A Bright And Happy 2015 Ahead

Welcome to a new year finally divisible by five! This is a year devoid of extra February days, Olympics, or anything else. It’s a chance for us to take a look at technology and make things better and easier for users and IT staff. It’s also probably going to be called the year of VDI, NFV, and SDN. Again.

Rather than writing a wrap up post for the end of 2014 like so many other sites, I like to look at what I said I was going to do 365 days ago and see if I followed through on them. It’s a way to keep myself honest and also to see how the year transformed around me and my goals.

Looking at 2014

Thankfully, my goals for 2014 were modest. I wanted to get more involved with the people in the IT industry. And I did that in a big way. I went to a ton of conferences and events through the year. Cisco Live, VMworld, and HP Discover Barcelona were all on my list this year, as well as all of the Tech Field Day events I took part in as an organizer. It was a grand Continue reading

Using IPv6 to Defeat Multi-tenancy Separation

I’ve always advised my clients to  carefully plan the implementation of IPv6. The protocol opens new attack vectors on which ne’er-do-wells can assault your infrastructure. There are countless examples I’ve seen such as service providers locking down access to routers using IPv4 transport but leaving IPv6 transport completely open. About a year ago, I stumbled […]

Author information

Jeff Loughridge

Jeff Loughridge has been promoting simplicity in IP networks since 1997. In his role as principal consultant at Brooks Consulting, Jeff helps his clients design and operate large-scale wireline and wireless networks. Prior to starting his company in 2009, Jeff spent ten years at Sprint in engineer and manager positions.

The post Using IPv6 to Defeat Multi-tenancy Separation appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Jeff Loughridge.

Community Show – The Rash Came Back After 19 Hours

While Packet Pushers were covering the Barcelona HP Discover conference and we got together with some of the folks attending the event on the show floor. The result is non-coherent discussion about whatever topics each person wanted to raise and discuss.

Author information

Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus.

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The post Community Show – The Rash Came Back After 19 Hours appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

CloudFlare in 2014: Bigger, Faster, Securer

At the end of 2013 we posted a blog article titled 2013: Rebuild the Engine; 2014: Step on the Gas which explained how in 2013 we had been rebuilding the engine that powers CloudFlare and how we expected 2014 to be when we stepped on the gas.

In that blog post, we said that we'd be expanding our network to betters serve customers in China and Latin America (as well as continuing other global expansions), and that we'd be making a big announcement around SSL.

CC BY-ND 2.0 image by Do Hyun-Kim

Looking back at 2014, we did a whole lot more and many of those changes had a meaningful impact well beyond CloudFlare. Now when we make a change, the needles on the Internet's dials move: when we roll out support for new protocols, sites tracking those protocols see a sudden jump in usage.

Here's a month by month review of CloudFlare's 2014:

January 8: keeping our promise to Latin America, we opened our first data center there in Chile.

January 27: we published our first transparency report covering National Security Orders on the first day it became legal to discuss them.

February 13: we Continue reading

Junos PyEZ Installation & Initial Testing on Mac OS X

I am educating myself about network automation. As I spend a lot of time in the Juniper world, a natural  place to work on automation skills is by leveraging PyEZ. What is PyEZ? Juniper describes it this way in their techwiki. Junos PyEZ is a microframework for Python that enables you to remotely […]

2014 Recap and 2015 Goals

When I started this post, the following mental image popped into my head, and I found it an apt description of 2014:

Oh well…..let’s give this a try anyways.

2014 Recap

I’ll list off the goals I set in my post one year ago, and reflect upon how they were pursued in 2014:

Write Code – I knew when I made this goal that it was going to be hard to quantify; I just knew that writing code was something I had been passionate about. Though I have always maintained this skillset in some form or another, I knew I wanted more, and a year ago, I made the goal of increasing my involvement with software development.

In 2014 I made two more contributions to OpenDaylight, specifically pertaining to the Unit Testing and Integration Testing efforts of the OVSDB project (much thanks to Madhu Venugopal and Dave Tucker for their unrelenting patience while I stumbled through Junit fundamentals). I also did a lot of work on various projects, like Ansible and Schprokits extensions, as well as standalone projects, all of which are Continue reading

2014 Recap and 2015 Goals

When I started this post, the following mental image popped into my head, and I found it an apt description of 2014: Doing the year-end recap post. 2014 was all: pic.twitter.com/aXtC2sjN8l — Matt Oswalt (@Mierdin) December 30, 2014 Oh well…..let’s give this a try anyways. 2014 Recap I’ll list off the goals I set in my post one year ago, and reflect upon how they were pursued in 2014:

2014 Recap and 2015 Goals

When I started this post, the following mental image popped into my head, and I found it an apt description of 2014: Doing the year-end recap post. 2014 was all: pic.twitter.com/aXtC2sjN8l — Matt Oswalt (@Mierdin) December 30, 2014 Oh well…..let’s give this a try anyways. 2014 Recap I’ll list off the goals I set in my post one year ago, and reflect upon how they were pursued in 2014:

2014 End of Year Blog Statistics

Although I wasn’t actively blogging this year, I’ve still been tracking views on the site and keeping an eye on number of visitors. I am looking forward to blogging again in 2015 so I wanted to collect the 2014 viewership statistics so I had something to compare to at the end of 2015.

Despite the lack of new content, I’m pretty happy that people are reading the existing articles and continue to post comments and email me questions. Please keep them coming!

Here are the year-over-year statistics for Jan 1 2014 – Dec 30 2014.

Overall YoY comparison:

2014_overall_stats

Once again these stats are courtesy of Google Analytics. If you compare this chart to the 2013 equivalent, you’ll see that Google has changed some of the metric names. Visits are now called Sessions and Unique Visitors are now Users. And like last year’s chart, the first number in gray is the current year’s number, the second number the previous year.

While the number of Users and Sessions grew at a slower rate than in 2013, they still grew! Very cool.

2014_new_vs_returning_visitor

As was the case in 2013, the users visiting the site are primarily made up of brand new visitors. It Continue reading

A Single Architect for Your Network

I finally got around to reading The Mythical Man Month (MMM), a famous book on large-scale software development projects (think operating systems) written in 1975, revised in 1995, and still strikingly relevant today in the neighboring field of building and managing massive networks.  While multiple points land directly on those of us working on massive […]

Author information

Keith Tokash

Keith Tokash

Keith Tokash, CCIE (R&S) #21236, began his career in 1999, and has spent the last decade running around large content and small ISP networks. He spends his spare time with his newborn son, on the mat at the local Jiu-Jitsu gym, and trying to keep his fat yap shut.

The post A Single Architect for Your Network appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Keith Tokash.

Q And A Should Include The E

The IT world is cyclical for sure. I’ve seen trends and topics repeating themselves over and over again in my relatively short time here. I find it interesting that we keep solving similar problems over and over again. I also find it fascinating that this particular issue leads to the reason why blogs are so important.

Any Questions?

Questions abound in IT. It’s the nature of the industry. However, it’s not just new questions that we create when technology leaps past us. We keep asking the same questions over and over again. This is the field of study that created the FAQ, remember?

In recent memory, I find the same questions being asked over and over again:

  • What is SDN?
  • How can SDN help me?
  • What makes this different from what we’ve done before?

You’ve probably asked those very same questions. Perhaps you found the answers you were looking for. Perhaps you’re still trying to figure it out. The problem is that those questions are still being asked. The industry should have evolved to the point where the simple questions have been answered with simple answers. Complex questions, or those questions that need more in-depth Continue reading

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