Mass Customization

I’ve mentioned in past articles about my belief that networking – both as a discipline and a technology – needs to be more consumable to other disciplines. But what does this mean? I was reminded of a few great examples today that I think are relevant to this idea, and might help explain my point a little more clearly.

Mass Production Meets Customization

The assembly line revolutionized the auto industry. Prior to this, vehicle production was very slow, and extremely costly. The introduction of the assembly line for creating automobiles allowed cars to be created in a predictable, repeatable way. However, Ford famously required all Model T’s to be painted black. Even before the introduction of the assembly line, the Model T was available in other colors, but with the move to mass production, this option was taken away.

The term “mass customization” is essentially the idea that mass production can co-habitate with customization, resulting in a customer experience that is personal and custom-built, but that also gets to experience the low unit cost that comes with mass production.

A great example of mass customization is the Moto X phone, whose commercials famously offer all kinds of customization options Continue reading

Response: Black Energy 2 Malware Router Abuse – Kaspersky

Kaspersky published a research note on Black Energy malware that uses backdoors and exploits on Cisco routers to install a TCL file, perform surveillance or destruction of the device configuration.   And, they revealed that their Cisco routers with different IOS versions were hacked. They weren’t able to connect to the routers any more by […]


The post Response: Black Energy 2 Malware Router Abuse – Kaspersky appeared first on EtherealMind.

Protocol Next-hops in a Junos Route-Reflection Cluster

I’ve finally had time to do some proper studying for JNCIE, and I noticed something that I may have been getting wrong for a looong time.  It is minor, but could have bad consequences in a route-reflection environment.

I have a lab topology set up that looks like this:

Route-reflection in JNCIE study lab

Route-reflection in JNCIE study lab

R1 is advertising a direct network of 10.0.5.0 to the route reflectors R3 and R4.   When I looked at R5 I was expecting to see R1 as the “protocol next-hop” but instead I was seeing R3 and R4.  That didn’t look right to me.

Some explanation first:  When you look at a route using “extensive” you get quite a lot of information but in there are two types of next hop.  The “forwarding next hop” is (literally) the next IP hop to get to the “protocol next-hop” which is the BGP speaker that is advertising the route.   The forwarding next hop is derived from the IGP, but the protocol next hop comes from iBGP.    I was expecting to see the forwarding next hop to be the other end of one of the circuits to R3 or R4 Continue reading

Show News: Network Down Stories and The Nightmare Before Christmas

Last year, we published two shows of horror stories about network outages and these shows generated a HUGE response from the audience. People emailed us about laughing, head nodding and “that happened to me”. Because you loved it, we are going to do it again. Because of time constraints the format will be a little […]

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 News: Network Down Stories and The Nightmare Before Christmas appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

Suppressing contributors to an aggregate route

This was a new one on me – in the past I have always advertised an aggregate route and then written policy to match the contributing routes so that they can be suppressed.  It turns out there’s an easier way to do this:

root@R3# show policy-options policy-statement AGG
term T1 {
    from protocol aggregate;
    then accept;
}
term T2 {
    from aggregate-contributor;
    then reject;
}

The Case for Hybrids

Plexxi along with Piston Cloud, Colovore, and King Star Computing published a white paper a few months back looking at the cost of a private cloud running OpenStack in a hosted environment versus renting compute instances from Amazon. The details are here. The short story is that in this analysis, at about 129 Cores, the costs for a private cloud start to become better than public cloud. Certainly the efficiency of colocation, commodity computing/storage, and an application oriented network fabric integrated tightly with a cloud orchestration management platform (OpenStack) has a lot of built in efficiencies so its not surprising to see the result of this analysis.

We’ve Seen this Story Before, Haven’t We?

Similarly, years ago in software development circles, the debates about outsourcing were fierce and emotional. Back then, much centered on the cost leverage available to companies to move development to low-cost areas such as India, China, and Eastern Europe. However, over time, companies found that while cost gave them flexibility and resourcing mite, the more important benefit ended up being owning development resources and presences close to emerging markets while leveraging outsourcing partners for on-demand resource expansion. Wow, sounds a lot like Colocation + Hybrid Cloud Continue reading

SDN Job Numbers – 3QCY14

How many SDN jobs are out there so far? If you missed the previous post, well, I’ve been counting them for about five months. Today’s post looks at the numbers for 3QCY14. Check out the previous post for all the picky details about how we gathered the data. This post focuses on the numbers!

 

 

 

SDN in the Job Title, 3QCY14

I’m theorizing that for a term to be in the title of the job posting, that term must be a pretty important part of the job. So, we searched for “SDN” in the title, at Dice.com and Monster.com, did some averaging to keep a week or two spike or drop from skewing the perception, and we’ve created some graphs.

Figure 1 shows the first graph:

  • Searches for SDN in the job title
  • The data is about new job listings per week
  • We use a couple of rolling averages to reduce the bumps in the graph
  • The graph shows both Dice and Monster combined, but with the raw numbers as well

 

Figure 1: SDN in the Job Title, Per-Week New Job Listings, 3QCY14

 

 

SDN in the Job Description

When we find “SDN” Continue reading

Alteon SSL key import wows

I was trying to import a new certificate with an SSL key, but it was without success.

But as usual, before trying that on production, I tried that on my lab setup. It was done without any problems.

But when trying with the production Alteon, running the same 29.5.1 version, I got this message:

> -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
Enter key passphrase:
Error: The private key is not a valid RSA key

Error: Failed to extract key XXXXX

After trying it several times, comparing some random strings inside the key I noticed a lag when I pasted the key to the production Alteon. The reason for the lag was SecureCRT that was configured to insert delays between keys. This feature is extremely useful with pasting large text into NX-OS.


My lab setup is with the default Line Send delay of 5ms and Character send delay of 0ms.

So I tried to use the lap SecureCRT delay setup on my production Alteon, and to my surprise it worked!

So to sum up: when pasting to Alteon 29.5.1, you better use the default SecureCRT delay settings.

One more thing and this will save you precious time digging through the command reference:

"key" and "srvrcert" names must be identical

SDN fabric controllers

Credit: sFlow.com
There is an ongoing debate in the software defined networking community about the functional split between a software edge and the physical core. Brad Hedlund argues the case in On choosing VMware NSX or Cisco ACI that a software only solution maximizes flexibility and creates fluid resource pools. Brad argues for a network overlay architecture that is entirely software based and completely independent of the underlying physical network. On the other hand, Ivan Pepelnjak argues in Overlay-to-underlay network interactions: document your hidden assumptions that the physical core cannot be ignored and, when you get past the marketing hype, even the proponents of network virtualization acknowledge the importance of the physical network in delivering edge services.

Despite differences, the advantages of a software based network edge are compelling and there is emerging consensus behind this architecture with  a large number of solutions available, including: Hadoop, Mesos, OpenStack, VMware NSX, Juniper OpenContrail, Midokura Midonet, Nuage Networks Virtual Services Platform, CPLANE Dynamic Virtual Networks and PLUMgrid Open Networking Suite.

In addition, the move to a software based network edge is leading to the adoption of configuration management and deployment tools from the DevOps Continue reading

Mass Customization

I’ve mentioned in past articles about my belief that networking - both as a discipline and a technology - needs to be more consumable to other disciplines. But what does this mean? I was reminded of a few great examples today that I think are relevant to this idea, and might help explain my point a little more clearly. Mass Production Meets Customization The assembly line revolutionized the auto industry.

Mass Customization

I’ve mentioned in past articles about my belief that networking - both as a discipline and a technology - needs to be more consumable to other disciplines. But what does this mean? I was reminded of a few great examples today that I think are relevant to this idea, and might help explain my point a little more clearly. Mass Production Meets Customization The assembly line revolutionized the auto industry.

Using Firewalls for Policy Has Been a Disaster

Almost every SDN vendor today talks about policy, how they make it easy to express and enforce network policies. Cisco ACI, VMware NSX, Nuage Networks, OpenStack Congress, etc. This sounds fantastic. Who wouldn’t want a better, simpler way to get the network to apply the policies we want? But maybe it’s worth taking a look at how we manage policy today with firewalls, and why it doesn’t work.

In traditional networks, we’ve used firewalls as network policy enforcement points. These were the only practical point where we could do so. But…it’s been a disaster. The typical modern enterprise firewall has hundreds (or thousands) of rules, has overlapping, inconsistent rules, refers to decommissioned systems, and probably allows far more access than it should. New rules are almost always just added to the bottom, rather than working within the existing framework – it’s just too hard to figure out otherwise.

Why have they been a disaster? Here’s a few thoughts:

  • Traditional firewalls use IP addresses. But there’s no automated connection between server configuration/IP allocation and firewall policies. So as servers move around or get decommissioned, firewall policies don’t get automatically updated. You end up with many irrelevant objects and Continue reading

Voters are jerks

Out and about today, jerks are proudly displaying a "I Voted!" sticker. My twitter feed is likewise full of people proudly declaring they voted. They only serve to perpetuate the problem.

Most voted for incumbents, while spending the rest of the year bitching about how bad the incumbents are.

Most base their voting on vapid political rhetoric, rather than understanding the issues. Their political analysis comes from late night comedians rather than serious sources. Those like Vox or the Economist do a good job with analysis, but of course, few read them because that would require thinking. It's much easier watching Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert and laugh about how stupid other people are.

Though, understanding the issues is really just a smokescreen. What people really vote for is to take money from other groups and give it to themselves. They mask it in issues like national defense or the environment, but it's really just a money grab.

People proudly vote in this election, where few contests are competitive. These same people ignored the primaries, where their votes could have made a difference.

People waste their vote on major parties. Frankly, we live in a one Party state with Continue reading

Normalizing ACLs to Support Automated Changes

Although I look forward to network fabric management seeing broad deployment, the fact is that many networks (and especially enterprise LAN/WAN) will be managed with traditional methods for some time yet. Inconsistencies in device configurations can present a barrier to some types of automation. In this article, we’ll explore that very challenge and a resolution I came up with to handle it.

Not long ago, I was trying to automate an ACL line insertion task with a popular network configuration push tool that basically does CLI interaction with something like Expect. I needed to push a similar change to about 20 devices with minimal effort. Unfortunately, when looking at the ACL on several sample devices out of the target device pool, I saw things like this:
R1(config)#do sh access-list NAT
Extended IP access list NAT
14 deny ip 10.10.1.48 0.0.0.7 10.0.0.0 0.255.255.255
20 deny ip 10.11.1.48 0.0.0.7 10.0.0.0 0.255.255.255
25 permit ip 10.10.1.48 0.0.0.7 192.168.0.0 0.0.255.255
30 permit ip 10.10.1.48 0. Continue reading

How Do You Spell That?

I spent a bit of my career on the phone doing support for a national computer vendor. In addition to the difficulties of walking people through opening the case and diagnosing motherboard issues, I found myself needing to overcome language barriers. While I only have a hint of an accent (or so I’ve been told), spelling out acronyms was a challenge. That’s where the phonetic alphabet comes into play

By now, almost everyone uses the NATO phonetic alphabet. It’s the most recognized in the world. The US joint Army/Navy version varies a bit but does have a lot of similarities. However, when I first started out using the NATO version quite a few callers didn’t know what Lima was or giggled when I said Tango.

I decided that some people have much more familiarity with first names. This was borne out when I kept using Mary for “M” instead of Mike. People immediately knew it. Same for Victor, Peter, and so on. So I cobbled together my own Name Phonetic Alphabet.

A – Adam
B – Barbara
C – Charlie
D – David
E – Edward
F – Frank
G – George
H – Harold
I Continue reading

Does a Cloud Orchestration System Need an Underlying SDN Controller?

A while ago I had an interesting discussion with a fellow SDN explorer, in which I came to a conclusion that it makes no sense to insert an overlay virtual networking SDN controller between cloud orchestration system and virtual switches. As always, I missed an important piece of the puzzle: federation of cloud instances.

2014-11-04 16:48Z: CJ Williams sent me an email with information on SDN controller in upcoming Windows Server release. Thank you!

Read more ...

FREE Ansible Up & Running Preview

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Are you camped out at your local bookstore awaiting the release of Ansible Up & Running next year and want something to read? How about the first 3 chapters of the book? 

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