ASIC Programmability from Barefoot Networks

Full disclosure : I was lucky to be among a group of networking influencers invited to Silicon Valley to visit some networking companies and see what they were offering to the market.  I was flown out and given accommodations at the expense of Gestalt IT – the company that organized the event.  I was given some swag by each company, but I was never paid to write a positive review on the product.  Heck, I’m not even expected to write at all.

Think about the fastest switch in your network and why it’s so fast.  Traditionally, it’s because the manufacturer has developed a very efficient ASIC that does switching very well (give me some leeway here and forget about routing, encapsulation, etc.), but it really can’t do anything else.  Want a new switching feature?  Well, your switch can’t do that if the ASIC doesn’t support it.  No big deal – the manufacturer just needs to make a new ASIC that supports it, right?  This sounds simple, but, generally, this is a many-years process and requires a hardware update on your end.  This is not a good solution in a world where new features and technologies Continue reading

VRF Series Article 2 – Extending L3 Segmentation with VRF-lite

In the last article, we took an initial look at L3 segmentation with VRFs. In that case, we created a basic first hop configuration that had isolated pci and data segments. In reality, most networks are far larger and more complex. This article continues down that same path by building proper layer 3 links and IGP adjacency with a Headquarter (Main) location. The starting point from a configuration standpoint is where we left off in Article 1 of this series.

Specifically in this article, we will configure subinterfaces to connect BrWan to Main for each VRF. We will also create a loopback on Main in each VRF to act as a test point that should be reachable from each host. From a routing protocol perspective, we will leverage EIGRP in Named Mode. This mode is a requirement because it is the method that allows the address family command to identify VRFs.

Note: I am working from some VIRL defaults, so I will be including the removal of unnecessary items. Also, I will be shutting down Gigabit 2 since the rest of the topology is out of scope for this article.

Main – HQ Router

//removing unnecessary routing  Continue reading

Review: Dell Latitude E7370

As part of my Linux migration (see my initial progress report), late this past week I started setting up my first non-Apple laptop since 2003. In this post, I’d like to share my thoughts on my new laptop, a Dell Latitude E7370.

First, let’s get the specs—the “speeds and feeds”—out of the way:

  • Intel Core m7 CPU
  • 16 GB of RAM
  • 512 GB NVMe SSD
  • 3200x1800 touchscreen
  • Intel HD graphics and Intel 802.11a/b/g/n/ac wireless

Based on the specs alone, it’s easy to see this laptop is no slouch. It’s certainly comparable to the latest-generation of MacBook Pro laptops, except for the touchscreen (which the Macs don’t offer/support).

Subjectively, I have to say I’m impressed with the E7370. I travel quite a bit, so size and weight are important. This laptop looks and feels more svelte than my previous laptop, a 13” MacBook Air. From a comparison perspective, I’d say it’s on par with my son’s 11” MacBook Air. The build quality is great, and the laptop feels solid and sturdy. The display is crisp, sharp, and bright, and battery life (so far, without any OS-level tuning) has been respectable. Unlike some previous ultrabooks I’ve seen, Dell’s done Continue reading

Musing: Google Establishes CA Root Authority.

Google continues to build out its ownership of key Internet infrastructure. Email/Spam filtering, Chrome Browser, DNS

As we look forward to the evolution of both the web and our own products it is clear HTTPS will continue to be a foundational technology. This is why we have made the decision to expand our current Certificate Authority efforts to include the operation of our own Root Certificate Authority. To this end, we have established Google Trust Services (https://pki.goog/), the entity we will rely on to operate these Certificate Authorities on behalf of Google and Alphabet.

Thoughts, in no particular order:

  1. Bought company with root certificates to shorten lead time to control
  2. Ownership of and widespread use of Chrome web browser, DNS and trusted root certificates means that Google has unprecedented amount of control over user data regardless encryption.
  3. Can silently MITM any traffic in browser by combining web browser and certificate configuration
  4. Data gathering from DNS servers for destinations, source addresses/geolocation, usage profiling
  5. Chrome already prevents many privacy and usability features available in other browsers e.g. Reading mode,
  6. Adds to data-gathering possibilities from web services that predict searches, URLs and spelling errors built into browser

One of the base Continue reading

VRF Series Article 1 – Basic L3 Segmentation with VRFs

Network engineers are well aware of the Layer 2 isolation properties of VLANs. Their use is so pervasive that they are second nature to most. This article is the first in a series that outlines specifically how VRFs can be used to provide the same type of end to end isolation for Layer 3 that VLANs provide for Layer 2.

In this example, we will work with a subset of the overall topology that I previously shared. Specifically, we are going to configure a router that I’ll call BrWan, a Layer 2 switch, and 3

VRF_Branch

routers that I’m using to emulate connected hosts (data-x/pci-x).

BrWan will contain the technology configuration that is the primary focus of the article. The other components are configured somewhat generically and using technologies that most are very familiar with.

At the end of this exercise, the requirement is that anything related to “data” can only reach other parts of the “data” network. Similar requirements exist for “pci”. There will be no ACLs used to prevent communication between pci and data, but the isolation requirement is strict. These concepts will be carried forward throughout the series. Later examples will provide a mechanism for some traffic between Continue reading

Segmenting Layer 3 Networks with VRFs

I am creating a multi-part series that focuses on Layer 3 network segmentation. This post serves as a landing point and aggregation place for these topics. As the series is built out, the individual links will be available below.

Articles in this Series

  • Article 1 – Basic L3 Segmentation with VRFs
  • Article 2 – Extending L3 Segmentation with VRF-lite
  • Article 3 – Creating a Shared Services VRF
  • Article 4 – VRF-lite in a DMVPN Network
  • Article 5 – Stateful Inter-Vrf connectivity

The basic topology is shown below. Each article will consist of the configuration information and relevant validation. This should serve as a very good starting point for anyone struggling with building out a common network with strict security zones requiring areas of isolation.

VRF_No_Int_Index

Other Articles about VRFs

Disclaimer: This article includes the independent thoughts, opinions, commentary or technical detail of Paul Stewart. This may or may does not reflect the position Continue reading

Tech leaders decry Trump’s Muslim ban

Taking to President Trump’s favored communications platform, Twitter, a who’s who of prominent technology and business leaders are speaking out against the new administration’s ban on Muslims from certain countries entering the United States.Mark Cuban, entrepreneur Twitter David Karp, Tumblr Twitter Mark Benioff, Salesforce.com Twitter Jack Dorsey, Twitter Twitter Elon Musk, entrepreneur Twitter Satya Nadella, Microsoft Twitter Here is Nadella's message.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tech leaders decry Trump’s Muslim ban

Taking to President Trump’s favored communications platform, Twitter, a who’s who of prominent technology and business leaders are speaking out against the new administration’s ban on Muslims from certain countries entering the United States.Mark Cuban, entrepreneur Twitter David Karp, Tumblr Twitter Mark Benioff, Salesforce.com Twitter Jack Dorsey, Twitter Twitter Elon Musk, entrepreneur Twitter Satya Nadella, Microsoft Twitter Here is Nadella's message.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tech leaders decry Trump’s Muslim ban

Taking to President Trump’s favored communications platform, Twitter, a who’s who of prominent technology and business leaders are speaking out against the new administration’s ban on Muslims from certain countries entering the United States.Mark Cuban, entrepreneur Twitter David Karp, Tumblr Twitter Mark Benioff, Salesforce.com Twitter Jack Dorsey, Twitter Twitter Elon Musk, entrepreneur Twitter Satya Nadella, Microsoft Twitter Here is Nadella's message.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ransomware locked hotel out of its electronic key lock system

A 4-star hotel in the Austrian Alps, the Romantik Seehotel Jaegerwirt, admitted to bowing to extortion after ransomware locked up the computer running the hotel’s electronic key lock system.This was not the first time that cyber thugs attacked the hotel. During one of the attacks, the hackers reportedly left a backdoor into the system.The third attack occurred during the opening weekend of the winter season. The computer hit with ransomware controlled the electronic key lock system, the reservation system and the cash desk system.Guests, who paid about nearly $300 a night for a room, could not open their rooms with their existing keycards; new keycards could not be programmed. Arriving guests couldn’t have their reservations confirmed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ransomware locked hotel out of its electronic key lock system

A 4-star hotel in the Austrian Alps, the Romantik Seehotel Jaegerwirt, admitted to bowing to extortion after ransomware locked up the computer running the hotel’s electronic key lock system.This was not the first time that cyber thugs attacked the hotel. During one of the attacks, the hackers reportedly left a backdoor into the system.The third attack occurred during the opening weekend of the winter season. The computer hit with ransomware controlled the electronic key lock system, the reservation system and the cash desk system.Guests, who paid about nearly $300 a night for a room, could not open their rooms with their existing keycards; new keycards could not be programmed. Arriving guests couldn’t have their reservations confirmed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Python – For Loops

I’m learning the basics of Python and these are my publically available notes for my reference. Hopefully they are useful for my readers as well.

The For loop in Python is used to iterate through different objects such as lists or dictionaries. The power of the For loop is that it can run as many times as needed and then stop without having to define the number of times it should run. It can also be used to run n number of times where we define n ourselves.

I’ll give some examples related to networking to make it more interesting. Let’s say that we want to create a lot of loopbacks so that we can advertise routes in BGP to play around with prefix-lists. We will create 10 loopbacks. This means that the For loop should run 10 times, we can use the range command for this. The iterator will start at 0 and have a stepping by 1 by default which means that our first loopback will be loopback0 and our first network will be 10.0.0.1/32.

for loopback in range(10):
    print "interface loopback{}".format(loopback)
    print "ip address 10.0.{}.1 255.255.255.255".format(loopback)

Continue reading

Internet of Things Messaging, Part 3: Testing Mosquitto

So, in the last installment of this series on the messaging protocol MQTT, we installed the Mosquitto MQTT broker. Now we'll test it which we’re going to do on the same machine that Mosquitto is running on. First, you’re going to need to install the Mosquitto client tools:sudo apt-get install mosquitto-clients Now, let’s run Mosquitto from the command line:root@deb-01:/home/mgibbs# mosquitto 1485602498: mosquitto version 1.3.4 (build date 2014-08-17 03:38:31+0000) starting 1485602498: Using default config. 1485602498: Opening ipv4 listen socket on port 1883. 1485602498: Opening ipv6 listen socket on port 1883. The Mosquitto broker is now listening on the standard MQTT port, 1883, for both IPv4 and IPv6 MQTT requests. Next, open a new terminal window and enter:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

APIC-EM Data Export

I was at a Cisco DNA customer event on Thursday. Someone in the audience asked a very good question. Basically they wanted to know if there was a way to extrapolate data from the APIC-EM network management tool. At first glance it didn’t seem to be something that was available in the UI. One of the Cisco representatives quickly and correctly stated that it APIC-EM to Excelis all available from the API.

My initial thought was that this was a product weakness. Why can’t we just manually extract this stuff to a CSV and import it wherever we want to? Whether due to intentional omission or strategic direction, an API first approach is better. It is better because it allows systems to be glued together and more of our mindless tasks to be automated. So the counter argument to that really revolves around use cases, initial effort and skills gaps. The examples I’m about to provide should help alleviate some of those concerns.

TL;DR — Looking to get APIC-EM data into an Excel spreadsheet? Python can easily grab Host and Device Data and provide it in a format that is easily consumable such as Text, Tab, CSV or other format of choice.

Continue reading

LSA issue @ January 28, 2017 at 02:35PM

A burden of many #NETCONF articles and tutorials is that they are often silent about the #YANG part. This is why we would like to highlight this post by Michael Kashin called ""Getting Started With NETCONF and YANG"" [1]. Not only this article covers the basics of network elements configuration via NETCONF (particularly via python

Skylake Xeon Ramp Cuts Into Intel’s Datacenter Profits

Every successive processor generation presents its own challenges to all chip makers, and the ramp of 14 nanometer processes that will be used in the future “Skylake” Xeon processors, due in the second half of this year, cut into the operating profits of its Data Center Group in the final quarter of 2016. Intel also apparently had an issue with one of its chip lines ­– it did not say if it was a Xeon or Xeon Phi, or detail what that issue was – that needed to be fixed and that hurt Data Center Group’s middle line, too.

Still, …

Skylake Xeon Ramp Cuts Into Intel’s Datacenter Profits was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Samsung Galaxy S8: Leaks, rumors and fake news

Samsung will not be launch its new Galaxy flagship phone, the S8, next month at Mobile World Congress like it usually announces new Galaxy flagships. The launch is delayed until March 29.The delay did not slow the January leaks, rumors and fake news about the new device, though, including leaked images showing the Galaxy S8 will have a USB C port, an almost bezel-less display and, OMG, a 3.5-inch jack that we may hear about every day in the news during the post-launch week because of the attention the iPhone 7 received for not having one.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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