“Now, as you look through this document you’ll see that I’ve underlined all the major decisions I ever made to make them stand out. They’re all indexed and cross-referenced. See? All I can suggest is that if you take decisions that are exactly opposite to the sort of decisions that I’ve taken, then maybe you…
Archives for October 2014
Junos – Wildcard Ranges, Interface Ranges and Configuration Groups
Until recently I have worked almost exclusively on Cisco ASA and IOS platforms. Within the last six months I’ve added Juniper’s Junos platform into my repertoire. The story for how this came to be is one for another post I hope to write soon. For those who aren’t familiar, Junos is a whole different ball…
HTIRW: Provider Peering and Revenue Streams (Part 1)
In the last post in this series, I described several types of providers — and even how those descriptions are no longer really “pure,” for the most part (although NTT, for instance, is a pure transit provider that only offers a few services throughout the world). For each piece of a provider’s business, then —…
Stretching the friendship
It has been nine months now since I hung up the console cable and embarked on my PhD. I seem to be unusual in the 21st-century IT world in that I have only had a couple of employers over the twenty or so years in the industry. I left each of those jobs on (I…
Automating the Cabbage Patch Network Today (2014)
“Sometimes my head is a bit of an idiot” is something my daughter might say and that happens to me too, if that time is today and this article, let me know. If you don’t get the Cabbage Patch reference and its juxtaposition to automation, see here. I’ve tried to avoid sarcasm (and arrogance) but have…
Thinking Through Title II Regulation
Over at CircleID, Geoff Huston has a long’ish article on Title II regulation of the Internet, and the ideals of “net neutrality.” The reasoning is tight and strong — his conclusion a simple one: At its heart, the Internet access business really is a common carrier business. So my advice to the FCC is to…
EVPN: Intro to next gen L2VPN
Introduction: With the ascent of DCI, a new set of requirements emerged which are not fully addressed by current L2VPN technologies like VPLS. There are three major options in deploying VPLS LDP based VPLS (RFC 4762) LDP based VPLS with BGP Auto discovery BGP based VPLS (RFC 4761) Each option has its pros and cons….
Traceroute – A Small Tool for Big Problems
Basics is must for Network Engineer.Traceroute is an imp and handy tool while troubleshooting any network issue.How Traceroute works ? Whats the concept behind it ? Its task is to determine the path taken by packet to reach its destination .Before going further ,lets see the IP header . 0 1 2 3 0 1…
Now that We’ve Buried the Seven Layer Model…
“But the seven layer model is still useful for teaching networking…” So ran the most common reaction to my post last week about the seven layer model being dead. But let me ask something — how useful is the seven layer model for teaching networking? It doesn’t match the TCP/IP stack, it doesn’t account for…
Traveling Light – 15 Things in an Engineer’s Bag (including the bag)
My day job involves traveling around northern Europe and occasionally further afield. I often get little notice of where I’m going, or how long I’m going for. This makes for a lot of trudging along train platforms and across departure lounges. Hauling too much stuff around is guaranteed to ruin my day. Traveling light becomes a necessity,…
