Totally Redesigned Free Content Web Site
One of the main complaints I was continuously getting about my free content is that there’s simply too much of it, and that it’s impossible to find what one is looking for.
New Year holidays gave me enough time to implement a project that has been on my to-do list for almost a year: total redesign of the free content web site. Feedback highly appreciated!
Infographic: SDN’s Pulse Among Service Providers
Infographic: SDN's Pulse Among Service Providers
by Steve Harriman, VP of Marketing - January 6, 2015
As Howard Baldwin recently wrote in InfoWorld, the lure of new enterprise technology is great, but then comes the inevitable uncertainty about how in the world to manage it. The backdrop for his comment is the service provider survey we conducted last month at the SDN/MPLS International Conference in Washington, D.C. As the infographic below shows, production deployment of SDN is way up among service providers, but nearly all are concerned about management.
Baldwin concludes his article by pointing out that although SDN holds great promise for automating and managing WAN operations, traditional management tools, processes, and standards will not work. The good news, he says, is that “…IT is not only being liberated from hardware-specific configuration, it’s also being liberated from hardware-specific management. In other words, you’ll be able to manage devices the way you want to, not the way the application dictates.”
Right now that’s more of a hope than a concrete solution. At Packet Design, we have made some headway on our concept of a Network Access Broker. See our conceptual demo here: http://www.packetdesign.com/blog/network-access-broker-conceptual-demo
Hello 2015!
Hard to be believe 2014 is gone and and 2015 is here! Yea I know we are already a few days into 2015 but hey for some reason I still hear people saying “Happy New Year”, much like I still Christmas decorations out. So what’s in store in for 2015!? Well we are going to […]
PQ Show 40 – HP Networking – Multi Service Routers (HP MSR)
This is a continuation of the sponsored series of shows we recorded at the HP Discover Barcelona conference in December 2014. An interesting facet of HP Discover to me was meeting smart HP folks at random. Sue Darte is such a person I was lucky enough to bump into. Here’s the story. While waiting to record a […]
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The post PQ Show 40 – HP Networking – Multi Service Routers (HP MSR) appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.
OpenFlow integration
The article describes the challenge of mapping between the different methods used by sFlow and OpenFlow to identify switch ports:
- Agent IP address ⟷ OpenFlow switch ID
- SNMP ifIndex ⟷ OpenFlow port ID
The Open vSwitch recently implemented the extension, unifying visibility and control of the virtual network edge. In addition, most physical that support OpenFlow also support sFlow. Ask vendors about their plans to implement the sFlow OpenFlow Structures extension since it is a key enabler for SDN control applications.
The Story Behind the Migration
A number of people have asked me why I migrated from WordPress—which powered my blog for 9 years—to Jekyll and GitHub Pages. Now that the migration is finally complete, I can share with you the story behind the migration: why I migrated, the process I followed, and some of the tools I used.
Why I Migrated
“Why?” is a question I heard quite a bit as I was sharing updates on the progress of the blog migration over the Christmas/New Year holiday. It’s quite simple, really: I needed to walk the walk.
Allow me to explain. For the last couple of years, I’ve occasionally been giving presentations at VMUG meetings and other events on how to stay relevant in the fast-changing world of IT. The most recent instance was a whirlwind tour of Dallas, Chicago, and Phoenix in September of this last year, where I presented this deck, titled “Closing the Cloud Skills Gap.”
In that presentation, one of the recommendations I made to the audience was to become more familiar with the software development process. That includes tools like Git (and, by extension, GitHub), Vagrant (a quick introduction is available here), and others. I Continue reading
A Look Ahead to Packet Pushers Content in 2015
Here’s an update on some Packet Pushers news, and a look ahead to the content we’re planning for 2015. No scary announcements, just some thoughts to share. Circling Back Around On Show 200 I think we’ve mentioned it before, but the response we received to show 200 was very encouraging to us. That’s understated. You really blew […]
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The post A Look Ahead to Packet Pushers Content in 2015 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.
Platitudes are only skin deep
I overdosed on Disney Channel over the holidays, because of course children control the remote. It sounds like it's teaching kids wholesome lessons, but if you pay attention, you'll realize it's not. It just repeats meaningless platitudes with no depth, and sometimes gets the platitudes wrong.For example, it had a segment on the importance of STEAM education. This sounds a lot like "STEM", which stands for "science, technology, engineering, and math". Many of us believe in interesting kids in STEM. It's good for them, because they'll earn twice that of other college graduates. It's good for society, because there aren't enough technical graduates coming out of college to maintain our technology-based society. It's also particularly important for girls, because we still have legacy sexism that discourages girls from pursuing technical careers.
But Disney adds an 'A' in the middle, making STEM into STEAM. The 'A' stands for "Arts", meaning the entire spectrum of Liberal Arts. This is nonsense, because at this point, you've now included pretty much all education. The phrase "STEAM education" is redundant, conveying nothing more than simply "education".
What's really going on is that they attack the very idea they pretend to promote. Proponents of STEM Continue reading
Internet Connectivity via Linux Host
-Intro - This post will serve as a step by step tutorial for setting up a GNS3 network with an internet connection with the host system isUpcoming Ansible Training Classes
We are pleased to announce to training courses. These courses are taught by members of the Ansible Team and will give a great look at how to get started using Ansible.
In this course, students will explore the origins of Ansible, how Ansible approaches automation, and the common use cases for Ansible. Students will learn about key Ansible concepts, including playbooks, plays, tasks, and modules, and the course will go through step-by-step creation of a playbook to deploy a full application from beginning to end.
The cost is $199.
Choose from one of the dates below.
The Innovators of Computer Networking (Infographic)
Originally published on the Auvik blog The history of computer networking reaches back surprisingly far. As early as the 1790s, intrepidContinuous Integration Pipeline for Networking
Popular development methodologies like Continuous Integration are usually accompanied by some kind of automated workflow, where a developer checks in some source code, which kicks off automated review, testing, and deployment jobs. I believe the same workflows can be adopted by network engineers.
Let’s say you are the Senior Network Engineer for your entire company, which boasts a huge network. You don’t have time to touch every device, so you have a team of junior-level network engineers that help you out. Let’s say you want to offload the creation/deletion of DHCP reservations to these junior engineers, but you still want to be able to approve all changes, just as a last line of defense, and a sanity check.
For this, I’m gong to show you how I’m managing my own home DHCP server (ISC) with Gerrit, Jenkins, and Ansible.
Config Review and Versioning with Git and Gerrit
I mentioned in a previous post that version control is an important component of efficiently managing network infrastructure. I’m going to take it a step further than what most are doing with RANCID, which is traditionally used at the end of a Continue reading
On Losing
When I got off the phone, I knew I’d blown it. I’d gotten so wrapped up in the discussion on eVPNs that I might have crossed over that magical line between, “this is a really neat technology,” to, “this technology will solve world hunger.” It brought back to mind my first “real fight” in the world of technology, a long ago argument between two network operating systems (Novell Netware and Banyan Vines).
At the time, I was a buck sergeant in the USAF assigned to the Small Computer Support Office. We were building a new base backbone, and trying to decide what network operating system to standardize on as an organization (as a base). The decision had come down to two options — Novell Netware and Banyan Vines. I was in the camp that wanted Vines. In fact, I’d written two papers (long’ish, on the order of 80 pages each), going through the positives and negatives in each direction. I’d been to a number of meetings, and we had small networks set up running both in our lab. In the end, though, I lost. The technology I was advocating for wasn’t chosen by “the powers that be,” and so Continue reading
BGPSEC: Signatures and Performance
BGPSEC is a set of BGP extensions being developed by the SIDR working group of the IETF to improve the security of the Internet’s routing infrastructure. So far in this series, we’ve looked at the basic operation of BGPSEC, the protections offered, and then the first set of performance issues — how do we prevent […]
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The post BGPSEC: Signatures and Performance appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.
BGP Deaggregation with Conditional Route Injection
Whenever there’s a weird request to do something totally illogical with BGP, there’s a knob in Cisco IOS to get it done (and increase the heartburn of CCIE candidates). Conditional Route Injection (the ability to insert more specific prefixes into BGP without having them in the IP routing table) is one of them.
Keep in mind: being a MacGyver is not a long-term strategy. Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.
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