A friend of mine who had the unfortunate “pleasure” of being exposed to one of the open-source controller platforms sent me this after reading my snarky take on bragging about what you’re doing at Something-Open-Something-Something conferences.

After documenting the basic challenges of using EBGP and 4-byte AS numbers with EVPN automatic route targets, I asked my friends working for various vendors how their implementation solves these challenges. This is what Krzysztof Szarkowicz sent me on specifics of Junos implementation:

David Barroso was sick-and-tired of using ZX Spectrum of Network Automation and decided to create an alternative with similar functionality but a proper programming language instead of YAML dictionaries masquerading as one. The result: Nornir, an interesting network automation tool formerly known as Brigade we discussed in Episode 90 of Software Gone Wild.

Listening to the networking vendors it seems that zero-touch provisioning is a no-brainer … until you try to get it working in real life, and the device you want to auto-configure supports only IP address assignment via DHCP, configuration download via TFTP, and a DHCP option that points to the configuration file.

As Hans Verkerk discovered when he tried to implement zero-touch provisioning with Ansible while attending the Building Network Automation Solutions course you have to:

Not long after I published the blog post arguing against physical appliances, Oven wrote a very valid comment: "But then you'd have 20 individual systems to manage, add licenses to for additional features, updates etc."

Even though the blog post (and the comment) was written in 2013, not much has changed in the meantime.

You probably know that fantastic feeling when you think your newly-discovered tool is a Hammer of Thor, capable of solving every problem (or at least crashing through it). I guess you’re also familiar with that sinking feeling when you’re trying to use your beloved hammer to whitewash a bikeshed.

Not surprisingly, the cruder the tool is, the quicker you’ll hit its limits, like when you try to do data processing in Jinja2 (hint: don’t).

I was listening to a very interesting Future of Networking with Fred Baker a long while ago and enjoyed Fred’s perspectives and historical insight until Greg Ferro couldn’t possibly resist the usual bashing of traditional routing protocols and praising of intent-based (or flow-based or SDN or…) whatever.

Here’s what I understood he said around 35:17

A while ago Greg Ferro invited me for another fireside chat on Packet Pushers podcast. Hope you’ll enjoy our discussion.

The network automation evangelists love to tell you that automation is more than just device configuration management. They’re absolutely right… but it’s nonetheless amazing how much good you could do with simple tools solving simple problems.

Here’s what I got from Nicky Davey:

Another month has swooshed by and it’s time for a refreshed list of upcoming webinars:

• Mitja Robas will explain the basics of NSX and ACI planning and design on April 24th. He has tons of material on this topic – expect to see him quite often in the autumn/winter timeframe;
• Dinesh Dutt will continue the EVPN Technical Deep Dive saga on May 3^rd;
• Christoph Jaggi will run a free webinar on the basics of transport (layer-1/2) and network (layer-3) security on May 10^th;
• We’ll run another SDDC webinar on May 22^nd. More details later…
• On June 5^th Christoph will be back with Ethernet Encryptors Deep Dive;
• The last webinar before the summer break will be Data Center Fabric Troubleshooting with Dinesh Dutt on June 19^th.

All you need to have to attend all these live sessions is a current ipSpace.net webinar subscription.

One of my friends sent me this question:

Do you remember if VLANs came first or was it VRFs?

I remember VLANs using ISL (pre-802.1q encapsulation) on early Cisco Ethernet switches (mid 90s), the earliest reference I could track down on Wikipedia is from 1988.

Guess what I found: a software developer trying to persuade his peers that they need an API version of their CLI tool. Yes, I checked and it’s still 2018, and the year CLI dies seems to be a bit further out than some people thought.

I’d guess this proves that the rest of the world is not so far ahead of us lowly network engineers as blabbering pundits and vendor marketers would have us believe.

Needless to say, the engineers architecting Junos knew this almost 20 years ago.

Continuing the series of data center routing protocol podcasts, we sat down with Russ White (of the CCDE fame), author of another proposal: OpenFabric.

As always, we started with the “what’s wrong with what we have right now, like using BGP as a better IGP” question, resulting in “BGP is becoming the trash can of the Internet”.

Here’s another back-to-the-fundamentals question I received a while ago when discussing IPv6 multihoming challenges:

I was wondering why enterprise can’t have dedicated block of IPv6 address and ISPs route the traffic to it. Enterprise shall select the ISP's based on the routing and preferences configured?

Let’s try to analyze where the problem might be. First the no-brainers:

I always love to read the practical advice by Andrew Lerner. Here’s another gem that matches what Brad Hedlund, Dinesh Dutt and myself (plus numerous others) have been saying for ages:

One specific recommendation we make in the research is to “Build a rightsized physical infrastructure by using a leaf/spine design with fixed-form factor switches and 25/100G capable interfaces (that are reverse-compatible with 10G).”

There’s a slight gotcha in that advice: it trades implicit complexity of chassis switches with explicit complexity of fixed-form switches.