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Wi-Fi 6E Growing Pains For Apple

You may have seen that the new iPad Pro has Wi-Fi 6E support. That caused a lot of my wireless friends to jump out and order one, as I expected. As I previously mentioned, 2023 is going to be a big year for Wi-Fi 6E. I was wrong about the 6E radio on the new iPhone but given the direction that Apple is going with the iPad Pro and probably the MacBook as well we’re in for a lot of fun. Why? Because Apple is changing their stance on how to configure 6GHz networks.

An SSID By Any Other Name

If you’ve ever set up wireless networks before you know there are some different suggestions about how to configure the SSIDs with multiple bands. One school of thought says that you need to combine both 2.4GHz and 5GHz in the same SSID and let the device figure out which one is the best to use. This is the way that I have mine set up at home.

However, if you do a quick Google search you’ll find a lot of other wisdom that suggests creating two different SSIDs that only work on a single band. The thought process Continue reading

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Intel forced to cut jobs and spending as revenue continues to decline

Despite a plan to cut thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in annual spending, Intel remains vulnerable, say analysts.

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Hybrid’s Dominance Brings New Focus to the Data Center

Hybrid is the dominant infrastructure today and likely for the foreseeable future. As such, IT and data center managers will need to ensure both data center and cloud environments are highly available and responsive.

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Heavy Networking 653: Design, Deploy, And Operate With Nokia Data Center Fabric Solution (Sponsored)

Today’s Heavy Networking, sponsored by Nokia, dives into Nokia's fabric-based approach to data center automation and operations. That approach includes its SR Linux network OS, its Fabric Services System intent-based platform, its NetOps Development Kit, or NDK, and how all this ties together to address your operational life cycle across Day zero, Day 1, Day Two, and beyond.

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Heavy Networking 653: Design, Deploy, And Operate With Nokia Data Center Fabric Solution (Sponsored)

Today’s Heavy Networking, sponsored by Nokia, dives into Nokia's fabric-based approach to data center automation and operations. That approach includes its SR Linux network OS, its Fabric Services System intent-based platform, its NetOps Development Kit, or NDK, and how all this ties together to address your operational life cycle across Day zero, Day 1, Day Two, and beyond.

The post Heavy Networking 653: Design, Deploy, And Operate With Nokia Data Center Fabric Solution (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Technology Short Take 161

Welcome to Technology Short Take #161! It’s been a little over a month since the last Technology Short Take, although the Full Stack Journey recently did an “Audio Edition” of a Technology Short Take that you should probably check out. In any case, I’ve spent the last month collecting links to articles and tutorials from around the web on all the various technologies that us IT folk are likely to encounter in our day-to-day adventures. I hope there’s something here that you find useful!

Networking

• Atulpriya Sharma illustrates how to use DNS-based routing (with Argo Rollouts and Azure Traffic Manager) to implement a blue/green deployment strategy.
• Ivan Pepelnjak addresses the idea that network automation is harmful. I believe that IT folks in all disciplines, including networking, need to embrace automation.
• How awesome is it that the first commercial distribution of SONiC comes from a company named Hedgehog?

Servers/Hardware

• Howard Oakley has a great series on Apple Silicon; the series is up to three posts so far. The first post provides a high-level overview of how Apple Silicon M-series chips are different, and the second post has more details on the capabilities of the P and E cores. The third post Continue reading

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Could I Use netlab instead of GNS3?

I’m often getting questions like “I’m using GNS3. Could I replace it with netlab?”

TL&DR: No.

You need a set of functions to build a network lab:

• Virtualization environment (netlab supports VirtualBox, libvirt, Docker, and Podman)
• An orchestration tool/system that will deploy network device images in such an environment (netlab supports Vagrant and containerlab)
• A tool that will build orchestration system configuration (netlab core functionality)

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Could I Use netlab instead of GNS3?

I’m often getting questions along the lines of “I’m using GNS3. Could I replace it with netlab?"

TL&DR: No.

You need a set of functions to build a network lab:

• Virtualization environment (netlab supports VirtualBox, libvirt, Docker, Podman)
• An orchestration tool/system that will deploy network device images in such an environment (netlab supports Vagrant and containerlab)
• A tool that will build orchestration system configuration (netlab core functionality)

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Data Validation using Pydantic Models

In the realm of automation, scripts often thrive on the variables they receive. These variables determine the actions the script will perform. However, if a script encounters a variable in a format or data type it doesn't expect, it might throw an error with a message that's about as clear as mud. This is where data validation comes into play.

Validating the data passed to a script is like giving it a road map to success. It ensures that the script knows what to expect and how to handle it. Whether the data is coming from another script or an end device, validation helps prevent those cryptic error messages and keeps your automation journey smooth sailing.

What is Data Validation?

Data validation is like the gatekeeper of your data world—it's all about ensuring that the data you're dealing with is accurate, reliable, and fits the requirements of whatever you're trying to do with it. Think of it as quality control for your data before you start using it in your programs or analyses. There are various ways to validate data depending on what you need it for and what rules it needs to follow. And that's where pydantic swoops in Continue reading

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The Next Wave of Network Orchestration: MDSO

Demand for network automation and orchestration continues to rise as organizations reap the business and technical benefits it brings to their operations, including significant improvements in productivity, cost reduction and efficiency. As a result, many organizations are now looking to the next wave of network orchestration: orchestration across technology domains, more commonly known as Multi-Domain Service Orchestration (MDSO). Early adopters have learned that effectively leveraging automation and orchestration at the domain level doesn’t necessarily translate to the MDSO layer due to the different capabilities required to effectively coordinate and communicate across different technologies. While the potential benefits of MDSO are high, there are unique challenges in multidomain deployments that organizations must tackle. The most obvious difference when orchestrating across domains versus within specific domains is the need to design around the direction your network data will travel. Within a single domain, the activities are primarily focused north to south, and vice versa. Instructions are sent to the domain controller which executes the changes to the network functions. This makes single-domain orchestration relatively straightforward. When you start orchestrating across domains, however, things get a little more complex. Now you need to account for both north/south activities and also for a large Continue reading

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How Cisco’s Cloud Control Framework helps it comply with multiple security standards

Its open-source Cloud Control Framework gives Cisco a common template to meet security standards and regulatory requirements across the globe.

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How Cisco’s Cloud Control Framework helps it comply with multiple security standards

Its open-source Cloud Control Framework gives Cisco a common template to meet security standards and regulatory requirements across the globe.

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Hedge 152: Joel King on the network and DevOps

DevOps, SecDevOps, GitDevOps—stick DevOps on the end of anything, and it will sound cool, generation FOMO in thousands (maybe millions). What does DevOps really mean to network engineers, though? In this episode of The Hedge, we discuss examples of how the Three Ways, (described in Part One of The DevOps Handbook) of Flow, Feedback, and Continual Learning with Joel King, a leading light in this field.

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