IP Infusion has been around for a while, but the conversation in the industry about white box networking is bringing what IP Infusion does to the main stage. They’ll be presenting at Networking Field Day 15, and I’m looking forward to hearing how they’re progressing in this space.
BGP Default Route Failover Using Reachability
Sometimes political, financial, or logistical hurdles determine how we solve networking problems. In these tricky situations we may not be able to solve the problem the way we’d prefer, but we still need to solve the problem.
In this post I’m going to look at how we can solve a WAN failover scenario when we have a default route learned from both of our service providers and a reachability problem via our primary ISP.
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Amazon S3 Outage: We’ve All Been There
I’ve been thinking a little bit about the Amazon S3 incident. Not really the incident, actually, but the responses to it. More than once I read something along the lines of “I’m sure that guy got fired” with regard to the engineer who entered the fatal command.
Sure, that’s kind of funny for a quick tweet or in the greater context of a blog post on change control, but for me, I’m not sitting at my desk shaking my head right now. Instead, I’m reminded about the times I did the exact same thing (on a much smaller scale) and will probably do it again.
Why OSPF isn’t your best option when using DMVPN Phase 3
Cisco’s DMVPN Phase 3 protocol offers many benefits, but make sure you evaluate options before using OSPF. Read the rest of the article at Tech Target’s SearchNetworking site.
My Network Cutover Soundtrack
Here’s a list of carefully thought-out pairings of songs for specific types of network activities like cutovers, refresh projects, and typical pain-in-the-butt network tasks.
Click on the network-y activity to listen, and make sure to have your sound at a decent volume. Most of these tasks take longer than the length of one typical song, so usually I’m listening to the entire album.
What Being a Landlord Taught Me About Networking
Among the many lessons I’ve learned about being a property owner and landlord, one stands out as clear as day:
Don’t put off minor maintenance.
Read the article at the Packet Pushers site.
Trust But Verify: Lossless End-To-End Visibility from Ixia
Tap everywhere. Tap everything. Trustworthy visibility is the key to network monitoring and security.
This is Ixia’s approach for how networking professionals can get an accurate picture of what’s really going in the network, and this was the theme of Ixia’s presentation at Networking Field Day 13.
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Apstra: The Intent-Driven Cure for Network Blindness
Apstra, Incorporated isn’t focused on new features, more advanced silicon, or some new widget. Instead, they’re offering a different way to look at networking. Apstra offers an early form of intent-driven networking that abstracts network programmability and allows network engineers to configure intent rather than device features. We expect the network to behave in a specific way, so we configure our intent accordingly. I was very excited to meet the Apstra team at Networking Field Day 13, and they didn’t disappoint.
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SD-WAN with VeloCloud at Networking Field Day 13
It looks like we’re going to have some SD-WAN goodness next week at Networking Field Day 13. I love the technology itself because of the real-world use case and practical benefits a good SD-WAN solution can offer. Many of the SDN-labeled offerings out there are still a little immature, but adding intelligence to the WAN edge is something that is already being adopted wholeheartedly in even small enterprises.
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Intent-Driven Networking with Apstra at Networking Field Day 13
In a couple weeks I’ll be headed to sunny San Jose for Networking Field Day 13. If you’re not familiar with Networking Field Day and other Field Day events, check out their website, YouTube channel, Twitter feed, and LinkedIn page. Tech Field Day does a great job bringing technology influencers, bloggers, and craft beer enthusiasts together with some of the biggest and newest names in the tech industry.
I’m particularly interested in Apstra’s presentation on Thursday afternoon. I recently wrote an article about intent-driven networking, something of particular interest to me, so I’m really interested to hear what they have to say about their platform, the Apstra Operating System, or AOS.
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The Early Bird Gets the CCIE
For the last 18 months or so I’ve been studying for the CCIE R&S. I took about 4 months off recently to focus on other technology, and right now I’m back at it with a schedule and pace that seems to be working very well for me so far.
Is the CCIE Becoming Irrelevant?
There’s a new story being told in the networking industry. The CCIE isn’t what it used to be, and pursuing it doesn’t make as much sense as in years past. My initial response to this is simple: BALONEY.
In Between You and Reality is Your Language
The networking community loves bad grammar. We love correcting mistakes and making silly jokes about it on social media. I appreciate how many of my online friends have rallied around such faux pas as the infamous premise/premises conundrum, and it warms my heart when half of my Twitter circle gently and lovingly corrects a poor, misguided engineer who tries to make a word plural by adding an apostrophe and an ‘s’. This is all a part of the geeky culture to which we all belong, but how important is grammar really?
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Network Automation: Another Tool in the Toolbox
Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed a few tweets and blog posts regarding the immaturity of network automation methods and the danger in utilizing those methods in production networks. Though I agree that processes always have room to mature and that wiggling wires in a production environment always poses some risk, I believe this new emerging narrative in social media makes several assumptions that aren’t necessarily true.
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School’s Out For Summer
School’s out, but I can’t wait for the fall semester to start. I don’t even know what class I’ll be teaching, but I know it’ll be awesome, and it’s going to be the best class I’ve ever had.
How do I know this? A few reasons, actually.
The Joy of Just Getting the Job Done
Getting the job done, whether blog-worthy or not, always gave me a deep sense of accomplishment in my work. Besides, it’s always the junior engineers cutting over IDFs in the middle of the night that get to expense all the pizza they want.
Routing at the Access Layer
Network devices have become so powerful that concern over hardware resources have all but disappeared. Modern routers, switches and firewalls can handle much more than their predecessors, and network designs are changing as a result. Network designs are shifting from the classic three-tiered model of a switched access layer and routed distribution and core layers to a completely routed design. Read the rest of the article at TechTarget’s SearchNetworking site.
Your wired LAN is dumb…or at least it should be
Why aren’t our wired LANs more like WLANs? Wireless vendors have already been doing for years what switch manufacturers are only starting to get into in the last couple years. A rough comparison of a few attributes of typical wired and wireless networks shows striking differences in how we manage our LANs and WLANs.
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Write Something
We don’t think in five paragraph essays. At least I don’t. We think in small explosions of ideas in a nebulous, non-linear cloud of word pictures. It makes sense in our own minds, but try to communicate those ideas to someone else, and we find that sometimes we don’t have as clear a picture of our own ideas as we thought we did.
Change Control: Embrace the Red Tape
Change control isn’t so bad. With the underlying goal of risk mitigation, good change control can save a network engineer from the dreaded resume generating event we sweat over during cutovers.
Read the rest of the article at the PacketPushers site.
{networkphil} 