Network Break 281: FCC Opens 6Ghz Band For Unlicensed Use; Arista Boosts WLAN Software

The FCC makes swathes of new spectrum available for Wi-Fi, Arista upgrades its WLAN software, Cisco and Google announce plans to partner on an SD-WAN solution for Google Cloud, Google rolls out a remote access product for the enterprise, and more tech news analysis on today's Network Break podcast.

The post Network Break 281: FCC Opens 6Ghz Band For Unlicensed Use; Arista Boosts WLAN Software appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Week in Internet News: Schools Still Face Equipment Challenges for Virtual Learning

Equipment shortages: As schools in the U.S. and other countries attempt to switch over to virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, some are still trying to get students Internet access or devices to use to access the Internet. In Chicago, only about half of the 115,000 public school students who need a computer have received one, WBEZ reports. Another 43,000 computers will be handed out, and 10,000 have been ordered and will be coming “over the next few weeks.”

Equipment shortages, part 2: In California, the state is planning to distribute laptops, Chromebooks, or tablets to more than 70,000 students so they can participate in distance learning, MercuryNews.com reports. The state has requested funding and devices from companies, business leaders and philanthropists around the state.

Getting creative: Some schools are exploring alternatives when students don’t have Internet access or devices, NBC News says. A teacher in Tennessee turned to using a copy machine to print out packets and mail them to students. In Arkansas, where 23 percent of households lack Internet service, a local PBS affiliate is providing daily television programming tied to the state’s distance learning curriculum.

Pumping up encryption: Popular video conferencing app Zoom will Continue reading

Releasing kubectl support in Access

Starting today, you can use Cloudflare Access and Argo Tunnel to securely manage your Kubernetes cluster with the kubectl command-line tool.

We built this to address one of the edge cases that stopped all of Cloudflare, as well as some of our customers, from disabling the VPN. With this workflow, you can add SSO requirements and a zero-trust model to your Kubernetes management in under 30 minutes.

Once deployed, you can migrate to Cloudflare Access for controlling Kubernetes clusters without disrupting your current kubectl workflow, a lesson we learned the hard way from dogfooding here at Cloudflare.

What is kubectl?

A Kubernetes deployment consists of a cluster that contains nodes, which run the containers, as well as a control plane that can be used to manage those nodes. Central to that control plane is the Kubernetes API server, which interacts with components like the scheduler and manager.

kubectl is the Kubernetes command-line tool that developers can use to interact with that API server. Users run kubectl commands to perform actions like starting and stopping the nodes, or modifying other elements of the control plane.

In most deployments, users connect to a VPN that allows them to run commands against that Continue reading

HS. Part 4. Forging Microsoft SONiC configuration out of the network graph.

Hello my friend,

The visualisation of the network graph is an important part of the network development and management, but we need to move on. Today we will focus on the configuration for Microsoft SONiC running as Docker containers.

1
2
3
4
5
No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a 

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any 

means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Network automation training – boost your career

To be able to understand and, more important, to create such a solutions, you need to have a holistic knowledge about the network automation. Come to our network automation training to get this knowledge and skills.

At this training we teach you all the necessary concepts such as YANG data modelling, working with JSON/YAML/XML data formats, Linux administration basics, programming in Bash/Ansible/Python for multiple network operation systems including Cisco IOS XR, Nokia SR OS, Arista EOS and Cumulus Linux. All the most useful things such as NETCONF, REST API, OpenConfig and many others are there. Don’t miss the opportunity to improve your career.

Brief description

As we pointed out Continue reading

Network Automation and Hammer of Thor

Imagine that you just stumbled upon the hammer Thor carelessly dropped, and you’re so proud of your new tool that everything looks like a nail even though it might be a lightbulb or an orange.

That happens to some people when they get the network automation epiphany: all of a sudden CLI and manual configuration should be banned, and everything can be solved by proper incantation of Git and Ansible commands or whatever other workflow you might have set up… even though the particular problem might have nothing to do with what you have just automated.

IT vendors offer new financing options for cash-strapped enterprises

Enterprise equipment vendors are rolling out financing and relaxed payment plans in an effort to keep customers buying during the COVID-19 lockdown that might be stressing their budgets.For example, Nutanix, the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software provider, announced the Nutanix Special Financial Assistance Program (NSFAP) that provides its partners extended payment terms to give them more financial flexibility. Nutanix also offers financing options for customers through Nutanix Financial Solutions (NFS). [Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] The program runs through May 31, and participating partners can offer the extended payment terms to their customers. The length of the term extensions will be based on individual partner’s needs, according to the company.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM’s big hybrid-cloud gamble

With the 2019 acquisition of open-source powerhouse Red Hat under its belt and a new cloud-savvy CEO at the helm, IBM is looking to reverse a decade of declining revenue and sagging stock prices with a bold strategy focused on hybrid cloud.CEO Arvind Krishna, who formerly led IBM's cloud and cognitive computing division and engineered the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition, made IBM's intentions clear in a LinkedIn post to employees in his first day on the job: "Hybrid cloud and AI are the two dominant forces driving change for our clients and must have the maniacal focus of the entire company. IBM has already built enduring platforms in mainframe, services, and middleware. I believe now is the time to build a fourth platform in hybrid cloud."To read this article in full, please click here

IBM goes all-in on hybrid cloud

With the 2019 acquisition of open-source powerhouse Red Hat under its belt and a new cloud-savvy CEO at the helm, IBM is looking to reverse a decade of declining revenue and sagging stock prices with a bold strategy focused on hybrid cloud.CEO Arvind Krishna, who formerly led IBM's cloud and cognitive computing division and engineered the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition, made IBM's intentions clear in a LinkedIn post to employees in his first day on the job: "Hybrid cloud and AI are the two dominant forces driving change for our clients and must have the maniacal focus of the entire company. IBM has already built enduring platforms in mainframe, services, and middleware. I believe now is the time to build a fourth platform in hybrid cloud."To read this article in full, please click here

How Did Big Tech Celebrate Earth Day 2020?

Cisco, Google, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft stepped up their Earth Day commitments, promising...

Read More »

MUST READ: When Programming a System with High Kinetic Energy

Kode Vicious (aka George V. Neville-Neil ) wrote another brilliant article on reducing risk in systems that can do serious harm. Here are just two of the gems:

The risks involved in these systems come from three major areas: marketing, accounting, and management.

There is a wealth of literature on safety-critical systems, much of which points in the same direction: toward simplicity. With increasing complexity comes increasing risk …

For whatever reason most networking- and virtualization vendors joined a lemming-like run in the opposite direction years ago.

EVPN-VXLAN | Virtual Gateway |QFX5k Forwarding | JUNOS

In this post, I want to discuss how to verify Virtual Gateway forwarding behaviour on Broadcom based Juniper QFX switches.

The general assumption with EVPN Anycast Gateway is that gateway flows are load-balanced across all gateway devices. And whilst EVPN provides the mechanism to support this behaviour, there is a requirement for the forwarding hardware to also support it.

The mechanism for an EVPN device to load balance gateway flows is to install the virtual gateway ESI as a next-hop for the virtual gateway MAC address. However, Broadcom based QFX switches do not support this behaviour and can only install a single VTEP as a next-hop. So this means that traffic flows heading towards the virtual gateway will only ever traverse via a single gateway device. This behaviour is well documented and there are some talks about Broadcom working with the vendors to improve gateway load-balancing with ESI functionality.

Now we understand the characteristics, let’s look at the steps to verify forwarding behaviour on a Broadcom based QFX switch. Here we’ll look at how to identify which VTEP is being used to reach the virtual-gateway MAC address and how the underlay is transporting the traffic.

Lab Setup

The lab setup Continue reading

SD-WAN Complexity Remains Adoption Burden, Says Aryaka

According to the vendor's latest annual survey, 37% of respondents named complexity as their No. 1...

Read More »

Interview: Impact of COVID-19 on Networking Engineers and Public Cloud

Ben Friedman and his team (the video crew producing all the Tech Field Day events) published a number of interviews about the impact of COVID-19 on IT.

Among other things we discussed how busy networking engineers are trying to cope with unexpected demand, and how public cloud isn’t exactly infinitely elastic.

Technology Short Take 126

Welcome to Technology Short Take #126! I meant to get this published last Friday, but completely forgot. So, I added a couple more links and instead have it ready for you today. I don’t have any links for servers/hardware or security in today’s Short Take, but hopefully there’s enough linked content in the other sections that you’ll still find something useful. Enjoy!

Networking

• Here’s a primer on hot potato routing vs. cold potato routing. ‘Nuff said.
• This isn’t necessarily networking-related, but it does pertain to a very well-known content creator who specializes in networking. Ivan Pepelnjak recently announced that he’s migrated his site over to Hugo.
• Andreas Wittig takes a look at some advanced AWS networking pitfalls to avoid.
• Josh VanDeraa shows how to use Netmiko, NTC-Templates, Telegraf, Prometheus, and Grafana for monitoring VPN infrastructure (a more critical piece of infrastructure these days given all the remote work going on).
• James McClay has a post talking about the use of BIND9 on Ubuntu 18.04 in an OSPF-routed lab topology using Cisco IOSv and Free Range Routing (FRR).

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time around!

Security

I don’t have anything to include this time, but I’ll stay alert for content I can Continue reading

Juniper Branch SRX LACP Weirdness

Juniper SRX 300 Series firewalls may stop forwarding traffic in some situations. The firewall says it is forwarding the traffic, but it doesn’t work. Monitoring traffic looks OK, ARP entries are present, but traffic never gets to the destination, until you clear ARP. Turns out the problem comes from using LACP with fast timers and active mode. Luckily the fix is simple.

Alert: Firewall Offline

Here’s the situation we saw: Our NMS reported a Juniper SRX320 offline. All other devices at the site were still working, but the firewall was unreachable. Traffic from the firewall to the NMS goes via the firewall’s default gateway. Firewall A in this diagram was unreachable, but Firewall B was fine.

OK, what’s happening? Why is my firewall unreachable?

Firewall says its fine?

Try to ping Firewall A, no response. From the default gateway, we can see an ARP entry for the firewall, but no response to ping. We can log in to Firewall B, and we see an ARP entry for Firewall A. Crucially: we can ping Firewall A from Firewall B. Hmmm. That’s strange. Why can we ping it from one locally connected device but not another?

From Firewall B, we SSH across Continue reading

Juniper Branch SRX LACP Weirdness

Juniper SRX 300 Series firewalls may stop forwarding traffic in some situations. The firewall says it is forwarding the traffic, but it doesn’t work. Monitoring traffic looks OK, ARP entries are present, but traffic never gets to the destination, until you clear ARP. Turns out the problem comes from using LACP with fast timers and active mode. Luckily the fix is simple.

Alert: Firewall Offline

Here’s the situation we saw: Our NMS reported a Juniper SRX320 offline. All other devices at the site were still working, but the firewall was unreachable. Traffic from the firewall to the NMS goes via the firewall’s default gateway. Firewall A in this diagram was unreachable, but Firewall B was fine.

OK, what’s happening? Why is my firewall unreachable?

Firewall says its fine?

Try to ping Firewall A, no response. From the default gateway, we can see an ARP entry for the firewall, but no response to ping. We can log in to Firewall B, and we see an ARP entry for Firewall A. Crucially: we can ping Firewall A from Firewall B. Hmmm. That’s strange. Why can we ping it from one locally connected device but not another?

From Firewall B, we SSH across Continue reading

Untangle Rolls Out Predictive Routing to SD-WAN Router

The technology is designed to translate information from packet headers, out of band information,...

Read More »

WiFi 6 Feeds Need for Speed With 5X Spectrum Boost

It’s the largest swath of spectrum allocated for WiFi since 1989, and it comes as WiFi 6 begins...

Read More »

Daily Roundup: AT&T Selects Stankey as New CEO

AT&T selected Stankey as new CEO; Verizon claimed its 5G is COVID-19 proof; and Intel posted...

Read More »

Heavy Networking 513: How The Internet Is Handling The Covid-19 Load