t understand what’s going on.


Efforts to convince remote workers to return to corporate offices appear to have stalled, based on data from the government, academia, and private-sector organizations.


Once in your home, different individuals have differing authority based on who they are. Family members have access to your whole home.


HP is squeezing more margin out of print customers, the result of a multi-year strategy to convert unprofitable business into something more lucrative, and says its subscription model is “locking” in people.


Microsoft helped Chinese state-run media outlets disseminate propaganda as part of previously unreported partnership agreements, Continue reading

Hedge 205: OId Engineering Quotes

For this month’s roundtable, Eyvonne, Tom, and I return to Addresses to Engineering Students by Harrington and Waddell. This book, published in 1912, is a “product of its time,” and hence deserves some trigger warnings. But it is also interesting to see how advice given to engineering students over 100 years ago holds up for today. Have engineering challenges, and the engineering life, changed all that much? What kinds of advice stand the test of time, what kinds do not?

download

Video: netlab IP Address Management (IPAM)

Did you know that netlab includes full-blown IP address management? You can define address pools (or use predefined ones) and get IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes from those pools assigned to links, interfaces, and loopbacks. You can also assign static prefixes to links, use static IP addresses, interface addresses as an offset within the link subnet, or use unnumbered interfaces.

For an overview of netlab IPAM, watch the netlab address management video (part of the Network Automation Tools webinar), for more details read the netlab addressing tutorial.

Watch the video
You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video and Standard ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the rest of the webinar.

Video: netlab IP Address Management (IPAM)

Did you know that netlab includes full-blown IP address management? You can define address pools (or use predefined ones) and get IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes from those pools assigned to links, interfaces, and loopbacks. You can also assign static prefixes to links, use static IP addresses, interface addresses as an offset within the link subnet, or use unnumbered interfaces.

For an overview of netlab IPAM, watch the netlab address management video (part of the Network Automation Tools webinar), for more details read the netlab addressing tutorial.

Watch the video
You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video and Standard ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the rest of the webinar.

Life is Life

The initial idea behind this blog was to have a medium to store and share notes on the different technologies I worked on in an searchable manner. I have decided to step back from work and take a year out so this new life tab of the blog will be for all things non-IT related. I still plan to write technology based blogs over this time (got a few automation projects and Azure tips to share), however this is unlikely to start happening until later into next year.

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