Checking community interest for a new kind of networking site

A couple of days ago I got an idea for a new kind of networking site. The idea is to do something similar to dpreview.com but for network products.

I work a lot on network designs these days and part of the design is always what device to choose. Maybe I need a product that does NAT, IPSEC, 200 Mbit/s of throughput and has at least 4 ports. This is the kind of knowledge that you get from working on design and staying up to date with products from different vendors. There is not a community for people where they can find a broad range of products and get help choosing the right one based on different search criteria such as number of ports, features and the throughput.

What I would like to do as well is to have people write about the products. The product page said 200 Mbit/s but I got 500 Mbit/s with IMIX traffic. After enabling IPSEC I only got 80 Mbit/s. These kind of figures are very difficult to find. There could then be some kind of rating or voting system to rate if the post is helpful to sort out if people are Continue reading

Fire your mobile app programmer and build it yourself

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.

Everyone used to hire mobile app developers to build custom programs, but that often resulted in shoddy, insecure programs that sometimes didn’t even work. And even when the software suited the need, chances are it was a colossal waste of money.

Today you can program without programming. Even business people can define and build apps that suit their needs – in just hours or days, depending on the complexity. Or have them built for you for as a low as $500 from a provider harnessing the same automated software creation tools.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Using Scapple To Help Manage Complex Network Changes

I’ve blogged about Scapple in the past, describing how I’ve been using Scapple to do basic network diagrams. If you are willing to give up some of the fancy features you get with an advanced diagramming tool like Visio or Omnigraffle, Scapple can take you reasonably far. In preparation for a recent change […]

Learning NSX, Part 17: Adding External L2 Connectivity

This is part 17 of the Learning NSX blog series. In this post, I’ll show you how to add layer 2 (L2) connectivity to your NSX environment, and how to leverage that L2 connectivity in an NSX-powered OpenStack implementation. This will allow you, as an operator of an NSX-powered OpenStack cloud, to offer L2/bridged connectivity to your tenants as an additional option.

As you might expect, this post does build on content from previous posts in the series. Links to all the posts in the series are available on the Learning NVP/NSX page; in particular, this post will leverage content from part 6. Additionally, I’ll be discussing using NSX in the context of OpenStack, so reviewing part 11 and part 12 might also be helpful.

There are 4 basic steps to adding L2 connectivity to your NSX-powered OpenStack environment:

  1. Add at least one NSX gateway appliance to your NSX implementation. (Ideally, you would add two NSX gateway appliances for redundancy.)
  2. Create an NSX L2 gateway service.
  3. Configure OpenStack for L2 connectivity by configuring Neutron to use the L2 gateway service you just created.
  4. Add L2 connectivity to a Neutron logical network by attaching to the L2 gateway service.

Continue reading

5 Dev Tools for Network Engineers

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series DevOps for Networking

I’d like to write about five things that you as a hardcore, operations-focused network engineer can do to evolve your skillsets, and take advantage of some of the methodologies that have for so long given huge benefits to the software development community. I won’t be showing you how to write code – this is less about programming, and more about the tools that software developers use every day to work more efficiently. I believe in this, there is a lot of potential benefit to network engineering and operations.

I’m of the opinion that “once you know what you don’t know, you’re halfway there”. After all, if you don’t know what you don’t know, then you can’t very well learn what you don’t know, can you? In that spirit, this article will introduce a few concepts briefly, and every single one will require a lot of hands-on practice and research to really understand thoroughly. However, it’s a good starting point, and I think if you can add even a few of these skills, your marketability as a network engineer will increase dramatically.

 

Proper Version Control

As a developer, version Continue reading

The Inner Ring

An avid reader of C.S. Lewis, I often find his thoughts and statements applicable far outside his original intent. For instance, in 1944 (at least a few years before I was born I feel safe to say), he gave an amazing lecture at the Memorial Lecture of King’s College, University of London. The entire speech can be found here, but to gain a sense of his statement, consider the following quote:

And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders Continue reading

Networking’s atomic unit: Going small to scale up

The major IT trends are all being driven by what can probably best be summarized as more. Some of the stats are actually fairly eye-popping:

  • 40% of the world’s 7 billion people connected in 2014
  • 3 devices per person by 2018
  • Traffic will triple by 2018
  • 100 hours of Youtube video are uploaded every minute
  • Datacenter traffic alone will grow with a 25% CAGR

The point is not that things are growing, but that they are growing exceedingly fast. And trends like the Internet of Things and Big Data, along with the continued proliferation of media-heavy communications, are acting as further accelerant.

So how do we scale?

Taking a page out of the storage and compute play books

Storage and compute have gone through architectural changes to alleviate their initial limitations. While networking is not the same as storage or compute, there are interesting lessons to be learned. So what did they do?

The history lesson here is probably largely unnecessary, but the punch lines are fairly meaningful. From a storage perspective, the atomic unit shifted from the spinning disk down to a block. Ultimately, to scale up, what storage did was reduce the size of the useful atomic unit Continue reading

Learning NSX, Part 17: Adding External L2 Connectivity

This is part 17 of the Learning NSX blog series. In this post, I’ll show you how to add layer 2 (L2) connectivity to your NSX environment, and how to leverage that L2 connectivity in an NSX-powered OpenStack implementation. This will allow you, as an operator of an NSX-powered OpenStack cloud, to offer L2/bridged connectivity to your tenants as an additional option.

As you might expect, this post does build on content from previous posts in the series. Links to all the posts in the series are available on the Learning NVP/NSX page; in particular, this post will leverage content from part 6. Additionally, I’ll be discussing using NSX in the context of OpenStack, so reviewing part 11 and part 12 might also be helpful.

There are 4 basic steps to adding L2 connectivity to your NSX-powered OpenStack environment:

  1. Add at least one NSX gateway appliance to your NSX implementation. (Ideally, you would add two NSX gateway appliances for redundancy.)

  2. Create an NSX L2 gateway service.

  3. Configure OpenStack for L2 connectivity by configuring Neutron to use the L2 gateway service you just created.

  4. Add L2 connectivity to a Neutron logical network by attaching to the L2 gateway service.

Continue reading

HTIRW: Provider Peering and Revenue Streams (Part 1)

In the last post in this series, I described several types of providers — and even how those descriptions are no longer really “pure,” for the most part (although NTT, for instance, is a pure transit provider that only offers a few services throughout the world). For each piece of a provider’s business, then — […]

Author information

Russ White

Russ White
Principle Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White is a Network Architect who's scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about, or don't really care about. You want numbers and letters? Okay: CCIE 2635, CCDE 2007:001, CCAr, BSIT, MSIT (Network Design & Architecture, Capella University), MACM (Biblical Literature, Shepherds Theological Seminary). Russ is a Principal Engineer in the IPOS Team at Ericsson, where he works on lots of different stuff, serves on the Routing Area Directorate at the IETF, and is a cochair of the Internet Society Advisory Council. Russ will be speaking in November at the Ericsson Technology Day. he recently published The Art of Network Architecture, is currently working on a new book in the area Continue reading

Stretching the friendship

It has been nine months now since I hung up the console cable and embarked on my PhD.  I seem to be unusual in the 21st-century IT world in that I have only had a couple of employers over the twenty or so years in the industry.  I left each of those jobs on (I […]

Author information

Matthew Mengel

Matthew was a Senior Network Engineer for a regional educational institution in Australia for over 15 years, working with Cisco equipment across many different product areas. However, in April 2011 he resigned, took seven months of long service leave to de-stress and re-boot before becoming a network engineer for a medium sized non-profit organisation. At the end of 2013, he left full-time networking behind after winning a scholarship to study for a PhD in astrophysics. He is on twitter infrequently as @mengelm.

The post Stretching the friendship appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Matthew Mengel.

5 Dev Tools for Network Engineers

I’d like to write about five things that you as a hardcore, operations-focused network engineer can do to evolve your skillsets, and take advantage of some of the methodologies that have for so long given huge benefits to the software development community. I won’t be showing you how to write code - this is less about programming, and more about the tools that software developers use every day to work more efficiently.

5 Dev Tools for Network Engineers

I’d like to write about five things that you as a hardcore, operations-focused network engineer can do to evolve your skillsets, and take advantage of some of the methodologies that have for so long given huge benefits to the software development community. I won’t be showing you how to write code - this is less about programming, and more about the tools that software developers use every day to work more efficiently.

SYDI-Server 2.4

Software BugIt’s now over 10 years since I released the first version of SYDI-Server, back in August 2004. During the first years I wrote quite a bit of code and kept adding features to the different scripts. However, the last version SYDI-Server 2.3 was released in 2009. So one could say that development has slowed down a bit. However even today it gets a few hundred downloads every week. Even today I keep getting emails from people who’ve just found SYDI for the first time and are loving it. Continue reading

Review: The Peripheral, by William Gibson

After four years, William Gibson is finally coming out with a new book, “The Peripheral”. Time to preorder now. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00INIXKV2

There’s not much to review. If you like Gibson’s work, you’ll like this book. (Also, if you don't like Gibon's work, then you are wrong).

What I like about Gibson’s work is his investment in the supporting characters, which are often more interesting than the main characters. Each has a complex backstory, but more importantly, each has a story that unfolds during the book. It’s as if Gibson takes each minor character and writes a short story for them, where they grow and evolve, then combines them all into the main story. It’s a little confusing at the start, because it’s sometimes hard to identify which are the main characters, but it pays off in the end. (I experienced that in this book, among the numerous characters he introduced at the start, it was the least interesting ones that turned out to be the main characters -- it's not that they were boring, it's that they took longer to develop).

One departure from his normal work is that this book is maybe a little more autobiographical. Continue reading

Google and Cloudflare: Encrypting the WWW

A couple of months ago, Google announced that it had started using SSL as a factor in SEO ranking. Since the search giant is the referrer for most website traffic, this is the type of announcement that gets the attention of website owners.

Cloudflare, a popular and easy to implement Content Delivery Network, seems to be stepping up to this challenge. Even their free offering has an option to provide forward facing SSL services. As discussed on Packet Pushsers Priority Queue show 34, they are also modifying SSL in ways that allow them to provide services to organizations without the need to obtain the site owner’s private keys. The likely result of the offering is that many existing and many new Cloudflare customers will take advantage of their SSL services.

Paul’s Take–I think Google’s announcement, combined with Cloudflare’s SSL offerings, will result in a significant increase of SSL encrypted traffic. This will have an interesting effect on how organizations do security. Traditionally, there has been a lower (but increasing) ratio of https to http traffic. Scanning SSL traffic, for troubleshooting or security, is significantly more challenging than its clear text counterpart.

Disclaimer: This article includes the independent thoughts, opinions, commentary or technical detail of Paul Stewart. Continue reading

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