This week there was a lot of buzz about SDN (as usual). There was a lightreading thread that I commented on and a fantastic read by Brent Salisbury about being the steamroller and not the road that got me thinking about OpenFlow and SDN in a way I had not before. 
Musings
Last year, Networking Field Day was something that I’d heard of but wasn’t really aware of what is really was. I occasionally looked at Twitter and saw the hash tags but did not know much about how it was set up or what it was about. In fact, I actually thought it was supposed to be like the HAM radio field day stuff where you go out and build out an emergency network on the fly. OK, I should have done more homework, admittedly. Fast forward 6 months. I’m working more and…
Pc and networking timeline. Commodity hardware. Custom hardware. Asics. White box.
There has been a lot of buzz about the service provider model, net neutrality and tiered access for consumers in the past few years. Just this week Google has been accused of paying Orange (more likely Orange is forcing google) for handling its traffic. This is a VERY slippery slope that teeters on the edge of what we all want to avoid as consumers or content creators. This recent story has sparked something I’ve been thinking about for a very long time. Rewind to 1999. I worked for a…
I’ve been lamenting about the SDN WAN options for a while now. Having SDN/OpenFlow in a data center or campus is relatively well documented and already widely deployed. Google has been doing SDN across their private WAN in production. These pieces are easy. What isn’t easy is the ability to plumb SDN across many domains that are under disparate control. This part is hard. What is lacking is a fundamental framework, or set of primitives to build from. As an example, how does…
I have a bunch of Apple wireless gear at my house. It’s inexpensive, feature rich and easy to maintain. However, with the update to mountain lion a while ago, the ability to install the older Airport Utility stopped. This is annoying since I have what apple now considers “advanced” features like IPv6 at my home and essentially all my gear here is a lab (except for the plex server =) I’ve been spending a lot of time on cacti lately, and I wanted to test out the syslog…
After reading Stephen Fosketts post “How Will Cisco Recover From The Consumer Strategy Blunder?”, it got me thinking. It’s a very different world than when Cisco got started all those years ago. I don’t have any brand loyalty to Cisco, I learned on cisco gear 14-15 years ago for the most part, but I try to keep the mentality of “the right tool for the job”, which means constantly surveying th emarket for new and interesting ways to do things. In doing this,…
I am very happy and flattered that this site actually proves to be useful to folks. It was always my intention to use this as a platform to try to give back a bit, to help with any data I may have run across that was interesting, useful, or obscure. I utilize sites like etherialmind.com, packetpushers.net, evilrouters.net, networkstatic.net and ioshints more than I can even measure. I wanted to try to contribute as much as I could to pay it back. So, seeing at it’s a new year and all, I…