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Where Is Cisco UCS Headed?

If you happen to read my writing(as infrequent as it is these days), you know that I am a networking focused person. I live my day to day within the walls of routing, switching, wireless, and other “network centric” platforms and technologies. The days of Unix, Windows, and other generalist type administration duties are gone for me. However, like many IT professionals, I have a strong desire to understand all of the different areas in order to enhance my capabilities within the networking space. If you wish to implement IT in any particular silo, it helps to understand all the different pieces. With that in mind, I happily accepted my invite to the Cisco UCS Grand Slam event in New York City a few weeks ago. My involvement with Cisco UCS usually stops at the fabric interconnect point, and occasionally down into the virtual networking piece as well.

I mention that to state that while I understand the moving parts within storage, compute, and virtualization, I DON’T understand it at the level of people who live in those worlds full time. In light of that, I have to point out that I may be completely wrong in my predictions or Continue reading

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[SDN Protocols] Part 4 – OpFlex and Declarative Networking

In this post, we will be discussing a relatively new protocol to the SDN scene - OpFlex. This protocol was largely championed by Cisco, but there are a few other vendors that have announced planned support for this protocol. I write this post because - like OVSDB - there tends to be a lot of confusion and false information about this protocol, so my goal in this post is to provide some illustrations that (hopefully) set the record straight, with respect to both OpFlex’s operation, and it’s intended role.

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[SDN Protocols] Part 4 – OpFlex and Declarative Networking

In this post, we will be discussing a relatively new protocol to the SDN scene - OpFlex. This protocol was largely championed by Cisco, but there are a few other vendors that have announced planned support for this protocol. I write this post because - like OVSDB - there tends to be a lot of confusion and false information about this protocol, so my goal in this post is to provide some illustrations that (hopefully) set the record straight, with respect to both OpFlex’s operation, and it’s intended role.

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[SDN Protocols] Part 4 – OpFlex and Declarative Networking

In this post, we will be discussing a relatively new protocol to the SDN scene - OpFlex. This protocol was largely championed by Cisco, but there are a few other vendors that have announced planned support for this protocol. I write this post because - like OVSDB - there tends to be a lot of confusion and false information about this protocol, so my goal in this post is to provide some illustrations that (hopefully) set the record straight, with respect to both OpFlex’s operation, and it’s intended role.

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No More Single Panes of Glass

The term “Single Pane of Glass” became something of a running joke during Network Field Day 8. The term has become over-used & abused, and it’s time we stopped using it. Time to find better terminology.

According to TechTarget:

A single pane of glass is a phrase used by information technology (IT) marketers to describe a management console that integrates information from multiple components into a unified display

All my information in one place? Sounds good, right? I like Single Panes of Glass. I like them a lot. In fact, I like them so much, I have several. Vendors like them too, so they’ve all got one.

And there’s the rub. The term is over-loaded, with every vendor using the term to describe their management console that can be used for managing all of their systems. The problem is that most vendors only see things from the perspective of their products. They don’t see things from the wider perspective of an organisation that is trying to use many different products to achieve business outcomes.

So the network vendor has a Single Pane of Glass (SPoG) that manages all the network, the MDM vendor has their SPoG for managing mobile Continue reading

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Secret Sunday – Mr Ethan C Banks

This week’s Secret Sunday post is a pointer to a fairly well known blogger, Ethan Banks. Yes, he’s well known for co-hosting the popular Packet Pushers podcast and he is an all round good guy, but his blog – especially of … Continue reading →

If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at Secret Sunday – Mr Ethan C Banks and give me a share/like. Thank you!

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Secure browser-to-proxy communication – again

I've previously blogged about a secure connection between browser and proxy. Unfortunately that doesn't work on Android yet, since except if you use Google for Work (an enterprise offering) you can't set Proxy Auto-Config.

This post shows you how to get that working for Android. Also it skips the stunnel hop since it doesn't add value and only makes Squid not know your real address. I'm here also using username and password to authenticate to the proxy instead of client certificates, to make it easier to set up.

Hopefully this feature will be added to Chrome for Android soon (bug here) but until then you'll have to use the Android app Drony.

First, why you would want to do this

• You have machines behind NAT, and a proxy that can see the inside while still accessible form the outside

  This way you can port forward one port from the NAT box to the proxy, and not have to use different ports everywhere. I'll call this proxy corp-proxy.example.com.

• You have servers that don't implement their own authentication, and you want the proxy to do it for you

  If you set up so that the only way to Continue reading

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IP Subnetting Part 5: Subnetting Across the Octet Boundary

Throughout this series, we have examined several fundamental building blocks of subnetting. In IP Subnetting Part 4, we looked at what was required to subnet a Class C network. This article takes the fundamentals one step further and looks at subnetting a Class A address. We will also add the complexity of crossing octet the octet boundary for both the subnet and the host portions of the address.

A Class A IP address has the following characteristics–

• I’s first octet begins with binary 0…….
• The first Octet will be in the range of 1 to 63 (0 is invalid)
• The first Octet (leftmost) represent the Network
• The last three Octets (rightmost) represents a Host on a network

You will also recall that a single network can be subnetting into multiple, smaller networks.

Using a consistent syntax, we could represent a Class A network as follows.

10.0.0.0

In this example--

Green represents the Classful Network
Blue represents the Host address

10.0.0.0 is would be a Network based on the fact that the host portion is 0.0.0. This is literally zero. Had the address been 10.0.0.1, 10.0.1.0 or 10.1.0.0 Continue reading

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Network Field Day 8 – #NFD8

After watching the Tech Field Day (TFD) events for a while, I decided to fill out the form and apply to be a delegate. With the events being based in the USA, me being based in the UK and my status not being at the power blogger level of the likes of Ethan Banks, Greg Ferro or Ivan Pepelnjak, the perceived chances of actually being selected to go were negligible to none. So how surprised was I when I received an email with an invite? You could have blown me over with a feather, so much so, the whole side of the train carriage I was sitting in at the time all heard the “whoop whoop” I decided to share!

So for any new delegates or those that want to know how it plays out, your travel, accommodation and pretty much all arrangements are taken care of by Gestalt IT and the TFD team. You just have to worry about getting to and from your chosen airport to depart and return.

The week that the event takes place in is northing short of hectic and by my experience was superbly executed by Steve Foskett and Tom Hollingsworth. You can pretty Continue reading

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ThousandEyes – NOC for the Internet?

ThousandEyes is a network monitoring company that provides application performance visibility across the Internet. They don’t just show how an application is performing, but can identify where across the Internet issues are occurring. Ethan Banks has written up some of the use cases. Recently I realised I could start thinking of them as a “NOC for the Internet.”

I was fortunate enough to attend Network Field Day 8, where ThousandEyes was one of the presenters. During their presentation Mohit Lad gave a demonstration of using ThousandEyes to investigate performance issues:

The problem with troubleshooting issues across the Internet is that it’s hard to get the complete visibility you need to track down where issues are happening. ThousandEyes helps, by giving you more viewpoints, but there’s still limits. Most of us can’t afford to run tests from hundreds of different public & private locations.

Interpreting data is also a challenge. ThousandEyes has done their best to make the data usable, but you might not have the networking resources to be able to fully understand what’s going on. You need both wider visibility, and the experience to fully interpret it.

That’s why I was very pleased to hear the exchange starting Continue reading

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Prescriptive Topology Manager (PTM) support with NX-API on the Nexus 9000?

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Plexxi Pulse—Adding Flexibility to the Cloud

It’s been a busy week here at Plexxi. On Tuesday, we announced our partnership with Cari.net, a high-performance, scalable and flexible hosting platform based on Microsoft Cloud OS. CARI.net’s newly released CARIcloud service is powered by Plexxi and uses software-defined networking to allow companies to automatically adjust to conditions on their networks and make sure that the most important applications are never starved for performance. The platform enables customers to manage organizations and scale their data centers without being restricted to a single cloud service provider.

In this week’s PlexxiTube of the week, Dan Backman explains how Plexxi’s datacenter fabric transport solution is different from a more traditional WAN gateway.

Hardware Customization in a Software-Driven Universe

Art Cole contributed an interesting piece to Enterprise Networking Planet this week on customizing IT hardware in a “software-driven” universe. In my opinion, we tend to think about the discrete layers within information technology hardware—the boxes that make up the network, the servers that make up compute, and the devices that make up storage. Having flexibility in each layer of hardware is crucial, but we also want the same flexibility in the interconnect that ties them all together. We want programmability Continue reading

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Network Break 17

Take a stroll through the Intel IDF 2014 conference which was all about the Software Defined Network/Storage/Infrastructure/Architecture ......

Author information

The post Network Break 17 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

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SolarWinds Thwack Ambassador for VoIP Management

I know I’ve been quiet of my blog this month, but that’s not because I’ve forgetting about this site! For the month of September I’m spending some extra time over at Thwack, this is SolarWinds community where everyone likes to get together and talk about network management. I’ve talked about Network Management quite a bit […]

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Vagrant vs Docker on OSX – Tales From The Front

Earlier this week I described how I had dipped my toe in the waters of Docker and determined in the end that while the solution was pretty neat, it smacked of being too much solution for the problem at hand. … Continue reading →

If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at Vagrant vs Docker on OSX – Tales From The Front and give me a share/like. Thank you!

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IPv6 Networking Detection Case #141 – Part 1: The Facts and Clues

Part #1 – I give you the facts and the clues. Part #2 – I give you what the problem ended up being. Ready to play? This is the IPv6 troubleshooting blog that started off as something else entirely.   I was going to do a post on IPv6 Multicasting, so I grabbed 3 ASR1K and […]

Author information

The post IPv6 Networking Detection Case #141 – Part 1: The Facts and Clues appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Denise "Fish" Fishburne.

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Keyless SSL: The Nitty Gritty Technical Details

We announced Keyless SSL yesterday to an overwhelmingly positive response. We read through the comments on this blog, Reddit, Hacker News, and people seem interested in knowing more and getting deeper into the technical details. In this blog post we go into extraordinary detail to answer questions about how Keyless SSL was designed, how it works, and why it’s secure. Before we do so, we need some background about how encryption works on the Internet. If you’re already familiar, feel free to skip ahead.

TLS

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the workhorse of web security. It lets websites prove their identity to web browsers, and protects all information exchanged from prying eyes using encryption. The TLS protocol has been around for years, but it’s still mysterious to even hardcore tech enthusiasts. Understanding the fundamentals of TLS is the key to understanding Keyless SSL.

Dual goals

TLS has two main goals: confidentiality and authentication. Both are critically important to securely communicating on the Internet.

Communication is considered confidential when two parties are confident that nobody else can understand their conversation. Confidentiality can be achieved using symmetric encryption: use a key known only to the two parties involved to encrypt Continue reading

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Virtual Networking in CloudStack

If you mention open-source cloud orchestration tools these days, everyone immediately thinks about OpenStack (including the people who spent months or years trying to make it ready for production use). In the meantime, there are at least two other comparable open-source products (CloudStack and Eucalyptus) that nobody talks about. Obviously having a working product is not as sexy as having 50+ vendors and analysts producing press releases.

Read more ...

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Some New Old Books

The Lean Startup approach is for companies that want to be more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively.  It relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

The products lean startup builds are really experiments: the learning about how to build a sustainable business is the outcome of those experiments. That information is much more important, because it can influence and reshape the next set of ideas. And it uses the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop at the core of Lean Startup model.



In short: build Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or Minimum Viable Service (MVS), launch, collect data to learn in order to perfect the ideas. Or if it doesn't work, fail fast, and pivot to another ideas.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate plans for new product, it's better to launch quickly and find a way to test the idea continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late.

How to decide which ideas Continue reading

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Colour calibration in Linux

This is just a quick note on how to create .icc colour profiles in Linux. You need a colour calibrator (piece of hardware) for this to be useful to you.

#!/bin/sh
NAME=$1
COLOR=$2
DESC="Some random machine"
QUALITY=h   # or l for low, m for medium
set -e

dispcal -m -H -q $QUALITY -y l -F -t $COLOR -g 2.2 $NAME
targen -v -d 3 -G -e 4 -s 5 -g 17 -f 64 $NAME
dispread -v -H -N -y l -F -k $NAME.cal $NAME
colprof -v -D $DESC -q m -a G -Z p -n c $NAME
dispwin -I $NAME.icc