Case Studies: Ruan & Lifesum
We are excited to announce two new case studies.
Read how Ruan and Lifesum are using Ansible to automate and simplify their workflows.
If you'd like to be featured in an Ansible case study, please contact us here.
The Degree or the Certification: Answering the Question
Okay, finally, I’m going to answer the question. For some value of the word “answer,” anyway. I’ve spent three weeks thinking through various question you should be asking, along the way making three specific points:
- Stop asking “should I get a degree or a certification,” and start asking “what do I want to learn next.” Neither degrees nor certifications are a “final point,” in education (terminal, in the vocabulary of the educational world).
- Learn to see beyond the question of specific technical skills — to think about the underlying skills, like abstraction.
- Stop acting and thinking like a widget. You are more than a money making machine.
Okay, so how do I actually decide?
First, ask: where do I want to go? Who do I want to be as a person, overall? This question needs to be a “bigger life” question, not a narrow, “how much money do I want to be making,” question. One of those other turning points in my life as an engineer was when Don S said to me one day, “When I’m gone, people aren’t going to remember me for writing a book. They are going to remember me as a father, friend, and Continue reading
Configure a DMVPN Spoke behind a Home router/modem
I’ve come across this scenario on multiple occasions now. Your company wants to set up a demo at a “customers” location. Your demo is reliant on its own router talking back to HQ to pull necessary data for the program in question. Unfortunately your internet connection at the “demo” site is sitting behind a NAT. […]
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The post Configure a DMVPN Spoke behind a Home router/modem appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Korey.
Quick Peek: Juniper vMX Router
While the industry press deliberates the disaggregation of Arista and Cisco, and Juniper’s new CEO, Juniper launched a virtual version of its vMX router, which is supposed to have up to 160 Gbps of throughput (as compared to 10 Gbps offered by Vyatta 5600 and Cisco CSR). Can Juniper really deliver on that promise?
Read more ...Juniper SRX-110H EoL
Somehow I missed this when it was announced, but the Juniper SRX-110H-VA is End of Life, and is no longer supported for new software releases.
End of Life announcement is here, with extra detail in this PDF. Announcement was Dec 10 2013, with “Last software engineering support” date Dec 20 2013.
This is now starting to take effect, with 12.1X47 not supported on this platform:
Note: Upgrading to Junos OS Release 12.1X47-D10 or later is not supported on the J Series devices or on the low-memory versions of the SRX100 and SRX200 lines. If you attempt to upgrade one of these devices to Junos OS 12.1X47-D10, installation will be aborted with the following error message:
ERROR: Unsupported platform <platform-name >for 12.1X47 and higher
The replacement hardware is the SRX-110H2-VA, which has 2GB of RAM instead of 1GB. Otherwise it’s exactly the same, which seems a missed opportunity to at least update to local 1Gb switching.
Michael Dale has a little more info here, along with tips for tricking a 240H into installing 12.1X47.
So I decided to see if I could work around this and trick JunOS into installing on my 240H, I Continue reading
New Features in the GNS3 Jungle
Wanted to firstly thank everyone for their patience as we ran some maintenance in the GNS3 Jungle last evening in order to provide a moreMoving Workloads to the Clouds
David Spark published 16 tips for moving your workloads to the clouds. Contrary to the usual useless nonsense coming down from hybrid cloud evangelists (you know, the people who moved from “VMs following the sun” to “seamless hybrid cloud workload mobility”) some of the tips actually make sense, starting with “Have a real reason for the migration”. Enjoy!
Using EEM to Speed up Multicast Convergence when Receiver is Dually Connected
When deploying PIM ASM, the Designated Router (DR) role plays a significant part in how PIM ASM works. The DR on a segment is responsible for registering mulicast sources with the Rendezvous Point (RP) and/or sending PIM Joins for the segment. Routers with PIM enabled interfaces send out PIM Hello messages every 30 seconds by default.
After missing three Hellos the secondary router will take over as the DR. With the standard timer value, this can take between 60 to 90 seconds depending on when the last Hello came in. Not really acceptable in a modern network.
The first thought is to lower the PIM query interval, this can be done and it supports sending PIM Hellos at msec level. In my particular case I needed convergence within two seconds. I tuned the PIM query interval to 500 msec meaning that the PIM DR role should converge within 1.5 seconds. The problem though is that these Hellos are sent at process level. Even though my routers were barely breaking a sweat CPU wise I would see PIM adjacencies flapping.
The answer to my problems would be to have Bidirectional Forwarding Dectection (BFD) for PIM but it’s only supported on Continue reading
APIs, APIs…a look at Arista’s eAPI
Arista switches have an API known as eAPI. In this article, I will discuss some of the basics of how eAPI operates, how to connect to it, and how to gather network information using it. Basic eAPI operation eAPI uses JSON-RPC over HTTPS. What this means in simpler terms is that the communication to and […]
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The post APIs, APIs…a look at Arista’s eAPI appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Kirk Byers.
Network Break 22
Cisco Loves and Hates Net Neutrality, SDN WAN continues to grow and Analysts as AWS puppy dogs - drooling, licking themselves and barking at the AWS reinvent conference.
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The post Network Break 22 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.
PlexxiPulse— Plenty To Be Thankful For At Plexxi
As many of you know, it’s been a busy month here at Plexxi. It’s hard to believe that November is coming to a close and that Thanksgiving is next week. We have a lot to be thankful for this year, particularly our new CEO Rich Napolitano and for the support of our skilled and dynamic team members – both new and old. Wishing everyone a safe and happy Thanksgiving holiday!
In this week’s PlexxiTube of the week, our own Dan Backman explains how Plexxi’s datacenter transport fabric can be used in a datacenter or on campus.
Check out what we’ve been up to over the past few weeks on social media!
The post PlexxiPulse— Plenty To Be Thankful For At Plexxi appeared first on Plexxi.
AnsibleFest London Tickets Available NOW
Join us for our FIRST AnsibleFest outside the United States!
We are offering Early Bird pricing from now until December 31st.
AnsibleFest is a day-long conference bringing together Ansible users, developers and industry partners to share best-practices, case studies and Ansible news. If you are a developer, sysadmin, operations director or devops practioner, AnsibleFest is for you. Past speakers have included Twitter, Google, Rackspace, EdX, HP, Twilio, Cumulus Networks, Telescope.tv and many more - as well as members of the Ansible Team.
Where is it happening?
AnsibleFest London 2015 will be held in central London at the Lancaster London. Lunch, coffee, snacks and wi-fi will be served... and please stick around for our happy hour at the end of the event.
Want to speak or sponsor?
AnsibleFest London 2015 call for presentations is OPEN. Email your presentation ideas to [email protected].
If you are interested in sponsoring AnsibleFest London 2015, email [email protected].
Buy your Early Bird Tickets TODAY!
Less Sales, Simpler Products, Easier Buying
Out of sheer frustration this week, I tweeted this and got a big response: The Back Story I’ve wasted about 60 hours of customers time working with resellers & vendors to get a quote for a relatively simple network upgrade. Neither the vendor staffers or the reseller employees knew how the product was licensed or […]
The post Less Sales, Simpler Products, Easier Buying appeared first on EtherealMind.
Removing OVS Configuration Settings
I’ve written quite a bit about Open vSwitch (OVS), but I realized recently that despite all the articles I’ve written I still haven’t talked about how to remove a configuration setting to OVS. I’m fixing that now with this article.
As part of my ongoing mission to give back to the open source community, I recently started making contributions and improvements to the OVS web site; specifically, I’ve been reformatting the configuration cookbooks to make them more readable (and to clean up the HTML source). Along the way, I’ve been adding small bits of content here and there. Most recently, I just updated the QoS rate-limiting entry, and I wanted to add information on how to remove the QoS settings.
Normally, you can remove an OVS configuration setting using the ovs-vsctl remove command. For example, if you set a VLAN tag on an port with this command:
ovs-vsctl set port vnet0 tag=100
Then you could remove that VLAN tag with this command:
ovs-vsctl remove port vnet0 tag 100
Note the slight syntactical difference in the two commands; the remove command expects four parameters.
It turns out, however, that this command won’t work for all configuration parameters. In some Continue reading
CCIE Collaboration Success :: Student Spotlight
We’d like to thank Jon Woloshyn for his testimonial! Jon recently passed the CCIE Collaboration lab! Here’s what Jon had to say:
“I attended iPexpert’s CCIE Collaboration 10-Day Bootcamp in August 2014 and I’m happy to say that on November 11th I passed the CCIE Collaboration exam on my first attempt.
I owe a lot of my success to Andy Vassar and iPexpert. The volume 1 workbook coupled with week 1 of the 10—Day CCIE Collaboration Lab Bootcamp helped solidify my understanding and comfort level with all of the technologies on the blueprint. Having my own un-shared, dedicated pod with the exact lab hardware that’s on the lab during that week to practice on day and night was huge. Being able to ask Andy every question that came to mind and get a detailed response was awesome. The fact the he would break from the lesson and lab up the questions being asked to prove the technology made the class very flexible and almost tailored to each student who required additional knowledge.
Week 2 of the 10-day course was the 1-Week Lab Experience (OWLE). I would not have passed without this week. Andy shared his lab strategy and at first Continue reading
iPexpert’s Newest “CCIE Wall of Fame” Additions 11/21/2014
Please Join us in congratulating the following iPexpert clients who have passed their CCIE lab!
- Andre Mitchell, CCIE #44619 (Collaboration)
- Gaurav Vasudeva , CCIE #42760 (Routing and Switching)
We Want to Hear From You!
Have you passed your CCIE lab exam and used any of iPexpert’s or Proctor Labs self-study products, or attended a CCIE Bootcamp? If so, we’d like to add you to our CCIE Wall of Fame!
Removing OVS Configuration Settings
I’ve written quite a bit about Open vSwitch (OVS), but I realized recently that despite all the articles I’ve written I still haven’t talked about how to remove a configuration setting to OVS. I’m fixing that now with this article.
As part of my ongoing mission to give back to the open source community, I recently started making contributions and improvements to the OVS web site; specifically, I’ve been reformatting the configuration cookbooks to make them more readable (and to clean up the HTML source). Along the way, I’ve been adding small bits of content here and there. Most recently, I just updated the QoS rate-limiting entry, and I wanted to add information on how to remove the QoS settings.
Normally, you can remove an OVS configuration setting using the ovs-vsctl remove command. For example, if you set a VLAN tag on an port with this command:
ovs-vsctl set port vnet0 tag=100
Then you could remove that VLAN tag with this command:
ovs-vsctl remove port vnet0 tag 100
Note the slight syntactical difference in the two commands; the remove command expects four parameters.
It turns out, however, that this command won’t work for all configuration parameters. In some Continue reading
Friday News Analysis: Open Networking Foundation, Dave Ward on Open
Open Networking Foundation Extends Conformance Testing to Non-Members “The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN), today announced it has extended the ONF OpenFlow™ Conformance Testing Program to include testing for non-ONF members. Companies interested in receiving an OpenFlow Certificate of Conformance for […]Open vSwitch Performance Revisited
A while ago I wrote about performance bottlenecks of Open vSwitch. In the meantime, the OVS team drastically improved OVS performance resulting in something that Andy Hill called Ludicrous Speed at the latest OpenStack summit (slide deck, video).
Let’s look at how impressive the performance improvements are.
Read more ...