Lots of interesting articles accumulated in my Inbox while I tried to figure out what one could possibly do when being stranded in an easy chair next to the sea with no Internet access. By far the best article that I stumbled upon in my Twitter feed is a 10-year-old IS-IS versus OSPF presentation by the legendary Dave Katz (thank you @yelfathi).

Data center

Lori MacVittie writes about the need to know – this time in the context of Amazon EC2 failure.

EMC FC/FCoE connectivity options – fantastic summary of what does and does not work.

What is the definition of a switch fabric? If you don’t believe switching and fabric are words that could mean anything and everything, and are desperately searching for their true meaning, this article might help.

The end of blade servers? I’m not convinced, but the developments the article mentions are definitely interesting.

Soft switching (switching in hypervisor) is good or meaningless and wasteful, depending on your perspective. If the hypervisor does only low-end L2 switching, I’m siding with Greg ... but soft switching should do way more.

Cisco UCS 2.0 – you know I don’t usually include links to product announcements, but this one is sort-of-cool.

IPv6

RFC 6264: Incremental Carrier Grade NAT for IPv6 Transition – another “interesting” approach: combine dual-stack IPv6 deployment (over 6-over-4 tunnel) with CGN. When will this nightmare stop?

RFC 6302: Logging Recommendations for Internet-Facing Servers. Source IP addresses are no longer associated with individual users due to widespread usage of CGN. Web servers should thus log source TCP port and the exact time of the request.

RFC 6294 - Survey of Proposed Use Cases for the IPv6 Flow Label – after 15+ years, we still don’t know how to use the fields in IPv6 header.

Other

Junosphere and buying shoes – a fantastic analogy from Dan Hughes.

An open letter to speakers – if you present at an event, respect the audience and prepare.