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Microburst: Intent-Washing (See Apstra Fight Back!)
Apstra – the intent-based networking company – was thrilled, perhaps in a somewhat ironic sense, when Cisco announced just before Cisco Live 2017 US that the future was intent-based networking. I hear...
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Traceroute Lies! A Typical Misinterpretation Of Output
Sometimes a user with performance issues will proudly present me with a traceroute and point to a particular hop in the network and accuse it of being the problem because of high latency on the link....
View ArticleMy Lexicon: Nexii
Nexii (noun, pl.; pronounced nex-eye) Usage “I have built a leaf/spine fabric using Nexii.” Explanation Nexii is the plural of Nexus, obviously. To talk about “Cisco Nexuses” is ugly. Referring to...
View ArticleMy Lexicon: Fexen
Fexen (noun, pl.; pronounced Fex-uhn) Usage “Do we have any copper FEXen on those switches?” Explanation Fexen is the plural of FEX (the Cisco Nexus Fabric Extender modules). Oh, I know, “FEXes” is...
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Pre-Provisioning Your FEXen For Fun and Profit
In this post, I’ll discuss how to protect your income by using the FEX pre-provisioning capability of NXOS. I discovered the hard way that not pre-provisioning your FEX can have catastrophic side...
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KRACK WPA2 Vulnerability Announced – Upgrade Now
If you haven’t already heard about the KRACK (Key Reinstallation Attack) vulnerability announced today, head over to the information page at https://www.krackattacks.com/ as quick as your fingers will...
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Decoding LACP Port State
It’s frustrating when the output to a show command gives exactly the information needed, but in a format which is unintelligible. So it is with the Partner Port State field in the NXOS show lacp...
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What Next Now the KRACK Smoke is Clearing?
It’s only four days since we were blessed with news of the KRACK vulnerability in WPA2, so what have we learned now that we’ve had some time to dig into the problem? Patching Infrastructure (Access...
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Hive Mind, Help Me Out with A10 AXAPI?
Dear Internet, I am writing some automation code in Go to create client-ssl templates on an A10 load balancer running AXAPI version 2. It’s going as swimmingly as it can with the v2 API, but one area...
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Unifi US-8 PoE Passthrough With The Cisco 3560CX
As part of my “everything should be on a UPS” strategy, I recently replaced a regular 8-port gigabit switch with a Ubiquiti Unifi US-8 Ethernet switch because the US-8 can be powered using POE (Power...
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One Little Thing Can Break All Your Automation
I’ve been doing some work automating A10 Networks load balancers recently, and while testing I discovered a bug which broke my scripts. As hard as I try to code my scripts to cope with both success and...
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Microburst: PSIRT Notifications – Are They Good Or Bad?
If your hardware or software vendor issues a lot of PSIRT (Product Security Incident Response Team) notifications, is that a good thing or a bad thing? After all, a PSIRT bulletin means that there’s a...
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Twinax – Cheap, Cheerful and Annoyingly Chubby
What’s not to love about twinax? Formerly the exclusive domain of IBM systems, twinax has seen itself reborn in the last few years in the form of the Direct Attach Cable (DAC) used to connect systems...
View ArticleCisco, Mellanox, Ixia and Cumulus: Last Day of NFD17!
In case you have missed the noise on my Twitter feed (@mrtugs) in the last couple of days, I’m currently at Networking Field Day 17 in Silicon Valley, and today (Friday, January 26) is the last day of...
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Networking Field Day 17 (NFD17) Redux
As I write this it’s Friday afternoon in Silicon Valley, Networking Field Day 17 (NFD17) is over, and I am truly exhausted after a week of presentations covering topics like Ethernet switch hardware,...
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Security: Mitigating Spectre on Older Intel CPUs
I suspect all of my readers are well aware of the Spectre exploit affecting, among others, Intel CPUs going back many years. Intel for their part, after a few missteps, have issued microcode updates...
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Mellanox, Ixia and Cumulus: Part 1
When I saw that Mellanox was presenting at Networking Field Day 17, I was definitely curious. When I found out that I would in fact be watching a joint presentation by Mellanox, Cumulus Networks and...
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Mellanox, Ixia and Cumulus: Part 2
This post is part two of three in a series looking at the joint presentations made by Mellanox, Ixia and Cumulus at Networking Field Day 17, in February 2018. More specifically, this post looks at what...
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Mellanox, Ixia and Cumulus: Part 3
Last–but not least–in the technology triumvirate presenting a joint session at Networking Field Day 17 was Cumulus Networks. This post looks at the benefits of Cumulus Linux as a NOS on the Mellanox...
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Orange Matter: Silo-Busting and Dream-Dashing
I’ve been blogging for Solarwinds recently, posting on Orange Matter, with a cross-post to the Thwack Geek Speak forum. I love automation, but it seems that dreams of a smooth customer experience can...
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