In many environments, the move to virtualization is a path well traveled.  My home and lab networks are no exception to this and I’m sure nearly everyone who reads these pages has at least been exposed to it in one way or another.  I have played with nearly all of the virtualization platforms and am firmly in the camp that there will be a large segment of networking that will move to a virtualized platform especially in the data center and campus segments.  Virtualization of routing tables…

I had the need to build a FlowVisor instance under CentOS.  Since nearly all of the docs I could find were for debian, I threw this together.  I utilized this GENI doc and the github docs as a simple reference.  This is the quick and dirty method I used: Install the prerequisites:``` sudo yum -y install ant eclipse java-1.6.0-openjdk.x86_64 git sudo yum -y groupinstall “Development Tools”

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 love to be the “uncola” of networking sites.  I like interop and I don’t do a lot with Cisco because I don’t have access to much of their gear anymore.  So, that being the case, I had a need to bring up a l2circuit (in JunOS speak), or VLL (in Brocade speak) between an MX480 and an MLX.  Since they are very different platforms, I had to do some digging and playing around to get it to work. You should have a rudimentary understanding of MPLS (which is about what I have)…

Jon Langemak has a great write up on building the OpenDaylight controller under CentOS. Since I’ll have to do this a bunch of times, I though tI’d take what he so generously put online and build a very rudimentary script for deploying ODC under CentOS. The prerequisites are that you already have an account and ssh key at the OpenDaylight GIT repo and that you disable SELinux. Here is the script:``` #!/bin/bash

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 had been working, off and on, on a how-to for building the daylight openflow controller under CentOS.  Most openflow docs and dev are done under ubuntu or debian, and while those are both fantastic alternatives, there are a huge number of folks that will want or need to use RHEL or CentOS. So, seeing as that is the case, having someone be mindful of that is important.  When I saw the write up by Jon Langemak, I scrapped my attempt at a how-to since his was so much better. If you’re not…

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 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…

Recently SI6 released the IPv6 Toolkit 1.3   This release is on the heels of this IETF draft  on IPv6 host scanning.  It was long thought that scanning an IPv6 network was impossible.  The address space was too large and reliably ascertaining the hosts from it would be too time consuming to even attempt.  However, as Dr. Hans Zarkov says in the 1980 classic cult film of my youth, Flash Gordon, “You can’t beat the human spirit!“  That fine community out there has thought outside…