Packet Rancher

John Day: IP Networks (v4 and v6) are Fundamentally Flawed

jason — Fri, 15 May 2009 19:13:50 +0000

I was at FutureNet Expo in Boston last week where I saw a very jarring and interesting presentation made by John Day, a professor at Boston University. If you’d like to take a look at the presentation, you can find it here. John has been involved with some fairly significant projects that were responsible for [...]

Useful Open Source Config Archival Tool

jason — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 22:09:17 +0000

I found this great tool recently I felt I should share called NetworkAuthority Inventory (was called ZipTie). It’s more than your run of the mill config archiver like the ever popular RANCID. Here are some of the more notable features: Performs autodiscovery of devices on a network which can be scheduled on a recurring basis Finds and [...]

40 Years of RFCs

jason — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 04:14:24 +0000

I just read Request For Comments (RFC) 5540 today. 40 years ago this month on April 7th, 1969, RFC 1 regarding “Host Software” authored by Steve Crocker at UCLA was published. Happy belated birthday, RFCs! Here’s to 40 more. For kicks I’ve included some fun RFCs on the books to celebrate the occasion. RFC 968 - ‘Twas [...]

Cool New Toy… errr… Valuable Networking Tool

jason — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 02:36:45 +0000

I’ve been wanting a Netbook for a while now but really couldn’t justify getting one. That is until I read you can install Apple’s OS X on them. There was no real way I could talk myself out of getting one after I found out that little fact. Once deciding I was going to get [...]

Anyone going to FutureNet?

jason — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 17:12:46 +0000

I’ve been going to a great conference for the last 3 years that I plan on attending this year and I think all readers should consider checking out. FutureNet is going to be held in Boston May 4-7 and is a fantastic show. If you work for a service provider or even for an [...]

Are You Afraid of the Big Bad Conficker?

jason — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:18:08 +0000

So is anyone out there nervous about what networks are going to do on April 1st this year? Is Conficker going to rip apart the Internet? If you’re not aware of what Conficker is, here’s some detailed analysis from SRI about a worm that people think is going to unleash a nasty attack come April [...]

The Service Provider IGP Question: OSPF or Integrated IS-IS?

jason — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 04:42:30 +0000

I had a choice to make recently in the decision of which open standards based IGP (i.e. NOT EIGRP) to chose between, OSPF or Integrated IS-IS. If you look out there on the Internets, you’ll find many, many different discussions about which one to go with. There are a lot of engineers who think IS-IS [...]

What the Hell is Cisco Doing in the Server Market With UCS?

jason — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:04:15 +0000

So you’d have to be living under a rock (or else have a real life) not to see the coverage today on the Unified Computing System (UCS). I’m not going to go over specifications nor any of the technical aspects of what it does or does not do, I just want to ask… What the [...]

ATLAS: Arbor Networks’ Goldmine Should Be Open

jason — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 04:43:54 +0000

Does Arbor Networks hold key data that could help save us from bad stuff on the Internet? Are they holding out on us? Let’s explore. Arbor Networks is a network appliance manufacturer that has some interesting products excluding the newer deep packet inspection (DPI) boxen known as the eSeries used by the likes of service providers [...]

Was Re-Writing the TCP/IP Stack In Vista a Good Idea?

jason — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:41:36 +0000

The TCP/IP stack in Microsoft Vista was completely rewritten with the new OS. With that rebuild came some more support for use with evolving technologies like IPv6 and additional features to future proof it as much as possible. Well it appears that they have some more work to do to. Take a look at this [...]

BGP’s Cool Younger Brother Talks With a LISP

jason — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 05:34:36 +0000

There’s been a lot of brouhaha lately about the fragility of the Internet. IP addresses are running out, silly folks are breaking BGP, routers are running out of resources… for how important this little thing we call the Internet is, it’s kinda freaky. You may or may not be aware, but these three problems I [...]

Twitter Updates for 2009-03-04

jason — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Check out the Cisco Global Internet Speed Test (GIST) for iPhone/Blackberry http://www.ciscopulse.com/ # RT @ciscosubnet: New post: New details on Cisco’s upcoming blade server http://twurl.nl/4wvfql # RT @om: cisco ceo john chambers in a guest post for gigaom.com argues broadband speeds our economy http://bit.ly/oZBGl # Powered by Twitter Tools.

Why Is It That San Fran Gets All the Cool Stuff?

jason — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 05:25:50 +0000

Comcast is launching a new DOCSIS 3.0 product in the San Francisco Bay Area with speeds of 50mbps/10mbps. Holy crap! Oh, that exclaimation was over the price. $139.95 for residential, $189.95 for business. Still cheaper than a DS3, I guess. From Light Reading’s Cable Digital News: Bay Area Gets Wideband

Nortel Winding Down Metro Ethernet In Favor of Packet Optical Transport

jason — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 12:50:16 +0000

The Nortel ERS 8600 seems like such a great platform based on the impression I’ve gotten from industry sources. I would think selling this division makes more sense than just killing it on the vine. It’s just sad to see a switch that had so much promise go the way of the dodo, which it [...]

Soooo… You’re Giving Bonuses to Execs? Really, Nortel?

jason — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:55:37 +0000

It’s amazing that these guys still get away with this time and again. The executives at companies sign the pink slips for thousands of people then think it’s OK to give themselves a bonus. I mean, what kind of people do that? How out of touch with humanity do you have to be? To each [...]

C’mon, When Will We REALLY Be Out of IPv4 Addresses?

jason — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:21:29 +0000

Sometimes I’m freaked out and sometimes I’m not. We’ve been through this before, right? It’s just the classic IPv4 exhaustion scare. I’m talking back when the IANA and the RIRs used to give away classful network allocations like they were Tootsie Rolls at an Independence Day parade. Back before NAT and before IPv6 was even [...]

Cisco QuantumFlow Processor

jason — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:42:49 +0000

I’m not sure how many of you have heard of the Cisco QuantumFlow processor in the new ASR 1000 routers, but it’s pretty neat to see where network processors are headed. Here’s a good article from Network World about it including charts, graphs, movies and all that jazz: The Cisco QuantumFlow Processor - The Engine [...]

Network Engineer + Mac = Love

jason — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 02:48:18 +0000

I switched to Macs with the acquisition of a 17″ Apple G4 Powerbook 5 years ago. I haven’t really looked back since then. At the time I got the Mac, the PC laptop I had up until then was dual booting SuSE Linux and Windows XP professional. It was an HP Pavilion Laptop that was crumbling [...]

US Govt Holding Up DNSSEC

jason — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:05:32 +0000

Sometimes we “Techies” have to take the law into our own hands. Domain Name System (DNS) security has been a hot topic as of late due to exploits like the “Kaminsky Bug“. As of right now, a protocol called Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) is percieved to alleviate some serious shortcomings in the DNS [...]

PBB, PBB-TE and PLSB are cool

jason — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 04:45:23 +0000

There are quite a few network operators that have been keeping tabs on Provider Backbone Bridging or PBB, Provider Backbone Bridging-Traffic Engineering or PBB-TE and Provider Link State Bridging or PLSB as they’ve made their way out of the Nortel Metro Ethernet Networks (MEN) labs and into the standards bodies. For those of you not [...]