Getting started with Network Packet Generators

bit blaster
A friend of mine has just ordered a shiny new packet generator for his network lab. I’ve spent some time working as a QA engineer in a network lab and wanted to share some advice.
You can purchase stateful and stateless packet generators from major vendors like Spirent, IXIA or Agilent. If you just need to test throughput, latency or loss, a stateless packet generator will do the trick. The test hardware will use an ASIC to produce line-rate 10G traffic or higher. The Cisco Enterprise Testing Book calls this a ‘bit-blaster’ which I love. In the wrong hands it can also be a ‘network-melter’. 
You need a stateful packet generator if you want to test your routing protocols in conjunction with traffic load. A stateful packet generator such as Ixia’s IxNetwork, will use dedicated CPUs to form and maintain adjacencies, inject routing protocol packets, etc. You can use the stateful feature to inject prefixes which are then used as test targets by high-rate stateless traffic.
Licensing is a major source of pain when operating a stateful packet generators. There are often licenses required per protocol and even per-combination of protocols. For example, I had to buy a license for Continue reading

How Ansible Makes Automating Windows Easier

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In case you missed it, Ansible 2.0’s Windows support includes a number of improvements and new features that make automating Windows with Ansible easier. Because of Red Hat’s commitment to solid cross-platform management, you’ll also see an acceleration of these kinds of improvements in future Ansible releases. I’ll highlight a few of the items I’m most excited about from 2.0, and give a quick peek at what’s scheduled for future releases.

Windows Update Support

Update management is a common pain point for Windows administrators. The new win_updates module makes it easy to orchestrate updates during your maintenance windows- no more logging into individual machines to kick off updates or hoping a scheduled update pass actually ran!

IIS Modules

2.0 shipped with a suite of modules for managing IIS. From configuring websites, AppPools, virtual directories, and more- now Ansible can deploy and manage your IIS apps with ease.

Performance Enhancements to File Copy

Since WinRM doesn’t have a built-in file transfer mechanism, Ansible has to jump through some “interesting” hoops to deploy its module code and copy files from the control host to a managed Windows box. Historically, this process was very slow, and could only transfer small Continue reading

US national lab advances wireless charging for electric cars

How cool would it be if you could just pull into your garage and park over a special pad and a recharge your electric car for your morning commute?It’s a convenience item that would go a long way to making electric cars more attractive to the average US consumer that’s for sure.+More on Network World: World’s coolest concept cars+This week the US Energy Department’s Vehicle Technologies Office, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Hyundai America Technical Center Inc. said that technology they have been working on since 2012 could soon make wireless charging for electric cars more widespread.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US national lab advances wireless charging for electric cars

How cool would it be if you could just pull into your garage and park over a special pad and a recharge your electric car for your morning commute?It’s a convenience item that would go a long way to making electric cars more attractive to the average US consumer that’s for sure.+More on Network World: World’s coolest concept cars+This week the US Energy Department’s Vehicle Technologies Office, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Hyundai America Technical Center Inc. said that technology they have been working on since 2012 could soon make wireless charging for electric cars more widespread.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bill Gates on Apple v. FBI: A balance has to be made between the needs of investigators and privacy rights

Bill Gates thinks new laws are needed to sort out the encryption conflict going on between law enforcement and tech companies.“The sooner we modernize the laws the better,” Gates says in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session.+More on Network World: 11 highest paying tech jobs in America+He says it’s clear the government under certain circumstances needs to be able to tap into encrypted communications, but also that there should be oversight so that power isn’t abused. “Right now a lot of people don't think the government has the right checks to make sure information is only used in criminal situations,” he says. “So this case will be viewed as the start of a discussion.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Playing Sportsball In High School Damaged My Team Skills

Takeaway: I was supposed to learn life lessons by participation in “sportsball” at school. Looking back, everything I learned was wrong for the modern era. So you played sportsball because the school education systems tells you that its good for your education. Sportsball is generic term for whatever team sport you played at school – […]

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Tired of waiting for websites to load? This new tech can cut the time by more than half

Slow-loading Web pages are surely one of the top frustrations on the Internet today, but new technology from MIT and Harvard promises to change all that. Announced on Wednesday, Polaris is a framework that determines how to sequence the downloading of a page's objects for faster load times overall.Created by researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Harvard University, the new system promises to decrease page-load times by more than 30 percent -- with the potential for reductions of almost 60 percent -- by minimizing the number of network "trips" the browser must make.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mizuho Bank speeds international securities transactions using blockchain

Japan's Mizuho Bank is considering using blockchain technology to speed the cross-border transfer of financial instruments. It has just concluded a three-month trial of the technology with Japanese IT company Fujitsu. Mizuho used the Open Assets Protocol in its trial to encapsulate the type and number of financial instruments being traded, the amount due and the currency used, the country of settlement, and the transaction date. The encapsulated data was then added to a blockchain as a new transaction, providing a tamper-resistant record of the trade.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Slicing and Dicing Flooding Domains (2)

The first post in this series is here.

Finally, let’s consider the first issue, the SPF run time. First, if you’ve been keeping track of the SPF run time in several locations throughout your network (you have been, right? Right?!? This should be a regular part of your documentation!), then you’ll know when there’s a big jump. But a big jump without a big change in some corresponding network design parameter (size of the network, etc.), isn’t a good reason to break up a flooding domain. Rather, it’s a good reason to go find out why the SPF run time changed, which means a good session of troubleshooting what’s probably an esoteric problem someplace.

Assume, however, that we’re not talking about a big jump. Rather, the SPF run time has been increasing over time, or you’re just looking at a particular network without any past history. My rule of thumb is to start really asking questions when the SPF run time gets to around 100ms. I don’t know where that number came from—it’s a “seat of the pants thing,” I suppose. Most networks today seem to run SPF in less than 10ms, though I’ve seen a few that Continue reading

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