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

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?

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?

The changing of the guard: Telecom Style-Part 1

The sale of a incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) aka the local telephone company can be much more complicated than one might think, ordinary folks anyway. Networking & IT  professionals most likely have a different viewpoint as migrations are a fundamental part of the IT field. Such a transaction becomes more complicated when triple play […]

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Mitchell Lewis

Mitchell is a young technology professional with an interest in networking & communications. He takes an interest in the ever changing telecom space as well as other networking technologies (datacenter etc). His main hobby project is overseeing the expansion of broadband into a co-operative campground, shares of which are owned by a family member.

Mitchell currently is a Cisco Certified Entry Level Tech (CCENT Certified) with intentions of obtaining higher as time permits.He graduated from the Connecticut Technical High School system with a focus in Information Systems Technology (Combination of Higher Ed MIS & Computer Science). While there he developed the production computing platform for his academic department( servers, networking, desktop).

He is currently pursing higher education from the UCONN School of Business & welcomes any opportunity to further advance his experience in the IT Field & professional knowledge.

Continue reading

The Linux ip Command – An Ostensive Overview

It came to my attention and I was rather surprised to learn a while back that the Linux ifconfig command has been deprecated for quite some time by the Linux ip command set. The ip command isn’t new to me and I’ve recognised its advantages for some time but considering its ‘elevated’ status I thought […]

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Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson

Steven Iveson, the last of four children of the seventies, was born in London and has never been too far from a shooting, bombing or riot. He's now grateful to live in a small town in East Yorkshire in the north east of England with his wife Sam and their four children.

He's worked in the IT industry for over 15 years in a variety of roles, predominantly in data centre environments. Working with switches and routers pretty much from the start he now also has a thirst for application delivery, SDN, virtualisation and related products and technologies. He's published a number of F5 Networks related books and is a regular contributor at DevCentral.

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The post The Linux ip Command – An Ostensive Overview appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Iveson.

Stop Doing Post Mortems & Root Cause Analysis With indeni

Indeni has technology that can predict known types of network failures using pre-mortem analysis.

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Sponsored Blog Posts

The Packet Pushers work with our vendors to present a limited number of sponsored blog posts to our community. This is one. If you're a vendor and think you have some blog content you'd like to sponsor, contact us via [email protected].

The post Stop Doing Post Mortems & Root Cause Analysis With indeni appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Sponsored Blog Posts.

Wipebook – A Portable Whiteboard

It is a stereotype, but engineers really do like whiteboards. Problem is, you can’t carry one around with you. Plus there’s still a few unenlightened employers who don’t provide whiteboards. Enter the Wipebook, a spiral-bound notebook made of whiteboard-like pages:

I normally carry a notebook for scratching out notes while talking to customers, sketching diagrams, working through problems, etc. I don’t archive these notes – most are just short-term things, and I shred them. Important stuff gets turned into OmniFocus tasks/emails/etc.

So the Wipebook looks perfect for me. My wife bought one for me recently, and I’ve started using it at work. So far, it’s working as expected. I can quickly scribble notes, sketch a diagram, make corrections, etc. When I’m done with it, I wipe the page down.

It’s not perfect – the pages don’t always wipe down perfectly, and obviously it gets bumped around in my bag. So it won’t last forever. But it’s a nice touch that I can open & close the bindings, so I can easily get rid of any pages that are too beaten up.

The pens have a small eraser on the end, but it’s only suitable for very minor corrections. I have a Continue reading

The Proof Is in The Facebook Data Center Pudding

In case you missed it, Wired just exposed the elephant in the room with last week’s article on the next generation Facebook data center.

For years, anyone who’s had to build out or run a network has handed over large sums of money to the networking hardware titans, without the freedom to choose what to run on that hardware. But I’m sure if you’re someone who placed one of those orders, the thought crossed your mind if this was always going to be the norm.

Every time before you clicked or signed on that dotted line, you wondered whether it’s worth buying from the incumbents and playing in their locked-in world. Maybe deep down you had some burning desire to break away, but were afraid to stray from the blue chip way of life.

I feel your pain and it’s okay because we all want to maximize the value of our dollar. That’s why we all shop for the best choice and at the best price point; otherwise, we will just wait and buy another day.

I mean, you have the freedom to buy the servers you want, so why not have the freedom to buy the network gear that Continue reading

Net Neutrality: It’s regulation for the public good, not government takeover

My good friend Chuck Papageorgiou recently wrote a post on his blog he titled Net Neutrality – Policies or Politics in which he argued:

… as a capitalist and free-marketer, I have a hard time reconciling the notion that the Government should just take over privately deployed and owned assets without fairly compensating the TelCo’s and their shareholders for the investment they have made, and continue to make, in internet infrastructure.

Despite the fact that yesterday was Chuck’s birthday I’m going to disagree strongly with my friend.

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

IT’s march towards mass customization

[Unbeknownst to me, Matt Oswalt (@mierden on Twitter) posted a thematically similar post a few days before me. While I did not see that post, it seems disingenuous not to reference it, so please read his thoughts here: http://keepingitclassless.net/2014/11/mass-customization/]

IT is constantly evolving, from mainframes to disaggregated components to an integrated set of infrastructure elements working in support of applications. But that description is more about how individual infrastructure is packaged and less about the role that these solutions play. There is a more subtle but perhaps more profound change in IT that is simultaneously taking place: a shift in how IT architectures are actually being designed.

So what is at the heart of this change?

Single purpose infrastructure

IT was born with the mainframe. Mainframes were basically entire IT ecosystems in a box. They included compute, storage, networking and applications. But what is most notable about these solutions is that the entire system was aimed at providing a single outcome. That is to say that the mainframe itself was a composed system that was designed with a single purpose in mind: deliver some application.

In the early days of IT, there was no need for systems to run different Continue reading

CCIE Data Center Lab Preparation :: Notable Documentation CD Locations

It never fails … every class I teach I am asked the question “Where do I find topic X in the documentation?”  Usually at the top of the lists are the topics that generally have longer configurations surrounding them that are sometimes hard to remember. Topics like FHRP isolation when using OTV, iSCSI gateway configuration on the MDS, Fibre channel zoning, and so on.  So I wanted to compile a quick list of the top 3 that I am always being asked about.

The most popular topic is first-hop redundancy protocol isolation when using OTV.  This can be a tricky one, as it contains MAC ACLs referencing the VMAC (virtual MACs) for the protocol you are trying to filter, access-list identifying the FHRPs multicast hello address, route-maps, route-redistribution filters, and VACLs.  I will have to admit, it is one that I definitely had trouble remembering!  The easiest way to find it is by locating the white paper outlining its use! Follow me!

Our famous starting point will always be here, we will call it “root”:

http://www.cisco.com/cisco/web/psa/default.html?mode=prod

20141119_01

From here we want to drill down:

Switches >> Data Center Switches >> Nexus 7000 Series Switches Continue reading

My Federal Communication Conniption

My Federal Communication Conniption

by Brian Boyko, Contributor - November 19, 2014

The Political Problem 

The President of the United States called for the FCC to reclassify ISPs under Title II of the Communications Act as “common carriers.” 

Your telephone company is a common carrier. It is illegal for, say, Telephone Company A to degrade service quality for calls to your grandmother, who uses Telephone Company B, or charge you more to connect to Telephone Company B. 

What’s problematic is that FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, is avoiding Title II regulation. And as Wheeler was a former lobbyist for the telecommunications industry, President Obama knew that Wheeler would probably not be for reclassifying ISPs as common carriers when he appointed him chair of the FCC back in November of 2013. 

In fact, Wheeler is opposing Obama’s proposals. Naturally. Instead of putting the ISPs under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934, he wants to classify them under the Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.  However, courts have ruled that the FCC doesn’t have regulatory oversight of Section 706. 

So, the President publically says one should classify ISPs as common carriers, but took the Continue reading

Show 213 – What’s Next for Avaya Enterprise Wireless – Sponsored

Unlike Gen Z’ers, who have never known a world without Wi-Fi (or Minecraft), some of us get to see technology come full circle. Join Alan Hase, VP of Avaya Networking, and the Packet Pushers as they outline (and relish and pontificate) how this phenomenon is playing out in WLAN and Mobility today. Alan highlights how […]

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Ethan Banks

Co-host at Packet Pushers

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials and high tech since 1995. Ethan co-hosts the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over 2M downloads and reaches over 10K listeners. With whatever time is left, Ethan writes for fun & profit, studies for certifications, and enjoys science fiction. @ecbanks
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The post Show 213 – What’s Next for Avaya Enterprise Wireless – Sponsored appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

iRules/Tcl – Watch the Comments

It’s pretty common practice to ‘comment out’ lines in scripts. The code stays in place, but doesn’t get executed. Perfect for testing, when you might need more debug output, or you want to run a slightly different set of actions. But you have to be careful when commenting out lines – it might catch you out, and the F5 iRules editor won’t save you.

Normally it’s pretty simple to comment out a line. Here’s a quick Bash example:

#!/bin/bash

FILECOUNT=`ls /tmp|wc -l`

if [ $FILECOUNT -lt 7 ]
 then
        echo "There are fewer than 7 files in /tmp"
        run_command
fi
...

When I’m testing the script, I might not want to actually run that command. So I’ll quickly comment it out like this:

#!/bin/bash

FILECOUNT=`ls /tmp|wc -l`

if [ $FILECOUNT -lt 7 ]
 then
        echo "There are fewer than 7 files in /tmp"
        #run_command
fi
...

The ‘#’ tells the shell to ignore anything else on that line. All pretty straightforward.

Today I was debugging an F5 synchronisation issue, where I got this message on synchronisation:

BIGpipe parsing error (/config/bigip.conf Line 333):
   012e0054:3: The braced list of attributes is not closed for 'rule'.

The offending section looked like this:

when  Continue reading

Wires Are The Exception

cropped-dsc_0734.jpg

Last week I went to go talk to a group of vocational students about networking.  While I was there, I needed to send a couple of emails.  I prefer to write emails from my laptop, so I pulled it out of my bag between talks and did the first thing that came to mind: I asked for the wireless SSID and password.  Afterwards, I started thinking about how far we’ve come with connectivity.

I can still remember working with a wireless card back in 2001 trying to get the drivers to play nice with Windows 2000.  Now, wireless cards are the rule and wired ports are the exception.  My primary laptop needs a dongle to have a wired port.  My new Mac Mini is happily churning along halfway across the room connected to my network as a server over wireless.  It would appear that the user edge quietly became wireless and no tears were shed for the wire.

It’s also funny that a lot of the big security features like 802.1x and port security became less and less of an issue once open ports started disappearing in common areas.  802.1x for wired connections is barely even talked about Continue reading

Using New Relic Server Monitoring With Cumulus Linux

One of the most visible trends on the Web today is the “SaaS-ification” of the enterprise. Major productivity functions like email and calendaring, customer relationship management (CRM), and IT systems management are gaining greater value by being deployed as cloud-based services. IT and systems monitoring companies like New Relic are thriving in the cloud as well.

Another major trend, one that Cumulus Networks is at the forefront of, is the transformation of the “switch as a server.” If you aren’t familiar, check out Cumulus Networks engineer Leslie Carr’s excellent PuppetConf 2014 presentation. Since Cumulus Linux supports Debian-based packages out of the box, we decided to take New Relic’s Server Monitoring product for a spin. We wanted to see how Cumulus Linux extends Server Monitoring’s functionality to monitoring switches.

Once logged into Cumulus Linux, installing the server agent takes just a few minutes, as expected. Leveraging the documentation and installation guide allowed us to get up and running in minutes.

Since it’s SaaS, there is obviously no server deployment required, so all you have to do is to log in to your New Relic account and start looking at the performance data that is automagically pushed to your dashboard. Here’s Continue reading

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