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Software Defined & Intent Based Networking

You are here: Home / 2008 / Archives for January 2008

Archives for January 2008

Custom sizing your MMC RDP console

31st January 2008 By Greg Ferro Filed Under: Operation

Following on from yesterdays post I was looking at some of the options and realised that you actually set the size of you RDP console.Since I use a Mac Book Pro with a wide screen the standard resolution are not very helpful, and I like to have fixed size windows, changing them to use the available width is a good thingô
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Multiple RDP consoles – who knew ?

29th January 2008 By Greg Ferro Filed Under: Operation

I have been working with Windows folks for a long time, and I have not seen this tool used before. As a networking guy maybe I missed it.

I often deploy a number of Windows servers to monitor and manage networks (typically with open source and Ciscoworks). I recently discovered the MMC Snap-in for Remote Desktops which makes my life simpler by letting you switch between many consoles at once on a Windows desktop. This is a quick overview on how to configure this for yourself.

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Flush DNS cache on MAC OS X – Updated

28th January 2008 By Greg Ferro Filed Under: Operation, OSX

Mac OS X – Clearing or flushing the DNS Cache is regular occurrence for a network engineer.

Once you go to a Web site, or do any DNS lookup, the IP gets cached for quite a while. This becomes a royal pain if youíre a systems administrator who is in the middle of migrating domains from one server to another. Executing the following clears the cache, restarts the caching daemon, and fetches fresh DNS records.

And there was much rejoicing

For OS X Yosemite

sudo discoveryutil udnsflushcaches

For Mountain Lion / Lion

sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

For Leopard


sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

For Tiger

lookupd -flushcache

(On Windows you do ipconfig /flushdns)

 

Reference: Apple Support Site here

Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) – introduction and comparison with F5

25th January 2008 By Greg Ferro Filed Under: Cisco, Design

ACE Introduction

The ACE comes in two formats, either a standalone 1RU appliance, or as a Cat6500 module. The appliance seems to have a faster development cycle and gets the new features early, but the module has more performance in every aspect.

And what amazing performance it is, this thing can perform load balancing at up 16 Gigabits per second, which is about four times more than the F5 8800 (note some conditions apply in the current versions of code, due to ASIC inputs at 8 Gigabits per second but expected to be resolved in future code releases), and at a price about two thirds of an F5 8800. (Note: I accept raw speed is not he only measure of performance see more later)

But not many people are going to need a load balancer at that sort of performance, and the ACE module is a key part of the Cisco SONA strategy. To this end the ACE module can have up to 250 virtual instances, more than 340000 sustained TCP connection, 15000 SSL TPS. SO this thing has high performance across the board.

Power Reduction

A rough rule, one ACE module is ‘performance equivalent’ to at least four F5 6400 units. An F5 6400/8800 chassis uses a maximum of 460W, so lets say its consumes about 300W in real life. One ACE module uses about 220W. The power saving in enormous.Of course, one ACE module uses a lot less space.

Functional Comparison

In my opinion, the F5 has superior functional capability in comparison to the Cisco ACE. The iRules function is powerful, flexible and easy to use. The graphical IDE is a smart piece of work and is really attractive to the GUI-centric folks amongst us (big shout-out to the Windows server people!)

As a networking person, it takes a while to adapt to using a a language like TCL (which F5 iRules uses), but since Cisco IOS has a TCL mode I am becoming comfortable using traditional techniques for programming.The F5 also has some good features relating to certain applications such as MS Sharepoint, SAP, Oracle and so on. If you know about these features you will know why you want an F5 for these.But for web hosting platforms which use TCP, DNS, FTP, HTTP SMTP and so on in the server farms, you will be hard pressed to appreciate the F5 benefits.

Virtualisation

The ACE virtualisation is very similar to the Cisco FWSM. There is full separation between contexts, including AAA, login, SNMP and all network management functions. The F5 uses a partition concept, which involves administrative restrictions, but only a single management instance. This makes security and sharing of Network Management and Monitoring difficult. F5 indicates that they will have some form of virtualisation in the next year or so.

Management

Cisco ACE can be managed using Cisco Application Networking Manager. It provides a tool for GUI configuration of multiple ACE modules. I haven’t seen ANM yet, but a paper review indicates that it has good AAA and full separation of the views.

Interestingly, Cisco ANM comes free with your ACE for two hardware and five contexts, but you need to buy licenses in an odd (and expensive) way. Thus, you need to buy context licenses per device, and thus you have to spend a lot of cash and have unused licenses all over the place. For larger installations make sure you plan this into your upgrade costs.

Futures

When you look at the modules you can see that there is space for two daughter cards. The suggestion is that new features are in the pipeline for Web Acceleration. I suspect that we will see features from the Application Velocity and WAAS platform in the future. Look for dynamic browser cache management, HTML transformation / and protocol management in the hardware over the next year or so.

Conclusion

I believe that for large data centres, you will most likely use F5 LTM where you need it for a specific feature or task, but you would choose to have a ACE module for most load balancing tasks.

You can can create lots of them, use MPLS to make them available anywhere in your network.

I also recommend that you buy the WS-C6509E-ACE20-K9 ACE20 8G 6509E Bundle. This is a Catalyst 6509 chassis, with Sup720 and dual 6000W power supplies, and an ACE module as a single item. The saving is about 20% over buying the items individually, which makes it good value.

Edit: Also check out my rant at F5 about no AAA authorization.

Postscript Oct 2010

Well, my experience with the Cisco ACE is far from good. Over the last couple of years the software has been consistently buggy and prone to crashing. At three different customers, I have found that the software is also prone to leak memory and lock up in a working state but not forwarding data. This occurs when using application inspection for load balancing HTTP and DNS.

On the basis of repeated poor experiences I WOULD NOT recommend using the Cisco ACE except for the simplest of TCP load balancing. Given that Cisco hasn’t been able to fix the problem for the last two years, I would have to say it isn’t fixable and the product should be avoided.

iTerm and Dynamips – write to all terminals at once

22nd January 2008 By Greg Ferro Filed Under: Dynamips, OSX

I am often find myself needing to stop, make a configuration change to Dynagen, and then restart. To make sure I don’t miss anything I go to every screen and write the configuration.

In iTerm, there is the ability to send the same command to all screens at once, excellent!

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Copyright Greg Ferro 2008-2017 - Thanks for reading my site, it's been good to have you here.

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