Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 30th June 2014 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them:

Minimum Viable Bureaucracy, June 2014 Edition // Speaker Deck – Enjoyed this presentation on “Minimum Viable Bureauracy” – some stimulating ideas on how to build better managers of engineers. I’m a big fan of asynchronous mode of communication having had great success with this idea.

Programmatic Interface to Routing – Presentation to NANOG 61 – apparently talking about programmable routing is “controversial”. Where do these people live when they aren’t attending conferences ? Mars ?

SFPTotal – Programmer Optical Transceivers GBIC, SFP, SFP , XFP, QSFP. – Nice overview of using OEM SFPs in vendor locked switches. Most transceivers refuse in the third party-party switches, and do not exceed a predetermined speed or cease to maintain the necessary protocols and formats.

Cooper Hewitt: the typeface by Chester Jenkins | Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum – This beautiful font is an excellent complement for technical diagrams. it is highly visible, server and condensed. It has an Open Font License and can be used for any purpose.

The new typeface, Cooper Hewitt, is a contemporary sans serif, with characters composed of modified-geometric curves and arches. Initially commissioned by Pentagram to evolve his Polaris Condensed typeface, Chester Jenkins created a new digital form to support the newly transformed museum. 
“Developing this typeface specifically for Cooper Hewitt has been enormously gratifying,” said Jenkins. “Instead of building on the Polaris structures, I drew everything from scratch, using the existing forms as a rough guide for letter widths and master-stroke thicknesses.”

Why Does Everyone Look Hotter in Sunglasses? — Science of Us – Except me. Because I keep losing them.

And now, Science of Us attempts to unravel the answers to a summertime question of monumental importance: Why does nearly everyone instantly look more attractive with sunglasses on?

Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 12th June 2014 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them:

Will Network Engineers Become Programmers? « ipSpace.net by @ioshints – Ivan explains his view on the ways that network folks will work with programmers. I think he describes OpenDaylight model pretty closely.

Will the networking expert become part of the programming team? It depends. For large projects it probably makes sense to embed experts with networking skills into programming teams, for longer-term low-intensity development projects you might add a programmer or two to your networking team, or merge development and operations.

ONF in China. Fresh Ink. | ONF BLOG – The ONF continues to sign on new partners in China. The ONF is still relevant and has a role to play in the forwarding plane of flow networking. Standards in this area are vital to vendor commitment and hopefully the fracturing and duplication of standards while fade away soon.

We welcomed Baidu, CATR, China Telecom, DCN, GreeNet, H3C, and xNet to the organization with a small ceremony in which representatives from each company made their way to a stage to sign a membership agreement. Present in the room were the new members as well as members of the press. The stage was set up so that I was in the center between two chairs. I signed alongside each member company, and Liu Dong, CEO of the Beijing Internet Institute (BII), acted as the witness and signed each document as well.

Living with Student Loans — TheLi.st @ Medium — Medium – How do you run up $100K in student debt ? But should she even have it ? Dumb & Dumber from all sides. Student debt is one of those ideas that steals from someone else in a subtle way but, in this case, we are stealing from the future.

I think about how my student loans left me with horrible credit. I think about anxiety I feel every month just to keep treading water. I remember running out of money and campaigns- scrounging for quarters for gas money until my next check came. I have no savings, and well retirement- I’ll be lucky if my loans are paid off by then— let alone any savings.

Home – LACNIC – LACNIC goes into Phase 3 exhaustion. Anyone who wants to use BGP PI for redundancy in Latin America and Carribean won’t be able to.

At that point, the reserve for new members (/11) will be activated, thus triggering Phase 3 of the IPv4 exhaustion plan designed by LACNIC and the National Registries. According to the policies in force, during this final phase only new members will be able to request IPv4 addresses, which will be assigned in blocks of between 256 (/24) and 1,024 (/22) addresses. Each new member will only be able to receive one assignment from this space.

Why OpenStack Doesn’t Need Fibre Channel Support – Stephen Foskett makes a strong case why OpenStack doesn’t need FibreChannel

OpenStack should consider the network. They should not just assume that data will arrive on time and intact. Cinder and Neutron should merge software-defined storage and networking so protocols like iSCSI can do their very best. But it would a ludicrous waste of time to wedge Fibre Channel into OpenStack beyond whatever limited support current implementers demand. Linux didn’t need CKD support and OpenStack doesn’t need Fibre Channel.

NANOG Meeting Presentation Abstract | North American Network Operators Group – New standard for routing Ethernet frames over MPLS backbone with less complexity. Takes advantage of Moore’s law for hardware.

In this presentation we’ll take a look at Ethernet VPN (EVPN), an overlay network technology for providing Ethernet services. EVPN offers an alternative to VPLS that integrates both Layer 2 and Layer 3 services, and can run over simple IP networks with ECMP for resiliency and load balancing. EVPN is an interesting new technology for network operators providing a Layer 2 infrastructure over multiple sites or delivering integrated Layer 2/Layer 3 services, and data center operators providing cloud services.

Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 5th June 2014 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them:

VMware NSX, Multi-Hypervisor Capability, and FUDslinging — The Peering Introvert – An outbreak of FUD slinging from Cisco at Cisco Live last week which was poorly executed. Factually incorrect and pronounced by Soni Jiandami on the kyenote stage. A lot of people instantly called bullcrap on the slide via Social Media. Ethan Banks writes more about it here :

“But the aggressive comments and outright attacks from Cisco against NSX and against people who criticize ACI need to stop. Ultimately, the customer is the one who loses out, trying to make important decisions while fighting through a haze of disinformation. The reality is that both ACI and NSX have much to commend them. They can each stand on their own considerable merits. Neither solution requires the FUDslingers to be out.If the Cisco ACI team continues like this, people will see it a confirmation that ACI is not cutting it rather than defending what might be a good product. Let the product talk, don’t let the people talk.

MPLS networks not obsolete, but Internet as WAN catches up – I was quoted in this article at SearchNetworking about the increasing interest in “Internet as WAN” instead of dedicated services or MPLS overlays. Its a good read about the fact that WAN technology still isn’t smooth or simple and that some people are finding MPLS isn’t working for their business needs.

Effective Development With Eclipse Mylyn, Git, Gerrit and Hudson – I found this presentation on software development to be helpful in understanding how OpenDaylight programmers think and talk. Java development isn’t easy but these tools proscribe a lot of the process. ( Note:Link to Slideshare.com)

Bitter Medicine – MacStories – Federico Viticci points out that the visual makeover in Apple’s iOS 7 paved the way for the internal makeover of iOS 8. Which highlights that Apple has a very long view of products that you can’t ‘see’. Trusting a vendor comes hard but it’s probably worth it.

At the peak of criticism last year, many thought that iOS 7’s redesign was a fashionable excuse – a facade – to cover the fact that Apple was running out of ideas. Instead, I now see many of Apple’s decisions with iOS 7 as functional and directly related to this year’s deep changes in iOS 8.

Changelog: A tool designed to help you recover faster – Engineering at Prezi – Tools like this are either excellent complement to SDN tools or they replace them completely. I can’t make up my mind which.

When (not if) things break, it’s important to know where to start looking. Proper monitoring helps isolate the symptoms, but you need to be able to answer a simple question within seconds: What’s changed in your system in the last ten minutes? If you find an answer, more often than not, you will seriously cut your mean time to recovery. Changelog is a tool we’ve created and used for almost a year that answers that very question, and now we’re open-sourcing it.

Cumulus Networks | Faster, Easier and Affordable | Blog – Andy Qin from Cumulus Networks provides an interesting story on finding a solution for customers and some very low-tech testing methods. Also interesting is insights into “low cost” networking which shows the pricing differential of against conventional vendors – buying kit at 1/5th the price of conventional networking.

Mellanox – Deploying Ceph with High Performance Networks, Architectures and benchmarks for Block Storage Solutions – Mellanox has published a white paper that covers the installation and deployment of a multi-Petabyte CEPH cluster using a their high density 10GbE networking kit. Lots of juicy things to learn on building a distributed IP storage cluser. This links directly to the PDF and there is NO REGISTRATION. Just download and enjoy.

Snabb NFV – Open source virtual appliance with Snabb becomes NFV ready and evaluated(?) by Deutsche Telekom

Snabb NFV is deployed as an OpenStack ML2 mechanism driver. The operator configures Neutron using the standard commands and API. Snabb NFV then implements the Neutron configuration using its own a fast data-plane and robust control-plane.

Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 24th May 2014 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them:

Google: ‘EVERYTHING at Google runs in a container’ • The Register – Containers are going to add to the complexity of virtual networking. With Google saying that they run their infrastruture on containers, expect to see a lot o interested in Docker & CoreOS. xThe company is able to do this because of how the tech works: Linux containerization is a way of sharing parts of a single operating system among multiple isolated applications, as opposed to virtualization which will support multiple apps with their own OS on top of a single hypervisor.

Declarative and Procedural Programming (and How I Got It all Wrong) « ipSpace.net by @ioshints – I am also struggling with the concept of declarative programming. The lack of precision means that execution of a given policy has the potential to be flawed and inaccurate. Did I say implementation details? Isn’t that procedural programming? No, we’re still in the realm of declarative programming (we never tell the switches how to implement VLANs, do we?), but working at a lower level of abstraction and dealing with how individual devices (or vendors) expect things to be declared. So I agree with Ivan, it’s confusing.

I’m lacking conviction that the path of imprecise declaration is a smooth one.

LiveAction Introduces its Single Pane of Glass, Next-Generation, LiveAction 4.0 – LiveAction – LiveAction released Version 4 of their product. I saw a live demo at TechFieldDay and I’m hoping to spend more time with this product in the near future. The visualisation around the QoS and data path really caught my attention.

SteelHead: Troubleshooting Riverbed Steelhead W… | Riverbed Splash – Guide to troubleshooting Riverbeed Steelhead platforms from engineers on their TAC.

A group of Riverbed TAC engineers have worked on an internal troubleshooting document to kick start new TAC engineers. It describes the design of the Steelhead appliance, the working of the optimization service and the setup of optimized TCP sessions, installation and operation related issues, various latency optimization related issues, on how to use the various CLI tools to troubleshoot and how you can deal with the contents of the system dump.

Nice work. The introduction to the WAN Optimisation is very well done.

On a side note, self publishing means that vendors can and should publish more documentation like this. Why aren’t they ?

Network architect perceptions of SDN, cloud, and the future of networking — Gigaom Research – This is my latest analyst report for GigaOm Research on the adoption of SDN. Of particular note in this research is survey and the survey responses showed a number of surprising results. In January 2014 Gigaom Research conducted a survey of network architects, engineers, and managers on their experiences with the cloud and SDN in today’s market. The results from more than 250 responses covering a survey audience of large companies with multiple data centers and extensive experience provide some startling insight into the reality of SDN.

The End of Undetected BGP Route Hijacking – This PDF from Renesys talks about the use of large scale analytics to monitor public BGP routing table to detect and analyse changes. Some of the changes are accidental and some are more suspicious. Worth reading and including into your network security thinking.

Hat Tip to Wes Felter at Hack The Planet in Exile blog

RFC 7196 – Making Route Flap Damping Usable – Interesting work on route flap damping. It appears that someone seems to believe that RFD is still needed and picked up on some old research into the better default values. Since the vendors all have different defaults (as listed in the RFC) I can’t see that this is anything useful since it will another IETF RFC that get ignored.

Can’t help but wonder if this is a “vanity RFC” for the authors. The IETF should be focussing on producing something useful. The authors actually point out that they don’t expect anyone to implement the proposed changes.

Route Flap Damping (RFD) was first proposed to reduce BGP churn in routers. Unfortunately, RFD was found to severely penalize sites for being well connected because topological richness amplifies the number of update messages exchanged. Many operators have turned RFD off. Based on experimental measurement, this document recommends adjusting a few RFD algorithmic constants and limits in order to reduce the high risks with RFD. The result is damping a non-trivial amount of long-term churn without penalizing well-behaved prefixes’ normal convergence process.

Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 16th May 2014 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them:

Source Serif Pro / Wiki / Home – Adobe has open sourced a Serif Font to go with the previous Source San Pro

Source Serif Pro is a set of OpenType fonts that have been designed to complement Source Sans Pro.

I’ve also switched my terminal font to use Source Code Pro from the same family. Thanks to Adobe for these really great fonts and making them available for anyone to use. And these are really great, top quality fonts. Every enterprise and home computer should be using them.

mcs07/AnySearch-safari-extension – I like using Safari on OS X. I don’t like using Google or the default forced search options. This Safari extension lets me set it up the way I like. I proudly use DuckDuckGo.

Use a custom search engine in the Safari address bar, or disable searches completely.

Terminus Font Home Page – I’m always looking for mono-spaced terminal fonts. Open Source.

Terminus Font is a clean, fixed width bitmap font, designed for long (8 and more hours per day) work with computers. Version 4.39 contains 891 characters, covers about 120 language sets and supports ISO8859-1/2/5/7/9/13/15/16, Paratype-PT154/PT254, KOI8-R/U/E/F, Esperanto, many IBM, Windows and Macintosh code pages, as well as the IBM VGA, vt100 and xterm pseudographic characters.

Glenn Greenwald: how the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers | World news | The Guardian – US Government pants being pulled down even further. I doubt anyone in IT didn’t think this was happening, but you could always hope that product integrity was real. Apparently not.

But while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers, foreign organisations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones. A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA’s Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit. The NSA routinely receives – or intercepts – routers, servers, and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers.

The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal, and sends them on

Throughput Calculator | Silver Peak – I found this bandwidth calculator at Silver Peak very useful last week. Lots o different options for loss, delay and speed. Very nicely done.

Throughput Calculator – How Effective is Your WAN?

How will key applications perform across your network? Will data acceleration help? Use our interactive throughput calculator to find out.