Packet Design Appoints Matt Sherrod as Vice President of Product Management

Company Snags Network Management Expert and Industry Veteran

SANTA CLARA, CA — April 16, 2013 — Packet Design, the leading provider of IP network route analytics software, announced today that it has hired Matt Sherrod as Vice President of Product Management. Sherrod will lead product strategy, product design and integrated partner solutions to expand the Packet Design product portfolio and deliver a best-in-class customer experience.

Sherrod has more than 25 years of networking experience. He joins Packet Design from CA Technologies where, as the Vice President of Product Management, he defined product direction and strategy for the company’s infrastructure management solutions. Over the last 10 years he has held a number of field and management positions at CA Technologies and NetQoS. Prior to joining NetQoS, Matt worked as Director of Communications for a Fortune 100 global enterprise, applying leading edge technologies to improve application delivery.

“Matt Sherrod has a deep understanding of customer needs coupled with years of experience in defining and delivering innovative network performance management products to address them,” said Scott Sherwood, CEO of Packet Design. “He is uniquely qualified to lead Packet Design’s product strategy and ensure we provide world-class management solutions for complex service provider and Continue reading

[Virtual Routing] Part 1 – CSR 1000v First Glance

As some of you have heard, the Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000v has recently been released for download, and I quite literally pounced on it when I first heard the word. For those that haven’t heard, the CSR 1000v is essentially Cisco’s answer to the problem that has existed in datacenters for a while - that the current multi-tenancy mechanisms, especially overlays like VXLAN and yes, even NVGRE, are just not cutting it for everyone.

[Virtual Routing] Part 1 – CSR 1000v First Glance

As some of you have heard, the Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000v has recently been released for download, and I quite literally pounced on it when I first heard the word. For those that haven’t heard, the CSR 1000v is essentially Cisco’s answer to the problem that has existed in datacenters for a while - that the current multi-tenancy mechanisms, especially overlays like VXLAN and yes, even NVGRE, are just not cutting it for everyone.

[Virtual Routing] Part 1 – CSR 1000v First Glance

As some of you have heard, the Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000v has recently been released for download, and I quite literally pounced on it when I first heard the word. For those that haven’t heard, the CSR 1000v is essentially Cisco’s answer to the problem that has existed in datacenters for a while - that the current multi-tenancy mechanisms, especially overlays like VXLAN and yes, even NVGRE, are just not cutting it for everyone.

The Route to Null0 is OK

Back to the basics today. I have seen this pop up a few times and wanted to offer some clarification on what seems to be a cloudy issue for CCNP (and some CCIE) candidates. I’ve seen quite a few times now where engineers see a route to Null0 in a Cisco router and assume instantly that the router is “black holing” traffic.   Sometimes, a route to Null0 is inserted into the routing table when performing summarization with nearly every routing protocol in common use today.

KIClet: SDN – Pick Your Poison

I keep having to remind myself that SDN is more about solving a policy problem than a transport problem. This is why the answer to the question “Will SDN solve all of our networking problems?” is always NO. Truth be told, SDN has been around for a while (see SNMP, Perl, Netconf) in various forms, but it’s receiving a lot of attention right now because the mechanisms are starting to mature and frankly, the networking industry hasn’t really seen a lot of groundbreaking innovations lately.

KIClet: SDN – Pick Your Poison

I keep having to remind myself that SDN is more about solving a policy problem than a transport problem. This is why the answer to the question “Will SDN solve all of our networking problems?” is always NO. Truth be told, SDN has been around for a while (see SNMP, Perl, Netconf) in various forms, but it’s receiving a lot of attention right now because the mechanisms are starting to mature and frankly, the networking industry hasn’t really seen a lot of groundbreaking innovations lately.

KIClet: SDN – Pick Your Poison

I keep having to remind myself that SDN is more about solving a policy problem than a transport problem. This is why the answer to the question “Will SDN solve all of our networking problems?” is always NO. Truth be told, SDN has been around for a while (see SNMP, Perl, Netconf) in various forms, but it’s receiving a lot of attention right now because the mechanisms are starting to mature and frankly, the networking industry hasn’t really seen a lot of groundbreaking innovations lately.

The Route to Null0 is OK

Back to the basics today. I have seen this pop up a few times and wanted to offer some clarification on what seems to be a cloudy issue for CCNP (and some CCIE) candidates. I’ve seen quite a few times now where engineers see a route to Null0 in a Cisco router and assume instantly that the router is “black holing” traffic.   Sometimes, a route to Null0 is inserted into the routing table when performing summarization with nearly every routing protocol in common use today.

Fighting Stale Documentation

In my continuing series on the decidedly boring, I would like to discuss the subtle, yet paralyzing, evil of stale documentation. In my experience, stale documentation can be useful or it can be disastrous, depending on how much is wrong. Personally, when I see more than a couple of tiny mistakes in a diagram, spreadsheet, […]

Author information

Keith Tokash

Keith Tokash

Keith Tokash, CCIE (R&S) #21236, began his career in 1999, and has spent the last decade running around large content and small ISP networks. He spends his spare time with his newborn son, on the mat at the local Jiu-Jitsu gym, and trying to keep his fat yap shut.

The post Fighting Stale Documentation appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Keith Tokash.

My Problem

Do you know what my problem is?
250 million people in Indonesia, and there are only about 160 CCIEs.

I'm not saying the whole population must become CCIE or must learn about computer networking. But think about how many networks are there in Indonesia:
We have 7 mobile operators.
We have more than 100 Internet Service Providers.
We have one mobile operator with more than 100 million subscribers.
And there are only less than 200 individuals who have reached the expert skill level in IP network technology.

There are many expatriates who currently work in my country. We don't need to replace them all with Indonesian professionals. But at least we need to make sure Indonesians have the same level of skill set, and they are given the same opportunity to compete.

I'm thinking that the solution is not to make every network engineer to become CCIE. It has to go beyond that. The solution must transform Indonesia's next generations, young professionals and students, to become globally competitive professionals. To become professionals who possess the complete package from social network, technical skill and soft skill, and extensive experiences.

So they can compete in global market. So they can move around Continue reading

CCIE Security v4 Reading List – Update From The Program Manager

Because of my personal interest in the CCIE Security program (at least the written exam the next time I’m up for CCIE recert), I asked Nat Timms if there was an updated CCIE reading list. This list was recommended to me by Nat in her role as CCIE Security program manager; a big thanks to […]

Author information

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 3M 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 CCIE Security v4 Reading List – Update From The Program Manager appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

Building a Ghetto WAN Emulation Network

I wanted a way to do some controlled tests of WAN acceleration products, using a production network. You can buy or rent commercial WAN emulators, but for my purposes it seemed like an improvised solution would suffice. I had a couple of Cisco 2800 routers, a switch, and an ESXi box in my lab that I could press into service, so I built a test network that looks like this:


R1 acts like the WAN router at a branch site. It has a QoS policy with a "shape average" statement on its "WAN" interface to change the bandwidth to whatever we want to test.

R2 simply NATs the test traffic onto an IP address in the production network, since I didn't feel like configuring a new production subnet just for the test.

The ESXi box is where the fun part lives: I created two vSwitches and connected one physical NIC to each. I then spun up a simple Ubuntu 12.04 VM with eth0 and eth1 connected to each of the two vSwitches, giving me a separate network connected to each Cisco router. I then enabled routing on the Linux VM and created the appropriate static routes to enable the Continue reading

Install Raspbmc without a Keyboard or Mouse

Once I had got my iTunes library downgraded to 10.7 and liberated some of my DRM'd media I thought it would be awesome to use my Raspberry Pi as an Airplay Receiver...

Head over to http://www.raspbmc.com/download/ and follow the instructions to download and install Raspbmc. Once you've prepped your SD card, popped it in your Pi hole and got it booted it should start the installation… at this point you can grab a coffee

In older versions of Raspbmc you had to SSH in and enable the web server in /home/pi/.xbmc/userdata/guisettings.xml

In the latest version this was already enabled, so I just picked up my phone, downloaded the official XBMC remote app from the Android marketplace (or iTunes store if you are that way inclined).

A couple of points of note when adding your host in the XBMC remote app. If you don't know your IP address and your Pi is not automatically found you can find this from your local router. The HTTP port is 80 by default in Raspbmc (not 8080) and the password is blank, although I configured username xbmc and password xbmc and this works just fine!

Once set up it Continue reading

Downgrading from iTunes 11 to 10.7 on OSX

I decided to downgrade my iTunes from 11 to 10.7 for a number of reasons, top most was the fact the the new UI drives me barmy!

I followed the great instructions at http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/03/how-to-downgrade-from-itunes-11-to-version-10-7-on-your-mac/ and found that I couldn't open my iTunes library after the upgrade.

Since I didn't make a library backup before the iTunes 11 upgrade I thought I would be stuck, but to my surprise I found a Previous iTunes Libraries folder in my ~/Music/iTunes

Restoring was as easy as taking my swapping iTunes Library.itl with the file in the Previous iTunes Libraries folder from December and everything worked fine...

One thing I noticed was that my new iTunes purchases didn't show, but this was a minor inconvenience. Now I have the old iTunes back and I'm happy… for now...

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