As much as I like to think I automate everything, I’m pretty bad at writing code to make my life easier since it tends to take me longer to write the code and it tends to make be a bit grumpy (this is eomthing I’m fixing by learning as much code dev as I can during my limited spare time).  However, I like to think I can be fairly smart about working around my limited programming skills (think boba fett rather than jedi) by using the tools available to common folk.  Enter iTerm2. Last…

I recently had the need to debug a run away ip_rx process on an older Brocade MLX.  For anyone that has had to do any type of low level debugging on the Brocade (Foundry) platform, you know that there many somewhat deep level diagnostics that are possible.  The debug (like cisco debug) is a bit lacking, but the dm, LP and MP commands are very useful (and a tad scary). Regardless, I’ve had to utilize them a lot in the last few years so my aversion to using them has been pretty much…

I’ve been doing a lot of MPLS in the last 45 or so days (which is one of the reasons I have been absentee in the OpenFlow world lately). Having had almost no real world MPLS experience aside from a handful of pseudo-wires and a very small LDP signaled network, I had to spend some time reading, hacking at routers and essentially learning. In doing so, I found a few things.

Let me preface this post by saying that I am absolutely not an enterprise IT or systems guy, take everything that I write here on out with that as a side dish.  I’m also very, very cheap. That said, one of the things I really like about KVM is the ability to easily view the console of a guest system using free, non-windows software like VNC. However, much like everything in life, there are reasons to do one thing or another. I love VMware as well. It’s refined, well documented,…

I started working on Juniper equipment around 2002. At my employer, we had an M40 with the serial number 256.  We did Layer3 only.  I had no idea if the Juniper even did layer2.  It certainly wasn’t a layer3 switch like a 6500 like I was used to.  It was like a deliciously robust version of any Layer 3 router I’d worked on previously.  Over the years Juniper has added a switching line utilizing their FreeBSD based OS, JunOS. All that being said, I’d never really messed with…

I’ve recently run into a situation where there was no longer enough space in the FIB to handle both the full IPv4 global table and the full IPv6 global table.  We prefer to run a default-free network within this particular SP network, but in this case, until a hardware refresh can happen, we’ll need to adjust that.  Given what we knew about the size of both tables, it made more sense to take a default IPv6 route from one transit provider and filter the rest.  How we did this…

I am a network engineer by profession, but with the proliferation of SDN and OpenFlow, I have had to spend a lot of time re-learning a lot of system admin skills that I’d shelved years ago.  Now, I’ve been a virtualization user forever. From VMware (Fusion, ESX), VirtualBox, to Parallels, I’ve used them at least in testing if not in production environments.  I’d not really spent any mentionable amount of time with XEN, qEMU or KVM, but some projects I was working on…

Starting from a base CentOS system with nothing configured, and referencing the CentOS wiki, here is how I like to set up a headless virtualbox environment: Disable selinux. It’s overly cumbersome and is enabled by default in CentOS.  I like to permanently disable it even though the default is permissive.  I ride the edge, I know.``` vi /etc/selinux/config

If you are running a network and aren’t using RANCID, you should give it a serious look.  RANCID is a cross platform configuration management toolkit for backing up router configurations and certain environmental and hardware information into version control.  It’s been around for as long as I can remember and supports nearly every platform I can think of, including a few modules that I cobbled together myself.  There is are a few nice web based front ends for CVS and SVN, I prefer…

Like many others, I rely heavily on my mobile devices to get my work done.  I’ve been a user of the iPhone since the original, with a year on a Nexus one android device.  I don’t have a strong preference and there are no “religious arguments” to be had with me on platform.  In fact, I’d probably choose PamlOS if I had a choice, it’s simple elegance and stability were a comfort to me…it just didn’t make it to modernization. ..but I digress.…