Topology Options for NFV
The question on NFV topology is whether to centralize or distribute the hosting. Both of these options are valid.
VCDX-NV Interview: Nemtallah Daher Discusses VMware NSX Certification
Nemtallah Daher is Senior Network Delivery Consultant at the consulting firm AdvizeX Technology. Recently he took some time out of his day to talk with us about why, as a networking guy, he thinks learning about network virtualization is critical to further one’s career.
***
I’ve been at AdvizeX for about a year now. I do Cisco, HP, data center stuff, and all sorts of general networking things: routing, switching, data center, UCS. That kind of stuff. Before coming to AdvizeX, I was a senior network specialist at Cleveland State University for about 20 years.
I started at Cleveland State in 1988 as a systems programmer, working on IBM mainframe doing CICS, COBOL and assembler. About 2 years after I started at Cleveland State, networking was becoming prevalent, and the project I was working on was coming to an end, so they asked me if I would help start a networking group. So from a small lab here, a building here, a floor there, I built the network at Cleveland State. We applied for a grant to get some hardware, applied for an IP address, domain name, all these things. There was nothing at the time, so we Continue reading
Validating and searching JSON
When it comes to dealing with network automation, you can find yourself battling with many things, including dealing with XML and JSON data structures as you build apps that consume or spit out data.
Recently I’ve been using ‘jq’ to provide my JSON validation (i.e. I’ve not missed a quotation, colon, comma, curly or square bracket) when building data in JSON. Its primary function and purpose is to search through JSON data to find something in the data set, or reduce the data set to an area of focus, thus also validating your application is generating what it should be generating! A ‘lightweight and flexible command line JSON processor’ if you take the website description which is here: http://stedolan.githib.io/jq/
So how do you use this jq?
Here’s a simple JSON example with an ‘error’.
{
"name":"App1",
"OS":["Linux", "Windows", "Solaris", "OSX"],
"Author":"David Gee",
"Email":"[email protected]",
"Twitter":"@davidjohngee"
"Version":"alpha-v0.1",
"IP_Address":"192.0.2.1:5000"
}
Using ‘jq’ I can not only validate the structure, but in the case of a script, I can also parse out the key/value I need. But first, let’s see where our error is.
$ jq '.' tst.json parse error: Expected separator between Continue reading
GNS3 Weekly Development Report: May 11th
Two week ago we launched our first weekly development report in an effort to provide the community with increased transparency on what theCisco CEO John Chambers Gets Cocky on His Final Earnings Call
IoT greatness and the 'wrong' predictions about SDN are on John Chambers' mind in his last earnings call.
CloudFlare Supports the Passage of the USA Freedom Act
Earlier today, the lower house in the U.S. Congress (the House of Representatives) passed the USA FREEDOM Act. The Act, if passed by the Senate and signed by the President, would seek to sunset the National Security Agency’s bulk collection and mass surveillance programs, which may or may not be authorized by Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Under this authority the U.S. government has established its broad surveillance programs to indiscriminately collect information. Other governments have followed this lead to create additional surveillance capabilities—most recently, the French Parliament has moved a bill that would allow broad surveillance powers with little judicial oversight.
Restricting routine bulk collection is important: it’s not the government’s job to collect everything that passes over the Internet. The new version of the USA FREEDOM Act keeps useful authorities but ends bulk collection of private data under the PATRIOT Act. It also increases the transparency of the secret FISA court, which reviews surveillance programs—a key start to understanding and fixing broken policies around surveillance. The Act would also allow companies to be more transparent in their reporting related to FISA orders.
To be clear, we continue to be supportive of law enforcement and work Continue reading
With VSAP, Nuage Can Read Any SDN Underlay
A network visibility tool lets Nuage users peer into any underlay network.
NSA: ad hominem is stil a fallacy
An ad hominem attack is where, instead of refuting a person's arguments, you attack their character. It's a fallacy that enlightened people avoid. I point this out because of a The Intercept piece about how some of NSA's defenders have financial ties to the NSA. This is a fallacy.The first rule of NSA club is don't talk about NSA club. The intelligence community frequently publishes rules to this effect to all their employees, contractors, and anybody else under their thumb. They don't want their people talking about the NSA, even in defense. Their preferred defense is lobbying politicians privately in back rooms. They hate having things out in the public. Or, when they do want something public, they want to control the messaging (they are control freaks). They don't want their supporters muddying the waters with conflicting messaging, even if it is all positive. What they fear most is bad supporters, the type that does more harm than good. Inevitably, some defender of the NSA is going to say "ragheads must die", and that'll be the one thing attackers will cherry pick to smear the NSA's reputation.
Thus, you can tell how close somebody is to the NSA by Continue reading