Rate my IOS?

Review schemes are useful for identifying good consumer products and applications. But that doesn’t mean that everything needs to prompt me to leave a review. Cisco has started prompting for reviews for IOS versions, but I’m not convinced it makes sense for network operating systems. Perhaps it will do one day when disaggregated hardware/software is the norm for network devices.

Reviews for Consumer Apps – no problem

I love the 1Password password manager. It’s a well-polished app, and has been great value. Part of making my life better means not annoying me with frequent prompts for review:

1Password never prompts you for a review. We value your workflow too much to interrupt it. If you feel generous and have a couple of minutes, please leave a review. It means the world to us.

I like the Pocket app too. It prompts me to leave a review every single time it gets updated, which annoys the hell out of me. But hey, it’s free, so maybe I shouldn’t complain too much.

Pocket and 1Password are examples of consumer applications in a competitive market. The barrier to switching is relatively low, and they live and die on reviews. In a crowded market, customers rely on reviews, and the Continue reading

How to build Mininet documentation

After installing the Mininet software-defined network simulator on a virtual machine, you may want to build the documentation. Documentation is available on the Mininet web site but, if you installed a beta version of a new development release or installed an old version, you may want to use the documentation specific for the version you are using.

Mininet documentation is built into the source code and can be generated using the doxypy program. This post details the simple steps required to install doxypy and other required software, and to build and view the documentation.

Install doxypy

Start the Mininet virtual machine and log into it via SSH. See my previous post about setting up the Mininet SDN Network Simulator virtual machine.

On the Mininet VM, run the following command to install doxypy, and supporting software packages:

$ sudo apt-get install doxypy doxygen doxygen-latex help2man

This could take a while because it downloads over one Gigabyte of data, such as fonts.

Build the documentation

On the Mininet VM, run the following command to build the documentation

$ cd ~/mininet
$ make doc

This builds a PDF version of the documentation named refman.pdf in the folder: ~/mininet/doc/latex/.

Install a PDF Continue reading

Sorting Bookmarks in Safari for Mac OS X

If you’re anything like me, then you may just be a bit OCD or ANAL when it comes to some things. One of those things is, I like my bookmarks/favorites in alphabetical order with folders sorted...

[[ Summary content only, you can read everything now, just visit the site for full story ]]

Sorting Bookmarks in Safari for Mac OS X

If you’re anything like me, then you may just be a bit OCD or ANAL when it comes to some things. One of those things is, I like my bookmarks/favorites in alphabetical order with folders sorted...

[[ Summary content only, you can read everything now, just visit the site for full story ]]

Sorting Bookmarks in Safari for Mac OS X

If you’re anything like me, then you may just be a bit OCD or ANAL when it comes to some things. One of those things is, I like my bookmarks/favorites in alphabetical order with folders sorted...

[[ Summary content only, you can read everything now, just visit the site for full story ]]

Sorting Bookmarks in Safari for Mac OS X

If you’re anything like me, then you may just be a bit OCD or ANAL when it comes to some things. One of those things is, I like my bookmarks/favorites in alphabetical order with folders sorted first....

[[ Summary content only, you can read everything now, just visit the site for full story ]]

CoreOS – Using fleet to deploy an application

At this point we’ve deployed three hosts in our first and second CoreOS posts.  Now we can do some of the really cool stuff fleet is capable of doing on CoreOS!  Again – I’ll apologize that we’re getting ahead of ourselves here but I really want to give you a demo of what CoreOS can do with fleet before we spend a few posts diving into the details of how it does this.  So let’s dive right back in where we left off…

We should have 3 CoreOS hosts that are clustered.  Let’s verify that by SSHing into one of CoreOS hosts…

image

Looks good, the cluster can see all three of our hosts.  Let’s start work on deploying our first service using fleet.

Fleet works off of unit files.  This is a systemd construct and one that we’ll cover in greater detail in the upcoming systemd post.  For now, let’s look at what a fleet unit file might look like…

image

Note: These config files are out on my github account – https://github.com/jonlangemak/coreos/

Systemd works off of units and targets.  Suffice to say for now, the fleet service file describes a service Continue reading

FYI: Snowden made things worse

Snowden appeared at a #CatoSpyCon, and cited evidence of how things have improved since his disclosures (dislaimer: as Libertarian, I'm a fan of both CATO and Snowden). He cited some pretty compelling graphs, such as a sharp increase of SSL encryption. However, at the moment, I'm pretty sure he's made things worse.

The thing is, governments didn't know such surveillance was possible. Now that Snowden showed what the NSA was doing, governments around the world are following that blueprint, dramatically increasing their Internet surveillance. Not only do they now know how to do it, they are given good justifications. If the United States (the moral leader in "freedoms") says it's okay, then it must be okay for more repressive governments (like France). There is also the sense of competition, that if the NSA knows what's going on across the Internet, then they need to know, too.

This is a problem within the United Sates, too. The NSA collected everyone's phone records over the last 7 years. Before Snowden, that database was accessed rarely, and really for only terrorism purposes. However, now that everyone else in government knows the database exists, they are showing up at the NSA with warrants to Continue reading

EFF: We’ve always been at war with EastAsia

As a populist organization, the EFF is frequently Orwellian. That's demonstrated in their recent post about the "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace", where they say:

"The Declaration resounds eerily today. We live in an era where net neutrality is threatened by corporations that want to remove competition and force customers to pay more to have equal access to some sites."

This is self-contradictory. The Declaration says, unequivocally, that governments should not regulate cyberspace ("You have no sovereignty where we gather"), and should not make it into a public utility. The current EFF position is exactly the opposite, that government needs to regulate cyberspace as a public utility.

It is like that bit in 1984 where Orwell's government changes allegiances, going from being an ally with Eastasia to becoming their enemy, and then claim that they had always been at war with Eastasia. They made the change in mid-rally. Orwell describes how the mob quickly switched their beliefs, agreeing that they'd always been at war with Eastasia.

When I read 1984, I thought this was a bit over the top, that the mob would not behave so illogically. But we see the EFF mob today acts exactly that way Continue reading

iPexpert’s Newest “CCIE Wall of Fame” Additions 12/12/2014

Please Join us in congratulating the following iPexpert clients who have passed their CCIE lab!

  • Chris Hayden, CCIE #45781 (Collaboration)
  • Ahmed Samir , CCIE #45697 (Wireless)

We Want to Hear From You!

Have you passed your CCIE lab exam using any iPexpert or Proctor Labs self-study products, or attended our CCIE Bootcamp? If so, we’d like to add you to our CCIE Wall of Fame!

On Policy in the Data Center: Congress

By Tim Hinrichs and Scott Lowe with contributions from Alex Yip, Dmitri Kalintsev, and Peter Balland

(Note: this post is also cross-published at RuleYourCloud.com, a new site focused on policy.)

In the first few parts of this series, we discussed the policy problem, we outlined dimensions of the solution space, and we gave a brief overview of the existing OpenStack policy efforts. In this post we do a deep dive into one of the (not yet incubated) OpenStack policy efforts: Congress.

Overview

Remember that to solve the policy problem, people take ideas in their head about how the data center ought to behave (“policy”) and codify them in a language the computer system can understand. That is, the policy problem is really a programming languages problem. Not surprisingly Congress is, at its core, a policy language plus an implementation of that language.

Congress is a standard cloud service; you install it on a server, give it some inputs, and interact with it via a RESTful API. Congress has two kinds of inputs:

  • The other cloud services you’d like it to manage (for example, a compute manager like OpenStack Nova and a network manager like OpenStack Continue reading

PlexxiPulse—Reflections in Networking

2014 was a busy year in networking, and our friend Marcia Savage did a great job of summarizing the industry highs and lows – from ACI to white box switches – this week in a slideshow for Network Computing. It’s definitely worth a read before you head out for the weekend. Check out Marcia’s year end wrap up below as well as other happenings in the networking space this week.

In this week’s PlexxiTube video of the week, Dan Bachman explains how Plexxi incorporates optical transport into datacenter transport fabrics.

Computer Weekly: Cisco is missing the transition to software-defined networks
By Alex Scroxton
Little doubt remains that the future of networking will be defined by software, but market-watchers warn Cisco is missing this move. Cisco’s hardware forms the backbone of most enterprise networks around the world. But this world is changing and many buyers no longer see compute, storage and networking as distinct silos… Software-defined networking (SDN) company Plexxi, which recently appointed former EMC executive Richard Napolitano as its CEO, is one such company looking at the networking industry’s transition from networking towards an application and data-focused world. “We stand today at a transition point in the IT landscape,” says Continue reading

Basic Python Multithreading

The first ‘proper’ Python app I made logged onto a list of devices and pulled out OSPF state. This worked perfectly fine. The app correctly works out whether it can log into a device or not, and waits a few seconds to ensure a device actually responds. The issue is that if I have a […]
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