A Decade of Blogging

Today is a milestone for me. Ten years ago I picked up a virtual notepad for the first time and committed my first blog post to the ether. It’s been a wild ride ever since. It also marks the milestone of being the job that I’ve held the longest so far in my career.

Blogging has been a huge boon for me. I’ve become a better writer in the last decade. I’ve learned how to ask the right questions and get good material for a story instead of just putting out what someone wants me to say. I’ve learned that being a pseudo-journalist is a thing you can do and have fun with.

I’ve written a ton over the years. 751 posts, as a matter of fact (counting this one). I’ve always tried to hold myself to a standard of getting something out once a week. Aside from the few times when I’ve tried to push that to twice a week I’ve held up pretty well. Yeah, I’ve slipped and the day job has gotten in the way more than once. However, keeping myself to a strict schedule has ensured that my attention stays focused on this blog and that Continue reading

Day Two Cloud 067: Choosing The Right Applications For The Cloud With SolarWinds (Sponsored)

What apps belong in the cloud and which are better on premises? Dave Wagner, Senior Manager, Product Marketing at SolarWinds, joins Day Two Cloud to develop a strategy and find the right tooling to help you make the best decision. SolarWinds is the sponsor for today's episode.

The post Day Two Cloud 067: Choosing The Right Applications For The Cloud With SolarWinds (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Cisco extends SD-WAN options with AWS, Azure hybrid-cloud integration

Cisco has further broadened the cloud-integration options available to its SD-WAN customers with new connectivity options to AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud services.With these additions, Cisco’s goal is to ensure cloud-destined traffic gets into the cloud network faster, improving management, performance, security and reducing the latency that can impact cloud workloads.More about SD-WAN: How to buy SD-WAN technology: Key questions to consider when selecting a supplier • How to pick an off-site data-backup method •  SD-Branch: What it is and why you’ll need it • What are the options for security SD-WAN? “Hybrid cloud is the norm and Cisco’s plan is bringing the networking support to improve app performance and add security without adding pain—it’s the right direction,” said Lee Doyle, principal analyst at Doyle Research.To read this article in full, please click here

pygnmi 1. Intro to pure Python gNMI module by karneliuk.com.

Hello my friend,

It took a while since our latest post from the Code Express (CEX) series. During this time we were working heavy to launch an advanced version of our industry-leading network automation training. However, this time we were working on something special…



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Automate all the network things

Each and every element in the network can be automated. It is always the question, if it shall be. Both of these questions are subject to our training:

  • We teach you how automate each and every network function in your network.
  • We teach you how to identify, what makes sense to automate, what not, and how to make your network automation successful.

At our network automation training (either live or self-paced) you will guide you from the foundation of the automation for the small networks till advanced automation use cases in big data centres, and clouds. You will lean how to structure the data using YANG Continue reading

Using Flow Tracking to Build Firewall Rulesets… and Halting Problem

Peter Welcher identified the biggest network security hurdle faced by most enterprise IT environments in his comment to Considerations for Host-based Firewalls (Part 1) blog post:

I have NEVER found a customer application team that can tell me all the servers they are using, their IP addresses, let alone the ports they use.

His proposed solution: use software like Tetration (or any other flow collecting tool) to figure out what’s really going on:

Read more …

Arm updates Neoverse server processors with considerable performance claims

Acquisitions and defections be damned, Arm Holdings is pushing forward with its Neoverse line of server processor designs with the launch of the Neoverse V1 and N2 processor architectures.The new chips are the successors to the Neoverse N1 and E1 designs, which are used in server processors like Ampere’s Altra, Amazon’s Graviton2, and Marvel’s ThunderX2. Arm claims these chips will deliver 40% to 50% better performance than the previous generation while consuming the same amount of power.To read this article in full, please click here

Arm updates Neoverse server processors with considerable performance claims

Acquisitions and defections be damned, Arm Holdings is pushing forward with its Neoverse line of server processor designs with the launch of the Neoverse V1 and N2 processor architectures.The new chips are the successors to the Neoverse N1 and E1 designs, which are used in server processors like Ampere’s Altra, Amazon’s Graviton2, and Marvel’s ThunderX2. Arm claims these chips will deliver 40% to 50% better performance than the previous generation while consuming the same amount of power.To read this article in full, please click here

Vendors extend the range of 5G millimeter-wave transmissions

Two wireless vendors say they have collaborated to significantly extend the useful range of millimeter-wave 5G transmissions beyond what had been widely considered its limits. 5G resources What is 5G? Fast wireless technology for enterprises and phones How 5G frequency affects range and speed Private 5G can solve some problems that Wi-Fi can’t Private 5G keeps Whirlpool driverless vehicles rolling 5G can make for cost-effective private backhaul CBRS can bring private 5G to enterprises Qualcomm and Ericsson have worked together in separate trials with two other companies to boost that distance from less than a mile (1.6km) to 3.8km in one case and to 5km-plus in the other, the companies claim.To read this article in full, please click here

Cable testing on Juniper EX switches

Does anyone use the cable test feature on EX switches? Did you even know you could do this kind of thing?

In case you didn’t, here is a bit of background and an example.

The Time Domain Reflectometer (TDR) test has been available on the EX switches for some time, but not a lot of people seem to know about it. What is TDR, I hear you ask?

A futuristic-sounding thing, what a TDR does is send a signal down a cable and measure how much (if any) is reflected by the far end. If the cable is damaged a little way along its length, the TDR test will tell you that distance to a fair level of accuracy.

In an ethernet cable, there are four pairs of conductors – eight wires in total. The operative ones are 1 & 2, and 3 & 6. The other conductors are unused but their presence in the Cat5 or Cat6 cable helps prevent cross-talk and signal attenuation. In a lab, usually cables are fairly short and easily replaced, but in a working environment, cables in floor-boxes under desks, or the structured wiring under the raised floor in an office often suffers quite Continue reading

Snakes in a Facebook Datacenter

 

What do you do when you find a snake in your datacenter? You might say this. (NSFW)

 

Fault tolerance is the property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of some of its components. You might think Facebook solved all of its fault tolerance problems long ago, but when a serpent enters the Edenic datacenter realm, even Facebook must consult the Tree of Knowledge.

In this case, it's not good or evil we'll learn about, but Workload Placement, which is a method of optimally placing work over a set of failure domains. 

Here's my gloss of the Fault Tolerance through Optimal Workload Placement talk:

Technologies that Didn’t: CLNS

Note: RFC1925, rule 11, reminds us that: “Every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and a different presentation, regardless of whether it works.” Understanding the past not only helps us to understand the future, it also helps us to take a more balanced and realistic view of the technologies being created and promoted for current and future use.

The Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model is the most often taught model of data transmission—although it is not all that useful in terms of describing how modern networks work. What many engineers who have come into network engineering more recently do not know is there was an entire protocol suite that went with the OSI model. Each of the layers within the OSI model, in fact, had multiple protocols specified to fill the functions of that layer. For instance, X.25, while older than the OSI model, was adopted into the OSI suite to provide point-to-point connectivity over some specific kinds of physical circuits. Moving up the stack a little, there were several protocols that provided much the same service as the widely used Internet Protocol (IP).

The Connection Oriented Network Service, or CONS, ran on top Continue reading

Full Stack Journey 046: Understanding AWS Controllers For Kubernetes (ACK)

Today's Full Stack Journey podcast explores AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK). Currently available as a developer preview, the ACK project lets customers manage their AWS services directly from Kubernetes. Our guide to ACK is Justin Garrison, a container advocate at AWS and author.

The post Full Stack Journey 046: Understanding AWS Controllers For Kubernetes (ACK) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Docker Github Actions

In our first post in our series on CI/CD we went over some of the high level best practices for using Docker. Today we are going to go a bit deeper and look at Github actions. 

We have just released a V2 of our GitHub Action to make using the Cache easier as well! We also want to call out a huge THANK YOU to @crazy-max (Kevin :D) for the of work he put into the V2 of the action, we could not have done this without him! 

Right now let’s have a look at what we can do! 

To start we will need to get a project setup, I am going to use one of my existing simple Docker projects to test this out:

The first thing I need to do is to ensure that I will be able to access Docker Hub from any workflow I create, to do this I will need to add my DockerID and a Personal Access Token (PAT) as secrets into GitHub. I can get a PAT by going to https://hub.docker.com/settings/security and clicking ‘new access token’, in this instance I will call my token ‘whaleCI’

I can then Continue reading

Python: The Minimum You Need to Know

Many network engineers and other professionals are transitioning their skills set to include programming and automation. Commonly, their previous programming experience comes from a few programming courses they attended in university a long time ago. I am one of those professionals and I created this Python programming guide for people like you and me.

In this guide, I explain the absolute minimum amount you need to learn about Python in order to create useful programs. Follow this guide to get a very short, but functional, overview of Python programming in less than one hour.

I omit many topics from this text that you do not need to know when you begin using Python; you can learn them later, when you need them. I don’t want you to have to unlearn misconceptions later, when you become more experienced, so I do include some Python concepts that other beginner guides might skip, such as the Python object model. This guide is “simple” but it is also “mostly correct”.

Getting Started

In this guide, I will explore the seven fundamental topics you need to know to create useful programs almost immediately. These topics are:

  • The Python object model simplified
  • Defining objects
  • Core types
  • Continue reading
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