OpFlex – is the abstraction in the right place?
It's been a few weeks since Cisco announced OpFlex and I've just finished gathering my thoughts...
RIP Net Neutrality
It's been an interesting couple of months in the ongoing tensions between Internet carriage and content service providers, particularly in the United States. The previous confident assertion was that the network neutrality regulatory measures in that country had capably addressed these tensions. While the demands of the content industry continue to escalate as the Internet rapidly expands into video content streaming models, we are seeing a certain level of reluctance from the carriage providers to continually accommodate these expanding demands within their networks though ongoing upgrades of their own capacity without any impost on the content provider. The veneer of network neutrality is cracking under the pressure, and the arrangements that attempted to isolate content from carriage appear to be failing. What's going on this extended saga about the tensions between carriage and content?Top 5 Reasons The Evaluator Group Screwed Up
It’s been a while since the trainwreck of a “study” commissioned by Brocade and performed by The Evaluator Group, but it’s still being discussed in various storage circles (and that’s not good news for Brocade). Some pretty much parroted the results, seemingly without reading the actual test. Then got all pissy when confronted about it. I did a piece on my interpretations of the results, as did Dave Alexander of WWT and J Metz of Cisco. Our mutual conclusion can be best summed up with a single animated GIF.
But since a bit of time has passed, I’ve had time to absorb Dave and J’s opinions, as well as others, I’ve come up with a list of the Top 5 Reasons by The Evaluator Group Screwed Up. This isn’t the complete list, of course, but some of the more glaring problems. Let’s start with #1:
Reason #1: I Have No Idea What I’m Doing
Their hilariously bad conclusion to the higher variance in response times and higher CPU usage was that it was the cause of the software initiators. Except, they didn’t use software initiators. The had actually configured hardware initiators, and didn’t know it. Let that sink Continue reading
Blessay: We Need To Buy Infrastructure Dolls Not Babies For The Private Cloud
The future of private infrastructure ownership is moving to a new model combines the old with the new that I describe as “dolls and babies” where the major transformation in infrastructure ownership is the transition from having babies to owning dolls. Infrastructure as Babies Enterprises buy infrastructure like people have babies. It takes months to […]
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Coffee Break 7
This is “The Coffee Break”. A podcast on state of the networking business where we discuss vendors moves and news, analysis on product and positioning, and look at the business of networking. In the time it takes to have coffee break.Coffee Break 7
This is “The Coffee Break”. A podcast on state of the networking business where we discuss vendors moves and news, analysis on product and positioning, and look at the business of networking. In the time it takes to have coffee break.
The post Coffee Break 7 appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Coffee Break 7
This is “The Coffee Break”. A podcast on state of the networking business where we discuss vendors moves and news, analysis on product and positioning, and look at the business of networking. In the time it takes to have coffee break. Topics Cisco Reveals OpenFlow SDN Killer:OpFlex protocol for ACI offered to IETF, OpenDaylight Researchs […]
Author information
The post Coffee Break 7 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.
Blessay: Overlay Networking, BFD And Integration with Physical Network
Lede: In discussions with a stealthy networking startup today, we were discussing how their overlay network technology for the SDN WAN was able to to detect network blackouts and brownouts in the physical network. Their answer was to run Bi-directional Forwarding Detection (BFD) in the overlay tunnels. Now you have effective quality and service detection in the overlay network.
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Internets of Interest for 24th April 2014
Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 24th April 2014 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them: Why I quit writing internet standards — Tech News and Analysis – Vidya Narayanan writes at GigaOm about the dysfunction and problems of the IETF. I have similar […]
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Thought for My Day: Existing Networks are Self Automated and Policy Driven
Today’s Networks are auto-configuring and self-orchestrating. When you connect a server to network device, the device will identity the MAC address of the server and update it’s database. The server can make a request to a DHCP server and self configure. A network can be intentionally designed so that multiple paths exist through the network. […]
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26-bis – VxLAN VTEP GW: Software versus Hardware-based
Just a slight note to clarify some VxLAN deployment for an hybrid network (Intra-DC).
As discussed in the previous post, with the software-based VxLAN, only one single VTEP L2 Gateway can be active for the same VxLAN instance.
This means that all end-systems connected to the VLAN concerned by a mapping with a particular VNID must be confined into the same leaf switch where the VTEP GW is attached. Other end-systems connected to the same VLAN but on different leaf switches isolated by the layer 3 fabric cannot communicate with the VTEP L2 GW. This may be a concern with hybrid network where servers supporting the same application are spread over multiple racks.
To allow bridging between VNID and VLAN, it implies that the L2 network domain is spanned between the active VTEP L2 Gateway and all servers of interest that share the same VLAN ID. Among other improvements, VxLAN is also aiming to contain the layer 2 failure domain to its smallest diameter, leveraging instead layer 3 for the transport, not necessarily both. Although it is certainly a bit antithetical to VxLAN purposes, nonetheless if all leafs are concerned by the same mapping of VNID to VLAN ID, it is Continue reading
Mininet integrated hybrid OpenFlow testbed
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| Figure 1: Hybrid Programmable Forwarding Planes |
A number of vendors support sFlow and integrated hybrid OpenFlow today, examples described on this blog include: Alcatel-Lucent, Brocade, and Hewlett-Packard. However, building a physical testbed is expensive and time consuming. This article describes how to build an sFlow and hybrid OpenFlow testbed using free Mininet network emulation software. The testbed emulates ECMP leaf and spine data center fabrics and provides a platform for experimenting with analytics driven feedback control using the sFlow-RT hybrid OpenFlow controller.
First build an Ubuntu 13.04 / 13.10 virtual machine then follow instructions for installing Mininet - Option 3: Installation from Packages.
Next, install an Apache web server:
sudo apt-get install apache2Install the sFlow-RT integrated hybrid OpenFlow controller, either on the Mininet virtual machine, or on a different system (Java 1.6+ is required to run sFlow-RT):
Continue reading
What You Should Know Before Deploying and Designing OTV for Your DCI Strategy
I had a recent oportunity to come in to an OTV project half-way into its deployment cycle. There’s nothing too massive it, project was for a local Enterprise. Before OTV Diagram Overview Two...[[ Summary content only, you can read everything now, just visit the site for full story ]]
OpenStack + Docker + OpenContrail
Docker is a tool that simplifies the process of building container images. One of the issues with OpenStack is that building glance images is an off-line process. It is often difficult to track the contents of the images, how they where created and what software they contain. Docker also does not depend on virtualization; it creates linux container images that can be run directly by the host OS. This provides a much more efficient use of memory as well as better performance. It is a very attractive solution for DC operators that run a private infrastructure that serves in-house developed applications.
In order to run Docker as an openstack “hypervisor” start with devstack on ubuntu 12.04LTS. devstack includes a docker installer that will add a debian repository with the latest version of the docker packages.
After cloning the devstack repository one can issue the command:
tools/docker/install_docker.sh
For OpenContrail there isn’t yet a similar install tool. I built the OpenContrail packages from source and installed them manually, modifying the configuration files in order to have config, control and compute-node components all running locally.
Next, I edited the devstack localrc file to have the following settings:
VIRT_DRIVER=docker disable_service n-net enable_service neutron Continue reading
Blessay: The Internet is a “Cloud” for Networking
Can the Internet be the “Cloud Network” ? If so, when could the transition happen (if it hasn’t started already) ?
Supposition/Hypothesis As a technology, the Internet has strikingly similar properties to sharing Compute and Storage as ‘Cloud’. A large pool of resource that can be used or shared between many parties. The total pool of resource is dynamically allocated. Internet bandwidth is shared between all users and access is determined by bandwidth purchased at the network edge
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SSH Fingerprint issue on Mac OS X
If you use an Apple Mac to SSH to a device and the terminal sends an error message saying the SSH fingerprint does not match (following text), the easiest way to get new SSH fingerprints is by doing a ‘ssh-keygen -R IP_Address’.
Last login: Tue Apr 22 10:21:10 on ttys000
doka:~ doka$ ssh -l root 10.100.0.1
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that a host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
81:79:83:12:f3:85:9c:13:f8:d2:01:ac:43:1c2:28:2c.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in /Users/doka/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Offending RSA key in /Users/doka/.ssh/known_hosts:88
RSA host key for 10.100.0.1 has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.
doka:~ doka$ ssh-keygen -R 10.100.0.1
# Host 10.100.0.1 found: line 88 type RSA
/Users/doka/.ssh/known_hosts updated.
Original contents retained as /Users/doka/.ssh/known_hosts.old
doka:~ doka$ ssh -l root 10.100.0.1
The authenticity Continue reading
Passing Command Line Arguments to Python
The Common Way (I think) There’s a very well know way of grabbing command-line arguments and passing them to a Python program. This is done by importing the sys module and using the argv...[[ Summary content only, you can read everything now, just visit the site for full story ]]
EGP
Today I came across an old Cisco router with original IOS image. Big surprise (at least for me) when I did check what routing protocols are supported on this router: I was out of the game, or better not even yet had discover the networking games, when the EGP was still out there and available […]Trojan.Eclipse — A Bad Moon Rising?
ASERT’s malware collection and processing system has automatic heuristics that bubble up potentially new and interesting DDoS malware samples into a “for human analysis” queue. A recent member of this queue was Trojan.Eclipse and this post is my analysis of the malware and its associated campaigns.
Analysis was performed on the sample with an MD5 of 0cdd10cd3393d3fe916a55b946c10ad6.
The name Eclipse comes from two places: a mutex named “eclipseddos” and a hardcoded Cookie value used in the command and control (C2) phone home. We’ll see in the Campaign section below that this threat is also known as: shadowbot, gbot3, eclipsebot, Rhubot, and Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.qgxi.
Based on the C2 domain names, GeoIP of the C2 IP addresses, and a social media profile of the owner of one of the C2 domains, I suspect this malware to be Russian in origin. In addition, Eclipse is written in Delphi and empirically Russian malware coders have a certain fondness for this language.
Command and Control
The analyzed binary has a hardcoded C2 domain string. This string is protected from modification by running it through a simple hashing algorithm and comparing it against a hardcoded hash at certain points of the code. The Continue reading
Is Netflix’s Arresting Development with Comcast a House of Cards, or Is it The New Black?
Is Netflix's Arresting Development with Comcast a House of Cards, or Is it The New Black?
by Brian Boyko, Technology Contributor - April 22, 2014
Comcast has decided to start charging Netflix extra to connect Netflix's customers on Comcast's network. More or less. It gets complicated, depending on whether Netflix is being charged for data transfer, or interconnectivity.
The headline in the New York Times reads: “Comcast and Netflix Reach Deal On Service.” But Netflix CEO Reed Hastings posted on the official Netflix blog that there was a need for “a strong net neutrality,” calling the Comcast deal an “Internet toll.” That does not sound to me like Hastings came out of the deal happy.
Now, to be clear, what the deal is actually doing, on a technical level, is allowing Netflix to deliver its content directly to Comcast's servers, rather than going through a middleman such as Cogent. It's a type of “paid peering,” instead of “paid prioritization.”
Hastings, however, believes the two are the same thing – charging the content provider to provide the data at the rate that the ISP charges its customers. After all, the only reason Continue reading