Five Reasons To Be At Interop New York
This guest post is by Drew Conry-Murray, Director of Content & Community at Interop and a good friend of the Packet Pushers. SPECIAL NOTE: Interop is offering the Packet Pushers community a 25% discount on Total Access and Conference Passes or a FREE Expo Pass for the New York show. Register today with the code PACKETP to receive the discount. The […]
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The post Five Reasons To Be At Interop New York appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Sponsored Blog Posts.
Basics – Docker, Containers, Hypervisors, CoreOS
Containers virtualize at the operating system level, Hypervisors virtualize at the hardware level. Hypervisors abstract the operating system from hardware, containers abstract the application from the operation system. Hypervisors consumes storage space for each instance. Containers use a single storage space plus smaller deltas for each layer and thus are much more efficient. Containers can boot and be […]
The post Basics – Docker, Containers, Hypervisors, CoreOS appeared first on EtherealMind.
SLAAC May Save Your Life
A chance dinner conversation at Wireless Field Day 7 with George Stefanick (@WirelesssGuru) and Stewart Goumans (@WirelessStew) made me think about the implications of IPv6 in healthcare. IPv6 adoption hasn’t been very widespread, thanks in part to the large number of embedded devices that have basic connectivity. Basic in this case means “connected with an IPv4 address”. But that address can lead to some complications if you aren’t careful.
In a hospital environment, the units that handle medicine dosing are connected to the network. This allows the staff to program them to properly dispense medications to patients. Given an IP address in a room, staff can ensure that a patient is getting just the right amount of painkillers and not an overdose. Ensuring a device gets the same IP each time is critical to making this process work. According to George, he has recommended that the staff stop using DHCP to automatically assign addresses and instead move to static IP configuration to ensure there isn’t a situation where a patient inadvertently receives a fatal megadose of medication, such as when an adult med unit is accidentally used in a pediatric application.
This static policy does lead Continue reading
Windows ISATAP Client, Part 3
In Part 2 we did the initial ISATAP configuration for our Cisco router. Here we’ll show the config we use on our Windows clients and server. netsh interface isatap set router 203.0.113.30 netsh interface isatap set state enabled Normally I tell system admins to never hard-code IP addresses into their application; always use DNS names! […]
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The post Windows ISATAP Client, Part 3 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Dan Massameno.
Debian/Ubuntu PMTUD & uRPF
I originally started my PMTUD posts using Ubuntu 14.04. Halfway through the post I simply could not get Ubuntu to change it’s MTU on receipt of ICMP fragmentation needed messages. I then tried Debian and it worked. Windows also had no issues changing it’s MTU. Wanting to finish off the post I switched to Debian […]Log analysis GUI tools
Log analysis is important to both troubleshoot and understand network devices behaviour. Tail/less/grep are great tools that can help to filter and search hundreds or thousands lines of logs. If you prefer a GUI there are a couple of alternatives…Network Infrastructure as Database
A while ago I wrote about the idea of treating network infrastructure (and all other infrastructure) as code, and using the same processes application developers are using to write, test and deploy code to design and implement networks.
That approach clearly works well if you can virtualize (and clone ad infinitum) everything. We can virtualize appliances or even routers, but installed equipment and high-speed physical infrastructure remain somewhat resistant to that idea. We need a different paradigm, and the best analogy I could come up with is a database.
Read more ...Q and A with Neela Jacques, OpenDaylight Executive Director
Q&A with Neela Jacques, OpenDaylight Executive Director
by Matt Sherrod, VP of Product Management - September 2, 2014
As OpenDaylight makes progress towards spurring adoption of SDN and NFV via an open platform, we asked Executive Director Neela Jacques his latest thoughts on the project’s current status, the state of SDN management, and what’s next.
1. For people who may not be familiar with
OpenDaylight, what is your mission?
OpenDaylight is an open source project
that is creating a common, open platform for SDN and NFV. We’re a community of developers
uniting competitors to work collaboratively to overcome networking’s toughest
challenge -- technology fragmentation and duplication. By creating an open
codebase for SDN and NFV, OpenDaylight is a vehicle for vendors to build their
unique products, service and support offerings on top of a common, core set of
technologies.
2. Do you feel like the move toward open SDN has
reached a critical mass? When and how do you see that happening?
In less than 15 months since we formed, OpenDaylight has grown
to include 39 member companies and more than 220 developers that are working to
unify the networking industry around a common, open, standard code base. Continue reading
Steve Jobs Thinks All Network Engineers Should Learn to Code
With some downtime this weekend, I was able to watch a few documentaries on NetFlix. There were a few great ones on Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffet, Mark Cuban, and Steve Jobs. Many of them came from the Bloomberg Game Changers series, but for Steve Jobs, I watched the Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview that was filmed in 1995, lost for almost two decades and then was released in 2012. I highly recommend all of them, but for this post, I want to highlight something Jobs said nearly 20 years ago.
What does this have to do with Networking?
There have been numerous articles over the past few months, some by me, that either advocate that network engineers should learn how to program, that there is no need for them to learn how to program, or they should simply learn to think like programmers.
Now check out what Steve Jobs said in the following video back in 1995:
There have been numerous articles over the past few months, some by me, that either advocate that network engineers should learn how to program, that there is no need for them to learn how to program, or they should simply learn to think like programmers.
Now check out what Steve Jobs said in the following video back in 1995:
…I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer – [they] should learn a computer language, because it teaches you how to think. It’s like going to law school. I don’t think anybody should be Continue reading
Let People Choose Their Own Tools
Why is it that people will pay a lot of money for a consultant’s time and expertise, but then hobble them by limiting the tools they can use?
Chris Wahl has written about learning to cope with the default tools and settings:
It’s almost a given that anything I own – personally or via my employer – will not be allowed to touch any piece of software or hardware in the average client environment. It causes too many headaches with compliance rule sets like Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX)…
This means that I’ve come to rely on whatever tools are universally available. Let’s take PowerShell for example. I have an entire library of scripts that I’ve written over the past several years. More often than not I end up using the vSphere Client or ESXi Shell instead because I can’t get to my scripts. If it’s a highly repetitious task I may just re-create a script by hand, but more often than not, it’s not worth the effort.
I’ve posted similar things to IEOC about the use of aliases on network gear:
I’m a consultant, so I work on a variety of different systems, and can’t rely on having a large list of aliases Continue reading
Fundamentals – PMTUD – IPv4 vs IPv6 – Part 2 of 2
This is a continuation of a post I started back here. Please read it first before starting below. RFC 4821 Another workaround we can use is Packetization Layer Path MTU Discovery – RFC 4821. The RFC enables a host to mainly acts in one of two ways: Use regular PMTUD. If no acknowledgments are received […]New GNS3 1.0 Beta 1
It appears that there are some significant changes ongoing with GNS3: As mentioned by the GNS3 CEO and co-founder Stephen Guppy on 11th of August 2014, the new GNS3 will be more polished and will migrate to a multi-vendor emulation platform. For those using this tool, it’s a well known fact that GNS3 […]SXSW Interactive 2015: Vote for CloudFlare’s Submissions
Has your Twitter feed been flooded with “vote for my SXSW panel” tweets? With so much buzz all over the place, we wanted to keep it simple and share all of the presentations and panels affiliated with CloudFlare, in one place. Check out CloudFlare's presentations and panels below. If our topics interest you, casting a vote will take just a few minutes!
How to vote:
- To sign up go to this link
- Enter your name & email address, then confirm your account
- Log in with your new account and go to the “PanelPicker”
- Click “search/vote” and search for your panel by title
- VOTE
Please note: Voting ends on September 6th!
PanelPicker voting counts for 30% of a sessions acceptance to SXSW. Our panels cover a variety of topics from a tell-all that reveals the real story behind the male/female co-founder dynamic to exploring ways to protect human rights online. There’s something for everyone so check them out and vote for your favorite! Every vote counts!
Help CloudFlare get to SXSW!
Presentations:
“Lean On” is the New “Lean In”
Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare will sit down with Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder and Head of User Experience at CloudFlare for Continue reading
Show 203 – SDN Policy + Congress with Martin Casado & Tim Hinrichs
This week, the Packet Pushers chat with Martin Casado & Tim Hinrichs about policy. What's policy, you ask? In the context of the software defined data center, policy is the big idea that what an IT system needs to do can be expressed in an abstract policy language. The need for abstraction exists because human beings aren't easily able to tell machines explicitly what they need to do build a system that conforms to a given policy.
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The post Show 203 – SDN Policy + Congress with Martin Casado & Tim Hinrichs appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.
Jack of All Trades
“Jack of all trades, master of none…”
How many times have you heard that in your life? In your career as an engineer? I’ve probably heard it hundreds of times, if not thousands, from working on RADAR and various sorts of radio and other electronics in the US Air Force to as recently as last week. There seems to be a feeling that if you can’t know one thing really well unless you somehow give up on knowing a lot of other things — perhaps there is some sort of limiter in our brains that keeps us from learning more than a certain amount of “stuff” in a single lifetime, or some such nonsense. We’ve all seen the Sherlock Holmes moment, for instance, when Sherlock says something about not remembering something because he has so much other stuff to remember.
And we come back to this idea: Jack of all trades, master of none.
Now I’ll readily admit that I only have so much time to read, and therefore to learn new things. I have four or five wish lists on Amazon, each of which has more than 100 books on it. I have a reading list in Logos Bible Continue reading
Thoughts on GitHub streaking
Thoughts on GitHub streaking
Thought it might be a good idea to brain dump on my thoughts of “Write Code Everyday” and more to the point the [github challenge](http://ryanseys.com/blog/177-days-of-gith
Secret Sunday: The World of Matt Oswalt
Welcome back to Secret Sunday! This week I’m directing your attention to Keeping It Classless, the blog of Matt Oswalt (aka @mierdin). Matt has recently published 3 of 4 planned parts of his SDN Protocols series, and if you’re interesting in … Continue reading
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Rant: Just stop it with the TFTP
TFTP was first defined in 1980. That is a very long time ago in IT, and while it’s s had a good run, it’s time for network engineers to stop using TFTP. It’s slow, insecure, and there are better options available.
TFTP is an unauthenticated, plain-text file transfer protocol. It is commonly used by network engineers to transfer switch configs, or IOS images. No passwords required, just a straight “Get this file ” or “Put this file ”. It uses UDP to transfer data. It is designed to be very simple, and light-weight. This is a large part of why it was popular – TFTP servers or clients could be implemented in low-powered devices, such as switches, VoIP phones, etc. Some systems also use it as part of an initial boot, where TFTP is used to retrieve the initial boot environment.
The main complaints I hear from engineers are “How do I get a TFTP server set up?”, and “Why is this taking so long to transfer?” Server configuration is just a Google exercise, but let’s look at file transfer speed.
Speedy? Not so much
For this test, I have a CentOS 6.x VM running on my laptop. I’m downloading Continue reading