Networks

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. ...

all interesting and worth reading. as usual during summer holidays i’ve tried to catch up with my reading queue - it’s been interesting two weeks: rework - great book for every company owner and destined for big things - previous version of the book - getting real can be read online managing humans - of Rands in Repose blog author; a lot of useful observations and tips for dealing with humans in IT world; you can however skip being geek - most of the content can be found either in ‘managing humans’ or in blog; Stephen Greys Operation Snakebite, Gregory Feifers The Great Gamble, Doug Beatties Task Force Helmand and finally Bing Wests No true Glory - bunch of good books about Iraq and Afghanistan; it’s unbelievable how people tend to make the same mistakes even when previous generations documented them very clearly; Metro 2033 and Metro 2034 - great reading, each of them took me just one day and night; Scott Berkuns Myths of Innovation - wonderful; Born standing Up - Steve Martins biography, tells compelling story about Steve himself, but also about world and America; Richard Wisemans 59 seconds - very practical book worth reading and applying to your daily routines - follow up can be found on You’re not so smart blog; well. now it is time to get back to OSPF and EIGRP. it seems i failed last CCDE exam :) ...

“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). ...

some time ago i’ve written a post about displaying live traffic that is going throught the router. also, i covered how it can be split based on autonomous system (with some sorting capabilities built in), thanks to Flexible NetFlow. recently, Flexible NetFlow was extended to use NBAR capabilities, and with that we have new options to sort traffic by application. with slightly modified flow record snippet, we can collect also the application name: ...

good people at RIPE did some testing and it turns out it’s pretty quick!

…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. ...

for some time Jim Gettys on his blog is writing a lot about problems caused by buffers, queues and other congestion avoidance mechanisms. you should really read about them. especially, if you’re in this group that believes big buffers solve all of the problems, and dropping traffic is absolute evil. nowadays it should be treated as absolutely normal thing - in most of the real life cases. on the upcoming, sixth PLNOG we may be able to tackle this problem (if there will be space in agenda), and have a shot at myths and legends related to network QoS. and yes, agenda will be out there soon, we’re just closing down last preparations. ...

while the experiment was a success, effects were rather modest :) during the entire 9th, if we dismiss connections from bots connecting from University of Pennsylvania (greetings!) and China (really interesting URL mangling techniques), we’ve had 20 unique users and 1145 sessions. late evening, after grand finale additional 80 users visited us, and session counter increased to over 4500. i definitely didn’t do good job of marketing IPv6 availability for WOŚP, or IPv6 geeks were far away from IPv6-enabled internet that day. ...