You have one, right? Even if your entire strategy is “collect some flow data”, there is absolutely NO reason not to have a netflow implementation, and frankly, it will save you time and money over time if you make the effort to do it. I love network data and analytics and I have waxed poetic about how important they are at every opportunity. There are a myriad of options for analytics and flow data. If you’re not doing something, you’re doing it wrong. I can go on and on about the importance of…

Taking politics and putting them aside, what the new administration has been attempting to change with regard to internet privacy is something we should all be informed about. Wether you have a tin foil hat or don’t care, “knowing is half the battle”. The other half is doing - which I will also lend some brief insight to (sorta). What’s changing? Nothing yet (as of the time of this writing). What will likely change? The ability of your internet (mobile or not) to sell…

     I was recently at a meeting where BGP RPKI was the topic de jour. While this has been a topic that I have visited on occasion of the last few years and something I wanted to spend significant time on, I have found that setting aside the time has been difficult and sparse, much like the deployment of BGP RPKI. In order to better understand the options available, it’s important to break down the pieces and terminology involved; BGP is daunting enough to those unfamiliar with it and…

I’m way overdue for a soapbox session – I found this one in my drafts and thought it was something I needed to put out there. It’s already dated in terminology but that actually helps make the point - it’s hard to keep up. 

A few years ago I wrote some text on interdomain SDN. Years later, work is being done, smart people are thinking about it and building ways to make it a reality. Not being one to give up on an idea, I gave this presentation in may at ChiNOG  on what my take on what that architecture should be. I (we) propose that the use of existing protocols such as BGP FlowSpec will make this realistically deployable and maintainable given some simple, pluggable middleware. As work continues to happen on this,…

Back in February of this year (2015) I was introduced to Solarwinds when they presented to us at Networking Field day 9. Until then I knew of SolarWinds products but only at a cursory level; I had never really seen or used their stuff since it was mostly focused on environments that were either smaller or outside of the networking world that I generally operate in. However, I am a[n insufferable] network monitoring “aficionado” so when the opportunity to play around with it arose, I…

There are a vast number of entities that offer the seemingly ubiquitous “cloud”. “SaaS”, “IaaS”, “BLAHaaS”, buzzword compliance is truly a sought after thing by marketing folks. With the proliferation of virtualization, containers and other “time slicing” of hardware by software the chatter can quickly become noise. As technical professionals and the warm bodies with the responsibility for actually making things work and keeping them running, the onus is on us to be able to decipher the useful…

At Networking Field day 9 there was a great deal of discussion regarding monitoring, modeling, and maintaining networks, as would be expected at an event with such a focus. Luckily for us, an interesting product that comes from a company that I was unfamiliar with called NetBeez gave an inspired presentation. Now, NetBeez got my attention for a few reasons. First off, NetBeez is doing some really great things in the field of network monitoring. What would that be, you ask? What is hard about…

In a few weeks I’ll have the opportunity to participate in another Network Field Day. I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend in the past and have done some remote participation when possible, but like some of the other rare opportunities I have had in my career, NFD is fairly unique in that it is constantly evolving in both the information provided and the individuals involved. As the saying goes, variety is the spice of life. I’m particularly excited about…

I’ve blathered on about BGP forever.  Say what you will about the venerable protocol, it runs the interwebs, is reliable, extendable and well documented.  I’ve also espoused”) ad nauseam about IPv6, so none of this [admitted] rant should really be a surprise coming from me. As of 8/12/2014, according to the CIRD report (and many mailing lists), the default free global ipv4 routing table has reached 512k routes.  This is a milestone from many perspectives, but more importantly,…