Happy New Year! I just realized the other day that this blog turned 5 years old in 2016. It's been a lot of fun and has paid me back for my time in terms of building my brand and being a means to explore and learn new topics. I have plans to put more focus on my writing in 2017 and reduce the friction between starting with a blank page and hitting that “Publish” button.
Anyways! Here's a look back at 2016 on packetmischief.ca.
Yet another recap post to follow up on last year’s. 2015 was a big transition year for me, and last year I wanted to make sure I kept the momentum going.
I make this post yearly to publicly track my own professional development goals. I find this helps me stay accountable to these goals, and it also allows others to give me a kick in the butt if I’m falling behind.
First, let me recap some of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year, and see how well I did.
Network Automation Book - At this time last year, I announced that I was working on a network automation book with Scott Lowe and Jason Edelman. This has certainly taken a bit more time than any of us would have liked, but we’re very near the end. The three of us have had a very busy year, and there are very few things to do for this release. However, we have pushed several additional chapters to O’Reilly, so you can still read these via Safari.
Open Source - Given that I now work for a company centered around an open Continue reading
Yet another recap post to follow up on last year’s. 2015 was a big transition year for me, and last year I wanted to make sure I kept the momentum going.
I make this post yearly to publicly track my own professional development goals. I find this helps me stay accountable to these goals, and it also allows others to give me a kick in the butt if I’m falling behind.
First, let me recap some of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year, and see how well I did.
Network Automation Book - At this time last year, I announced that I was working on a network automation book with Scott Lowe and Jason Edelman. This has certainly taken a bit more time than any of us would have liked, but we’re very near the end. The three of us have had a very busy year, and there are very few things to do for this release. However, we have pushed several additional chapters to O’Reilly, so you can still read these via Safari.
Open Source - Given that I now work for a company centered around an open Continue reading
The Uptime Institute has estimated the gains from eliminating 'zombie' servers versus doing nothing.
A man, a plan, a canal, a data center. Over 5 million Internet properties are now faster across Panama, as Cloudflare turned up its newest data center in Panama City. This is our 102nd data center globally, and brings us to a special milestone as our network now spans 50 countries. While perhaps not quite as big an announcement as the $5B Panama Canal expansion, the websites of many important newspapers, TV stations, banks and airlines can be accessed directly from Panama.
‘A man a plan a canal’ y un data center! A Partir de hoy más de 5 millones de sitios en internet serán mas rápidos desde Panamá, ya que hemos introducido nuestro más reciente centro de datos en Ciudad de Panamá. Es nuestro centro de datos número 102 a nivel mundial. Es una hito especial ya que la red global de Cloudflare alcanza 50 países a nivel mundial. Tal vez no es un anuncio tan grande como la inauguración de la expansión del canal, pero a partir de hoy muchos de los sitios importantes de diarios, Televisoras, bancos y aerolíneas serán servidos directamente desde Panamá.
Bridge of the Americas
Puente de las Américas
What you need to know when considering service assurance for your carrier SDN projects.
For the past 12 months weve discussed technology that could transform networking. But did anything really change? Three guests join the Packet Pushers to discuss. The post Show 321: Did Anything Change In 2016? appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Remember last year when I said the market for Docker jobs was blowing up? Well, it’s more than doubled in the last year. And Swarm is also rising quickly, growing 12829%, almost all of that in the last year. We expect that with our partnership with Microsoft and Windows Docker containers, that this will grow even faster in the next year as .NET developers start to containerize their applications and Windows IT Professionals start porting their infrastructure to Docker. Take a look at this trendline from indeed.com.
So what are you doing to increase your Docker skills? Want a few suggestions?
Whether you’re a developer or more an ops person, a great place to start is the Docker Labs repository, which has currently 28 labs for you to choose from. They range from beginner tutorials, to orchestration workshops, security and networking tutorials, and guides for using different programming languages and developer tools.
Of course there’s also the Docker Documentation, which has a rich set of resources.
At Dockercon 2017 in April, there will be rich set of material for beginners and experts alike, and you will get to meet people from all over the world Continue reading
I’ve spent the last few days experimenting with APIC-EM and the path trace capabilities. My lab environment is currently leveraging VIRL (Virtual Internet Routing LAB). Since it wasn’t obvious how to integrate APIC-EM with the lab platform, I wanted to share my configuration.
TL;DR–When building the topology, click the background and view the properties for the Topology. Change the Management Network to “Shared flat network”. This will put the all of the devices ‘Mgmt-intf’ vrf on the ‘flat’ (172.16.1.0/24 by default) network when the topology is built.
When I started this process, I really didn’t realize how easy it could be. I actually tried to leverage a manual connection to L2 External (FLAT) to do the management in-band for the topology. This is certainly possible, but there is a much easier way. As most VIRL users have noticed, there is a management IP address that gets assigned to each device. There is a simple configuration change that will allow that address to be one from the ‘FLAT’ pool and connected externally to the ‘L2 External (FLAT)’ network.
One of the most common complaints about SDN that comes from entry-level networking folks is that SDN is going to take their job away. People fear what SDN represents because it has the ability to replace their everyday tasks and put them out of a job. While this is nowhere close to reality, it’s a common enough argument that I hear it very often during Q&A sessions. How is it that SDN has the ability to ruin so many jobs? And how is it that we just now have found a way to do this?
One of the biggest reasons that the automation portion of SDN has become so effective in today’s IT environment is that we can finally measure what it is that networks are supposed to be doing and how best to configure them. Think about the work that was done in the past to configure and troubleshoot networks. It’s often a very difficult task that involves a lot of intuition and guesswork. If you tried to explain to someone the best way to do things, you’d likely find yourself at a loss for words.
However, we’ve had boring, predictable standards for many years. Instead of Continue reading
An abbreviated version of this post originally appeared on TechCrunch
Looking back over 2016, we saw the good and bad that comes with widespread use and abuse of the Internet.
In both Gabon and Gambia, Internet connectivity was disrupted during elections. The contested election in Gambia started with an Internet blackout that lasted a short time. In Gabon, the Internet shutdown lasted for days. Even as we write this countries like DR Congo are discussing blocking specific Internet services, clearly forgetting the lessons learned in these other countries.
CC BY 2.0 image by Aniket Thakur
DDoS attacks continued throughout the year, hitting websites big and small. Back in March, we wrote about 400 Gbps attacks that were happening over the weekend, and then in December, it looked like attackers were treating attacks as a job to be performed from 9 to 5.
In addition to real DDoS, there were also empty threats from a group calling itself Armada Collective and demanding Bitcoin for sites and APIs to stay online. Another group popped up to copycat the same modus-operandi.
The Internet of Things became what many had warned it would become: an army of devices used for attacks. A botnet Continue reading
I came across a small but irritating issue with ASR / IOS XR licensing today, and since I found a way to fix it, I’m sharing my results.
I have an ASR9006 with two A9K-MOD160-TR linecards on which I need to run VRFs, so I purchased two of the A9K-IVRF-LIC linecard-based VRF licenses. I got the PAK keys from my reseller, and went to Cisco’s licensing portal to fulfill both of them following the usual process with the PID and S/N information taken from admin show license udi. I downloaded the license file and transferred it to an accessible jump server, then from the regular privileged exec mode (rather than the admin exec mode), I used sftp to transfer the file to the router.
Simple: to transfer the license file within the admin exec means using tftp or ftp:
RP/0/RSP0/CPU0:asr9006-1(admin)#copy ? /recurse Recursively list subdirectories encountered WORD Copy from file bootflash: Copy from bootflash: file system disk0: Copy from disk0: file system disk0a: Copy from disk0a: file system disk1: Copy from disk1: file system disk1a: Copy from disk1a: file system disk2: Copy from disk2: file system Continue reading
Under the control of Chuck Robbins, Cisco has seen quite a few rearrangements.
Under the control of Chuck Robbins, Cisco has seen quite a few rearrangements.
Data center designs are undergoing massive transformation due to cloud and IoT.