IT/IT: The Future of Network Engineering

Two different articles caught my attention this last week. They may not seem to be interrelated, but given my “pattern making mind,” I always seem to find connections. The first is an article from Network Computing discussing the future of network engineering skill sets.

It’s a new day in enterprise technology, with Chuck Robbins at the helm of Cisco. But John Chambers left a lasting dark impression with the audience at Cisco Live in June. He essentially dropped a hand grenade, predicting the end of IT as we know it, and walked offstage.

Patrick Hubbard goes on to talk about the hand grenade John Chambers left in the room 3 that there would be major mergers, failures, and acquisitions in the next twenty years, leaving the IT industry a very different place. The takeaway? That individual engineers need to “up their game,” learning new technologies faster, hitting the books and the labs on a more regular basis. Given the view in the industry of Cisco as a “safe harbor” for IT skills, this is something of a hand grenade in the room, coming from Chambers at Cisco Live.

The second article predicts a hand grenade, as well, though of a Continue reading

Why My Water Droplet Is Better Than Your Hadoop Cluster

We’ve had computation using slime mold and soap film, now we have computation using water droplets. Stanford bioengineers have built a “fully functioning computer that runs like clockwork - but instead of electrons, it operates using the movement of tiny magnetised water droplets.”

 

By changing the layout of the bars on the chip it's possible to make all the universal logic gates. And any Boolean logic circuit can be built by moving the little magnetic droplets around. Currently the chips are about half the size of a postage stamp and the droplets are smaller than poppy seeds.

What all this means I'm not sure, but pavo6503 has a comment that helps understand what's going on:

Logic gates pass high and low states. Since they plan to use drops of water as carriers and the substances in those drops to determine what the high/low state is they could hypothetically make a filter that sorts drops of water containing 1 to many chemicals. Pure water passes through unchanged. water with say, oil in it, passes to another container, water with alcohol to another. A "chip" with this setup could be used to purify water where there are many contaminants you want separated.

Alibaba’s cloud and mobile business soar, but total revenue disappoints

Alibaba Group’s cloud computing and mobile business are surging, but its reported revenue in the second quarter missed analysts’ estimates, amid a slowing Chinese economy.In the quarter ended June 30, Alibaba generated over $3.2 billion in revenue, up 28 percent year over year, but short of the $3.39 billion consensus expectation from analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.The e-commerce giant raked in a net profit of US$4.9 billion, for a 150 percent increase, but the huge profit increase largely came from its film production arm, Alibaba Pictures. In June, the company reduced its stake in Alibaba Pictures, and “deconsolidated” it from the financial results. This resulted in a major gain for Alibaba’s investment income.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FIS seeks to boost financial software portfolio with $9.1B Sungard acquisition

Fidelity National Information Services is buying financial software vendor SunGard for US$9.1 billion to broaden its range of enterprise banking and capital market offerings.The deal, announced Wednesday, ends SunGard’s bid to go public. The Wayne, Pennsylvania, company filed for an initial public offering in June, about 10 years after being acquired by a group of private equity firms. The firms that purchased SunGard for approximately $11 billion in 2005 include Bain Capital, Silver Lake Management and Blackstone Group.Some of the firms involved with the 2005 buyout were also SunGard customers. The vendor’s software covers a range of financial services functions including tax and compliance, insurance, retail banking and retirement administration. SunGard’s annual revenue totals $2.8 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Getting to Know Robyn Bergeron, Community Architect at Ansible

robyn-bullKnowing the members of our Ansible community is important to us, and we want you to get to know the members of our team in (and outside of!) the Ansible office. Stay tuned to the blog to learn more about the people who are helping to bring Ansible to life.

This week we're happy to introduce you to Robyn Bergeron, who recently joined Ansible as a Community Architect. Her prior role was as a Developer Advocate at Elastic, where she worked closely with the ELK stack community. And many of us at Ansible know her from her days at Red Hat, where she was the Fedora Project Leader -- a role that her illustrious boss once himself had.

What’s your role at Ansible?

Open source communities work best when contributors are empowered and enabled to make things happen; the easier it is to contribute, the more likely they’ll continue to do so, and enjoy doing it. As a community architect, it’s my job to ensure that contributors, both long-time and new, are connected with the opportunities, ideas, tools, and people to make great things happen in the Ansible community, with minimal bureaucracy.

A good deal of my focus will Continue reading

Announcing Docker Toolbox

The fastest way to get Docker running in development written by Michael Chiang, Product Manager at Docker Inc. Today we’re announcing a new installer for Mac OS X and Windows called Docker Toolbox. We’ve been hearing again and again that … Continued

SDN and the Trough Of Understanding

gartner_net_hype_2015

An article published this week referenced a recent Hype Cycle diagram (pictured above) from the oracle of IT – Gartner. While the lede talked a lot about the apparent “death” of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), there was also a lot of time devoted to discussing SDN’s arrival at the Trough of Disillusionment. Quoting directly from the oracle:

Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.

As SDN approaches this dip in the Hype Cycle it would seem that the steam is finally being let out of the Software Defined Bubble. The Register article mentions how people are going to leave SDN by the wayside and jump on the next hype-filled networking idea, likely SD-WAN given the amount of discussion it has been getting recently. Do you know what this means for SDN? Nothing but good things.

Software Defined Hammers

Engineers have a chronic case of Software Defined Overload. SD-anything ranks right up there with Fat Free and New And Improved as the Most Overused Marketing Terms. Every solution release in the last two years Continue reading

Another useful SRX command for looking at IPSec tunnels

This is a new one on me – obviously I’ve not been paying much attention since it has been around since 10.2!

On 12.1X45-D15.5 the counters for packets/bytes all show zero, but at least you can see that your tunnel is up and what the various parameters in use are…  See below:

imtech@srx650-1-POD1> show security flow session tunnel extensive 
Session ID: 38046, Status: Normal
Flag: 0x10000
Policy name: N/A
Source NAT pool: Null
Dynamic application: junos:UNKNOWN, 
Maximum timeout: N/A, Current timeout: N/A
Session State: Valid
Start time: 105905, Duration: 52592
 In: 10.1.0.9/49698 --> 10.1.0.1/27622;esp, 
 Interface: ge-2/0/13.0, 
 Session token: 0xa, Flag: 0x100621
 Route: 0x110010, Gateway: 10.1.0.2, Tunnel: 0
 Port sequence: 0, FIN sequence: 0, 
 FIN state: 0, 
 Pkts: 0, Bytes: 0

Session ID: 38047, Status: Normal
Flag: 0x10000
Policy name: N/A
Source NAT pool: Null
Dynamic application: junos:UNKNOWN, 
Maximum timeout: N/A, Current timeout: N/A
Session State: Valid
Start time: 105905, Duration: 52592
 In: 10.1.0.9/0 --> 10.1.0.1/0;esp, 
 Interface: ge-2/0/13.0, 
 Session token: 0xa, Flag: 0x621
 Route: 0x110010, Gateway: 10.1.0.2, Tunnel: 0
 Port sequence: 0, FIN sequence: 0, 
 FIN state: 0, 
 Pkts: 0, Bytes: 0
Total sessions: 2

Another useful SRX command for looking at IPSec tunnels

This is a new one on me – obviously I’ve not been paying much attention since it has been around since 10.2!

On 12.1X45-D15.5 the counters for packets/bytes all show zero, but at least you can see that your tunnel is up and what the various parameters in use are…  See below:

imtech@srx650-1-POD1> show security flow session tunnel extensive 
Session ID: 38046, Status: Normal
Flag: 0x10000
Policy name: N/A
Source NAT pool: Null
Dynamic application: junos:UNKNOWN, 
Maximum timeout: N/A, Current timeout: N/A
Session State: Valid
Start time: 105905, Duration: 52592
 In: 10.1.0.9/49698 --> 10.1.0.1/27622;esp, 
 Interface: ge-2/0/13.0, 
 Session token: 0xa, Flag: 0x100621
 Route: 0x110010, Gateway: 10.1.0.2, Tunnel: 0
 Port sequence: 0, FIN sequence: 0, 
 FIN state: 0, 
 Pkts: 0, Bytes: 0

Session ID: 38047, Status: Normal
Flag: 0x10000
Policy name: N/A
Source NAT pool: Null
Dynamic application: junos:UNKNOWN, 
Maximum timeout: N/A, Current timeout: N/A
Session State: Valid
Start time: 105905, Duration: 52592
 In: 10.1.0.9/0 --> 10.1.0.1/0;esp, 
 Interface: ge-2/0/13.0, 
 Session token: 0xa, Flag: 0x621
 Route: 0x110010, Gateway: 10.1.0.2, Tunnel: 0
 Port sequence: 0, FIN sequence: 0, 
 FIN state: 0, 
 Pkts: 0, Bytes: 0
Total sessions: 2

Useful SRX debugging blog

Just came across a useful debugging guide for site-to-site IPSec VPNs on Juniper SRX. It is a bit confusing because in steps 2 and 3, where it says [LOCAL PEER IP] it should actually say [REMOTE PEER IP].   But otherwise, this is a very useful set of instructions.

It doesn’t mention that you should observe the lifetime of the IKE and IPSec security associations, and also keep an eye on the SA index or ID.  If the index number keeps changing, it means your tunnel is going down and coming back up all the time.   If the lifetime regularly starts again at the maximum value and does not count down to zero steadily, this indicates the same thing.

Particularly interesting is the way the author splits out the sections on troubleshooting the packet flow within the VPN, versus the packet flow of the VPN crypto itself.  I’ve not used packet-filters in flow debug before, so will definitely be trying that out.

Link to SRX debug article at fir3net.com


Useful SRX debugging blog

Just came across a useful debugging guide for site-to-site IPSec VPNs on Juniper SRX. It is a bit confusing because in steps 2 and 3, where it says [LOCAL PEER IP] it should actually say [REMOTE PEER IP].   But otherwise, this is a very useful set of instructions.

It doesn’t mention that you should observe the lifetime of the IKE and IPSec security associations, and also keep an eye on the SA index or ID.  If the index number keeps changing, it means your tunnel is going down and coming back up all the time.   If the lifetime regularly starts again at the maximum value and does not count down to zero steadily, this indicates the same thing.

Particularly interesting is the way the author splits out the sections on troubleshooting the packet flow within the VPN, versus the packet flow of the VPN crypto itself.  I’ve not used packet-filters in flow debug before, so will definitely be trying that out.

Link to SRX debug article at fir3net.com


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