When I started studying in earnest for my CCIE, I started a log of how I was spending my time studying, which books and papers I'd read, videos I'd watched, and so on. I thought it would be a neat exercise to look back afterwards at what it took to achieve this goal. I'm also somewhat self-deprecating and tend to minimize my accomplishments, so having this data is a way for me to remember that this wasn't a small accomplishment at all.
Upon hearing the news that Red Hat had released the Atomic Host variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I decided that it would be a good idea for me to take a look at the CentOS flavor of the Atomic Host variant. In case you’re unfamiliar, the Atomic Host variant is the result of Project Atomic, which aimed to provide a container-optimized flavor of RHEL/CentOS/Fedora. This container-optimized flavor would leverage rpm-ostree for atomic system updates (hence the name) and come with Docker preinstalled. What I found, frankly, disappointed me.
Before I continue, I will make two very important disclaimers:
Note that there has been no official announcement of the release of final builds of an Atomic Host variant for CentOS 7. So, it’s entirely possible that all the issues I mention here are known issues that will be addressed. That being said, I did find CentOS 7 Atomic Host builds dated March 5, 2015; this is the same date as the Red Hat announcement. It’s reasonable, therefore, to believe that these builds are very close to final builds.
It’s entirely possible these issues are the result of errors on my part. I’ve spent most of my time with Continue reading
IPv6 adoption has been slow. But I think it’s reaching a tipping point. I’m very close to calling 2015 “The year of IPv6.” There’s plenty of people who won’t believe me, but the statistics are very interesting. You need to keep a close on eye on what the data is saying.
Recently I asked the question “What percentage of Internet traffic needs to be IPv6 for you to consider IPv6 to be mainstream/arrived/the year of IPv6?”
@bobbobob had the best answer for when IPv6 can be considered ‘mainstream’:
@northlandboy When I see criminal minds, or law and order using a poorly faked IPV6 address when they're 'hacking', I'll say it's arrived.
— Rabbit Sultan (@bobbobob) February 21, 2015
But @icemarkom was probably technically correct with this answer:
@northlandboy More than 50%.
— Marko Milivojevic (@icemarkom) February 20, 2015
So how far away is that? It’s tough trying to measure IPv6 adoption. Traffic patterns are region- & user-specific. The services that Chinese users access are different to those that a New Zealand business users. Traffic is often concentrated with a few ISPs and/or a few big services (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc).
I like to use the Google IPv6 statistics Continue reading
Introduction
Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is a link state protocol that has been around for a long time. It is geneally well understood, but design considerations often focus on the maximum number of routers in an area. What other design considerations are important for OSPF? What can we do to build a scalable network with OSPF as the Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP)?
Prefix Suppression
The main goal of any IGP is to be stable, converge quickly and to provide loop free connectivity. OSPF is a link state protocol and all routers within an area maintain an identical Link State Data Base (LSDB). How the LSDB is built it out of scope for this post but one relevant factor is that OSPF by default advertises stub links for all the OSPF enabled interfaces. This means that every router running OSPF installs these transit links into the routing table. In most networks these routes are not needed, only connectivity between loopbacks is needed because peering is setup between the loopbacks. What is the drawback of this default behavior?
To change this behavior, there is a feature called prefix suppression. When Continue reading
You may have noticed that we’ve been spending some time out west demonstrating our big data fabrics and sharing our vision for the third era of networking. You’ll be seeing more meet-ups and live demonstrations in the near future, so keep an eye on the blog and on Twitter to see where we are headed next. In the meantime, can you name the 5 main characteristics of a third era network? Hint: the answer is somewhere on the Plexxi website. Tweet us your answers for the chance to win some Plexxi swag. We can’t wait to hear from you!
Below please find a few of our top picks for our favorite news articles of the week. Enjoy!
InformationWeek: 8 Ways IoT Will Change IT Forever
By Andrew Froehlich
There has been a great deal of discussion lately surrounding the concept of how the Internet of Things (IoT) will change everything. But very little of it really dives into the nuts and bolts of how IoT could dramatically change the roles and opportunities for those of us who work within IT. Here are eight ways we think IT will change in an IoT world. We’re focusing on areas of IT that Continue reading