I found this great tool recently I felt I should share called NetworkAuthority Inventory (was called ZipTie). It’s more than your run of the mill config archiver like the ever popular RANCID. Read more…
I’ve been going to a great conference for the last 3 years that I plan on attending this year and I think all readers should consider checking out. FutureNet is going to be held in Boston May 4-7 and is a fantastic show. If you work for a service provider or even for an enterprise and you need to stay abreast of the newest in new of services delivery, this show is one of the better ones around. From my past experience, there has been some awesome sessions and panel discussions on subjects like the state of MPLS and carrier ethernet network interconnection, what high end enterprise clients are demanding for services and how to make your network scale to support future growth. If you have plans on attending this show in Boston, DM me on Twitter. I’d love to meet up!
So is anyone out there nervous about what networks are going to do on April 1st this year? Is Conficker going to rip apart the Internet? If you’re not aware of what Conficker is, here’s some detailed analysis from SRI about a worm that people think is going to unleash a nasty attack come April 1st. I think it’s nerve racking for the average network admin. We’ve already had to live through streaming events like the presidential inauguration of Barak Obama which caused a 3x increase over the average in transit consumption for my network that day. What is everyone out there doing to prepare for the next rumored incoming threat? Let’s hope it’s a non-starter like a lot of these scares have been in the past.
I had a choice to make recently in the decision of which open standards based IGP (i.e. NOT EIGRP) to chose between, OSPF or Integrated IS-IS. Read more…
Does Arbor Networks hold key data that could help save us from bad stuff on the Internet? Are they holding out on us? Let’s explore. Read more…
There’s been a lot of brouhaha lately about the fragility of the Internet. IP addresses are running out, silly folks are breaking BGP, routers are running out of resources… for how important this little thing we call the Internet is, it’s kinda freaky. You may or may not be aware, but these three problems I detailed could be addressed by a protocol that is making it’s way into the world called Location/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP). Aside from the unfortunate acronym that it shares with the ancient programming language also called LISP, this is a pretty promising idea. Basically what it boils down to (and I’m over simplifying) is that it’s kind of like the layer 2 Ethernet methodology of tag stacking or Q-in-Q but for layer 3 IP traffic between autonomous networks. Read more…
Comcast is launching a new DOCSIS 3.0 product in the San Francisco Bay Area with speeds of 50mbps/10mbps. Holy crap! Oh, that exclaimation was over the price. $139.95 for residential, $189.95 for business. Still cheaper than a DS3, I guess. From Light Reading’s Cable Digital News: Bay Area Gets Wideband
Sometimes I’m freaked out and sometimes I’m not. We’ve been through this before, right? It’s just the classic IPv4 exhaustion scare. I’m talking back when the IANA and the RIRs used to give away classful network allocations like they were Tootsie Rolls at an Independence Day parade. Back before NAT and before IPv6 was even ratified, the fear was here. So what’s different this time? Is it real? I think there are different factors that make it more of a threat of being legit this time.
I’m not sure how many of you have heard of the Cisco QuantumFlow processor in the new ASR 1000 routers, but it’s pretty neat to see where network processors are headed. Here’s a good article from Network World about it including charts, graphs, movies and all that jazz: The Cisco QuantumFlow Processor - The Engine in the ASR 1000 Series
There are quite a few network operators that have been keeping tabs on Provider Backbone Bridging or PBB, Provider Backbone Bridging-Traffic Engineering or PBB-TE and Provider Link State Bridging or PLSB as they’ve made their way out of the Nortel Metro Ethernet Networks (MEN) labs and into the standards bodies. For those of you not aware of these protocols, they are extensive additions to Ethernet that aim to make it more scalable and flexible to suit tranport of modern Carrier Ethernet networks. Read more…
Recent Comments