After writing the Mikrotik IPsec VPN article and I got some questions about how Mikrotik will work with a Linux device to build an IPsec VPN. I did notice that the questions were more oriented for a copy / paste solution, so I’ll provide one that it’s working. If you need more details about why the solution is like it this, please let me know.
Also don’t forget to customize the solution as you need.
An early version of Flood Protect won the 2014 SDN Idol competition in a joint demonstration with Brocade Networks.Visit sFlow.com to learn more, evaluate pre-release versions of these products, or discuss requirements.
If you did not hear yet about Mikrotik I can’t say I blame you. Not exactly something you’ll find in SOHO network shops next to brand like TP-Link, Linksys or Netgear. Mikrotik is a company
in Latvia that produce network hardware under the name of RouterBOARD. The devices are excellent and the RouterOS support an amazing amount of feature for a SOHO product.
We are pleased to announce that Ansible has been named a Top 10 Open Source Project for 2014 by Opensource.com. Be sure to watch Michael DeHaan's presentation on why your IT infrastructure should be boring, read his interview with Opensource.com's Jen Krieger and learn about one of his favorite Star Trek quotes.
View the full list here.
This talk is a case study around some of the issues and solutions for TelePost Greenland. I’ll have to give credit to Denise Donohue and the folks there as I go along through the slides, but it’s a unique network with some extreme requirements — and therefore some interesting solutions.
Gallons of virtual ink have been committed to virtual paper in the last few days with regards to Cisco’s lawsuit against Arista Networks. Some of it is speculating on the posturing by both companies. Other writers talk about the old market vs. the new market. Still others look at SDN as a driver.
I didn’t just want to talk about the lawsuit. Given that Arista has marketed EOS as a “better IOS than IOS” for a while now, I figured Cisco finally decided to bite back. They are fiercely protective of IOS and they have to be because of the way the trademark laws in the US work. If you don’t go after people that infringe you lose your standing to do so and invite others to do it as well. Is Cisco’s timing suspect? One does have to wonder. Is this about knocking out a competitor? It’s tough to say. But one thing is sure to me. Cisco has effectively killed the command line interface (CLI).
“Industry Standards”
EOS is certainly IOS-like. While it does introduce some unique features (see the NFD3 video here), the command syntax is very much IOS. That is purposeful. There are two Continue reading
What most people don’t know is that many high-end network switches already run on Linux.
Switches from Cisco®, Extreme Networks® and Arista® use Linux to run their switch hardware (the operating system is hidden behind abstractions and APIs). As well, most of these share the same switching silicon products from Broadcom® and Intel®.
We are in the midst of a major transformation in networking. Innovation from companies like Cumulus Networks® and Edge-Core® are leading the way, disrupting the way new networks are deployed and old networks are upgraded.
In my role as head of product engineering at Tuangru, almost every small-to-mid size hosting service provider I talk to is considering open networking. Why? Because it just makes sense.
Open network hardware is more affordable and easy to acquire. The Linux software is familiar and, in most cases, admins prefer it over the next CLI and syntax versions available.
The rise of DevOps and cloud technologies like OpenStack are driving higher levels of automation and uniformity. Continue reading
Howard Marks from Deep Storage and long-term curmudgeon sent Ethan & I the following email: As I continue to tilt at the VMware windmill I’m facing fanbois telling me that all you have to do is plug the EVO:RAIL in and turn it on. This of course leaves out the fact that the little sucker still […]
The post Unreliable Multicast means Unreliable VMware VSAN appeared first on EtherealMind.
I’m sure that we have all experienced poorly designed Wi-Fi networks. When a technology is so ubiquitous, so easily accessible, and is increasingly the most relied upon method of Internet access for mobile devices and cloud computing, then there are bound to be some issues. Unfortunately, the prevalence of underperforming Wi-Fi networks is still much too common for my liking.
Great Wi-Fi starts with proper design. There are various approaches to WLAN design that have evolved over time, ranging from providing basic coverage to maximum capacity and situations in-between.
At one end of the spectrum, we have a basic coverage oriented design. This was the historical way of designing a WLAN that simply involved ensuring adequate signal strength from access points was present in desired locations. At the other end of the spectrum is a design focusing on maximum capacity. This involves careful RF planning in order to integrate the most Wi-Fi cells as possible into a physical area.
The problem with both of these approaches is that they are the extremes and aren't applicable for many wireless networks. Basic coverage designs may still work for warehouses and some retailers and maximum capacity designs are great for stadiums and Continue reading
The edited videos for Scaling Overlay Virtual Networking webinar are available on ipSpace.net Content site. Nuage Networks sponsored the webinar; the videos are thus publicly available (without registration).
The Network Access Broker Conceptual Demo
Talk is cheap when it comes to SDN, but at Packet Design we’ve created a working SDN analytics and orchestration prototype that will enable network engineers to effectively manage hybrid networks. In this new demo, we outline how our Network Access Broker (NAB) – based on our core Route Explorer™ System – analyzes application requests for network resources, assesses their impact on services, and provisions them optimally using a combination of the following (if you’re already familiar with SDN and its management challenges, you can skip the intro and head straight to the demo at the 2:47 mark):
In the NAB demo, we use Continue reading
#10: The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques. The CIA's Office of Public Affairs and senior CIA officials coordinated to share classified information on the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program to select members of the media to counter public criticism, shape public opinionOf course they did, but then so did the Senate committee itself. They've been selectively leaking bits of the report for over a year. Their description of the "CIA hacking" scandal was completely inaccurate.
Recently, I’ve heard several people suggest that the advent of IPv6 changes the requirements for data-center virtual network solutions. For instance, making the claim that network overlays are no longer necessary. The assumption made is that once an instance has a globally unique IP address that all requirements are met.
In my view, this analysis fails in two dimensions:
Neither of these assumptions hold when examined in detail.
While there are IaaS use cases of users that just want to be able to fire up a single virtual-machine and use it as a personal server, the most interesting use case for IaaS or PaaS platforms is to deploy applications.
These applications, serve content for a specific virtual IP address registered in the DNS and/or global load-balancers; that doesn’t mean that this virtual IP should be associated with any specific instance. There is layer of load-balancing that maps the virtual IP into the specific instance(s) service the content. Typically this is done with a load-balancer in proxy mode.
As an aside, enabling IPv6 in the load-balancer Continue reading
steal (since Linux 2.6.11)Keeping close track of the stolen time metric is particularly import when running managing virtual machines in a public cloud. For example, Netflix and Stolen Time includes the discussion:
(8) Stolen time, which is the time spent in other operating systems
when running in a virtualized environment
So how does Netflix handle this problem when using Amazon’s Cloud? Adrian admits that they tracked this statistic so closely that when an instance crossed a stolen time threshold the standard operating procedure at Netflix was to kill the VM and start it up on a different hypervisor. What Netflix realized over time was that once a VM was performing poorly because another VM was crashing the party, usually due to a poorly written or compute intensive application hogging the machine, it never really got any better and their best learned approach was to get off that machine.The following articles describe how to monitor public cloud instances using Host sFlow agents: