With the recent announcement of Cisco Systems intent to purchase tail-f, proponents of a multi-vendor environment are waiting with baited breath to see how the networking giant will deal with support of competitor hardware and CLIs. Yang is here to stay, there is no doubt about that. As is netconf. Both of these are good things for the industry as a whole, having a standard way to communicate with network hardware [that isn’t openflow] is necessary and immeasurably useful. I’m not…

Many regular internet users are extremely upset about the recent proposed changes the FCC has opened for comments about the delivery and provisioning of internet services.  Watch this video if you’re unaware of the high emotions it has evoked: While these are proposed rules and are not in any way finalized, there is real concern that they may become law.  Where this is problematic is that it opens up the possibility of some real misuse, abuse or simple misunderstanding of needs and…

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A while ago I got an email asking me to participate in Network Field Day 7.  I was very happy and humbled to get asked again since I wasn’t able to attend NFD5 or NFD6 for various reasons outside of my control (although I did try to participate with NFD5  remotely).   If you’re unfamiliar with the tech field day series, you should spend a little time and learn about the value it brings.  There are archived video feeds of previous conferences and live feed and social media outlets for…

My personal background in computing (specifically networking) is atypical.  I have a bachelors in visual arts and only took a handful of computing classes in my relatively long tenure in college.  However, I did learn one valuable lesson that has served me pretty well over the 15 or so years I have been doing networking and I’d bet money any good network engineer that has more than 10 years of experience will nod their head at this and agree. A really good Network Engineer knows enough…

Let me be clear, when I say “single vendor” I’m talking about being “single vendor” in what you work on, not necessarily what you install (although one basically forces the other) and what I really mean is multilingual.  I’ll explain after a brief history of why I am the way I am. I’m idealistic but I’m also realistic.  I generally propose solutions that I think are best even if it is non-standard or out of current comfort level along with an…

I have been learning and using IPv6 for a quite a while, even before I worked in research and education, back in the ISP days.  I thought I should learn it because, frankly, I figured we’d all be converted to it by now, already whole hog using it like it was the layer 3 addressing mechanism that it is.  Flashback: My first IPv6 access was via a tunnel to HE a long, long time ago and before that I was reading what I could about it.  I’ve been evangelizing IPv6 for about that long,…

I want to preface this by saying that I have not seen or worked on the cumulus networks system yet. This is a stream of consciousness post on my thoughts and opinions based on what I’ve read publicly. Recently a new network player has emerged on the scene with a very simple, straightforward idea. Take linux and put it on a switch. While this isn’t exactly new (see Juniper and FreeBSD, Arista with Linux, Force10 with NetBSD or the plethora of other vendors using an opensource OS as…

Lately I’ve been lamenting the fact that there seems to be a lack of options in a very specific product level.  Lets say you have a network that looks like this:   Right Away you’re limited since you need MPLS and more than 2 10G interfaces. Even more so if you require full support for IPv6 and ISIS. If budget is of any concern, you’re in real trouble. For many, Cisco pricing and smartnet is potentially going to exclude anything reasonable from them.  There are a substantial…