Using LISP for IPv6 tunnelling.

In this post I would like to show how its possible to use a fairly new protocol, LISP, to interconnect IPv6 islands over an IPv4 backbone/core network.

LISP stands for Locator ID Seperation Protocol. As the name suggest, its actually meant to decouple location from identity. This means it can be used for such cool things as mobility, being VM’s or a mobile data connection.

However another aspect of using LISP involves its tunneling mechanism. This is what I will be using in my example to provide the IPv6 islands the ability to communicate over the IPv4-only backbone.

There is alot of terminology involved with LISP, but i will only use some of them here for clarity. If you want to know more about LISP, a good place to start is http://lisp.cisco.com.

The topology i will be using is a modified version of one presented in a Cisco Live presentation called “BRKRST-3046 – Advanced LISP – Whats in it for me?”. I encourage you to view this as well for more information.

Here is the topology:

LISP-IPv6-Topology

Some background information about the setup. Both Site 1 and Site 2 are using EIGRP as the IGP. Both IPv4 and Continue reading

HP NNMi 10.00 Released

HP NNMi version 10.0 has been released. This is a good release, with many usability enhancements. I’m pleased to see continued development, as the future nirvana of all-powerful software defined networks hasn’t quite arrived yet. For now, we still have to manage our networks the old-fashioned way: SNMP is still alive & kicking.

NNMi – Background

HP NNMi is a spiritual descendant of HP OpenView, one of the first network monitoring tools. Between versions 6 and 7, HP completely re-wrote the NNM code, and now we have NNMi. The core product performs network discovery and fault monitoring. Add-on components (iSPIs) offer performance monitoring, NetFlow analysis, IP SLA monitoring, etc. A sister-product (HP Network Automation) is used for network configuration management. The add-on components were all separately licensed, but HP now bundles products together.

Historically NNMi has focused on underlying network monitoring capabilities, and less on the user interface. This meant that almost anything was technically possible, but the visual experience was underwhelming. The integration between core product and add-on components was limited.

The last major release was 9.20, in June 2012. There have been minor enhancements and fixes since, but the last patch was in September 2013. We’ve been due for Continue reading

Why logging is so important? VSS example.

Example: Why switch in VSS mode crashed? Few weeks ago there was a great podcast about logging (show 192). Recently I came with great example about how important logging is. If there is only one thing that I could pick up from the podcast it would be following statement “log as much as you can, […]

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Michał Janowski

Michał Janowski

I was happy to finish light studies with a specialization active turism :). Than moved to IT world and participated in postgraduate studies which relied upon CCNA exploration course. After that I got my first job in IT as a software tester in Nokia Siemens Networks where I was responsible for verification of code running on radio equipment (3g, LTE). Now, as a Cisco TAC enginner I am helping cutomers resolving problems in their networks. I belong to unit responsible for Catalyst switches, so forgive me as most of my posts would be influenced by the technology I know the best.
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The post Why logging is so important? VSS example. appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Michał Janowski.

What is Service Chaining?

This post is in response to a comment on one of my previous posts on using MPLS in the Data Center. Service chaining has been getting a lot of press — and I’m encountering it a lot in the customers I’m talking to. What’s the big deal? To understand service chaining, let’s look at a […]

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Russ White

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

OSPF Enhancements in recent IOS versions

OSPFv3 Authentication Trailer In 2011 I wrote an article showing that in order to provide authenticated OSPFv3 neighbour sessions, you needed the security license on IOS. Manav Bhatia commented on that post stating they were working on an IETF standard to fix this. That draft became RFC6506 and then RFC7166 Cisco has added support for […]

OpenStack taining

There are two buzzwords floating around. Cloud and SDN.

They are even closely related.

For now, SDN is mostly a buzzword but Cloud is actually something people are using daily, such as AWS, Azure, Rackspace, Google and others.

As network engineer, my chances of touching or even seeing the details of the backends of those public clouds are quit small. However, private clouds are different.

With private clouds, as it was with VMWare installations, network engineers are expected to be able to support and install the network side of things.

So I have decided to jump in and learn private clouds. And for me, the best way to learn is always hands on.

OpenStack has these online training guides: http://docs.openstack.org/training-guides/content/

I'll jump right in and do the Operator Training Guide.

I'll publish a series of posts with my experience with the training material, and I'll update this post with links to all of the posts.




Blog status report 2014

The occasion of my fiftieth post is a good milestone to pause and look back on the two years since I started blogging about open-source routing and network simulation. I will review the blog’s performance statistics and reflect on why I started this blog and what I want to do next.

50th post stats

The chart above shows the blog traffic over the past two years, starting in August 2012. In the first year I thought I would reach only a small audience but, as I posted more content, more users found my blog. In the past twelve months, 29,500 unique users visited this blog. Traffic grew steadily almost every month in the past year.

Users from almost every country on Earth have visited this blog. The map below illustrates the number of users in each country who have visited the blog during the past twelve months, with shades of blue representing the number of users.

50th-post-map-stats

I considered writing a technical blog after listening to the audiobook Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuck, read by the author. The audiobook was very inspirational and made me understand that writing a blog could be a positive experience.

The next book I read was Technical Blogging Continue reading

Joining the Cisco Team

HeadShots-10pToday was a bittersweet day for me. It was my final day working with a great group of people at a prominent community bank. I have nothing but good things to say about the people, the organization, and the interesting projects I’ve been involved in. I’ll miss everyone a lot and plan to stay in touch.

Tomorrow I begin a new role as a Systems Engineer at Cisco Systems. I will be working with the SLED (public sector) sales team in Kentucky and West Virginia. In this role I hope to broaden my knowledge of networking components and spend time helping customers better position their technology infrastructures.

What this means for me–

I will be aggressively learning the Cisco Product lines, including areas that I previously had less exposure to. I will take advantage of the resources I have and marry my vision of the changing network industry to the components Cisco positions into higher education environments. My intentions include better understanding the roadmap and technical details as they pertain to the integration path from traditional networking to software defined approaches.

But what about…

As long time PacketU readers know, I have written positive and negative articles about many vendors. All vendors have their strengths and weaknesses. We regularly see them Continue reading

How I Passed the CCIE Collaboration Lab Exam

Having passed the CCIE Voice 10 years ago, and having taught on the technologies surrounding both Voice and Collaboration ever since, one might think that the exam would be easy to pass. I can assure you that no matter how much you know, no CCIE exam is easy to pass. Cisco doesn’t allow them to be. Every CCIE track requires hard work and preparation, even if it may, at first glance, seem somewhat of a repeat of things you already know. You may ask since I had the CCIE Voice already, why I didn’t simply take the Collaboration Written exam and convert my cert to a CCIE Collaboration? The answer I think is pretty straightforward – it’s the challenge!! Seeing if you still have it 10 years later. Seeing if what you’ve been teaching your students for 10 years is still up to par and still relevant. To take you back to when I passed CCIE Voice ten years ago, the track was literally brand new that year, and Cisco was testing on CallManager version 3.3, SIP wasn’t anywhere to be found, and creating a hunt group meant tweaking Attendant Console to make it do things it shouldn’t ever Continue reading

Juniper Password Recovery

I recently purchased a Juniper J2320 from eBay for a fair price.  I know it is an older router, but it has the features I need in order to test and write a few things.  When I received the router it was not sent with a wiped config, so I was unable to log into […]

Network Break 14

The Network Break isn't broken and returns for another week with a closer look at the news.

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 Network Break 14 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

New Feature in Cumulus Linux 2.2: sFlow

sFlow is an open protocol, newly supported in Cumulus Linux 2.2, that enables a collector to determine what is going on in a complex network.

It is used to collect statistics, such as packet counts, error counts, CPU usage, etc from a large number of individual switches. What is especially interesting is that it can be used to collect sampled packets (usually only the first n bytes, containing the header), along with some metadata about those packets.

Bringing sFlow to Cumulus Linux was particuarly easy, because “hsflowd” was already available for implementing sFlow support on Linux servers. We were able to reuse that existing code, with extremely minimal modification, to implement sFlow on our Linux based switches.

sFlow allows a collector to get a statistical view of what is going on in a collection of switches, approaching per-flow granularity. This is extremely useful information to present to users for capacity planning and debugging purposes, but things really get interesting when the collector can make decisions based on the information.

For example, our friends at inMon implemented detection of elephant flows (high bandwidth), followed by marking those flows on the switch at network ingress for special QoS handling. This nearly Continue reading

More DHCP Snooping

This post is a follow up to Ethan’s post and Edward’s post. Both were very useful to me as I began to plan rolling out this feature. I wanted to verify something TimA said in the comments at the bottom of Ethan’s post, namely that a switch running DHCP Snooping will drop DHCP Discovers from […]

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Guy Morrell

Guy is a Network Architect and Engineer working at a major UK university. He blogs over at howfantastic.net mostly for his own benefit. From time to time he may write something which he thinks will be of interest to a wider audience and will post those blogs here at packetpushers.net, until someone tells him to stop.
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The post More DHCP Snooping appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Guy Morrell.

Install and configure vSphere Data Protection (VDP/VDPA)

The vSphere Data Protection appliance allows to backup virtual machines with a built-in tool instead of a third-party backup product. VDP is available on all vSphere editions but Essentials Kit. Moreover VDP can be extended to VDPA (vSphere Data Protection Advanced). Basically VDPA has the same features of VDP, except: VDPA has a per-CPU (socket) license, VDP […]
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SDN, APIs, and DevOps

There was a recent blog by Mark Burgess, founder and creator of CFEngine. It is a must read (on his personal blog).  He really makes you think where we are as an industry, question if we are on the right path, and quite frankly calling out certain technologies as pity attempts compared to what is needed. Regardless of all that, we cannot forget one key point, the industry is in fact moving forward right now. 
As I read his post, I remembered a conversation that I saw on twitter not too long between John Willis, Lori MacVittie, and Joe Onisick. It was more or less on the intersection of SDN and DevOps. 

The article by Burgess and the Twitter conversation really got me thinking. 

When you combine these interactions, even at the highest levels, you have to wonder, what is the right approach from both a vendor (product) and user standpoint? Are we on the right path? Do we have it all wrong? Must we fail first before getting it right?

SDN Will Simplify

SDN controllers will totally simplify things, but even then, the APIs they expose are arguably too low level for the average consumer of Continue reading

SDN Lesson #1 – Introduction to Mininet

Intro Welcome to a new series of articles that will be structured as lessons with the target of bringing SDN closer to everyone’s understanding. Each article will present a topic plus one or more exercises that will show that topic in action. The lessons will wrap up with some questions asking the readers to exercise on their own and provide the answers. As you see, the approach is pretty similar... [read more]

SDN Lesson #1 &#8211 Introduction to Mininet

Welcome to a new series of articles that will be structured as lessons with the target of bringing SDN closer to everyone's understanding. Each article will present a topic plus one or more exercises that will show that topic in action. The lessons will wrap up with some questions asking the readers to exercise on their own and provide the answers.

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