Posts

using our new blogging platform, i just published short piece about just announced onePK. i’m watching live discussions for over two years now about network control capabilities. i was one of those distanced guys when it comes to OpenFlow “explosion” in popularity. and as time did show - I was right. today even hardware vendors suddenly slowed down a bit and distance themselves from new standard versions, and development tempo also falls down. more and more of these that believed supporting OpenFlow will suddenly change their support model and feature set - start to understand thats hardly true. some of them even decided to abandon this direction altogether. ...

there’s a lot of wisdom in books, presentations and trainings covering “how to achieve success” (however we choose to define it). this can be applied to working with people, managing them - or companies. one of great books helps reader achieve the success by simply structuring it in a simple, three-step program: decide what you want to achieve prepare plan, that will help you achieving what you want execute the plan simple, isn’t it? what’s really interesting, it’s actually that easy. but people tend to get lost very quickly around point number 2, and spend most of their lives around number 1. ...

i just made a short post describing a bit behavior and characteristics of new Sup720-10GE switching matrix that can be installed in Catalyst 6500 - for cisco-nsp@ folks: In old Sup720 design, the Supervisor itself is connected to the fabric using one channel. This channel is used by Hyperion ASIC to provide for bus interface, and multicast/SPAN features. Because there’s no other way to connect the uplinks on the Sup itself, the Hyperion has it’s interface also terminating the uplinks (2xGE) thus limiting effective throughput/etc. BTW, both PFC and MSFC are also connected to the rest of the chassis linecards by Hyperion (PFC) and Pinnacle (MSFC). On the Sup720-10GE, the separate, 19th channel is used to connect the uplinks directly into fabric. Hyperion is still there, it still takes the channel “belonging” to the slot which Supervisor itself is in, but thanks to such design doesn’t limit in any way performance you can achieve on the 2x10GE uplinks (or 4xGE). In the new design, Hyperion takes care of providing connectivity to MSFC3 complex, while Metropolis (ASIC terminating the uplinks and connected to fabric) takes care of providing transport to PFC3C/CXL. The 20th channel is used in the same fashion for the redundant Sup if it’s inserted into chassis. Hope that clears it a bit. ...

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’ve had a opportunity today to take the CCDE exam in London again. accompanied by two fellow SEs and one of the engineers working for Cisco Partner in Poland, we’ve took our chances. and it’s definitely better - feedback works. out of 6 scenarios you work only with 4, split statically by 2 for before and after the lunch. questions are more to the point, and there’s less of text to look for information from. there’s less of mistakes as well. finally it’s the exam you can pass, this time however it seems it is more focused on book knowledge not necessarily experience. ...

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. ...

FreeBSD 9.0 did an unannounced appearance lately. it introduces a bunch of different features, two of which are of great interest to me. firstly, we can select different mechanisms to fight traffic congestion for TCP. to do that, you need to change sysctl net.inet.tcp.cc.algorithm from the list available under net.inet.tcp.cc.available. NewRENO, the default one, works quite OK, but in some specific configurations you can select others and check if they’d behave better. ...

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. ...

a year ago, the idea was to test the wide range of different IPv6 implementations and solutions. this year, we’re gathering together to turn on IPv6 - in the devices, on the portals - and let it be on forever. the idea is World IPv6 launch - worth reading about and obviously joining yourself. cisco is part of the initiative and again the first vendor to join it.