SONiC and White Box switches in the Enterprise DC! – Part 1

In recent years two buzz words began to arise: open-networking and white box switches. Those two words go often hand-in-hand with each other. They are often promoted by big names like Facebook or Microsoft.
From the software side, SONiC is maybe the biggest player out there as it powers Microsoft Azure’s cloud, while from the hardware side, Accton has arguably been one of the most important vendors.

The truth though, at least in my opinion, is that while this innovation is great it is not ready to be embraced by everyone yet. Only companies willing to make this “leap of faith” can take advantage of all of this, but what about us poor mortals? Are SONiC and white boxes ready to be widely deployed? Well let’s give it a look!

We will be deploying a simple VXLAN-EVPN Fabric like in the picture below and we will be checking how difficult is to configure and troubleshoot the fabric, but also and most importantly if this common Enterprise design actually works.

The Hardware

For our spines we’ll be using Edge-Core’s AS7816-64X, powered by Broadcom’s Tomahawk II chipset. This switch is a 2RU lean spine providing 64x 40/100 Gbps QSF28 ports.

For Continue reading

McAfee, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks Track Evolving COVID-19 Cyberattacks

Three reports show cyberattacks continue to mutate along with the COVID-19 pandemic, and they...

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Ericsson Pins 5G Gains on Pandemic

The Swedish vendor raised its prediction for 5G subscriptions from 2.6 billion to 2.8 billion by...

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The Week in Internet News: Hackers Revamp Malware With COVID-19 Messages

Taking advantage: Cyberattackers are reconfiguring the Remcos trojan, which allows them full access to victims’ computers, to include COVID-19 warnings in spam and phishing emails, Security Boulevard reports. “With the economy directly affected by the pandemic, people pay more attention to emails pretending to offer solutions, loans and other types of financial support. Another effective approach is to scare people with threats of account closures or company furloughs.”

The impact of a shutdown: An ongoing phone and Internet service shutdown in the Kashmir region is hurting the ability to distribute information and supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic, Greater Kashmir says. “People in need of essentials used to reach out to us on our helplines which have turned defunct,” said the chairman of an aid agency. “We used to make phone calls to our existing 750 beneficiaries for conveying them about timings to pick up their quota of essentials. But suspension of mobile networks has disturbed this entire process.”

Cooperative Internet service: The Christian Science Monitor has a story about small rural cooperatives building their own Internet services. Cooperatives, which are private businesses owned by customers, are common in parts of the U.S. Midwest, some providing electricity and Continue reading

Using Cisco ACI as Inventory for Ansible Tower

Managing a software-defined networking (SDN) solution in Ansible can be tricky. In most use cases, Ansible communicates with each managed node individually. However, in a SDN scenario, Ansible is most likely managing policy on a controller appliance, which ultimately may make changes to thousands of network endpoints behind it.

But what about these endpoints behind that controller abstraction? Wouldn't it be best if Ansible Tower had visibility to every node, in addition to the controller? Not to run playbooks directly against those nodes, but for the following reasons:

  • Many organizations need to perform capacity planning against current and projected license usage. Ansible Tower provides license usage data, but it's not accurate if Ansible Tower only knows about the SDN controller(s).
  • Networking teams are still asked for physical node information by other IT areas, even if the focus is on a software-defined fabric. What if the best system to get that data from is Ansible Tower? You may not want a CMDB probe (for example) to communicate directly with the SDN controller, or Ansible Tower may already be home to similar data about other systems.

 

Inventory plugin for Cisco ACI

I wrote an Ansible inventory plugin that solves these issues Continue reading

Innovium Unveils ‘First’ 25.6 Tb/s Programmable Switch Chips

The company also claims the new Teralynx 8 platform is the first generation of switch silicon to...

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The Internet of Things in 2020: More vital than ever

If you work in IT, you’re probably safely ensconced at home right now, clinging to your laptop at the edge of your company’s network. The shift from office to home has been momentous. But it’s also symbolic of a larger trend: The network edge has become as important as the network core. Remote workers aside, the IoT (internet of things) is the biggest reason why the edge has become so crucial.According to Gartner, a crazy variety of some 21 billion connected “things” are at this moment collecting data and performing all sorts of tasks. The majority are consumer devices, from smart speakers to watches to door locks. The rest serve business: medical devices, engine sensors, industrial robots, HVAC controllers…almost every enterprise now relies on IoT devices in one form or another.To read this article in full, please click here

GNMI. Part 1. Intro to Protobuf.

Hello my friend,

Some time ago we have covered in-depth OpenConfig with NETCONF configuration as well as the OpenConfig telemetry with NETCONF. Today we want to make a next step and start discussion about another approach to manage the network elements in a programmatic way, which is gNMI.



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Network automation training – self-paced and live online

Following your asks we open a new format for the network automation training – self-paced format:

  • It doesn’t matter what your timezone is.
  • It doesn’t matter how much hours weekly do you have to study.
  • It doesn’t matter how solid is your current background in automation, scripting and software development.

You decide on your own when, how often and how quickly you can learn.

However, if you want to join groups, that is something we are happy to offer you as well.

At this training we teach you all the necessary concepts such as YANG data modelling, working with JSON/YAML/XML Continue reading

What If… There Would Be an Easy Way to Run Your Network

Imagine a life where you would be able to…

  • Find all interfaces that have VRRP configured but no useful VRRP neighbor;
  • Find all OSPF adjacencies that should be up but are not;
  • Get an alert every time the default IP route is lost;
  • Find all MTU mismatches in your network;
  • List all VXLAN-to-VLAN mappings across your data center, and find if two different VLANs map into the same VXLAN VNI;
  • Compare IP routes in your data center to those you had yesterday;
  • Verify that IP routing tables on all spine switches contain the same prefixes;
  • Do the same comparison before and after a software upgrade;
  • Identify changes in IP routing tables or ARP tables that happened between yesterday evening and this morning;

… and be able to do all that in a multi-vendor environment without writing tons of Ansible playbooks or Python code.

Read more …

Backblaze challenges dominance of cloud-storage vendors

Backblaze, the cloud-backup vendor legendary for its quarterly hard-drive-failure reports, has decided to kick Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in the shins with a much cheaper and more customer-friendly storage offering.Like other cloud backup services, Backblaze used a small app to backup and restore on a PC. In 2015, in response to repeated requests for direct access to its storage services, the company introduced an API and service under the name Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and now claims more than 100,000 customers.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] The company has released beta versions of S3-compatible APIs that allows customers to redirect data workflows from S3 to Backblaze’s B2 Cloud Storage. The company says through its services, customers will have infinitely scalable, durable offsite storage at a quarter of the price of S3, Azure, and Google Cloud Storage.To read this article in full, please click here

Juniper Default ARP Policer

Juniper devices have a default ARP policer that drops ARP requests and responses over 150kbps. By default, this is an aggregate policer that applies to all interfaces. This can lead to unexpected behavior when high levels of ARP on one interface lead to BGP session drops on another interface. You can’t change the default policer limits, but you can create a new policer, with higher limits.

Problem: IPv4 BGP Session Flaps on PNI

I was investigating a problem reported by one of our Transit providers. Once a day or so, our IPv4 BGP session with them would flap. The interface itself was stable, and the IPv6 session remained up. One particular site was seeing this more than others. The sites used different platforms, but were running the same code version.

The curious thing was the logs - we saw log messages saying that we had a notification message saying NOTIFICATION received from 192.0.2.188 (External AS 64498): code 4 (Hold Timer Expired Error). The syslog included this hold timer 30s, hold timer remain 0s, last sent 2s. So our router thought it was sending regular KEEPALIVE messages, but the remote end thought it had missed too many.

Looking Continue reading

Juniper Default ARP Policer

Juniper devices have a default ARP policer that drops ARP requests and responses over 150kbps. By default, this is an aggregate policer that applies to all interfaces. This can lead to unexpected behavior when high levels of ARP on one interface lead to BGP session drops on another interface. You can’t change the default policer limits, but you can create a new policer, with higher limits.

Problem: IPv4 BGP Session Flaps on PNI

I was investigating a problem reported by one of our Transit providers. Once a day or so, our IPv4 BGP session with them would flap. The interface itself was stable, and the IPv6 session remained up. One particular site was seeing this more than others. The sites used different platforms, but were running the same code version.

The curious thing was the logs - we saw log messages saying that we had a notification message saying NOTIFICATION received from 192.0.2.188 (External AS 64498): code 4 (Hold Timer Expired Error). The syslog included this hold timer 30s, hold timer remain 0s, last sent 2s. So our router thought it was sending regular KEEPALIVE messages, but the remote end thought it had missed too many.

Looking Continue reading

Money Moves: April 2020

Nokia faced a hostile takeover bid; Google eyeing a D2iQ purchase; T-Mobile to slash $30M in cloud...

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Rakuten Mobile ‘Working Like Crazy’ to Deploy 5G Next Month

"We might be slowed down on the number of base stations that we are able to construct, but I...

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Interesting: Hugo with Docsy and AWS Amplify

Mat Jovanovic decided to follow my lead and migrate his blog from Blogger to Hugo, using Docsy theme, AWS Amplify as the CI/CD pipeline, and AWS S3 as the hosting platform.

Nice job… but he did way more than that - he documented the whole process, including tool selection, setup, and Blogger migration.

Thank you Mat! Every time I see someone publishing blog posts about open-source tools on Medium I’ll send them a link to your blog (with a comment “this is how you should blog about open-source solutions").

BPF Compiler Collection – BCC in short

Network Tracing sometimes is really important, although most of the times tcpdump utility is quite handy there are other tools that can make life much easier.

while am no expert in eBPF and scripts, i do know how to use bcc-tools in some scenarios.

https://github.com/iovisor/bcc/blob/master/INSTALL.md#ubuntu—binary

Alright What is the scenario:

Let’s start with something small, you want to measure TCP connection latency.

Other interesting options, you can capture lifetime, stats and most importantly TCP-Retransmissions

Ebpf filters are safer and more powerful to implement, give this a consideration during any Linux troubleshooting scenarios.

-Rakesh

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