Network Namespace Provisioning

I’d written previously on how to use OpenContrail with Linux network namespaces. I managed to find the cycles to put together a configuration wrapper that can be used as a pre-start and post-stop scripts when starting a daemon out of init.d. The scripts are in a python package available in github.

As in the previous post, the test application i used was the apache web server. But most Linux services follow a rather similar pattern when it comes to their init scripts.

I started by installing two bare metal servers with the OpenContrail community packages; one server running the configuration service and both of them running both control-node and compute-node components.

For this exercise, the objective was to be able to select the routing for the outbound traffic for a specific application. For this purpose, I started by creating two virtual-networks, one used for incoming traffic and separate one to be used for outbound traffic for a specific application. The script network_manage.py can be used for this purpose; it can create and delete virtual-networks as well as add and delete external route targets.

After creating an inbound and app-specific outbound networks, one can use the netns-daemon-start script to create Continue reading

Show 186 – The Silicon Inside Your Network Device – Part 1

This is Part 1 in a special series looking at the inside of your network device. Although software will be at heart of network innovation, it will still run on hardware and it’s time to expose the internals of our network hardware and understand the hardware architecture inside a typical device. Many people are surprised […]

Author information

Greg Ferro

Greg Ferro is a Network Engineer/Architect, mostly focussed on Data Centre, Security Infrastructure, and recently Virtualization. He has over 20 years in IT, in wide range of employers working as a freelance consultant including Finance, Service Providers and Online Companies. He is CCIE#6920 and has a few ideas about the world, but not enough to really count.

He is a host on the Packet Pushers Podcast, blogger at EtherealMind.com and on Twitter @etherealmind and Google Plus.

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The post Show 186 – The Silicon Inside Your Network Device – Part 1 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

Response: RFC 7167 – A Framework for Point-to-Multipoint

Frame Relay was to teach multipoint networking to upcoming engineers and we recently abandoned on the curriculum. Now it's back in MPLS-TP.

The post Response: RFC 7167 – A Framework for Point-to-Multipoint appeared first on EtherealMind.

Brocade Vyatta & Forwarding Performance on X86 Server

It's a constant and oft repeated fallacy that software on x86 servers will never forward packets at speed. Here is Vyatta explaining why their software will be able to go past 100 Million Packets Per Second this year on standard COTS hardware.

The post Brocade Vyatta & Forwarding Performance on X86 Server appeared first on EtherealMind.

Why Internet Standards are Still Important

Vidya Narayana, in a piece at Gigaom, said recently: So, why did I actually stop contributing to standards definitions? The primary one is the fact that while the pace at which standards are written hasn’t changed in many years, the pace at which the real world adopts software has become orders of magnitude faster. Standards, unfortunately, […]

Author information

Russ White

Principle Engineer at Ericsson

Russ White is a Network Architect who's scribbled a basket of books, penned a plethora of patents, written a raft of RFCs, taught a trencher of classes, and done a lot of other stuff you either already know about, or don't really care about. You want numbers and letters? Okay: CCIE 2635, CCDE 2007:001, CCAr, BSIT, MSIT (Network Design & Architecture, Capella University), MACM (Biblical Literature, Shepherds Theological Seminary). Russ is a Principal Engineer in the IPOS Team at Ericsson, where he works on lots of different stuff, serves on the Routing Area Directorate at the IETF, and is a cochair of the Internet Society Advisory Council. Russ will be speaking in November at the Ericsson Technology Day. he recently published The Art of Network Architecture, is currently working on a new book in the area Continue reading

Amusing Junos commands….

This Junos command always makes me laugh – and I’ve never bothered to work out what it does:

  qualified-bum-pruning-mode  Enable BUM pruning for VPLS instance

No, Software Defined Networking will not Doom Engineers

No, Software Defined Networking will not Doom Engineers

With the advent of SDN, there is a lot of speculation these days about the future of network engineers. An article in PCWorld written by Stephen Lawson of IDG News Service caught our eye a while back for doing an excellent job dissecting the situation: 

“Will software-defined networking doom the command line interface?” “Will SDN spell doom for the tool that network engineers have used throughout their careers?” Lawson asks. 

“If done properly, yes, it should kill the CLI. Which scares the living daylights out of the vast majority of CCIEs,” Gartner analyst Joe Skorupa said. “Certainly all of those who define their worth in their job as around the fact that they understand the most obscure Cisco CLI commands for configuring some corner-case BGP4 (Border Gateway Protocol 4) parameter.” 

Now, Lawson did a great job of examining the question he set up. In our opinion though, the main issue is not with the CLI. Sure, command line interfaces were eventually replaced in many places with graphical user interfaces in the general history of computers. But CLIs have Continue reading

Deploying Datacenter MPLS/VPN on Junos

One of my recent projects has been deploying an MPLS/VPN architecture across a pair of smallish datacenters comprised entirely of Juniper gear. While I'm no stranger to MPLS/VPN, I am still a bit green to Junos, so it was a good learning exercise. My previous articles covering MPLS/VPN on Cisco IOS have been fairly popular, so I figured it would be worthwhile to cover a similar implementation in the Juniper world.

For our datacenters, we decided to implement a simple spine and leaf topology with a pair of core routers functioning as IBGP route reflectors and a pair of layer three ToR switches in each server rack. The spine is comprised of four layer three switches which run only MPLS and OSPF; they do not participate in BGP.

This article assume some basic familiarity with MPLS/VPN, so if you're new to the game, consider reading through these previous articles for some background before continuing:

• Intro to VRF Lite
• Inter-VRF Routing with VRF Lite
• Getting to know MPLS
• Creating an MPLS VPN

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Building a business case for an SDN deployment