As an incentive to use their service, Amazon Web Services offers new users a “free tier” of service that provides a VPS “micro-instance” at no cost for one year.
The free tier of service is fairly flexible. Amazon AWS provides enough free hours to run the micro-instance twenty-four hours a day for a year. But if a user needs more services, he or she may create multiple micro instances and run them concurrently, which multiplies the rate the user consumes hours.
In this post, we’ll show how to set up the free server, and how to connect to it using SSH.
The first step is to create a user account on AWS. Go to the AWS Free Tier web page and click on “Sign up for AWS Account”
Then, click on “Create a free Account”.
Click on the “Free Account” button
Follow the directions provided on the AWS web site to set up a user account. You need to have a mobile phone for identity verification.
If you already have an account on amazon.com, you can use your already existing account to log into AWS services.
Amazon AWS provides excellent Continue reading
A number of readers have asked—via e-mail, of course, given the subject of this post—why comments aren’t available yet on the new site. I’d like to take a quick moment to explain the current situation.
First and foremost, it’s not because I don’t want feedback from readers. I would love to continue to have the outstanding feedback from readers that I’ve had over the last 9 years of this site. It’s also not because it’s too much trouble (too much comment spam, too much time to moderate, etc.). It’s not because enabling comments is too difficult, either.
If not these reasons, then why? With a static site generator like Jekyll, I’m left with very few options for handling comments. The most common way is to use a service like Disqus, but there are a number of privacy and security concerns around Disqus (see here for just one example). As a result, I’m hesitant to put my readers in the situation where the privacy of their information is outside my hands. At least with WordPress, readers’ personal information was under my control alone. Not so with a service like Disqus (or any of the hosted alternative solutions).
I’ve tried Continue reading
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.
While the term Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) might be increasingly more common to networking, the concept of automation has existed for years in IT. At its core, ZTP is an automation solution that’s designed to reduce errors and save time when IT needs to bring new infrastructure online.
This is particularly useful for data center servers, where scale and configuration similarities across systems make automation a necessity. In the server world, for example, Linux has revolutionized on boarding and provisioning. Rather than using command-line interfaces (CLI) to configure systems one at a time, administrators can use automation tools to roll out the operating system software, patches and packages on new servers with a single command, or the click of a mouse.
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SDN's First Use Case Is the WAN, But Wither Management?
Considering how long Packet Design has been talking about the promise of SDN in the WAN, it was encouraging to see a Q&A in Network World last week on the subject. Editor John Dix interviewed Michael Elmore, IT Senior Director of the Enterprise Network Engineering Infrastructure Group at Cigna. Michael is also on the board of Open Network Users Group (ONUG).
Dix began the interview by asking why ONUG’s membership has voted the WAN as the top use case for SDN twice in a row now. In the context of the enterprise, Elmore replied that software defined WANs (SD-WANs) can reduce both capital and operational costs. He also said that they are easier to deploy than in the data center.
Elmore went on to discuss the limitations of today’s WANs (mainly the MPLS-based layer 3 VPN service offerings used by the Fortune 500) in terms of cost, scale, service quality, security, visibility, and agility/flexibility. He then outlined the benefits of SD-WANs in all those areas, saying that enterprises will be able to “take back control from service Continue reading
Several key factors are driving the change to white box or open hardware – ROI, flexibility and customizability of design, ease of implementation, and the avoidance of vendor lock-in along with the high price-tag it can bring. The rise of white box hardware started with servers and storage, and now a movement towards the adoption of open networking has gained quite a bit of traction. The
Open Compute Project (OCP) movement is driving creation of bare metal switches, such as Open Switches, that are designed to be open and disaggregated. This white box model for switching enables users to deploy, monitor, and manage networking alongside servers and storage at a much lower price-point than a traditional network switch.
With a white box switch, the OS layer is decoupled from the hardware itself which allows users to independently select the best-of-breed components and networking software stack Continue reading
Cool news today from BigSwitch who have taken some big steps forward with their rather awesome Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) solution.
Building on the existing features of BCF 2.0 that was announced last July (see my post on the BCF launch for more details), version 2.5 adds some pretty good new features and a surprise partner.
BCF now supports VMWare vCenter. BigSwitch sees an Ethernet fabric as a complementary technology to VMWare’s NSX, not a competitor; very wisely they would like to be the underlay while NSX provides the overlay. The BCF controller integrates right into vCenter so that network configuration can be automated with the virtual environment, and the controller provides a single interface to the entire fabric.
The original BCF supported OpenStack. BCF 2.5 now has more elements of OpenStack (Juno) support and adds CloudStack support. With this and the vCenter integration, BCF has positioned itself quite nicely for full server and switch automation.
My first question when I heard about this was “What on earth is Brite Box switching?” It turns out that somebody somewhere coined the phrase Continue reading
It is just about time to get ready for Cisco Live US this year and, harking back to 2012, we are again in San Diego, CA for the June 7-11th event. I just wanted to take a few moments and share some information that I have put together. Oh, if you have not registered yet – […]
The post Cisco Live 2015 – Time to get ready! appeared first on Fryguy's Blog.
This is a continuation from Part 2 Fast Reroute Why Fast Reroute? Many NSP’s like ACME have traffic with tight SLAs. For instance below is an ITU delay recommendation for Voice. One Way Delay Characterization of Quality 0-150ms Acceptable for most applications 150-400ms May impact some applications Above 400ms Unacceptable ITU G.114 delay recommendations Having […]
The post MPLS TE Design -Part 3 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Diptanshu Singh.
This is a continuation from Part 1 Case for LDPoRSVP As we mentioned at the very beginning that ACME provides L3VPN and L2VPN services, which requires end to end LSP between the PEs. But due to scaling reasons, ACME decided not to extend RSVP to the edge routers. This creates a problem as there is […]
The post MPLS TE Design -Part 2 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Diptanshu Singh.
In this post we will be exploring different aspects of Traffic Engineering (RSVP-TE) from a design perspective using fictional ISP as a reference. The intent of the post is to not necessarily recommend a particular solution, but to bring up different aspects involved in the design. I am assuming that the reader already has somewhat […]
The post MPLS TE Design -Part 1 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Diptanshu Singh.
Listening to some SDN pundits one gets an impression that SDN brings peace to Earth, solves all networking problems and makes networking engineers obsolete.
Cynical jokes aside, and ignoring inevitable bugs, is controller-based networking really more reliable than what we do today?
Read more ...Now that I’ve provided you with an introduction to Git and a brief overview of using Git with GitHub, it’s time to build on that knowledge by taking a closer look at one workflow often used when collaborating with Git. The “fork and branch” workflow is a common way of collaborating on open source projects using Git and GitHub. In this post, I’m going to walk through this workflow (as I understand it—I’m constantly learning), with a focus toward helping those that are new to this sort of thing.
If you’re new to Git and/or GitHub and haven’t yet read the earlier posts on Git and using Git with GitHub, I strongly recommend you read those first.
Basically, the “fork and branch” workflow looks something like this:
Here’s a bit more Continue reading
