Opening the Black Box – Linux Network OS for Bare Metal Switches
Transform the network from gatekeeper to enabler with a Linux Network OS platform for switches that enables automation, feature velocity and innovation on par with servers.
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” – Albert Camus
In my role as a Customer Solutions Engineer (affectionately known as CSE) at Cumulus Networks, I am on the frontlines discussing customer requirements, use cases and networking architectures. A frequent question that customers ask me is “what can an open network operating system (OS) do for me?”
Most customers have lived in the world of black boxes where the OS and hardware are vertically integrated and your vendor keeps you in a sandbox that controls what you can and cannot do. In the black box world, if you want a new feature, application or a different operational model, you have to request it from your account team and wait while the vendor decides if your use case is important enough or you are a big enough customer.
The idea of having direct access to the different operational aspects of the OS is a foreign concept Continue reading
Hands-On Tail-F Experience – Part 2
Want to know even more about Tail-F NCS after listening to Episode 22 of Software Gone Wild? Boštjan Šuštar and Marko Tišler from NIL Data Communications continue their deep dive into the secrets of NCS in Software Gone Wild Episode 23.
Device Naming Conventions – What’s in a Name
Choosing a device hostname seems trivial to say the least. However, from multiple design meetings, this is a topic that tends to drag on. Everyone has a preference, and opinion or just set in the...[[ Summary content only, you can read everything now, just visit the site for full story ]]
BGP routing incidents in 2014, malicious or not?
Over the last year we have seen and written about numerous BGP routing incidents that looked out of the ordinary, straight-up suspicious or were just configuration mistakes. In this blog post we will highlight a few of them and look at the impact and cause of each of the observed incidents and try to determine if there was any malicious intent.
I presented the same data last week at NANOG 63, in San Antonio, a recording of this presentation can be found below:
BGP hijacking for monetary gain.
We have all heard of Bitcoin, it’s been in the news quite a bit and chances are that some of you are mining Bitcoins right now. There are now computing devices optimized for Bitcoin mining and even dedicated Bitcoin mining data centers. In addition to the dedicated data centers, many Bitcoin miners use cloud compute instances from Amazon, OVH, Digital Ocean, etc. So it’s obvious that there is a lot of money spent on Bitcoin mining & trading; and as such there is also an opportunity to make a quick buck.
This summer we blogged about a series of BGP hijacks where an attacker cleverly misused the Bitcoin stratum protocol. By Continue reading
Overlay Networking as a Method to Scale Flow Networking and Handling
Overlay Networking and Coarse Flow Table are two ways to scale up the flow networking for SDN.
The post Overlay Networking as a Method to Scale Flow Networking and Handling appeared first on EtherealMind.
The Secrets to Drawing Effective Network Diagrams
by Kevin Dooley, originally published on the Auvik blog Good network diagrams aren’t hard to make, but I find them distressinglyA Neutral ‘Net?
This week I’m going to step off the beaten path for a moment and talk about ‘net neutrality. It appears we are about to enter a new phase in the life of the Internet — at least in the United States — as the FCC is out and about implying we should expect a ruling on Title II regulation of the ‘net within the United States in the near future. What the FCC’s chairman has said is —
- The Internet would be reclassified as a Title II communication service, which means the portions within the United States would fall under the same regulations as telephone and television service.
- “comma, but…” The ‘net infrastructure in the United States won’t be subject to all the rules of Title II regulation.
- Specifically mentioned is the last mile, “there will be no rate regulation, no tariffs, no last-mile unbundling.”
A lot of digital ink has been spilled over how the proposed regulations will impact investment — for instance, AT&T has made a somewhat veiled threat that if the regulations don’t go the way they’d like to see them go, there will be no further investment in last mile broadband throughout the US (as Continue reading
Interview with Ansible CEO
Ansible CEO Saïd Ziouani recently sat down for an interview with Adrian Bridgwater of ToolsAdvisor.net to talk about the past, present and future of Ansible.
Tools Advisor: Ansible Tower is an opportunity for less technical users to get involved with IT automation by virtue of its role-based access control and dashboard functionality being core extras over and above the command line version of the open source product. Just exactly how 'non-technical' a user do you think should be involved here?
Saïd Ziouani: We strongly believe that IT Automation should be a dull task; your IP competency should be your priority and the main focus for your software developers. Managing your infrastructure must be simple to a point that it's almost boring. Tower takes the simplicity model of Ansible to a new level, allowing easy push button automation at scale, and team role delegation.
Read the full interview here.
Software Defined Reality – NFD9 Redux
I’ve just got back from Networking Field Day 9 (NFD9) and my head is buzzing after a busy week of presentations. I posted a preview of NFD9 so it seems only fair to give a quick wrap up of the week’s themes and presentations as I saw it.
My NFD9
After some time spent thinking on the flights back home, I came to the conclusion that there were two themes that were recurring this week.
The dominating theme for me was, at last, seeing the magic rainbow-expelling problem-solving unicorn that is Software Defined Networking – SDN – and all its inherent paradigm-shifting magic, turned into products that actually seem real, and are starting to deal with some of the issues that were flagged up when SDN was first being described. It’s relatively easy to SDN-wash a product, but making it something from which a user can actually benefit, well, that’s something else.
The second theme was that many of the products looked to the concept of detecting or fixing problems before the users were aware of them, whether as an alert from a monitoring system, or a network that automatically self-heals or otherwise avoids problem areas.
SDN == Programming
Don’t Continue reading