My Inbox is (yet again) overflowing with great links.

IPv6

Tassos is describing the DHCPv6 prefix delegation nightmare in great details.

Cut Me Some SLAAC, Or Why You Need RA Guard by Tom the Networking Nerd describes the details of the recently-hyped SLAAC vulnerability. Conclusion: work with a vendor that knows a bit about fixing security problems.

OpenFlow

Openflow, Merchant Silicon, and the end of the reign of King John describes what could happen when OpenFlow gets implemented by a lot of vendors. An alternative ending: Cisco focuses on controller software and becomes Oracle/Microsoft of internetworking.

OpenFlow Will Change Network Architecture. Finally an article that’s not pure hype.

Clouds and other meteorological phenomena

What happens in Vegas… on the Loose Couple’s Blog introduces a badly needed term: enterprise craplication.

The Five Why’s of Cloud – this is how every IT project should start: figure out what we need to make more money (not how we twist and break the network to allow vMotion between data centers because we have to support ... see above).

Application identity theft in cloud computing environment – or what happens when someone misconfigures load balancer in multi-tenant environment. Ugly.

Zynga and the journey to private cloud. How to do it right.

Should We Abandon the Cloud – a great overview of the lessons we should learn from recent cloud failures (and why they happen in the first place).

Virtualization

Virtualizing JunOS on VMware. Nice lab setup.

Stretched VMware clusters presentation by Scott Lowe. Good overview of challenges and problems ... but somehow nobody wants to tackle the question I asked: “what happens when the DCI link goes down”

Free virtual router in OVF format. Nice toy.

Others

Seven kinds of software developers. A must-read for anyone interacting with that weird crowd (before you scowl: I am one of them ;)

Lifelong learning in 20 lessons. Another must-read.

Three B’s of innovation. Build, Buy or B*tch. Some vendors love the third way. Try to guess who they are before reading the article.

Along the same lines: On the price of innovation. Unless you’re willing to invest in R&D, your only other option is to build a better and cheaper mousetrap. In totally unrelated news, pouring your hard-earned profits into frivolous consumer-focused gimmicks (oops ... market adjacencies) has also been proven not to work too well.

Just Weld It to the Rack – avoiding forklift upgrades at all costs is bad.