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PQ Show 43 – HP Networking – Beyond Traditional Network Management

This is the last in a series of podcasts sponsored by HP, all recorded at HP’s Discover conference in Barcelona, Spain in early December 2014. The series is made up of interviews and technical discussions with HP engineers and lab geeks about products in HP’s networking portfolio. Ken Gott, Product Line Manager, joins Chris Young, Senior Solutions […]

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The post PQ Show 43 – HP Networking – Beyond Traditional Network Management appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

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Don’t Underestimate Your Users

The “consumerisation of IT” has an interesting side-effect. Historically people mainly used computers for work. But now that many people have smartphones, tablets and laptops at home, their perception and understanding of technology has shifted. Old assumptions about training required when upgrading applications or client operating systems may no longer apply.

This comment at The Register aligns with what I’m seeing:

…We’re at the point now where users are using Windows 8 at home and wondering why the work computer is so dated. It’s the perception of IT people that users can’t handle change holding up that change, not the ability of the users. At home that same set of users has managed quite well with updated versions of Office, updated Windows, iPads, Android tablets, Facebook, video messaging and various other completely new things. Somehow they coped without extensive training and therapy. From what I’ve seen, it’s actually IT staff who don’t like Windows 8 and are trying to keep users away from it…

I can recall being involved in Office upgrades just a few years ago, and being nervous about how that would be perceived. We were concerned that there would be major push-back, because the exact locations of the buttons Continue reading

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Network Automation @Interop Vegas 2015

In case you are planning on attending Interop in Las Vegas this year, I’d like to let you know about my two sessions, both centered around emerging methodologies and technologies in the networking space. Practical Network Automation With Ansible and Python This is going to be a 3 hour workshop, aiming to be a practical look into network automation. I picked the topics that I have been working with most heavily in this space, and I think this workshop will be a great way to get up to speed with some down-to-earth network automation methodologies.

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Network Automation @Interop Vegas 2015

In case you are planning on attending Interop in Las Vegas this year, I’d like to let you know about my two sessions, both centered around emerging methodologies and technologies in the networking space. Practical Network Automation With Ansible and Python This is going to be a 3 hour workshop, aiming to be a practical look into network automation. I picked the topics that I have been working with most heavily in this space, and I think this workshop will be a great way to get up to speed with some down-to-earth network automation methodologies.

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Flexible SSL & WordPress: Fixing “Mixed Content” Errors

As many are aware, CloudFlare launched Universal SSL several months ago. We saw lots of customers sign up and start using these new, free SSL certificates. For many customers that didn’t already have an SSL certificate, they were able to use “Flexible SSL”.

Flexible SSL creates a secure (HTTPS) connection between the website visitor and CloudFlare and then an in-secure (HTTP) connection between CloudFlare and the origin server. For any site using absolute links to assets (i.e. javascript, css, and image files), this can lead to a “Mixed Content” error.

Mixed Content = Mixed Protocol

What is “Mixed Content”? This can be understood as mixed protocol. When the webpage is loaded over SSL (HTTPS protocol), most browsers expect all of the assets to be loaded over the same protocol. Some browsers will display an error about loading “insecure content” while others will just block the insecure content outright.

This error only applies to pages loaded over SSL, since the browser is working to make sure that secure pages only load equally secure assets.

Wordpress Plugin Updates

The latest version of the CloudFlare plugin for Wordpress works to resolve a lot of these errors by altering the protocol within the Continue reading

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Netvisor Takes SDN Switching Mainstream with $50M Series D

We closed our Series D in financing right before Christmas. This is a $50M round lead by Temasek and Ericsson. Temasek is a $170B plus sovereign fund out of Singapore that is best described as Berkshire Hathaway of Technology. They were the people responsible forinvestments into Alibaba. This is important to understand that with Netvisor achieving success in Enterprise Datacenter and Private Cloud markets, the bigger players now believe that SDN switching and applications on Server-Switches is pretty real.

The finding is primarily to scale our business side and help sell more products, build support infrastructure and create a application group that can write more applications on Netvisor to exploit the world of programmable networks.

Netvisor as an Application Platform

The best way to explain this is to draw a parallel between Netvisor as a switch Hypervisor and Smartphone.

When Apple released a IOS based smartphone, the world was full of small hardware devices like camera, GPS navigators etc. IOS (and later Android) become a software platform that allowed many applications to come of top of this platform.

Netvisor is creating the same paradigm for datacenter switching. Today, you have a physical fabric, a separate Observability fabric (using TAPS and Continue reading

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OSPF inter-area and intra-area routing rules

The following lab focuses on intra-area and inter-area route selection process. For the sake of clarity, I put the final conclusions first, wrapped in a table form, with some explanations to ponder upon, followed by the different lab cases used to check OSPF route selection rules. For each case, I used interface costs and states […]

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OSPF inter-area and intra-area routing rules

The following lab focuses on intra-area and inter-area route selection process. For the sake of clarity, I put the final conclusions first, wrapped in a table form, with some explanations to ponder upon, followed by the different lab cases used to check OSPF route selection rules. For each case, I used interface costs and states […]

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OSPF routing protocol

OSPF Open shortest path first is a dynamic routing protocol which creates a topology between the routers to distribute routing information inside an Autonomous system. If you are not familiar with OSPF, don’t worry ! In this article OSPF will be explained in great detail. Are you interested in design aspect of OSPF, many OSPF design examples will […]

The post OSPF routing protocol appeared first on Network Design and Architecture.

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Ansible Adds Over 300 Customers in 2014

2014 was a great year for Ansible.

Ansible Highlights from 2014

• Named SD Times #1 Company to Watch in 2015 and a Top 10 open source project in 2014 by Red Hat’s opensource.com.

• The Ansible open source project has had over one million downloads in 2014.

• O’Reilly released the preview of its first Ansible book (available on Ansible.com) with the full book due out in early 2015.

• There are over 40 regular worldwide Ansible meetups, with new meetups popping up weekly around the world from Sydney to South Africa.

• Over 600 people attended AnsibleFests in San Francisco, Austin & New York in 2014, and 400 people are expected at the first AnsibleFest London in February 2015.

• Ansible Tower - Ansible’s enterprise IT automation solution - has been downloaded over 5,000 times and by 27 of the Fortune 100.

• Ansible Tower is in production managing tens of thousands of servers, VMs and cloud instances across enterprise verticals that include financial services, government, high-tech manufacturing, education, web & e-commerce and media.

• Ansible released three major upgrades of Ansible Tower in 2014, most recently adding capabilities for delivering self-service IT and HA for enterprise IT organizations.

• Ansible released agentless support for Continue reading

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ComputerWeekly: Ansible’s secret agentless route to IT automation

ComputerWeekly recently posted a great breakdown of Ansible's role in IT automation.

Ansible Inc (upper case) is a company that makes "agentless" orchestration and configuration management tools in the form of an automation engine designed to help deploy both applications and the wider software systems that they exist within.

The core technology proposition here is a developer play yes -- but it's also an opportunity for less technical users to get involved with IT automation because Ansible avoids the need to write custom scripts or code to manage applications.

Read the full atricle on ComputerWeekly

 

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Open Source Networking

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News Analysis: Cumulus Linux 2.5 Released + Validated Design Guides

One of my favorite companies to talk to and keep track of is Cumulus Networks, makers of Cumulus Linux, a network operating system that runs on whitebox switches. As I’m not in a build phase on the network I do most of my work on, I haven’t had a chance to try Cumulus Linux […]

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Bored Room

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SDN start-up says it is best funded in industry

Pluribus Networks, an SDN start-up developing converged compute, network, storage and virtualization systems, said it raised $50 million in a Series D round of funding led by Temasek, an investment company based in Singapore with a net portfolio value of $177 billion.Temasek is an investor in Chinese search engine company Alibaba.+ MORE ON NETWORK WORLD:SDN market could hit $18 billion by 2018 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Lock-In Is Inevitable – Get Used to It!

For whatever reason (subliminal messages from vendor marketing departments?), I’m constantly brooding about the vendor lock-in, its inevitability, and the way supposedly disruptive companies try to use the fear of lock-in to persuade na├»ve customers to buy their products.

Read more ...

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BGP in 2014

The Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, has been holding the Internet together, for more than two decades and nothing seems to be falling off the edge so far. As far as we can tell everyone can still see everyone else, assuming that they want to be seen, and the distributed routing system appears to be working smoothly. All appears to be working within reasonable parameters, and there is no imminent danger of some routing catastrophe, as far as we can tell. For a protocol designed some 25 years ago, when the Internet of that time contained some 10,000 constituent networks, its done well to scale fifty-fold, to carry in excess of half a million routed elements by the end of 2014.

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Open Source Networking

We’ve heard a lot of Software Defined Networking (SDN), Open Networking, APIs, and policy models over the past few months (and years). There are days where it’s sickening to hear the term SDN, but even on those darkest days, the reality is that the network industry has a bright and open future. In this post, I’m going to share a list of networking projects that I’m aware of that are not only open, but also open source. It is definitely eye opening and extremely positive to see so much open source activity in the network industry.

Edit/Note: updated list can be found here on GitHub. Feel free to issue a pull request to add or modify the list.

OpenDaylight (ODL) – established in April 2013 is an open source Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller platform(s). There are different controller platforms for different use cases.

OpenFlow (OF) – established in the late 2000s, the OpenFlow 1.0 release launched in December 2009. The Open Networking Foundation took over the development (not actually coding) of OpenFlow when ONF formed in late March / early April in 2010.

Open vSwitch (OVS) – established in mid to late 2009 by the Nicira team to Continue reading

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January’s Network Resolution Mission

Hope everyone had a great holiday season and is getting back into the groove of things. Firstly wanted to thank those who participated in

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OSPF Authentication – Part 1

Original content from Roger's CCIE Blog Tracking the journey towards getting the ultimate Cisco Certification. The Routing & Switching Lab Exam
There are three types of OSPF authentication. Type 1 – no authentication Type 2 – clear text Type 3 – cryptographic (MD5 or SHA) Lets explore each type in a lot more detail and then look at the router configuration for some real world examples. Authentication can be configured on a per area or per... [Read More]

Post taken from CCIE Blog

Original post OSPF Authentication – Part 1