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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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

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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

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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!

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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

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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 […]

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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 ...

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Not Raising Red Flags While Looking For A New Job

A reader wrote to me, explaining that they were unhappy in their current job situation, and queried how they might be able look for a new job without raising any red flags with their existing employer. Tricky, but I have a few thoughts, having done this a time or two over my career. […]

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In the Data Center, No One Can Hear You Lose Your Hearing

Working for a data center-focused reseller/integrator like H.A. Storage Systems, I spend my fair share of time in various data center environments. I have, for years, elected to use some sort of hearing protection when in these facilities. I have constantly been amazed, though, at how few other workers in data centers do the same.

Honestly, I’m not sure why most people I see in data center facilities don’t use hearing protection. Perhaps they think they’ll only be on the data center floor for a few minutes. We all know it never goes like that! Perhaps they think it makes it too hard to hear co-workers. Personally, I find it easier to communicate with someone when I have ear protection on. Maybe workers think it’s not loud enough for ear protection to be necessary. Unfortunately, this isn’t true in most cases.

Can You Hear Me Now?

As an example, I was recently down at the Sungard Availability Services colo facility in Philadelphia. It’s one of the largest colos in the immediate area with 230,000 square feet of raised floor. I was in there all day long with one of my customers, for two days while we traced out Continue reading

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One Month in Review – The Numbers

It has been 30 days since we unleashed GNS3 v1.x, GNS3.com, and the GNS3 Jungle onto the world. And we figured there was no better way to

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Doxxing defense: Remove your personal info from data brokers

Many women gamers and developers, as well as those who support them, have lately come under attack from online trolls. A common intimidation tactic that trolls use is "doxxing," or publicly exposing their targets' personal details, including home address, phone number and even financial records.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Maturity and Evolution of SDN

A few weeks ago I read this article from Craig Matsumoto on SDN Central.

At first I read it with a bit of a smile, but for some reason it has actually started to bother me a little. In this article, Craig summarizes a talk by Scott Shenker about SDN and a proposal for an SDNv2 that would fix the things that are wrong with SDNv1. In a way this represents what is wrong with our industry. We create a new version or create a new name for a concept that is not particularly well defined to begin with, and in many interpretations is far broader than is assumed in the pre-fixed version.

Many folks still believe that OpenFlow defines SDN. And that all the limitations of a basic protocol invalidate or limit the capabilities of an evolving concept like SDN. Why do we feel such a need to increment a version of an undefined term to make it sound like we are creating something new and different?

In SDNv2, we would still have separation of control and date (at least all that work is not wasted), but there are three major differences between it and the “old” SDN concepts. Continue reading

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Network Programmability Phase 2: the Provisioned Network

After describing the current state of affairs in his Network Programmability 101 webinar, Matt Oswald moved to the low-hanging fruits: automating repetitive tasks in baby steps, from VLAN provisioning to consistent device configurations.

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Who’s Watching?

It's been more than a year since Edward Snowden released material concerning the activities of US agencies in the area of cyber-intelligence gathering. A year later, and with allegations of various forms of cyber spying flying about, it's probably useful to ask some more questions. What is a reasonable expectation about privacy and the Internet? Should we now consider various forms of digital stalking to be "normal"? To what extent can we see information relating to individuals' activities online being passed to others?

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The Resolvers We Use

The Internet's Domain Name System is a modern day miracle. It may not represent the largest database that has ever been built, but nevertheless it's truly massive. The DNS is consulted every time we head to a web page, every time we send an email message, or in fact every time we initiate almost any transaction on the Internet. We assume a lot about the DNS. For example, content distribution networks are observed to make use of the location of the DNS resolver as being also the same location as the user. How robust is this assumption of co-locality of users and their resolvers? Are users always located "close" to their resolvers? More generally, what is the relationship between the end user, and the DNS resolvers that they use? Are they in fact closely related? Or is there widespread use of distant resolvers?