Before we go in to observed trends, let’s put some context on this post and definitions around monitoring. Network monitoring and tapping, this can be described as “packet capture, packet and session analysis and NetFlow generation with analytics”. Tap fabrics typically provide a means of extracting packets from a network but not so much the analysis. Tools like Wireshark, Lancope’s Stealth Watch and a good IDP solution are still required.
Current Situation and Legacy Methodology
In days of past (and most current networks), if you want/ed to harvest packets from a network the quickest route was to mirror a port to a server running Wireshark and filter the results to make sense of what was going on from a protocol and application point of view. Cisco have tools like the NAM, which comes in several forms such as a server, Catalyst 6500 switch module and ISR module. The NAM allows you to visually observe network trends and network conversations via generated graphs but also inspect by download the PCAP files. Probably one of the most pleasant experiences most people have in addition to Wireshark.
Some shortcomings exist with this approach in so much as the device that receives the mirrored Continue reading
In a blog week dedicated to the application and the policies that govern them, I wanted to add some detail on a discussion I have with customers quite often. It should be clear that we at Plexxi believe in application policy driven network behaviors. Our Affinities allow you to specify desired behavior between network endpoints, which will evolve with the enormous amount of policy work Mat described in his 3 piece article earlier this week.
Many times when I discuss Affinities and policies with customers or more generically with network engineering types, the explanation almost always lands at Access Control Lists (ACLs). Cisco created the concept of ACLs (and its many variations used for other policy constructs) way way back as a mechanism to instruct the switching chips inside their routers to accept or drop traffic. It started with a very simple “traffic from this source to this destination is dropped” and has very significantly evolved since then in Cisco’s implementation and many other of the router and switch vendors.
There are 2 basic components in an ACL:
1. what should I match a packet on
2. what is the action I take once I found a match.
Both Continue reading
I’m running or participating in five workshops or sessions during next week’s Interop New York. Three of them build on each other, so you might want to attend all of them in sequence:
Designing Infrastructure for Private Clouds starts with requirements gathering phase and focuses on physical infrastructure design decisions covering compute, storage, physical and virtual networking, and network services. If you plan to build a private (or a reasonable small public) cloud, start here.
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With Docker containers fast becoming the standard for building blocks for distributed apps, we’re working with the Docker community to make it easier for users to quickly code and assemble their projects. Official Repos, publicly downloadable for free from the Docker Hub Registry, are curated images informed by user feedback and best practices. They represent a focused community effort to provide great base images for applications, so developers and sysadmins can focus on building new features and functionality while minimizing repetitive work on commodity scaffolding and plumbing.
At DockerCon last June, we announced the first batch of Official Repos which covered many standard tools like OS distributions, web servers, and databases. At the time, we had several organizations join us to curate Official Repos for their particular project, including Fedora, CentOS, and Canonical. And the community responded enthusiastically as well: in the three months since they launched, Official Repos have so grown in popularity that they now account for almost 20% of all image downloads.
Parlez-vous…?
Based on the search queries on the Docker Hub Registry and discussions with many of you, we determined that the community wants pre-built stacks of their favorite programming languages. Specifically, developers Continue reading
It has been a while since Cisco acquired Tail-F but no one seems to have noticed how this acquisition impacts Cisco's competitors by upsetting the software development plans.
The post Musing: Cisco Buys Tail-F and Disrupts Competitor Product Development appeared first on EtherealMind.
This morning, Stephane Chazelas disclosed a vulnerability in the program bash, the GNU Bourne-Again-Shell. This software is widely used, especially on Linux servers, such as the servers used to provide CloudFlare’s performance and security cloud services.
This vulnerability is a serious risk to Internet infrastructure, as it allows remote code execution in many common configurations, and the severity is heightened due to bash being in the default configuration of most Linux servers. While bash is not directly used by remote users, it is used internally by popular software packages such as web, mail, and administration servers. In the case of a web server, a specially formatted web request, when passed by the web server to the bash application, can cause the bash software to run commands on the server for the attacker. More technical information was posted on the oss-sec mailing list.
The security community has assigned this bash vulnerability the ID CVE-2014-6271.
As soon as we became aware of this vulnerability, CloudFlare’s engineering and operations teams tested a patch to protect our servers, and deployed it across our infrastructure. As of now, all CloudFlare servers are protected against CVS-2014-6271.
Everyone who is using the bash software package should upgrade Continue reading
Necessity of Monitoring and Analytics in the SDN Era
A recent SDNCentral article about the Five Habits of Highly Effective SDN Startups asserts that achieving success in the SDN landscape will require creating focused products that solve real-world problems. In addition, the article emphasizes the need to build a sales channel with great partners, market strategically but be lean and mean, and adopt a slow and steady route into the SDN world.
The article quoted the new landscape of SDN as we know it. Take a look at the diagram below. The building blocks range from controllers to network operating systems to monitoring and analytics.
As the above diagram illustrates, monitoring and analytics are key. With SDN, the network self-adapts to the new demands of the application, and without visibility into these changes it’s very hard to say if an SDN application is doing the right things to your network. Understanding the programmable events that happen in real time requires mature analytics technology that can correlate service delivery to physical and virtual resource states.
At Packet Design, we have been working on a solution for SDN analytics Continue reading
My first experience with ThousandEyes was a year ago at Network Field Day 6, where they were kind enough to give us a tour of their office, and introduce us to their products. I’ve been fairly distracted since then, but kept an eye on what other delegates like Bob McCouch were doing with the product since that demo.
A year later, at Network Field Day 8, they presented again. If you’ve never heard of ThousandEyes, and/or would like an overview, watch Mohit’s (CEO) NFD8 introduction:
One of the things that really stuck out a year ago, and was reinforced tenfold this year, was that ThousandEyes was not introducing any new protocols to the industry – at a time when all of the headlines were talking about new protocols (i.e. OpenFlow). Numerous tech startups – especially those in networking – are in existence purely to tackle the big “software-defined opportunity” gold rush.
Instead, ThousandEyes is focused on network monitoring. If you’re like me – you hear those words and immediately conjure up images of all of the…..well, terrible software that exists today to monitor networks. In addition, network monitoring is inherently very fragmented. You can really only Continue reading
I was looking at some Ethernet interface statistics last week when I realized I couldn’t find the output that confirmed the results of Ethernet Autonegotiation, just that autonegotiation had been enabled: john@noisy> show interfaces ge-0/0/0 Physical interface: ge-0/0/0, Enabled, Physical link … Continue reading
If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at Proposed Junos XML Enhancements and give me a share/like. Thank you!
If you missed the first 2 parts of this series, you can catch them here and here. The short version is that there are Enterprise customers that are actively seeking to automate the production deployment of their workloads, which leads them to discover that capturing business policy as part of the process is critical. We’ve arrived here at the point that once policy can be encapsulated in the process of application workload orchestration, it is then necessary to have infrastructure that understands how to enact and enforce that policy. This is largely a networking discussion, and to-date, networking has largely been about any-to-any all equal connectivity (at least in Data Centers), which in many ways means no policy. This post looks at how networking infrastructure can be envisioned differently in the face of applications that can express their own policy.
[As an aside, Rich Fichera over at Forrester researcher wrote a great piece on this topic (which unfortunately is behind a pretty hefty paywall unless you're a Forrester client, but I'll provide a link anyway). Rich coins the term "Systems of Engagement" to describe new models for Enterprise applications that depart from the legacy "Systems of Record." If you have access Continue reading
In the first part of the Network Programmability webinar Matt Oswalt described some of the major challenges most networks are facing today:
