The Impact of White Box on Cloud Networking

The adoption of cloud networking architectures by both the hyper-scale cloud companies and increasingly enterprise networks proves the need for open standards and modern networking software to gain the benefits of agility, programmability and resiliency. These architectures are all driven by the move to standardized topologies and container-scale deployment to achieve cloud economics.

The recent Facebook introduction of a reference design to align to the OCP (Open Compute Platform) server project with a network switch (“Wedge”) based on a Linux OS is a good benchmark for the use of open standards, control and merchant silicon. While many may view this as a threat to legacy proprietary networking, to me it’s a welcome validation of Arista’s approach to building modern software that is open and programmable as opposed to a proprietary, bloated and complex legacy OS. It is also a symbol of Arista’s co-development of APIs offering access for specific application control in Facebook’s network. This is a fitting example of how “white box” technology could be applied to a specific SDN use case. It is not trying to address broad data center use with multiple applications and mobile workloads.

Arista EOS for Universal Workloads and Workflows

Two factors are driving Continue reading

Internets of Interest for 30th June 2014

  Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 30th June 2014 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them: Minimum Viable Bureaucracy, June 2014 Edition // Speaker Deck – Enjoyed this presentation on “Minimum Viable Bureauracy” – some stimulating ideas on how to build better managers of […]

The post Internets of Interest for 30th June 2014 appeared first on EtherealMind.

Spine/Leaf Topology Explorer with Ansible

I’ve mentioned before the need for networks to be addressed in a very programmatic way. Very often, I’ve found the discussion is actually a lot less about “programming language” details and more about getting rid of the methodology of addressing the network as a mere “collection of boxes” (see “Box Mentality“).

Instead, we have the ability to address the network as any developer would address the distributed components of an application. We acknowledge that networks are a distributed system – it’s what makes them as scalable as they have been. However, it’s important to understand we can address configuration and troubleshooting needs in a unified, automated way as well.

My goal in this post is to explore one particular application of such a methodology. I will use Ansible to first create a dataset that represents a spine/leaf network topology – also demonstrating how it might scale beyond my small lab implementation – then I will move into some kind of network task based on this information.

I have access to a few Cisco Nexus 9000 switches in the lab, and I wanted to be able to model a spine/leaf topology in a very elegant way that would (theoretically) scale as Continue reading

Show 194 – SDN Northbound Interfaces with Sarwar Raza + Colin Dixon

At a conference I attended in late 2013 or early 2014 (I’ve forgetten which one), I was privileged to hear Sarwar Raza (HP, ONF) discuss the challenge of creating and implementing SDN northbound interfaces (NBI). Then at the Open Daylight Summit in February 2014, I found myself in a conversation with Colin Dixon (Brocade, formerly […]

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Ethan Banks

Co-host at Packet Pushers

Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, has been managing networks for higher ed, government, financials and high tech since 1995. Ethan co-hosts the Packet Pushers Podcast, which has seen over 2M downloads and reaches over 10K listeners. With whatever time is left, Ethan writes for fun & profit, studies for certifications, and enjoys science fiction. @ecbanks
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The post Show 194 – SDN Northbound Interfaces with Sarwar Raza + Colin Dixon appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Spine/Leaf Topology Explorer with Ansible

I’ve mentioned before the need for networks to be addressed in a very programmatic way. Very often, I’ve found the discussion is actually a lot less about “programming language” details and more about getting rid of the methodology of addressing the network as a mere “collection of boxes” (see “Box Mentality”). Instead, we have the ability to address the network as any developer would address the distributed components of an application.

Spine/Leaf Topology Explorer with Ansible

I’ve mentioned before the need for networks to be addressed in a very programmatic way. Very often, I’ve found the discussion is actually a lot less about “programming language” details and more about getting rid of the methodology of addressing the network as a mere “collection of boxes” (see “Box Mentality”). Instead, we have the ability to address the network as any developer would address the distributed components of an application.

DNS Packet

The Naked DNS Packet







The above shows the DNS Opcodes in a DNS request.








Additional insight into the packet - As you can see that the DNS server responding was not authoritative and supported recursion.

IP Subnetting Part 2: Simple Subnetting Examples

Subnetting is a foundational concept in IP networking. Although it is often misunderstood and even dreaded, this is a simple concept if we could look at things from the perspective of binary. However the combination of binary concepts, IP addressing and subnet masking is a lot to attempt to understand at once.

In this article, we will look at some simple examples that are meant to illustrate the process of IPv4 subnetting. This is not meant to be a comprehensive study. It is meant to build my previous subnetting article and should introduce only basic concepts. In future articles, we will delve into more complex and complete examples of IP subnetting.

In an earlier article, I outlined the concept of Classful IP Addressing. That knowledge is a fundamental starting point for the IP Subnetting discussed here. In that article, I outlined three classes of unicast IP addresses. The class an IP address belongs to determines what part of the address is the network and what part is the host. That assumption can be overridden when by applying a subnet mask to the configuration of a modern IP stack.

Example IP Addresses

Address           Class           Network           Continue reading

Docker Essentials – The docker file

So we’ve done quite a bit with docker up to this point.  If you’ve missed the earlier posts, take a look at them here…

Getting Started with Docker
Docker essentials – Images and Containers
Docker essentials – More work with images

So I’d like to take us to the next step and talk about how to use docker files.  As we do that, we’ll also get our first exposure to how docker handles networking.  So let’s jump right in!

We saw earlier that when working with images that the primary method for modifying images was to commit your container changes to an image.  This works, but it’s a bit clunky since you’re essentially starting a docker container, making changes, exiting out of it, and then committing the changes.  What if we could just run a script that would build the image for us?  Enter docker files!

Docker has the ability to build an image based on a set of instructions referred to as a docker file.  Using the docker run command, we can rather easily build a custom image and then spin up containers based upon the image.  Docker files use a Continue reading

Choosing Sides In Technology

Sometimes There Is Too Much Choice

Sometimes There Is Too Much Choice

I started out the evening writing a post on Aruba ClearPass, but this has been weighing on my mind lately, so I figured Aruba ClearPass can wait.

It seems that the Internet is filled with all sorts of opinions as it relates to all things IT. Shocking, isn’t it? ;)

We squabble over all sorts of technical things that mean a great deal to us as IT folks, but probably not a whole lot to the people who actually benefit from the use of those systems. Yes, I am referring to the end users. What do they care about? They care about their systems working. That’s it. They have their own jobs to worry about. This can be confirmed by the fact that end users almost never call up the IT department or fire off an e-mail unless there is a problem. Consider exhibit A:

1. Does it work? Great. I can do my job. The IT department isn’t even on my mental radar.

2. Is it broken? Uh oh. Now I can’t do my job as effective, or quite possibly, at all. Time to notify IT to get this thing back up and running.

Continue reading

EIGRP and OSPF – Are We Connected?

For both OSPF and EIGRP routers to become neighbors, their interface’s primary IP address must be on the same subnet. That statement is true. There is a difference in the definition of “same subnet”, though.

In OSPF, both routers have to be configured to be on the same subnet with the same mask or else they won’t neighbor up.  When an hello packet is sent, the subnet mask is sent embedded in there.  The router does a quick look to be sure the subnets are defined the same way on both ends.  If everything doesn’t match, they don’t neighbor. Here’s a Wireshark screenshot to show you the OSPF hello.  Note: See edit below.

OSPF-Header

In EIGRP,the subnet mask isn’t sent in the hello packet, so that doesn’t come into play.  Each router does a subnet calculation on the source address of the potential suitor, and, if that guy falls within the connected network, the peering magic happens.  Here’s another Wireshark shot for you to enjoy.

EIGRP-Header

Send any Wireshark certification vouchers questions my way.

Edit:  I did some further research on Julius’s comment about point-to-point links in OSPF.  It is absolutely true that point-to-point links do indeed ignore the subnet Continue reading

Docker performance monitoring

IT’S HERE: DOCKER 1.0 recently announced the first production release of the Docker Linux container platform. Docker is seeing explosive growth and has already been embraced by IBM, RedHat and RackSpace. Today the open source Host sFlow project released support for Docker, exporting standard sFlow performance metrics for Linux containers and unifying Linux containers with the broader sFlow ecosystem.
Visibility and the software defined data center
Host sFlow Docker support simplifies data center performance management by unifying monitoring of Linux containers with monitoring of virtual machines (Hyper-V, KVM/libvirt, Xen/XCP/XenServer), virtual switches (Open vSwitch, Hyper-V Virtual Switch, IBM Distributed Virtual Switch, HP FlexFabric Virtual Switch), servers (Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD), and physical networks (over 40 vendors, including: A10, Arista, Alcatel-Lucent, Arista, Brocade, Cisco, Cumulus, Extreme, F5, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Juniper, Mellanox, NEC, ZTE). In addition, standardizing metrics allows allows measurements to be shared among different tools, further reducing operational complexity.


The talk provides additional background on the sFlow standard and case studies. The remainder of this article describes how to use Host sFlow to monitor a Docker server pool.

First, download, compile and install the Host sFlow agent on a Docker host (Note: The agent needs to Continue reading

ERSPAN – My New Favorite Packet Capturing Trick

When I first looked at the documentation for ERSPAN I could imagine some uses for it. In some cases it could replace RSPAN, but since it’s only available on Cisco Nexus switches, newer Catalyst 6500s, Cisco ASR routers, and other “high end” devices, I determined that it really had limited uses. But I was wrong. […]

Author information

Gary Sckolnick

Gary Sckolnick

Gary is a Senior Network Engineer at a large academic medical center. Gary has over 17 years of networking and IT experience primarily in healthcare, manufacturing, and as a networking consultant both in Europe and in the U.S. Although a networking jack-of-all-trades, Gary’s primary focus is data center networking and network security. Gary blogs periodically at PacketPushers.net.

The post ERSPAN – My New Favorite Packet Capturing Trick appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Gary Sckolnick.

Wireshark on Android

The other day I found myself wishing I could run wireshark in realtime on an Android phone, but use the familiar GUI on my laptop. After a few minutes tinkering around, I was doing exactly that.

The phone belonged to an Android developer, so he'd already rooted it, enabled developer tools, etc... He'd also installed a packet capture application which worked, but didn't allow me to see things in real time.

The Android SDK bundle contains the adb binary, which is required for connecting to the phone. Extract adb and drop it somewhere in $PATH
 # run adb as root:  
 adb root  
 # connect to the phone over WiFi (the phone's owner had
 # already enabled this feature with 'adb tcpip' via USB):  
 adb connect <phone's wifi ip address>  
 # check that we get a root shell on the phone:  
 adb shell 'id'

It turns out that the packet capture application included a tcpdump binary at /data/data/lv.n3o.shark/files/tcpdump, and invoking it from the adb shell worked normally. It produced the usual startup message, and then a one line summary of each packet.
 adb shell '/data/data/lv.n3o.shark/files/tcpdump -c 2'
 tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for  Continue reading

F5 Configuration Backups 3.0

In a previous article I introduced a project for the configuration backups of F5 devices. It offered an automated, centralized backup service for F5 BigIP devices with a web interface. There was also several features mentioned in the road map. Now after 4 months of tireless work, version 3.0 of the Config Backup for F5 […]

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Eric Flores

Eric Flores

Eric is a senior network engineer for a major real estate company. He has seven years in the field and has a passion for anything related to technology. Find him on Twitter @nerdoftech.
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The post F5 Configuration Backups 3.0 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Eric Flores.

Microsoft Office 365 outage

6/24/2014 Information Week - Microsoft Exchange Online Suffers Service Outage, "Service disruptions with Microsoft's Exchange Online left many companies with no email on Tuesday."

The following entry on the Microsoft 365 community forum describes the incident:
====================================

Closure Summary: On Tuesday, June 24, 2014, at approximately 1:11 PM UTC, engineers received reports of an issue in which some customers were unable to access the Exchange Online service. Investigation determined that a portion of the networking infrastructure entered into a degraded state. Engineers made configuration changes on the affected capacity to remediate end-user impact. The issue was successfully fixed on Tuesday, June 24, 2014, at 9:50 PM UTC.

Customer Impact: Affected customers were unable to access the Exchange Online service.

Incident Start Time: Tuesday, June 24, 2014, at 1:11 PM UTC

Incident End Time: Tuesday, June 24, 2014, at 9:50 PM UTC

=====================================
The closure summary shows that operators took 8 hour 39 minutes to manually diagnose and remediate the problem with degraded networking infrastructure. The network related outage described in this example is not an isolated incident; other incidents described on this blog include: Packet loss, Amazon EC2 outage, Gmail outage, Delay vs utilization for Continue reading

Beyond the Blog

I'm thinking about writing a book.

Obviously, there are a lot of networking books on the market today. Search for any mainstream certification on Amazon and you'll find titles from half a dozen publishers. The majority of these are oriented toward specific vendors (most commonly Cisco) and many parallel a given certification exam. These books are overall pretty great. Most of them.

There also exists a minority of books which cover topics outside of the vendor-driven mainstream, like Gary A. Donahue's Network Warrior published by O'Reilly, now in its second edition. I love this kind of independent title because its content isn't constrained to a particular mold. The author finds stuff he thinks is relevant and interesting, and he writes about it. This is the correct way to write a book.

But over the past few years it has become painfully evident to me that there are many areas of this field we simply don't talk about in print, at least not at the entry level where perhaps it would be most helpful. If you want a thirty-page lecture on subnetting or a terrible mnemonic for the OSI model, pick any CCNA book from the pile and you're good to Continue reading

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