Managing Performance In SDN And NFV Environments
Gauging service quality in an SDN/NFV network requires looking at every layer that makes up your application.Transforming ideas into light bulbs – LiFi
About 4 years ago, Harald Haas, a physicist and professor of mobile communications at the University of Edinburgh, was the first to coin the term Li-Fi, at a TED Talk during TEDGlobal 2011. Since then, millions of bits about this technology roamed the Internet, and many companies already started implementing it.
Who’s doing this already?
The history begins with a company named Velmenni, which has produced a light bulb that works with Li-Fi technology on a small scale. They are not the first to prove the technology works, nor the first to conduct a real-world experiment, but here’s their Jugnu Lighbulb demo.
Philips has developed a VLC (Visible Light Communication) system for shoppers at stores. People have to download an app on their smartphone and then it will interact with the LEDs in the store. The LEDs can pinpoint their location in the store and give them corresponding coupons and information based on which aisle they are on and what they are looking at.
ByteLight has developed a system similar to Philips’ lighting network, making LEDs “talk” to any smartphone and tablet with a camera and/or Bluetooth Smart technology that is “opened to listen”.
The first VLC smartphone prototype was Continue reading
CPLANE Networks on Software Gone Wild
When I wrote a blog post explaining the difference between centralized control and centralized control plane, John Casey, CEO of CPLANE Networks wrote a comment saying “yeah, that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
It took us a while to get the stars aligned, but finally we managed to sit down and chat about what they’re doing, resulting in Episode 46 of Software Gone Wild.
Custom metrics with Cumulus Linux
Host sFlow version 1.28.3 adds support for Custom Metrics. This article demonstrates how the extensive set of standard sFlow measurements can be augmented using custom metrics.
Recent releases of Cumulus Linux simplify the task by making machine readable JSON a supported output in command line tools. For example, the cl-bgp tool can be used to dump BGP summary statistics:
cumulus@leaf1$ sudo cl-bgp summary show json
{ "router-id": "192.168.0.80", "as": 65080, "table-version": 5, "rib-count": 9, "rib-memory": 1080, "peer-count": 2, "peer-memory": 34240, "peer-group-count": 1, "peer-group-memory": 56, "peers": { "swp1": { "remote-as": 65082, "version": 4, "msgrcvd": 52082, "msgsent": 52084, "table-version": 0, "outq": 0, "inq": 0, "uptime": "05w1d04h", "prefix-received-count": 2, "prefix-advertised-count": 5, "state": "Established", "id-type": "interface" }, "swp2": { "remote-as": 65083, "version": 4, "msgrcvd": 52082, "msgsent": 52083, "table-version": 0, "outq": 0, "inq": 0, "uptime": "05w1d04h", "prefix-received-count": 2, "prefix-advertised-count": 5, "state": "Established", "id-type": "interface" } }, Continue reading
I use SNMP SETs and I’m not afraid to admit it.
Do you remember back in CCNA school when we learned all sorts of great things that we very rarely followed. One of the favourites was that we are supposed to put meaningful descriptions on all of our interfaces so we know what the other side is connected to.
How many people actually follow that advice?
Yeah, I never do it either. There’s always just too many things on the list that need to get done and it seems like that extra 5 seconds it would take me to update the description to the interface just doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort. Of course, then I later check the port and end up knocking out my XYZ services and cause myself an outage.
This is where a little python and a decent NMS can help to solve a problem.
Understanding ifIndex
Before we get into the code. We need to understand a little about ifIndex values and how they relate to the physical interfaces of the devices. If you’re REALLY interested, you can do some reading in RFC 2863. But in a nutshell, each interface on a device, whether physical or logical has a specific numeric value assigned to it Continue reading
DockerCon EU 2015 Videos: Use Cases
We just posted videos from both days of the Use Case track DockerCon EU 2015! Below are all nine recorded videos and slides from those sessions. More videos from the Ecosystem and Docker, Docker, Docker tracks will be available soon! … ContinuedPolicy wonks aren’t computer experts
This Politico story polls "cybersecurity experts" on a range of issues. But they weren't experts, they were mostly policy wonks and politicians. Almost none of them have ever configured a firewall, wrote some code, exploited SQL injection, analyzed a compromise, or in any other way have any technical expertise in cybersecurity. It's like polling a group of "medical experts", none of which has a degree in medicine, or having a "council of economic advisers", consisting of nobody with economics degrees, but instead representatives from labor unions and corporations.As an expert, a real expert, I thought I'd answer the questions in the poll. After each question, I'll post my answer (yes/no), the percentage from the Politico poll of those agreeing with me, and then a discussion.
Should the government mandate minimum cybersecurity requirements for private-sector firms?
No (39%). This question is biased because they asked policy wonks, most of which will answer "yes" to any question "should government mandate". It's also biases because if you ask anybody involved in X if we need more X, they'll say "yes", regardless of the subject you are talking about.
But the best answer is "no", for three reasons.
Firstly, we experts don't know Continue reading
Using SSH Multiplexing
In this post, I’m going to discuss how to configure and use SSH multiplexing. This is yet another aspect of Secure Shell (SSH), the “Swiss Army knife” for administering and managing Linux (and other UNIX-like) workloads.
Generally speaking, multiplexing is the ability to carry multiple signals over a single connection (see this Wikipedia article for a more in-depth discussion). Similarly, SSH multiplexing is the ability to carry multiple SSH sessions over a single TCP connection. This Wikibook article goes into more detail on SSH multiplexing; in particular, I would call your attention to the table under the “Advantages of Multiplexing” to better understand the idea of multiple SSH sessions with a single TCP connection.
One of the primary advantages of using SSH multiplexing is that it speeds up certain operations that rely on or occur over SSH. For example, let’s say that you’re using SSH to regularly execute a command on a remote host. Without multiplexing, every time that command is executed your SSH client must establish a new TCP connection and a new SSH session with the remote host. With multiplexing, you can configure SSH to establish a single TCP connection that is kept alive for a specific period Continue reading
Technology Short Take #57
Welcome to Technology Short Take #57. I hope you find something useful here!
Networking
- Tor Anderson has an article on using IPv6 for network boot using UEFI and iPXE.
- Larry Smith Jr. has a great blog series going called “Hey, I can DevOps my Network too!” He started out with an intro post just to set the stage for the series, then had a post on the prep work required to get ready to proceed with the series. In part 2 Larry walks through the node definitions in Vagrant, and in part 3 he reviews the
Vagrantfileand turns up the environment. Parts 4 and 5 walk through auto-configured OSPF and manually-configured OSPF, respectively. I’m looking forward to more posts in this series! - Sometimes I see blog posts that tout themselves as a “deep dive” but aren’t really that deep or detailed. However, this OVN L3 deep dive by Gal Sagie really is a deep dive—he goes into a pretty fair amount of detail on how OVN’s L3 implementation works. Good stuff if you’re interested in getting more details on how OVN is implementing new features like L3.
- Kirk Byers has a helpful article that provides some Continue reading
Blue Planet Won’t Drive Ciena Revenue in 2016
Blue Planet did add two new Tier 1 customers in late 2015.
Citrix White Paper: Cisco ACI & Citrix NetScaler Accelerate Application Deployment & Propel Agile Application-Driven Networks
Citrix outlines a joint solution with Cisco that provides a flexible way to link network services to applications, improving security, and accelerating application deployment.
Worth Reading: The Marriage of the Ecosystem
The post Worth Reading: The Marriage of the Ecosystem appeared first on 'net work.