Building a Multi-Vendor Automation Platform

One of the attendees in our Building Network Automation Solutions online course sent me this question:

While building an automation tool using Python for CLI provisioning, is it a good idea to use SDK provided by device vendor, or use simple SSH libraries Netmiko/Paramiko and build all features (like rollback-on-failure, or error handling, or bulk provisioning) yourself.

The golden rule of software development should be “don’t reinvent the wheel”… but then maybe you need tracks to navigate in the mud and all you can get are racing slicks, and it might not make sense to try to force-fit them into your use case, so we’re back to “it depends”.

Guest Shell Built-in Linux Container on Cisco IOS-XE

What is Boolean?

I am watching a George Boole bio on Prime but still don’t get it.

Techgig Kubernetes Webinar

Kubernetes and GKE – Day 2 operations

Juniper Direct vs Local Routes

Juniper routers consider a directly configured IP as a “local” route, except when you use /32 mask. Then it is a “direct” route. This caused me some confusion when creating a policy to redistribute loopback IP addresses into BGP.

Route Protocol Types

A router learns routes from a variety of sources - networks configured on the box, those learned from IS-IS, rumors of prefixes from BGP or RIP, etc. You can see the full list here.

When routes are learned from different sources, Junos uses “Route Preference Values” to decide which route source to prefer. (Cisco refers to this as Administrative Distance). If routes are otherwise identical, the route with the lowest preference will be installed into the FIB.

If you’re looking at the route table, you can narrow down displayed routes to look at a specific type, e.g. show route protocol direct to see locally connected networks:

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vagrant@vqfx> show route protocol direct

inet.0: 7 destinations, 7 routes (7 active, 0 holddown, 0 hidden)
+ = Active Route, - = Last Active,  Continue reading

Juniper Direct vs Local Routes

Juniper routers consider a directly configured IP as a “local” route, except when you use /32 mask. Then it is a “direct” route. This caused me some confusion when creating a policy to redistribute loopback IP addresses into BGP.

Route Protocol Types

A router learns routes from a variety of sources - networks configured on the box, those learned from IS-IS, rumors of prefixes from BGP or RIP, etc. You can see the full list here.

When routes are learned from different sources, Junos uses “Route Preference Values” to decide which route source to prefer. (Cisco refers to this as Administrative Distance). If routes are otherwise identical, the route with the lowest preference will be installed into the FIB.

If you’re looking at the route table, you can narrow down displayed routes to look at a specific type, e.g. show route protocol direct to see locally connected networks:

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vagrant@vqfx> show route protocol direct

inet.0: 7 destinations, 7 routes (7 active, 0 holddown, 0 hidden)
+ = Active Route, - = Last Active,  Continue reading

IBM’s League of Extraordinary Computers Wage War on COVID-19

With 5 million CPU cores, 50,000 GPUs, and 483 petaFLOPs of cumulative performance, IBM claims it's...

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Worth Reading: The Burning Bag of Dung

Loved the article from Philip Laplante about environmental antipatterns. I’ve seen plenty of founderitis and shoeless children in my life, but it was worshipping the golden calf that made me LOL:

In any environment where there is poor vision or leadership, it is often convenient to lay one’s hopes on a technology or a methodology about which little is known, thereby providing a hope for some miracle. Since no one really understands the technology, methodology, or practice, it is difficult to dismiss. This is an environmental antipattern because it is based on a collective suspension of disbelief and greed, which couldn’t be sustained by one or a few individuals embracing the ridiculous.

That paragraph totally describes the belief in the magical powers of long-distance vMotion, SDN (I published a whole book debunking its magical powers), building networks like Google does it, intent-based whatever, machine learning…

Playing Politics with Section 230 Makes the Internet Weaker, Not Stronger

This opinion piece was originally published in The Hill.

Thursday the president of the United States signed an executive order that aims to address the liability regime of social media companies. A wide variety of reports have highlighted the problems with this move, but there is one problem that we find especially troubling: the danger of politicizing what is fundamentally a legal debate around party lines.

The president needs to stay out of this debate.

The Internet and politics have always had an awkward relationship. There have been numerous attempts to bring the Internet into mainstream politics over the years, most of which have been unsuccessful. The main reason is that the Internet is not a static “thing,” but a model for how networks and computers can interconnect through voluntary collaboration. A key characteristic of this model is that it’s decentralized, which means it doesn’t have a central point of control that dictates how the Internet should evolve. There is no switch that one can turn on and off, and as soon as policymakers or regulators try to impose one they inevitably chip away at the Internet itself. This characteristic has always been its most powerful asset, and the reason it Continue reading

Technology Short Take 127

Welcome to Technology Short Take #127! Let’s see what I’ve managed to collect for you this time around…

Networking

• Banzai Cloud’s Toader Sebastian explains how to write WASM (WebAssembly) filters for Envoy and deploy those filters with Istio. Be forewarned—this is a bit of an advanced topic.
• Ivan Pepelnjak provides a 101-level overview of AWS networking.
• This recent post by Eric Sloof shows how to do BGP neighbor adjacency between GNS3 and NSX-T 3.0.
• Andrew Sy Kim tackles explaining a (somewhat) obscure part of Kubernetes networking: the externalTrafficPolicy setting. Read his write-up here.

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time around, but I’ll stay alert for items to include next time!

Security

• Ubuntu 20.04 has backported support for WireGuard in its 5.4-based kernel, but for earlier versions some additional work is needed. Here’s a write-up on setting up WireGuard on Ubuntu 18.04.
• Bruce Schneier weighs in on the security and privacy implications of Zoom. (And while we’re on the topic of Zoom, I’d love to hear your thoughts on their acquisition of Keybase.)
• Some security vulnerabilities with Thunderbolt were recently discovered and disclosed. See this website for more details.
• Looking for some security tools? Look no further.

Cloud Continue reading

Pandemic Muddles SD-WAN Supply Chain

Supply chain disruptions are affecting SD-WAN vendors and managed service providers differently....

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Daily Roundup: Cisco Pays $1B for ThousandEyes

Cisco paid $1 billion for ThousandEyes; VMware posted stronger-than-expected Q1 results; and...

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SAP Cloud CFO Set to Jump Ship

Todd McElhatton, who currently serves as SVP and CFO of SAP’s Cloud Business Group, will join...

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Heavy Networking 519: Let’s Meet Wi-Fi 6E

Heavy Networking 519: Let’s Meet Wi-Fi 6E

Just as we're getting comfortable with Wi-Fi 6, along comes 6E, an extension that enables the use of newly available unlicensed spectrum in the 6GHz frequency band (at least here in the US). Our guest to introduce us to Wi-Fi 6E is Wes Purvis. We discuss the properties of the spectrum, how it might be used, when to expect products, and more.

The post Heavy Networking 519: Let’s Meet Wi-Fi 6E appeared first on Packet Pushers.

How Nutanix and HPE’s Partnership Delivers Simplicity, with Brian Cox and Abhi Karmakar

Abhi Karmakar and Brian Cox, of Nutanix, sat down to share their thoughts on the ongoing...

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Weekend Reads 052920

Data breach notifications are meant to tell you what happened, when and what impact it may have on you. —Zack Whittaker

If “experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes,” as Oscar Wilde puts it in The Picture of Dorian Gray, then the more we know about the threats we face and how we react to these threats, the better our chances are of keeping our data secure and our company’s name out of the headlines for all the wrong reasons. —Anastasios Arampatzis

Whenever a popular web interface gets any kind of significant visual change, a lot of people react with confusion, dismay, and even anger. —Angela Lashbrook

MicrosoftMicrosoft is creating a new kind of Office document. Instead of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, the company has created Lego blocks of Office content that live on the web. The tables, graphs, and lists that you typically find in Office documents are transforming into living, collaborative modules that exist outside of traditional documents. —Tom Warren

First of all, I’d like to discourage you from adding security gimmicks to your product. You are no more likely to come up with an exciting new security feature on your own as you are Continue reading

GSMA, O-RAN Forge Alliance

“The growth of the open networking ecosystem will be essential to meeting enterprise coverage and...

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The Week in Internet News: Executive Order Targets Social Media

Trump vs. Twitter: U.S. President Donald Trump, one of Twitter’s most prolific users, has signed an executive order directing government agencies to target social media sites after Twitter fact-checked one of his tweets about voting by mail. The executive order argues social media platforms should lose their lawsuit protections for content posted by users, by directing the Federal Communications Commission to begin a rule-making proceeding to determine when those protections should be stripped away, NPR reports.

Internet freedom? Meanwhile, Business Insider notes that Trump said he’d shut down Twitter if he could, even as he tried to emphasize his “commitment to free and open debate on the Internet.” Trump, with more than 80 million followers on Twitter, complained about social media platforms stifling conservative voices.

Robots vs. COVID-19: A shopping center in Thailand is deploying artificial intelligence-powered robots to fight COVID-19, Euronews.com reports. The mall has thermal scanners to check shoppers’ temperatures, and robots carry public health messages and hand sanitizer.

AI on the beach: In Israel, startup Sightbit is using AI and video cameras to help lifeguards on busy beaches, NoCamels reports. The company is running a pilot program at one of Israel’s most popular beaches. Continue reading