I don’t care what your vendor alignment of choice is, Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, Alcatel….it doesn’t matter. At one point or another you’re going to need to bird dog an address to see where it’s coming from, who owns it, what it’s DNS name is or what path you’re taking to get to it.  We’ve already talked about BGP tools, they’re a great choice for checking routes across the internet. Hunting down addresses is an interesting one, though, as…

I firmly believe that blending disciplines is the way of the future in IT. I’ve rambled about it here at other venues and I’m vocal (some would probably say brash) about it on the twitters.  Be it Networking and System, Systems and Security, Programming and Networking, most of us that have been around any length of time already do it but now it’s happening out in the open and “DevOps”, a form of the hybrid IT worker, has seemingly become the BOTD (Buzzword of the…

Time to rewind from the new and shiny and get back to roots of networking. BGP is one of those odd protocols that is foundational to the functioning of the internet but yet somewhat hard to get experience with.  Say what you will about this venerable protocol, it’s been here a while and it is not going anywhere any time soon. I’ve been doing BGP since around late 1999, and I completely fell into it by accident, having only the Cisco Internet Routing Architectures book (which I…

“Hopefully there are some things here that will make you really upset in a very good way” is how Carl Moberg of Swedish based company tail-f opened up to the crowd at Networking Field Day 7 on Feb 19, 2014.  Tail-f is a sleeper, I had actually never heard of them before NFD7, but they’ve got a very unique product in NCS and in my opinion it can change the way existing and future networks are managed.  Right now.  It’s not a platform that is green, unpolished or unfinished.  NCS is in…

One of the things that I’ve always lamented about using non-Cisco hardware is the lack of true 1:1 netflow support.  Say what you will about jflow, cflow, sflow….there is no substitute for netflow, with sflow being the exception to that since it is a protocol that inherently supports ipv6 and can transport far more than simple network information if configured in certain ways on certain devices. On newer MX series Juniper routers the game has changed.  One to one flow data export…

Working on some MX series routers recently I encountered a problem I’d never seen before, essentially preventing the configuration from being committed:``` buraglio@rtr# commit check re0: error: could not open configuration database (juniper.data+)

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.

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)…

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…