Getting Paramiko To Work

I’ve had a lot of struggles getting Paramiko to work and today I’ve finally managed it.
Here’s my setup:

-bash-3.2$ cat /etc/redhat-release
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.1 (Maipo)

This is fairly important.

pip install paramiko

Didn’t work for me. Some Googling led me to believe I needed the python-dev package installed. So I tried:

yum install python-dev

This didn’t work, so I had to search for it. So I searched for it using:

yum search python-dev

The above is my new favourite command. It turned up:

$ yum search python-dev
 Loaded plugins: product-id, rhnplugin, subscription-manager
 This system is receiving updates from RHN Classic or Red Hat Satellite.
 ==================================================================================================== N/S matched: python-dev =====================================================================================================
 python-devel.x86_64 : The libraries and header files needed for Python development

I then did a:

pip install paramiko

And I was done!


IGP LDP Synchronization

I implore all my readers to always remember this topic: IGP LDP synchronization. It is important to use IGP LDP synchronization to avoid blackholing, especially when MPLS networks fails to function effectively.     In the topology above, IS-IS is running in the network of the service provider. For the transport label distribution or topmost label/tunnel label, […]

The post IGP LDP Synchronization appeared first on Network Design and Architecture.

2015 End of Year Blog Statistics

Happy New Year! As is my tradition, here are the 2015 blog statistics as compared to 2014.

I'm pretty excited that once again readership and overall reach of this blog has increased by double digits. I'm looking forward to growing these numbers and creating challenging and interesting new content in 2016.

2015 Recap and 2016 Goals

Wow, it’s that time of year again! 2015 went by really quickly, and a lot has changed for me. It’s also worth mentioning that this is the first year-end recap to be published on my new github pages site! If you haven’t seen this kind of thing before, 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.

2015 Recap and 2016 Goals

Wow, it’s that time of year again! 2015 went by really quickly, and a lot has changed for me. It’s also worth mentioning that this is the first year-end recap to be published on my new github pages site! If you haven’t seen this kind of thing before, 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.

2015 Recap and 2016 Goals

Wow, it’s that time of year again! 2015 went by really quickly, and a lot has changed for me. It’s also worth mentioning that this is the first year-end recap to be published on my new github pages site!

If you haven’t seen this kind of thing before, 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.

2015 Goal Recap

First, let me recap some of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year, and see how well I did.

Public Presence (aka Community Contributions)

Last year I added this goal because I was doing a lot more than just blogging, and wanted to capture it all. This was a good move, since - as expected - I did quite a bit of community-oriented work, and a large portion of it didn’t take place on the blog. So, while I didn’t hit that (admittedly fairly arbitrary) 50 post number, I can say I truly feel good about what little writing I did manage to Continue reading

Looking Back: 2015 Project Report Card

In early 2015, I posted a look ahead at my planned 2015 projects, where I took a quick look at some of the self-development projects I set out for myself over the course of 2015. In this post, I’m going to review my progress on those 2015 projects.

The 2015 projects were as follows:

  1. Complete a new book
  2. Make more open source contributions
  3. Expand to a new configuration management solution
  4. Complete a “wildcard project”

So, how well did I do? Let’s take a look.

  1. Complete a new book: Technically, I haven’t (fully) completed a new book, but given that my new book project with Jason Edelman and Matt Oswalt on network automation is available now as an Early Access edition, I suppose this should count for something. Strangely enough, this wasn’t the book project I had in mind at the start of 2015, but sometimes things like this take unexpected turns. Grade: C

  2. Make more open source contributions: I expected this one to be easy, but it turns out that this is the area where my performance is the worst. I submitted a pull request to Terraform (for a docs update), but I did not make the contributions Continue reading

Cairo, Egypt: CloudFlare’s 74th Data Center

Cairo

It’s been a big year of expansion for CloudFlare’s global network as we added new data centers across six continents, and we’re certainly not done. Today we announce the launch of our newest data center in Cairo, Egypt and a partnership with Telecom Egypt. This marks our third data center in Africa, after Johannesburg and Mombasa, and our 74th data center globally.

Faster performance across Egypt

For many years, CloudFlare has been trusted by Egyptian websites to be protected from attacks.

Over half of the 20 most popular websites in Egypt already use CloudFlare to be safe, and are now seeing a 2x improvement in performance.

Reduced latency to Egypt's largest network

Reduced latency to Egypt's largest network, Telecom Egypt

Local Deployments

Just like in Egypt, we partner with ISPs globally by deploying caches directly into their facilities. These points of presence help major networks improve the performance of millions of websites, reduce their costs and capacity used in accessing our customers' content, and provide a direct local interconnect with critical Internet infrastructure. If you are a carrier or Internet service provider in Egypt, elsewhere in Africa or anywhere around the world that would like to request a CloudFlare cache deployment, please reach out to Continue reading

In Memoriam: Ian Murdock

Dear friends and members of the open source community, It is with great sadness that we inform you that Ian Murdock passed away on Monday night. This is a tragic loss for his family, for the Docker community, and the … Continued

How to choose an in-memory NoSQL solution: Performance measuring

The main purpose of this work is to show results of benchmarking some of the leading in-memory NoSQL databases with a tool named YCSB.

We selected three popular in-memory database management systems: Redis (standalone and in-cloud named Azure Redis Cache), Tarantool and CouchBase and one cache system Memcached. Memcached is not a database management system and does not have persistence. But we decided to take it, because it is also widely used as a fast storage system. Our “firing field” was a group of four virtual machines in Microsoft Azure Cloud. Virtual machines are located close to each other, meaning they are in one datacenter. This is necessary to reduce the impact of network overhead in latency measurements. Images of these VMs can be downloaded by links: one, two, three and four (login: nosql, password: qwerty). A pair of VMs named nosql-1 and nosql-2 is useful for benchmarking Tarantool and CouchBase and another pair of VMs named nosql-3 and nosql-4 is good for Redis, Azure Redis Cache and Memcached. Databases and tests are installed and configured on these images.

Our virtual machines were the basic A3 instances with 4 cores, 7 GB RAM and 120 GB disk Continue reading

BGP in Large Scale Data Centers with Clos Networks

Getting to the point where big is never big enough, one may think “What’s cooking?” Well, BGP in the DC is a subject that’s been under my radar for some time, so the purpose of this article is to get things a bit more straight-forward regarding the WHYs and HOWs.

A look in the past

First of all, we should ask ourselves who was Clos. Charles Clos started his work at Bell Labs, mainly focusing on finding a way to switch telephone calls in a scalable and cost-effective way. In 1953, he published the paper “A Study of Non-Blocking Switching Networks”, where he described how to use equipment having multiple stages of interconnections to switch calls.

The crossbar switches (you may think of them as common use switches with a defined number of ports) connected in a three-stage network (ingress, middle, egress) form the so called Clos network.

This had a pretty big use back in the 1950’s but once the level of circuit integration got to the point where interconnections would no longer be a problem, it was no longer of interest, at least for some time.  Until huge scale data centers came to be needed (and Continue reading