My “Was it bufferbloat?” blog post generated an unexpected amount of responses, most of them focusing on a side note saying “it looks like there really are service providers out there that are clueless enough to reorder packets within a TCP session”. Let’s walk through them.
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In recent network designs, the big, hot and heavy chassis switch has become the last option for a number of reasons. Switch Performance and Capacity. Port Density In the past, the most common decision for buying a chassis has been port density. A chassis backplane provides a high speed connection for the line cards to […]
The post Last Chance at Chassis Switch Saloon appeared first on EtherealMind.
Michael Church wrote an interesting answer on Quora, describing a logarithmic scale of programming skills and (even more importantly) hints to follow to get from n00b into the top N% (for some small value of N):
Replace “programmer” with “networking engineer” and read the whole answer ;)
HP’s SDN App Store has finally seen the light of day. This is intended to be a common platform for users and developers, to find and distributed real-world, practical SDN applications. Some of the launch apps include:
It’s interesting to look at the price points for applications. They are certainly not $0.99 apps, but they are still cheaper than typical ‘Enterprise’ software. I think it will take us a while to figure out what the right level of ‘value’ is.
HP has done well to put together a platform that developers can use to distribute SDN applications. It’s not an easy task to put together all of the back-end work required for something like this. It’s not simply hosting a website, it’s figuring out all the legal & financial implications, the support mechanisms, etc. There’s a lot of non-technical effort that goes into this.
The only challenge is that currently it is for SDN apps that use the HP VAN SDN Controller, which will limit the size of the market. I’m hoping that in future it will work with OpenDaylight. That will expand Continue reading
You can ignore big problems but they need big solutions to remove them from the agenda.
The post Big Problems Often Require Big Solutions appeared first on EtherealMind.
A couple of weeks ago, Cloudflare announced a new solution that allows DDOS Protection, Caching and application firewalls of SSL encrypted traffic without handing over the private key. This is a significant breakthrough for companies. Many companies have strong controls over private keys that prevent external sharing. More often the simple cost of key ceremonies is punitive to the business.
The post PQ Show 34 – Cloudflare Keyless SSL appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.
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| KennyK/Shutterstock |
Painting by Rene Margritte
Today CloudFlare is publishing its third Transparency Report covering the first half of 2014. This report covers government information requests from January 1, 2013 to June 30, 2014, and updates our two existing transparency reports: partial January 2013 Transparency Report and complete 2013 Transparency Report.
CloudFlare’s Transparency Reports shows how many subpoenas, court orders, search warrants, pen register/trap and trace (PRTT) orders, and national security orders CloudFlare received during the reporting period. In this current Transparency Report, we have also added a separate category for wiretap orders CloudFlare received. CloudFlare’s Transparency Reports also shows how many domains and accounts were affected by our response to those requests during the reporting period. CloudFlare’s Transparency Reports do not include non-governmental requests.
We will continue to update this report on a semiannual basis at Transparency Report.
Special thanks to our legal intern, Murtaza Sajjad, for helping to compile this report.
Plexxi is teaming up with SDNCentral to host DemoFriday on October 24 at 10 a.m. PST. Tune in to hear our own Ed Henry and Nils Stewart demonstrate how to build scalable and manageable Big Data fabrics that easily integrate with systems such as OpenStack and Cloudera. You can register to attend here.
In this week’s PlexxiTube of the week, Dan Backman explains how Plexxi’s Big Data fabric solution is applicable beyond Big Data.
SDN: Unshackling the Network Application Environment
Art Cole claims that SDN will enable the development of a robust ecosystem of network applications in a recent article for Enterprise Networking Planet. As we look at applications, it is worth making the distinction between network apps (things that run on the network) and business apps (apps the network enables). The real value in SDN will permit the business apps to influence the network (whether that is automated or not is an interesting side conversation). To bring this to life there has to be a focus on policy abstraction. This is why Congress (part of OpenStack) and OpenDaylight are potentially powerful. If we can agree on policy abstraction, then the applications can interact with the network and Continue reading
Like “orchestration”, compliance is a frequently overloaded phrase in IT -- it means very different things to different people. Ansible is frequently used in all sorts of compliance use cases, which we’ll expand on below.
Compliance can mean checking to see if a system has “drifted” from a known state, pushing a system back into line from a different state, or making it conform with a very specific set of (often security related) standards.
I wish my life was like this dashboard where I could turn all the knobs to ten but I can't.
The post Poster: Life Dashboard appeared first on EtherealMind.
I had a shorter version of my IPv6 High Availability talk @ Slovenian IPv6 summit this spring. The video is online, but wouldn’t be of much use to anyone but both Slovenian readers of this blog.
The English version of that same talk is now available on NIL TV (or you could decide to go for the full webinar or whole IPv6 track).
Introduction: With the ascent of DCI, a new set of requirements emerged which are not fully addressed by current L2VPN technologies like VPLS. There are three major options in deploying VPLS LDP based VPLS (RFC 4762) LDP based VPLS with BGP Auto discovery BGP based VPLS (RFC 4761) Each option has its pros and cons. […]
The post EVPN: Intro to next gen L2VPN appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Diptanshu Singh.
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| U-NII Unlicensed Spectrum in 5 GHz (Click to Download PDF) |
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| NTIA Graphic of U-NII Unlicensed Spectrum in 5 GHz |
VXLAN exciting technology that’s been integrated into a number of product offerings from networking and cloud vendors. OpenStack® supports VXLAN via a set of Neutron plugins, and Metacloud OpenStack® has supported VXLAN for a few releases already.
One of the challenges with deploying and scaling VXLAN has been the MAC-to-VTEP learning and BUM (Broadcast, Unknown Unicast, Multicast) packet flooding. The VXLAN spec uses a simple multicast solution to solve this problem. Multicast has its own set of scaling challenges, and reliable multicast routing between network segments isn’t always available. The majority of vendors who have VXLAN support have attempted to solve this problem by implementing their own form of learning and flooding. Some of these solutions work well, but all of them require you to operate in a homogenous network environment or pay expensive per CPU or per VM licensing fees.
Until today…
Metacloud, in partnership with our friends at Cumulus Networks®, have been working together on a solution to these problems for the past year. Starting today, VXFLD is open source and freely Continue reading
In this post id like to provide an example of a fairly new development to EIGRP which is called EIGRP Over The Top (OTP).
In all its simplicity it establish an EIGRP multihop adjacency using LISP as the encapsulation method for transport through the WAN network.
One of the applications of this would be to avoid relying on the SP in an MPLS L3 VPN. You could simply use the L3 VPN for transport between the interfaces directly connected to the Service Provider and run your own adjacency directly between your CPE routers (without the use of a GRE tunnel, which would be another method to do it)
The topology used for this example consists of 4 routers. All 4 of the routers are using OSPF to provide connectivity (you could take this example and do a L3 VPN using MPLS as an exercise). Im simply taking the lazy path and doing it this way 
EIGRP-OTP-Topology
R1 and R4 are running EIGRP in a named process “test”. This process is in Autonomous system 100 and the Loopback 0 interfaces are advertised into the V4 address-family.
Lets verify that we have connectivity between R1’s g1.102 interface and R4’s g1.304 Continue reading
