0

OpenFlow, Controllers – Whats missing in Routing Protocols today?

There is a lot of hype around OpenFlow as a technology and as a protocol these days. Few envision this to be the most exciting innovation in the networking industry after the vaccum tubes, diodes and transistors were miniaturized to form integrated circuits.  This is obviously an exaggeration, but you get the drift, right?

The idea in itself is quite radical. It changes the classical IP forwarding model from one where all decisions are distributed to one where there is a centralized beast – the controller – that takes the forwarding decisions and pushes that state to all the devices (could be routers, switches, WiFi access points, remote access devices such as CPEs) in the network.

Before we get into the details, let’s look at the main components – the Management, Control and the Forwarding (Data) plane – of a networking device. The Management plane is used to manage (CLI, loading firmware, etc) and monitor the device through its connection to the network and also coordinates functions between the Control and the Forwarding plane. Examples of protocols processed in the management plane are SNMP, Telnet, HTTP, Secure HTTP (HTTPS), and SSH.

The Forwarding plane is responsible for forwarding frames Continue reading

0

Q-in-Q

Q-in-Q
——-
Consider a situation where service providers want to offer transparent LAN services that preserve a customers VLAN tags across your Layer-2 network.This can be done by the Q-in-Q IEEE 802.1q standard which allows us to use a single VLAN to transport multiple VLANS across the MAN or WAN. In doing so, we stack on an extra 802.1q tag to the customer’s traffic at the provider’s edge (PE). The original 802.1Q specificationallows a single VLAN header to be inserted into an Ethernet frame.A port configured to support 802.1Q tunneling is called a tunnel port. When you configure tunneling, you assign a tunnel port to a VLAN that is dedicated to tunneling. Each customer requires a separate VLAN, but that VLAN supports all of the customer’s VLANs.

How It works
——————-

Referece pic: Cisco Site

Customer Edge1——(802.1Q Trunk port having cutomer Vlan Ids)

                                 V
                                 V
                                 V

Service Provider edge switch1 —-(Packets entering the tunnel port on the service-provider edge switch, which are already 802.1Q-tagged with the appropriate VLAN IDs, are encapsulated with another layer of an 802.1Q tag that contains a VLAN ID unique to the customer).

Continue reading

0

Creating a CCNA Voice Lab

I've been working on something that at this point in my career I never thought I'd be doing: another Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certification. The CCNA Voice, to be exact. Now that I'm in a job role where I'm expected to be somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades, I can no longer avoid learning voice :-) For a long time I've focused on just the underlying network bits and left the voice “stuff” to others. Since I now need to talk intelligently about Cisco voice solutions, products, and architectures, I decided to go through the CCNA Voice curriculum as a way to establish some foundational knowledge.

This post is about the tools and methods I used to build a small lab to support my studies.

0

Rapid Spanning Tree and PortFast

0

The VAR-y good upsides to being a consultant!

Earlier today Ethan Banks wrote a really good blog posts about “Thoughts on Working as a Consultant for a VAR“. I found his point of view quite interesting and I will say I can understand his points. I can also say that I would rather be a consultant than a full time engineer at a customer site. As a little bit of background I have spent most of my career working as a consultant. I did do a two year stint as network operations manager for a wireless ISP which itself was quite fast paced, but other than that Ive work as a consultant in one form or another.

Maybe I have ADD, maybe I just need to focus, but I have found that constantly having different projects going allows me to satisfy these tendencies. I feel I work better with more than one thing to occupy my time. I see friends who work for enterprise customers who spend their days submitting change requests that third party support companies fulfil, or spend months writing detailed design guides for projects that inevitably get canceled and all that time is spent without getting to touch the things they got into this Continue reading

0

My First Junos Switch: Detailed Review After Three Days Under The Covers

Background This post is the story of my first practical look at Junos on Juniper EX-series switches. One day last December, Skeeve Stevens from eintellego opened a can of worms by offering a deal on Juniper equipment to all network engineers on the AusNOG mailing list. I had been looking for an excuse to try […]

Author information

The post My First Junos Switch: Detailed Review After Three Days Under The Covers appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Paul Gear.

0

Thoughts On Working As A Consultant For A VAR

One of the questions I’m frequently asked via e-mail is how to get started in networking and/or whether or not a particular job change is a good idea. Those are always hard questions to answer intelligently because everyone’s individual situation is different. In addition, everyone’s personality is different. Different jobs work for different people. It […]

Author information

The post Thoughts On Working As A Consultant For A VAR appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

0

Healthy Paranoia Show 10: Beware the Shmoo

Darkness falls across the land, The hacker hour is close at hand. Creatures crawl in search of 0-days To terrorize your enterprise. And whosoever shall be found, Without the soul for clamping down, Must stand and face the nerds of hell, And rot inside a clear text shell. The foulest stench is in the air, […]

Author information

The post Healthy Paranoia Show 10: Beware the Shmoo appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Mrs. Y.

0

A /64 On Every Link? Are You Crazy?

I’ve had some great conversations lately with a lot of folks on the topic of IPv6 prefix length in a variety of applications, specifically one very good discussion on just about anything IPv6 between me, the kind folks over at The Class-C Block and Tom Hollingworth (aka The Networking Nerd). For many folks that are considering the impact of going dual-stack in their environments, the idea of using a /64 on all links is still a point of contention.

0

Assigning IPv6 Prefixes for Customers

Now we arrive at the question of how much address space to allocate for…anyone. You may be a service provider, you may be a business, you may be a home user. Today, this question is quite easy to solve. If you’re a business-class customer, you ask your ISP for a block of addresses, and based off of your need (or ability to justify the need), you’ll be allocated some addresses. For many small-to-medium businesses, this can be as small as 8, or even 4 addresses.

0

Assigning IPv6 Prefixes for Customers

Now we arrive at the question of how much address space to allocate for…anyone. You may be a service provider, you may be a business, you may be a home user. Today, this question is quite easy to solve. If you’re a business-class customer, you ask your ISP for a block of addresses, and based off of your need (or ability to justify the need), you’ll be allocated some addresses. For many small-to-medium businesses, this can be as small as 8, or even 4 addresses.

0

A /64 On Every Link? Are You Crazy?

I’ve had some great conversations lately with a lot of folks on the topic of IPv6 prefix length in a variety of applications, specifically one very good discussion on just about anything IPv6 between me, the kind folks over at The Class-C Block and Tom Hollingworth (aka The Networking Nerd). For many folks that are considering the impact of going dual-stack in their environments, the idea of using a /64 on all links is still a point of contention.

0

How to Study Better

How to study better Exams are a stressful thing to study for—even to the most organised students.  Most students are afraid of pulling in a goose egg instead of an A and so they talk themselves out of doing well before they even see the exam.  But they don’t really have to; studying in a […]

The post How to Study Better appeared first on Roger Perkin - Networking Articles.

0

Show 137 – Gartner Is Not For Sale with @Aneel Lakhani

Summary Packet Pushers co-hosts Ethan Banks & Greg Ferro chat with Aneel Lakhani, a research director at Gartner about his job. Aneel provides an insider perspective on  how the research & analysis business works. More Info Analyst firm research offerings seem to cynical network engineers like bought-and-paid-for shill pieces whose conclusions follow the money back to its […]

Author information

The post Show 137 – Gartner Is Not For Sale with @Aneel Lakhani appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.

0

NetCitadel and Software Defined Security

It’s been an exciting couple of weeks in the security realm, with a number of innovative startups appearing. That’s refreshing because recently most “innovation” in the security space has been something involving a new way of marketing a signature or reputation based system – and that’s just a bit rubbish, and not a little tiresome. Most […]

Author information

The post NetCitadel and Software Defined Security appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Neil Anderson.

0

Pull My Strings, I’m Your Puppet: Juniper Bringing DevOps to Networking

The buzzword in the industry of late is DevOps. It is one that I hope isn’t tarnished by the marketing machine where buzzwords go to die. DevOps is the shift in the paradigm of network and infrastructure management. Centralized infrastructure that is transparent to the administrator and end-user, IaaS, cloud – whatever you want to […]

Author information

The post Pull My Strings, I’m Your Puppet: Juniper Bringing DevOps to Networking appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Anthony Burke.

0

Uplink Fast

Uplink Fast
___________

Cisco enhanced the original 802.1D specification with features such as Uplink Fast to speed up the convergence time of a bridged network.
The drawback is that these mechanisms are proprietary and need additional configuration.  The UplinkFast feature is a Cisco proprietary technique that reduces the recovery time further down to the order f 1 sec

Normal Scenerio without Uplink fast
————————————
Assume SW1 = Root Bridge 
                 SW3 = access switch with one of its uplinks in blocking mode 
                 Uplink from SW3 to SW2  via port A is primary and SW3 to SW2 via port B is redundant uplink

 SW1——————- SW2      
  –                              -
    –                         -
      –                    -
         –               -
             -SW3-

suppose uplink SW3 to SW1 fails,port A goes down immediatly.SW3 consider now link to SW2 as its still receiving BPDUs from root,but to get the link to forwrding state ,it will take 30 sec(learning and listening stage) Port B reaches forwarding state after 30 sec qnd network connectivity is established.

Scenerio with Uplink fast
—————————

Note: 1) The switch has only two uplinks.
           2) The switch has more than two uplinks, but the STP parameters are set in such   way, that Continue reading

0

What I’ve Been Doing Lately

Beside Cisco and my MBA, I work as managing director for a non-profit organization GEM Foundation that I founded last year along with other Indonesian professionals.

 
Our focus is to help preparing Indonesian students and young professionals, as the next generation leaders for my country, to be prepared for the global competition.


Our activity includes regular biweekly Webex session by experienced professionals and entrepreneurs, mostly live outside the country, to share their knowledge, wisdom, experience, tips and tricks in finding a job, getting a job, or creating a job.
In average 70-80 students and young professionals attended our session.


We always try to meet the students in person in order to provide inspiration and opportunity to have face-to-face and open discussion. Last year I met more than 400 students and professionals during my visit to 4 universities in Indonesia.


My activity won me spot in national news. But I didn't bother.


Early this month I went to one technical high school and couple of universities in one Indonesian city called Malang, to do something similar like last year. I was given honor to give keynote speech in the annual event arranged by the alumni of the high school.


I Continue reading

0

CCDE Group Study by INE

Over the weekend I attended the CCDE group study sponsored by INE in Chicago. Discussion and material were let by Petr Lapukhov and Brian McGahan. I’m very excited to see high level networking event in my hometown. We had about 15-20 people in the class. This was my first exposure to CCDE so it was a lot of information absorbing. The test is composed of 4 scenarios. You have about 8 hours to pass the computerized test. Just like in other written Cisco certifications, you can’t go back once you answer the question. The test seems to be based on mastering the design’s information extraction from pages and pages of information. Most of the technology focus is on MPLS, routing, QoS and some security.

In the group study we went through Cisco’s CCDE practice demo (https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/docs/DOC-2438). I thought the discussion was very interested, especially from people that have been studying for the test. If you take it and want to look at the solution you can find it at http://www.shafagh.net/2012/08/ccde-demomystery-solved.html. Next we went through INE’s CCDE practice scenarios written by Petr and Brian.

Mainly, I wanted to post some very interesting documents that Continue reading

0

Quiz #9 &#8211 BGP peering over a Cisco ASA

Your company has 2 offices that are interconnected via a firewall (Cisco ASA) as shown below. You received the task to configure a BGP session between the border routers but something does not go according to plans.