I’m helping a company (as a favor) that’s looking for a network administrator in the Cary, NC area. The company is moving from another area, and hence rebuilding their office and backend systems. They rely heavily on their IT “stuff,” as they’re essentially in the information business. Please send me an email if you’re interested […]
Most RFCs are deeply technical — and they follow the “Yaakov rule” for intelligibility (if you didn’t write it, or you didn’t sit with one of the authors in a bar someplace to talk about it, you can’t understand it), there are a few here and there every network engineer should know. RFC 6250 is […]
Over the last year, I haven’t been writing many new blog posts. I have been pretty busy with a new job, but also starting a new networking group called the Chicago Network Operators Group (CHI-NOG). The idea behind it is that there aren’t that many places where network engineers can meet to talk about technology, learn something new and network with each other. The communities are mostly virtual and that’s something I wanted to change by creating CHI-NOG.
Chicago Network Operators Group
Last year Brian McGahan, Jason Craft and I met to talk about the void of the networking community. A lot of times people only know each other from email or forum exchanges. We wanted to bring in the Chicago community together and have a place to met and discuss the topics that interests us and learn from each other.
We try to host CHI-NOG events 3 times a year. So far our events have been in the evenings for few hours. For each event we have a number of guest speakers. They present on any topic relating to networking, which is a good way to spark conversation for the social hours that start right after.
This October Continue reading
[This post was authored by T. Sridhar and Jesse Gross.]
Earlier this year, VMware, Microsoft, Red Hat and Intel published an IETF draft on Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation (Geneve). This draft (first published on Valentine’s Day no less) includes authors from the each of the first generation encapsulation protocols — VXLAN, NVGRE, and STT. However, beyond the obvious appeal of unification across hypervisor platforms, the salient feature of Geneve is that it was designed from the ground up to be flexible. Nobody wants an endless cycle of new encapsulation formats as network virtualization designs and controllers mature, certainly not the vendors that have to support the ever growing list of acronyms and RFCs.
Of course press releases, standards bodies and predictions about the future mean little without actual implementations, which is why it is important to consider the “ecosystem” from the beginning of the process. This includes software and silicon implementations in both commercial and open source varieties. This always takes time but since Geneve was designed to accommodate a wide variety of use cases it has seen a relatively quick uptake. Unsurprisingly, the first implementations that landed were open source software — including switches such as Open Continue reading
Some OpenFlow-focused startups are desperately trying to tell you how redundant their architecture is. Unfortunately all the whitepapers (and the prancing unicorns) cannot change a simple fact: an SDN controller (OpenFlow-based or otherwise) is in some aspects a single failure domain.
Read more ...Not really the line anyone wants to hear, especially after watching the Terminator films! This however isn’t what this post is about, so if you’re a bit of a rebel, fear not. No network vendor branded termination thing (maybe other than poor documentation or code) will result in your death.
Since the era of the abacus, little consideration has been given to how software that relies upon a computer network actually interacts with it. Sure, most developers know how to drive a socket library and make things happen at a session level, but almost no consideration is given by a developer on how to deploy an enterprise application to a production environment.
This post represents a set of thoughts that have been maturing over the last few months. They are very much my own thoughts and do not represent those of others. I would be interested to hear if you have the same thoughts or any interesting different takes.
Before smart phones and tablets came along, software for the domestic populous provided a means of typing and printing spell checked letters to your pen pals, figuring out your weekly shopping Continue reading
There’s nothing quite so unnerving as being laid off. I know, because I’ve been let go in a “limited restructuring” twice in my life. Through the process, I learned some “life lessons,” that apply to just about every engineering in the world. While I’m safely ensconced in a great place at Ericsson, I thought it might be useful to reflect on the lessons I’ve learned — especially as it seems to be layoff season in other places (or maybe it’s layoff season all the time?).
First, it doesn’t matter if it’s about you, the politics, or just a random event. I still harbor a suspicion that both times I was laid off there was more going on in the background than just “we don’t need your services any longer.” There were probably politics. On the other hand, the politics in these situations are always bigger than you, no matter how personal it might seem. There’s always some back story, there’s always some power play in progress, there’s always some internal struggle.
But the truth is — it doesn’t matter. You can either stew on the past, or move on with your life. Stewing in the past isn’t going Continue reading
In the first article of this series, reliability and resiliency has been explained. Every component and every device can and eventually will fail, thus system should be resilient enough to re converge/recover to a previous state. Resiliency can be achieved with redundancy. But how much redundancy is best for the resiliency is another consideration to […]
The post Common Network Design Concepts Part-2 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Orhan Ergun.
One of my readers sent me an interesting challenge: they’re deploying a new DMVPN WAN, and as they cannot expect all locations to have native (non-NAT) IPv4 access, they plan to build the new DMVPN over IPv6. He was wondering whether it would work.
Apart from “you’re definitely going in the right direction” all I could tell him was “looking at the documentation I couldn’t see why it wouldn’t work” Has anyone deployed DMVPN over IPv6 in a production network? Any hiccups? Please share your experience in the comments. Thank you!
TL;DR: I'll be in Bern on September 9th. If you'd like to drop by and discuss network design or automation challenges, read on…
Read more ...At this point in the PacketU subnetting series, we have worked through the following–
This article takes the concept of subnetting to the next step. Today we are going to look at the concepts required to subnet a Class C network. As we reflect on the Classful IP rules, we recall that a Class C network has the following characteristics–
We also know that this single IP network can be further subdivided into multiple, but smaller, networks. This process is known as subnetting.
Continuing with the syntax used in previous articles, we might represent a Class C Network as follows–
192.168.100.0 In this example-- Blue represents a Classful Network Green represents a Host address
In this case the host address value is 0, so only the network is being represented here. Based on this information, we only have one IP network that can be assigned. That one network could Continue reading
The latest release of Cisco Nexus 1000V for vSphere can handle twice as many vSphere hosts as the previous one (250 instead of 128). Cisco probably did a lot of code polishing to improve Nexus 1000V scalability, but I’m positive most of the improvement comes from interesting architectural changes.
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The narrow stairway at 463 (and a half) Bryant Street was my first impression of working at Cumulus Networks. Victoria opened the door, and I said, “Wow, this door is tiny and those stairs- what is this, a speakeasy?” I got the sly, dry smile that I have come to see as indicative of Victoria and was escorted inside to the conference room of what looked like an empty apartment turned into an office. There, I met Kathleen and we chatted for half an hour. It was one of the most informal, comfortable, genuine experiences I’d ever had in a job search.
“Do you think you can commit to working at Cumulus Networks a few months, understanding it’s sort of up in the air right now, the future of this office, etc.?”
“Yeah, I think so. I mean, unless I become like, a famous author over night, or something. Which probably isn’t going to happen.”
Victoria glanced at my resume. “It says here that you published a book.”
“Two, actually. But you know… that’s how I Continue reading
Vendors keep telling me that every business is different and customer have different needs. We all buy the same products from the same companies, use the same deployment methodologies and best practices, have the same problems and deliver the same results to the business. You aren't a precious snowflake.
The post Rant: You Are Not A Precious Snowflake. IT Infrastructure Is The Same Everywhere. appeared first on EtherealMind.
The pilot episode of Software Gone Wild podcast featuring Snabb Switch created plenty of additional queries (and thousands of downloads) – it was obviously time for another deep dive episode discussing the intricate innards of this interesting virtual switch.
During the deep dive Luke Gorrie, the mastermind behind the Snabb Switch, answered a long list of questions, including:
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