How Does MPLS-TE Interact with QoS
MPLS Traffic Engineer is sometimes promoted as a QoS solution (it seems bandwidth calendaring is a permanent obsession of some networking engineers, and OpenFlow is no more a solution than MPLS-TE was ;), but in reality it’s pretty hard to make the two work together seamlessly (just ask anyone who had to implement auto-bandwidth MPLS-TE in a large network).
Not surprisingly, we addressed the topic during our MPLS Tech Talk.
HTIRW: IETF Organizational Structure
So far, we’ve looked at the naming system, routing, and policy in our travel through “internet land.” Last time, we took a quick look at some of the various organizations that create the standards that make the internet work. This time I’m going to start looking in more depth at one specific standard body, or […]
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The post HTIRW: IETF Organizational Structure appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Russ White.
Parsing Junos XML with Python
I’ll admit it – I’ve drunk the “Network Engineers should learn programming” Kool-Aid. In so doing, I’m gearing up for Kirk Byers upcoming “Python for Network Engineers” course by hacking a bit of Python most every evening. Kirk has recently released a Python “wrapper” module for the popular Python SSH module “Paramiko” that simplifies connections […]
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The post Parsing Junos XML with Python appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Will Dennis.
My 2015 goals
I’ve always sort of set goals for myself, but I never really write any of them down. This year, after talking to a friend about it, I decided to write down some actual goals for 2015. What really struck me about the conversation was a single sentence he said. I believe the exact words he used were “Write them down and you’ll be amazed at how motivated you can be”. Since it certainly sounded like he was speaking from experience, here’s my list. Some are more subjective which will make them harder to ‘check off’ than others. Some are related to my work/career, some are personal, and some are just sort of for fun.
Run a marathon – Some of you know I made a serious attempt at this 2 years ago. It started with others offering tips and training schedules, continued with me disregarding the training plan, and ended with me doing it wrong and messing up my knee. So this year, I’m going to make a serious attempt at following a training schedule and try and get this done. I’ll aim for the Twin Cities marathon which happens Continue reading
Remove Duplicates from Pocket List
One problem I’ve noticed with my Pocket list is that my reading list contains quite a few duplicate entires. Sometimes I forget I saved an article and I save it multiple times, or maybe I save it across-sources (like Twitter or Facebook, or just browsing.
It looks like Pocket has some protective capabilities around this. If I endlessly spam the button provided to me by my Pocket chromecast extension, Pocket only saves the one copy and all is good.
However, take the following example. Many of the articles we read and put into our Pocket list use some kind of URL options for tracking purposes:
?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=1215
If you arrive to an article from different sources, but save both to Pocket, Pocket will treat these as different URLs. This means that if you’re bad about staying caught up with your Pocket list (like I am), it can be very easy to save duplicate articles, making the situation even worse.
Fortunately I have a solution. I wrote this python script to automate the removal of duplicates of entries in your pocket list.
Currently this script works by removing ALL text after a question mark (?) or a hash mark (#) in each Continue reading
Remove Duplicates from Pocket List
One problem I’ve noticed with my Pocket list is that my reading list contains quite a few duplicate entires. Sometimes I forget I saved an article and I save it multiple times, or maybe I save it across-sources (like Twitter or Facebook, or just browsing. It looks like Pocket has some protective capabilities around this. If I endlessly spam the button provided to me by my Pocket chromecast extension, Pocket only saves the one copy and all is good.Remove Duplicates from Pocket List
One problem I’ve noticed with my Pocket list is that my reading list contains quite a few duplicate entires. Sometimes I forget I saved an article and I save it multiple times, or maybe I save it across-sources (like Twitter or Facebook, or just browsing. It looks like Pocket has some protective capabilities around this. If I endlessly spam the button provided to me by my Pocket chromecast extension, Pocket only saves the one copy and all is good.Technology Short Take #47
Welcome to Technology Short Take #47! This is the first Technology Short Take for 2015 and the first to be published on the new blog platform. I have quite a bit of information to share this time around, so buckle up and let’s get started!
Networking
- Michael Webster isn’t a name that normally pops up here in the Networking section of my Technology Short Takes, but he recently wrote an article on installing Cumulus Linux from a MacBook Pro that I thought might be handy. I’m particularly jealous that Michael was able to get his hands on a Cumulus-supported switch while here I am—with a full NSX installation just ready to integrate with Cumulus—not making any progress on that front.
- Speaking of Cumulus Linux, here’s a write-up on using Cumulus Linux on Dell Networking switches; in particular, this article describes how to install Cumulus Linux on a Dell S6000-ON. I spoke to some folks at Dell a while ago about getting my hands on a Cumulus-compatible switch, but never heard back. Sure would be nice…(hint, hint).
- The folks over at Weave (who are building a lightweight overlay networking solution for Docker containers) recently posted some thoughts on life and Continue reading
DDoS Packet Forensics: Take me to the hex!
A few days ago, my colleague Marek sent an email about a DDoS attack against one of our DNS servers that we'd been blocking with our BPF rules. He noticed that there seemed to be a strange correlation between the TTL field in the IP header and the IPv4 source address.
CC BY 2.0 image by Jeremy Keith
The source address was being spoofed, as usual, and apparently chosen randomly, but something else was going on. He offered a bottle of Scotch to the first person to come up with a satisfactory solution.
Here's what some of the packets looked like:
$ tcpdump -ni eth0 -c 10 "ip[8]=40 and udp and port 53"
1.181.207.7.46337 > x.x.x.x.53: 65098+
1.178.97.141.45569 > x.x.x.x.53: 65101+
1.248.136.142.63489 > x.x.x.x.53: 65031+
1.207.241.195.52993 > x.x.x.x.53: 65072+
$ tcpdump -ni eth0 -c 10 "ip[8]=41 and udp and port 53"
2.10.30.2.2562 > x.x.x.x.53: 65013+
2.4.9.36.1026 > x.x.x.x.53: 65019+
2.98. Continue readingOpen vSwitch performance monitoring
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| Credit: Accelerating Open vSwitch to “Ludicrous Speed” |
The recent Open vSwitch 2014 Fall Conference included the talk, Managing Open vSwitch across a large heterogeneous fleet by Chad Norgan, describing Rackspace's experience with running a large scale OpenStack deployment using Open vSwitch for network virtualization. The talk describes the key metrics that Rackspace collects to monitor the performance of the large pools of Open vSwitch instances.
Continue reading
Don’t Judge a White Box by Its Color
Hey all, happy new year and this is my first post in 2015. I wanted to take a step back and ease us into this year withTime For A Data Diet?
I’m running out of drive space. Not just on my laptop SSD or my desktop HDD. But everywhere. The amount of data that I’m storing now is climbing at an alarming rate. What’s worse is that I often forget I have some of it until I go spelunking back through my drive to figure out what’s taking up all that room. And it’s a problem that the industry is facing too.
The Data Junkyard
Data is accumulating. You can’t deny that. Two factors have lead to this. The first is that we now log more data from things than ever before. In this recent post from Chris Evans (@ChrisMEvans), he mentions that Virgin Atlantic 787s are generating 500GB of data per flight. I’m sure that includes telemetry, aircraft performance, and other debugging information that someone at some point deemed crucial. In another recent article from Jacques Mattheij (@JMattheij), he mentions that app developers left the debug logging turned on, generating enormous data files as the system was in operation.
Years ago we didn’t have the space to store that much data. We had to be very specific about what needed to be Continue reading
Python and MySQL
Let me preface this post by stating I am not a database expert. I use them occasionally now and then. The below post probably doesn’t show best practices. If you have any suggestions feel free to comment. Over the weekend I’ve been testing various ways for me to store, update, and retrieve data from a […]Totally Redesigned Free Content Web Site
One of the main complaints I was continuously getting about my free content is that there’s simply too much of it, and that it’s impossible to find what one is looking for.
New Year holidays gave me enough time to implement a project that has been on my to-do list for almost a year: total redesign of the free content web site. Feedback highly appreciated!
Infographic: SDN’s Pulse Among Service Providers
Infographic: SDN's Pulse Among Service Providers
by Steve Harriman, VP of Marketing - January 6, 2015
As Howard Baldwin recently wrote in InfoWorld, the lure of new enterprise technology is great, but then comes the inevitable uncertainty about how in the world to manage it. The backdrop for his comment is the service provider survey we conducted last month at the SDN/MPLS International Conference in Washington, D.C. As the infographic below shows, production deployment of SDN is way up among service providers, but nearly all are concerned about management.
Baldwin concludes his article by pointing out that although SDN holds great promise for automating and managing WAN operations, traditional management tools, processes, and standards will not work. The good news, he says, is that “…IT is not only being liberated from hardware-specific configuration, it’s also being liberated from hardware-specific management. In other words, you’ll be able to manage devices the way you want to, not the way the application dictates.”
Right now that’s more of a hope than a concrete solution. At Packet Design, we have made some headway on our concept of a Network Access Broker. See our conceptual demo here: http://www.packetdesign.com/blog/network-access-broker-conceptual-demo
Hello 2015!
Hard to be believe 2014 is gone and and 2015 is here! Yea I know we are already a few days into 2015 but hey for some reason I still hear people saying “Happy New Year”, much like I still Christmas decorations out. So what’s in store in for 2015!? Well we are going to […]
PQ Show 40 – HP Networking – Multi Service Routers (HP MSR)
This is a continuation of the sponsored series of shows we recorded at the HP Discover Barcelona conference in December 2014. An interesting facet of HP Discover to me was meeting smart HP folks at random. Sue Darte is such a person I was lucky enough to bump into. Here’s the story. While waiting to record a […]
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The post PQ Show 40 – HP Networking – Multi Service Routers (HP MSR) appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.
OpenFlow integration
The article describes the challenge of mapping between the different methods used by sFlow and OpenFlow to identify switch ports:
- Agent IP address ⟷ OpenFlow switch ID
- SNMP ifIndex ⟷ OpenFlow port ID
The Open vSwitch recently implemented the extension, unifying visibility and control of the virtual network edge. In addition, most physical that support OpenFlow also support sFlow. Ask vendors about their plans to implement the sFlow OpenFlow Structures extension since it is a key enabler for SDN control applications.