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interesting enhancement to transport traffic in HTTP sessions proposed by Google is starting to gain popularity and traction. while i don’t use Chrome browser, in Firefox starting from version 11 you can turn the protocol on (about:config -> network.http.spdy.enable=true). on the server side you should run mod_spdy if you’re running Apache server. it also makes sense to install Firefox extension signalling SPDY work. the end effect? SPDY gets the traffic faster (usually), as multiple sessions are initiated at the same time. ...

…and inside, you’ll find a lot of completely new features overall (MediaTrace 2.0, IPv6 for GETVPN data plane, new IPv6 IP SLA extensions, LISP extensions), or for the first time available on software routing platforms like ISR G2s (BGP PIC Edge and Core, BGP route-server, Multicast Live-Live). everything can be found here. simultaneously, IOS_XE 3.6S came out, along with bunch of features that are catching up with traditional IOS releases - things like CGNAT or hardware support for BFD. ...

i highly recommend reading this good article about moving network stacks forward. it’s great addendum to network hardware bible. and yes, let’s stop ACTA - we’re not deploying IPv6 just to make our governments to force upon us adoption of poor technical standards. instead of deploying IPv6, fly to stars - we’re drowning in proposals like SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and - generally speaking - attacking each other. ...

if you visit Western portals or if you look into English-language wikipedia from time to time, you have noticed a significant protest happening today against the two legal acts US advocates want to introduce. the way it unfolds, leads to strong belief controlling everything and everything (due to - of course - money) is true goal. it presents interesting point of view in a discussion on cloud technologies and their real application - take a look here to get some feeling about scale of the games happening at an international level. even if you don’t like it, we already live to a large extent in the world perfectly portrayed in the ‘1984’ book. the question is just how much more we will give in the name of getting rich, or stated differently - when we finally notice as humanity that it is worth focusing on other things. other than money increasing on our bank accounts. ...

after experiencing massive hardware problems with MacBook Pro, i immediately fell into series of mysterious SSD failures. i’m baffled with the state of the (pro) electronics market. first, there was OCZ Vertex 2. my MacBook Pro couldn’t properly work in SATA3 mode despite the fact that Intel controller could. so i moved then to OCZ 2 working on slower SATA bus. it died after week, silently and ultimately. well, RMA submitted, disk will travel to Netherlands and then they’ll send me back working one. i immediately started search for some other, stable solutions. my next best option - Intel 320 announced firmware problems and tried to convince PC owners that it wasn’t happening ’too often'. ...

as i was visiting US for extended period of time, i decided to pull the trigger and in Apple Store bought myself new, shiny 17" MacBook Pro 2011. what’s ridiculous is that when you compare prices in Poland vs US, i’ve paid around 4,5k PLN (around 1000$) less than I’d pay in Poland - even though, Apple doesn’t import such high end configs to Poland. unbelievable, 1/3 of the cost of the whole machine! ...

“Cisco eats in own dog food” or as you may elite-write-it: c15c0 d06 f00d. we announced participation in ISOC IPv6 day as a first vendor. some parts of our infrastructure serve IPv6 natively, but that’s a great opportunity to test it at scale - including hardware and software for systems that’s used for our internal and Customer services. among other things we’re testing AnyConnect 3.0 with native IPv6 support (public version is going to be available in couple of months), ACE 3.0 service cards for load-balancing, and firewall systems (ASA-SM service cards and ASA 5585-X). ...

as you can see, 1GE share in overall switching market started to rise only recently (mainly thanks to cheap NICs and onboard integrations done by Realtek, Marvell, Broadcom and Intel). on the other hand, hunger for bandwidth grows as well - full HD movies from NAS need a lot of it, and if you’re planning to do something in addition to that sourced from the same NAS - it’s even worse (it seems everyone streams nowadays video content to different mobile devices around their homes over WLAN). ...

…hit me again (in a positive way). i was experimenting in my lab and wanted to define a lot of queues (and i mean a lot of them) in ALTQ. unfortunately, very quickly during parsing of pf.conf pfctl barked out following information: pfctl: DIOCADDALTQ: Cannot allocate memory to overcome the problem, you only need to modify those three files: /usr/include/altq/altq_hfsc.h /usr/src/sbin/pfctl/missing/altq/altq_hfsc.h /usr/src/sys/contrib/altq/altq/altq_hfsc.h where #define HFSC_MAX_CLASSES 64 is defined - to requested value. then rebuild the kernel and everything should work as expected. ...

it seems Google decided to reach out to wider community and use the freely available network stack for it’s own MPLS prototyping. the effect is complete MPLS LSR prototype described during recent NANOG 50 talk that’s also available as video. of course it’s quite interesting to see Google experimenting with that kind of solutions - maybe it will be connected to OpenFlow as non-academic exercise? will it become mainstay of new service provider networks? let’s talk about it during next, march edition of PLNOG. ...