NETCONF, YANG, RESTCONF and NetOps in an SDN World

I've had some great discussion with the OpenDaylight OVSDB team around NETCONF, YANG, RESTCONF and what network operations will look like in an SDN world. This post summarizes where my head is at on this subject.

Background Info

What is NETCONF

NETCONF is defined in RFC 6241 which describes it as follows:

The Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF) defined in this document provides mechanisms to install, manipulate, and delete the configuration of network devices. It uses an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based data encoding for the configuration data as well as the protocol messages. The NETCONF protocol operations are realized as remote procedure calls (RPCs).

It's not a new technology, as work started on this approximately 10 years ago, but what it gives us is an extensible and robust mechanism for managing network devices.

NETCONF understands the difference between configuration data and state data. As somebody who has been bitten by trying to perform a create operation and faced validation issues as I've mistakenly sent (or worse, edited) a read-only field in a request, I feel this is really valuable.

Another great thing from an operations perspective is the ability to test/validate configuration before it's applied to the device. NETCONF allows you Continue reading

MPLS , ATOM AND VPLS

I would love to share article by Mbong Ekwoge explaining different Flavors of MPLS ,that can help you to clear any confusion about MPLS ,ATOM and VPLS….

MPLS is the enabler of all these fancy services and applications we hear about today, such as MPLS VPNs, AToM (Any Transport over MPLS), MPLS TE (Traffic Engineering), etc.

In order to clearly understand what VPLS is, you need to understand what led to the “birth” of VPLS (Virtual Private LAN Service).  It all began with MPLS VPNs. The client had to form a peer-to-peer relationship with the Provider’s PE routers. What this means is that the provider is intricately involved with routing and forwarding the customer’s traffic and some customers did not like this idea. Also, providers had invested heavily into Layer 2 VPN techniques such as ATM, Frame Relay, etc and completely eliminating these overlay VPN techniques didn’t feel right with their financial people. Some engineers did not like the idea of having to let go of their beloved ATMs, Frame Relay PVCs for some new chap coming in.

This led Cisco and IETF to develop a solution which would let you run MPLS in the core but users Continue reading

Blogs of Interests 2014-03-14

Working from home? Useful insights from Ethan Banks on his methodology and process of working from home. You can find ethan on Twitter @ecbanks. Deploying VXLAN or any type of overlay? Maybe just...

[[ Summary content only, you can read everything now, just visit the site for full story ]]

Blogs of Interests 2014-03-14

THE BITS Working from home? Useful insights from Ethan Banks on his methodology and process of working from home. You can find ethan on Twitter @ecbanks. Deploying VXLAN or any type of overlay?...

[[ Summary content only, you can read everything now, just visit the site for full story ]]

WLAN Professionals Conference Videos Posted

Videos of presentations from the WLAN Professionals Conference that occurred Feb. 10-12th in Austin, TX have now been posted by Keith Parsons and the Prime Image Media team. The conference was chalk-full of great content, both technical and business focused, by some of the best experts in the industry!

I had the honor of presenting a session titled "Going Beyond RF Coverage: Designing for Capacity." The topic is about how to define, measure, and plan for capacity needs for ALL wireless networks (not just high-density environments - for which no commonly accepted definition even exits). I provided a bit of background on why I decided to give my presentation on this topic in my previous blog "Mind the Gap in Your WLAN Design" and you can download the full presentation and related material.

Check it out!


WLAN Pros Summit 2014 | Andrew Von Nagy Beyond RF Coverage 1 from Keith R. Parsons on Vimeo.

Be sure to check out all of the great presentations from the event on the WLAN Pros website and Keith's Vimeo channel!

Cheers,
Andrew

Coffee Break – Show 5

Our attendance at the Open Networking Symposium promotes a discussion of events there.

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.

TwitterFacebookGoogle+

The post Coffee Break – Show 5 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.

phpipam version 1.0 released

Dear all, I am happy to announce new version of phpipam IP address management – version 1.0. Subnet details

New features, like changelog, favourite subnets, upgraded UI with bootstrap3 and other were introduced, and also lots of improvements and bug fixes are included. Most important are:

  • IP address changelog, subnet and section changelogs with full changelog under tools;
  • Favourite subnets for quick access;
  • Bootstrap 3 with UI enhancements;
  • Widgets can be reordered (dragged) directly on dashboard;
  • Mail settings can now be set on gui (localhost / smtp);

If you find phpIPAM useful for your company donations would be highly appreciated :)

You can demo it here: http://demo.phpipam.net/
You can download it on sourceforge site: phpipam-1.0.

Special thanks to all the people submitting bug reports, translators and feature testers!

Screenshots:

Dashboard Subnet scanning Subnet details Subnet editing Settings IP address editing

Full changelog for this release is:

New features:
----------------------------
+ IP address page with IP address details and IP history (Changelog);
+ IP address changelog, subnet and section changelogs with full changelog under tools;
+ Favourite subnets for quick access;
+ Adding subnets from free space with automatic mask provided;
+ Automatic database validity check after upgrading and automatic field/table fix under administration;
+ Automatic weekly check for new phpipam Continue reading

IPv4 and IPv6 dual-stack PPPoE

The lab covers a scenario of adding basic IPv6 access to an existing PPPoE (PPP for IPv4). PPPoE is established between CPE (Client Premise Equipment) the PPPoE client and the PPPoE server also known as BNG (Broadband Network Gateway). PPPoE server plays the role of the authenticator (local AAA) as well as the authentication and […]

Read This if You’re Going to Cisco Live in May!

Do not tell anyone I told you, but I heard a rumor today.  It looks like the attendees will be in for quite a treat for the 25th Anniversary of the Customer Appreciate Event.  It seems that we’re all going to be shipped off to AT&T Park for the show!  It’s the home of the San Francisco Giants and a beautiful stadium.  And guess who’s going to be there?  Yes, me.  And my wife.  And about 984572 of my friends.  But so will Lenny Kravitz and Imagine Dragons!

AT&T Park  I can’t imagine a better place to spend the evening with your friends than here.  McCovey Cove.  The Giants Wall of Fame.  The 1927 Glove.  The Willie Mays statue.  Ballpark food.  And, for the network angle, it boasts one of the largest public hotspots in the world.

ATT Park

AT&T Park in San Francisco

Lenny Kravitz  We all know he plays Cinna in the Hunger Games, but did you know he actually plays music on the side?  I had no idea!  Ok…maybe I did.  And maybe I’m a fan.  And maybe I’ve never read Hunger Games.  (All are true, by the way.)

Lenny’s a Grammy winner.  Four of them, to Continue reading

How to Fix the SIOCSIFFLAGS Error in Kali Linux

I recently rebuilt my laptop and reloaded the applications I use for pentesting including Virtualbox and Kali Linux. If you need help setting up Kali Linux in Virtualbox here is a great link that walks through the setup process.

Once I had Kali up and running in my virtual environment I plugged in my ALFA wireless adapter and made sure the USB device was running in the virtual environment.

I ran iwconfig to verify the wireless interface.

iwconfig

So far so good and I ran ifconfig to verify the interface was up, but the only interface returned was the loopback.

loopback

After discovering the wireless interface was not up and I ran ifconfig wlan0 up to bring it up and got the SIOCSIFFLAGS error.

siocsifflags

I wrote about this error a while back when I was running Backtrack 5 and I first started using the Fern WiFi Cracker. I decided to expand on that post plus I was asked about creating a script to run all the commands at one time instead of typing them individually. The script should be run every time Kali is booted, but after your adapter is plugged in and recognized.

First open a text editor and type in the Continue reading

The DRY Principle, and Why Network Engineers Should Care

The networking industry has long speculated that coding skillsets are something that will likely become key in the future. I’m sure this will vary from job to job, but I can tell you that - at least for me - it’s already happened. I’m not even just talking about knowing syntax like Python, Java, Ruby, etc. I’ve maintained these skillsets sufficiently throughout my network-specific studies that recalling these skills isn’t that hard (admittedly I’m a youngin so it hasn’t been that long).

The DRY Principle, and Why Network Engineers Should Care

The networking industry has long speculated that coding skillsets are something that will likely become key in the future. I’m sure this will vary from job to job, but I can tell you that - at least for me - it’s already happened. I’m not even just talking about knowing syntax like Python, Java, Ruby, etc. I’ve maintained these skillsets sufficiently throughout my network-specific studies that recalling these skills isn’t that hard (admittedly I’m a youngin so it hasn’t been that long).

What’s better for your big data application, SQL or NoSQL?

One of the critical decisions facing companies embarking on big data projects is which database to use, and often that decision swings between SQL and NoSQL. SQL has the impressive track record, the large installed base, but NoSQL is making impressive gains and has many proponents.  We put the question to experts in both camps.

The Experts
Ryan Betts
Ryan Betts

CTO, of VoltDB says SQL has already earned its stripes in large organizations and big data is just one more job that this stalwart can shoulder. View debate

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Secret CEF Attributes, Part 5

So far we’ve explored some very cool features of CEF and the attributes we can push into the FIB to identify certain kinds of traffic. We can color the prefixes in the RIB and FIB with a particular IP-Precedence, QoS-group or traffic_index and we can then perform traffic monitoring, shaping and policing and packet marking […]

Author information

Dan Massameno

Dan Massameno is the president and Chief Engineer at Leaf Point, a network engineering firm in Connecticut.

The post Secret CEF Attributes, Part 5 appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Dan Massameno.

The Management Challenges of SDN

The Management Challenges of SDN

by Brian Boyko, Technology Commentator  - March 11, 2014

Really, when we talk about SDN in the WAN, all we’re talking about is separating the control plane (which tells data where to go) from the data plane (which forwards traffic to the next node). We’ll still have physical routers and other infrastructure, but they’ll become “commodity forwarding devices” with the control plan intelligence residing in a server – the SDN controller. This enables us to create virtual network overlays and functions. 

Where this can be a challenge is not so much in figuring out how to integrate it into your network but the lack of widely accepted standards for SDN. Certainly, the Open Networking Foundation is developing one, but it’s yet to see full adoption. And without standards for SDN, it will be difficult to build systems. Now the ONF and other consortia and standards bodies such as the IETF are making progress on this issue – and Packet Design will be part of the process by which progress is made – but until standards are fully established, SDN may be limited only to those companies willing to spend the massive amount of time Continue reading

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