For the Supercomputing 2012 show, as in years past, I was “the guy who installed and maintained RANCID” as part of my duties for the SCinet routing team. If you don’t know about RANCID for change management and config back up, check the link. It’s ree and works on a huge amount of gear. Every year there is a new and interesting platform, this year is was Juniper qfabric and Brocade VDX.

Every year there is an international conference for High Performance Computing, or HPC as it is often called. This is a bit of a niche in that it’s something that many enterprises and researchers need but don’t do themselves and so many don’t have a grasp as to what all is invoved. It’s a specialized, potentially expensive and very different environment as well as mindset than the general sysadmin or network engineer will ever see.

Recently we’ve run into an odd issue while routing on an EX4200 series. These little JunOS boxes are a nice alternative for an entry level building router, they support L2/L3 functionality, a PVST+-ish protocol and, with advanced licensing, IPv6, ISIS and BGP. They have multi 10G interface options and come in a pluggable fiber option. We use them all over for light layer 3. They can also be stacked via stacking cables and fiber, which is very handy and makes them extremely versatile but not really applicable for the purpose of this entry.

If I had my perfect world where I lived in a gumdrop house with lollypop trees and everything smelled like butterfly kisses, here is what I would like to see in WAN networking gear. I can build a list for LAN and edge gear as well. It’s not a golden rocket ship I’m looking for. OK, maybe it is. Full MPLS support  Full IPv6 support, all the features, not just pieces.

As I sit here thinking if this site is worth my time, some words that someone said to me recently ring true. “Take from things you’re doing every day” is what Brent Salisbury of networkstatic.net said to me. He was right. …And it was why I originally started this site, in a way. The original goal was to make a site I could take notes on and possibly help out someone trying to solve the same issues as me or look at something from the same perspective I had.

As I sit here thinking if this site is worth my time, some words that someone said to me recently ring true. “Take from things you’re doing every day” is what Brent Salisbury of networkstatic.net said to me. He was right. …And it was why I originally started this site, in a way. The original goal was to make a site I could take notes on and possibly help out someone trying to solve the same issues as me or look at something from the same perspective I had.

Moving to JunOS from IOS can be a daunting task. It’s a completely different command structure and the config, by default, looks like a programming language. I was fortunate enough to have gotten in on using JunOS very early in my career, 1⁄3 in to be exact (as of this writing). Not to mention that wen I got started, IOS wasn’t the only game in town. Remember Xylan? Gandalf? OpenRoute?