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The Future of F5 Networks: SDN, iRules & Node.js

Unlike some others in the network industry (until lately at least), those dealing with F5 Networks’ products are probably well accustomed to change – significant and fast paced change at that. F5 are not a company to shy away from rapid change and replacing old technology and tools with newer, better ones. The change from the […]

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The post The Future of F5 Networks: SDN, iRules & Node.js appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Iveson.

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Why is there a “Wrong Way” to Interconnect Datacenters?

There's certainly a lot of focus on data center interconnection (DCI) right now. And understandably so since there are many trends in the industry that are making IT organizations look at data center redundancy. Among these trends are:

1. The business is saying to IT that they require their IT services to be available at all times. In effect the business is saying that they want to be shielded from technology issues, maintenance windows, and unplanned downtime because the IT services they consume (not all of them mind you, but certainly some of them) are so critical to running the business that they cannot be without them (or, they cannot be without them for whatever period of time it would take IT to recover the service).
2. The technical ability to move workloads between sites thanks to the near ubiquity of features like vMotion and Live Migration. The ability to pick up an application and swing it over to another location makes item #1 above far less daunting to IT shops and lowers the barrier to adoption.

In this post I'm going to talk about how IT can address item #1 above — the business need — in a manner Continue reading

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Help translate phpIPAM

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Which IPv6 source address to choose

In the good old days of IPv4, an interface on a host could have only one IPv4 IP address. Things were very simple, every IP host would use that one address as the source IP for all communication. When we get into IPv6, each interface can have multiple IPv6 addresses. These addresses have different scopes such as global, unique-local and link-local. If an IPv6 enabled host would like to send a packets to another host, which source IPv6 address does it choose? What if it has four addresses: 2001:10::3/64 (Global from ISP A), 2001:23::3/64 (Global from ISP B), fc00:23::3/64 (Unique-Local) and fe80:23::3 (Link-Local)?

As with almost everything there is a nice RFC written on this topic. RFC6724 Default Address Selection for Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) defines how to select a source IPv6 address. It mentions eight rules for source selection, here is the summary and translation:

Rule 1: Prefer same address
Rule 2: Prefer appropriate scope
Rule 3: Avoid deprecated addresses
Rule 4: Prefer home addresses
Rule 5: Prefer outgoing interface
Rule 6: Prefer matching label
Rule 7: Prefer temporary addresses
Rule 8: Use longest matching prefix

In the remainder of Continue reading

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OpenFlow 1.0 Actual Use-Case: RTBH of DDoS Traffic While Keeping the Target Online

Sakura Internet operates several data centers across Japan, including this one, and my team is in charge of building and taking care of our IP backbones. In this article, I will introduce the ongoing process of upgrading our DDoS mitigation solution, which happens to be a down-to-earth, if not widely applicable, use case for OpenFlow. […]

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The post OpenFlow 1.0 Actual Use-Case: RTBH of DDoS Traffic While Keeping the Target Online appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Tamihiro Yuzawa.

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SDN and Virtualization Utilizing IP over Avian Carrier Networks

Network Virtualization has been a hot button topic for the last few years, particularly in the data center. With trends like SDN, cloud, and unicorns taking off, it’s incredibly important to move towards technologies that improve scalability while preserving proper multi-tenancy. You may be wondering that all this vendor-supplied, marketing-fueled magic and fairydust is too good to be true. You wouldn’t be too far off - the fact is that none of the solutions provided thus far have addressed the implementation and operation of network virtualization in cases such as a remote datacenter where traditional connectivity like satellite and long-haul fiber is unavailable.

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Call for IPv6 Papers

I am working on an IPv6-related project, and though I think I have enough content to at least get started, I’d like to submit a request to the community at large. This project is aimed at providing additional awareness around IPv6 in general, but will be geared towards the entire networking community, ranging from those familiar with the protocol, to those that barely know what an 128-bit address is. This material will be publicly available and organized towards the goal of learning and becoming more aware of the new protocol.

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SDN and Virtualization Utilizing IP over Avian Carrier Networks

Network Virtualization has been a hot button topic for the last few years, particularly in the data center. With trends like SDN, cloud, and unicorns taking off, it’s incredibly important to move towards technologies that improve scalability while preserving proper multi-tenancy. You may be wondering that all this vendor-supplied, marketing-fueled magic and fairydust is too good to be true. You wouldn’t be too far off - the fact is that none of the solutions provided thus far have addressed the implementation and operation of network virtualization in cases such as a remote datacenter where traditional connectivity like satellite and long-haul fiber is unavailable.

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Call for IPv6 Papers

I am working on an IPv6-related project, and though I think I have enough content to at least get started, I’d like to submit a request to the community at large. This project is aimed at providing additional awareness around IPv6 in general, but will be geared towards the entire networking community, ranging from those familiar with the protocol, to those that barely know what an 128-bit address is. This material will be publicly available and organized towards the goal of learning and becoming more aware of the new protocol.

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my Cisco Live 2013 US program

Once again I'll be attending Cisco Live 2013 in the United States. This year it's in Orlando, Florida. Below is my tentative schedule although there were some overlap with a few other session that I would have liked to attend. Hope to see a lot of the people I've met at previous Networkers and Lives there too :-)

This is my schedule. There are many like it but this one is mine.

• BRKOPT-2106 DWDM 101
• BRKNMS-2517 Operations Architecture
• BRKCOM-3003 UCS Ethernet Troubleshooting of the uplinks to the Data Center LAN Switches

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Show 142 – Huawei – End to End SDN Strategy – Sponsored

SDN innovation has been primarily focused on the data center where centralized network programmability has been shown to be capable of providing many benefits to the complex and dynamic (on-demand) data center environment. Service provider networks will also benefit from SDN. Traversing a service provider network involves crossing different network types, technologies, layers and administrative domains. SDN solutions, including OpenFlow’s programmatic control, will provide capabilities unique to these service provider technologies. Huawei presents an architecture that expands SDN into multiple, task specific, controllers and domains and extends networking control across all of the service provider network dimensions.

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The post Show 142 – Huawei – End to End SDN Strategy – Sponsored appeared first on Continue reading

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Protecting the BGP Session with MD5 Authentication

This post represents the solution and explanation for quiz-9. There are some challenges to allow an authenticated MD5 BGP session via a firewall, involving TCP Options. Let's see what happens!

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Looking at the spamhaus DDOS from a BGP perspective

It’s been a busy week for network engineers world wide, rerouting around broken optical links and of course the 300Gb/s DDOS attack towards Spamhaus and Cloudflare. This DDOS has been classified as the largest DDOS attack ever recorded and has been written about quite a bit in mainstream media.

There’s been a bit of discussion about how much this DDOS actually slowed down the Internet globally. Fact is that the Internet didn’t come to a halt but the large amount of new traffic that had to be handled by some of the carriers did result in congestion and significant packet loss by some of the Tier1 carriers last weekend. In this blog post we’ll look at this event from the routing perspective, what effects did this have on the Internet Exchanges and we’ll also look at some BGP hijacks related to this attack.

BGP hijack affecting Spamhause
The majority of the attack towards SpamHaus and cloudflare was a brute-force DDOS of attack. But in an attempt to affect spamhause services different techniques were used, one of them was a BGP hijack by the alleged initiator of the attack. Greenhost.nl has a great description on their blog about how AS34109 Continue reading

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Complete wipe of a cisco switch configuration

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Friday Distraction: Who’s Leaking >/24 to Global BGP?

[It occurred to me after finishing this that I should have done everything based on ASN, but play time is over for the day...]

An interesting conversation with my friend @denise_donohue led to this question: what providers are leaking prefixes longer than /24 to the global Internet?

Following my continuing theme of "fun stuff you can do by combining IOS and Bash", I ran a two step process via one of my BGP routers to get the answer:

$ ssh routername 'show ip bgp prefix-list GT24' > /tmp/gt24.txt

$ grep "^*" /tmp/gt24.txt | awk '{print $1}' | sed 's/*>i//g' | awk -F. '{OFS=".";print $1,$2 ".0.0"}'  | sort -u | xargs -i whois {} | grep netname | sort -u

Here's the breakdown:

 Extract just valid BGP prefixes from the router output:

grep "^*" /tmp/gt24.txt | awk '{print $1}'
 
Extract just the prefix itself and substitute ".0.0" for the last two octets, normalizing to the parent /16, then remove duplicates:

| awk '{print $1}' | sed 's/*>i//g' | awk -F. '{OFS=".";print $1,$2 ".0.0"}'  | sort -u

Send those prefixes one-by-one to the "whois" command, extract the "netname" field, Continue reading

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Healthy Paranoia Show 11: Bro – the Outer Limits of IDS

Join Mrs. Y, Taylor Banks and esteemed Nerd Captain Ivan Pepelnjak for another exciting episode of Healthy Paranoia!  In this installment, we discover the day the security industry stood still for Bro IDS with expert and project contributor Liam Randall. Just a few of the fun facts you’ll learn include: The real meaning of “bromance.” […]

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The post Healthy Paranoia Show 11: Bro – the Outer Limits of IDS appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Mrs. Y.

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A Small Yellow Wooden Door: Thinking Practically About SDN

As I do most days, I took a walk in the woods at the back of my garden after a hearty dinner. I was quite surprised to come across a small wooden yellow door I’d never seen before, set into the trunk of a tree I’d never noticed until today. I opened the door and squeezed […]

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The post A Small Yellow Wooden Door: Thinking Practically About SDN appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Iveson.

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PQ Show 23 – OpenFlow and SDN – ONF Testing & Interoperability with Michael Haugh

In this show we speak with Michael Haugh, the chairperson of Testing and Interoperability Working Group  https://www.opennetworking.org/working-groups/testing-a-interop  at the Open Networking Foundation. Michael is a Senior Product Line Manager and oversees Ixia’s Carrier Ethernet go-to-market strategy and product line on the Ixia core and IxN2X platforms. Michael has been in networking for 17 years and […]

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The post PQ Show 23 – OpenFlow and SDN – ONF Testing & Interoperability with Michael Haugh appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

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Handling Tech Support Interaction Effectively

Network engineers deal with technical support frequently. That’s the nature of the networking business: the products often don’t work as advertised or break down under their own complexity. Throw in some ambiguous documentation that leaves you scratching your head, and you’ll finally resort to opening a case with the vendor to resolve the issue. In […]

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The post Handling Tech Support Interaction Effectively appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

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Data Center design constraints