Remember how I was always saying the big picture is important? Here's the wallystic approach:

If you’re building a DMVPN network with large spoke-to-hub ratio, BGP is one of the better options – it has no scalability limitations associated with multicast flooding; the only parameter you have to consider is the number of BGP sessions the hub router can handle (and according to this presentation, ASR can handle 2000+ spokes).

Just before 2010 disappeared, a tweet by my friend Greg @etherealmind Ferro triggered a minor twitstorm. He wrote:

If we had implemented IPv6 ten years ago, would we have MPLS today? I think not.

His tweet contains two major misconceptions:

• MPLS was designed to implement layer-3 VPN services;
• We wouldn’t need VPNs if everyone would be using global IPv6 addresses.

I’ll focus on the first one today; the inaccuracy of the second one is obvious to anyone who was asked to implement MPLS VPNs in enterprise networks to ensure end-to-end path separation between departments or users with different security levels.

John McManus published excellent Remote (in Band) Configuration Tips post on etherealmind.com last week, prompting a “Too bad there isn't a fix for forgetting ‘reload in’” tweet by @mfratto. My immediate reaction was “this should be easy to solve with EEM” ... and it is.

New Year Resolution #1: I shall clean my Inbox on a weekly basis. Here are the links that started gathering dust during the last week:

• It’s amazing how similar the sysadmin problems are to ours: give us CLI, not eye candy, ASCII configurations and APIs. One could only hope the networking vendors would listen as well.
• Moving To The Cloud Is Not Cut And Paste. Some people will try to move their existing broken applications to the cloud. Some people have used screen scrapers to GUIze their existing 3270 SNA applications. The results will probably be the same.
• The Curious Case of the MBO Cloud ... and some people will move to the cloud just to get the yearly bonus. Fantastic motivation; expect pure awesomeness.
• The Recertification Treadmill – great news; I can stop ranting about stupidities in our industry. @networkingnerd is doing a great job.
• Cisco Nexus 7000 connectivity solutions for Cisco UCS – what else would you expect from @bradhedlund but another great UCS/Nexus post.
• Technology Short Take #9 – Another great summary from Scott Lowe.
• An introduction to Net Neutrality. A nice introductory article.
• Q-tools: An approach for discovery and knowledge work – a bit academic, but a must-read.
• Controller-less WLANs – the controller pendulum is swinging.

Another year-end cleanup action: I wrote lots of articles for SearchTelecom in the last few years. You can find links to all of them (together with those I wrote for SearchNetworking and SearchEnterpriseWan) on this page. Enjoy!

You have to register with TechTarget to be able to view them, but they do respect your settings (you can decide not to subscribe to any of their mailing lists).

Last gems found in dusty corners of my cluttered Inbox:

• The Myths of IT – Part 1 and Part 2. A must-read for anyone working in the IT industry.
• Phone - Scott Adams (of the Dilbert fame) ranting about smartphones. Priceless.
• Maybe you only need it because you have it – seen it too many times. Might also apply to long-distance vMotion.

Every Internet-related post is a great opportunity to increase comment count. I’ll pass this time, here are the articles I found interesting with little or no comments from my side. First the generic Internet:

• IPv6 and Transitional Myths – Great mythbuster by Geoff Huston
• Google IPv6 statistics

And then my favorite controversy:

• Net Neutrality for Dummies
• Network Neutrality: Pretty Much Just Socialism (I’m obviously not the only one claiming that)
• ISP's top data hog gobbles 2.7TB of data in a month – a bit old but still relevant
• Congress Needs to Step In for Net Neutrality...Really? Seriously?
• Mobile Carriers Dream of Charging per Page

Links to great data center, storage and virtualization articles found in the depths of my bloated Inbox:

Technology short takes by Scott Lowe. A must-read.

Keys to Virtualization Success – this is how you do it right. Great job, Bob!

Ian sent me a really good OSPF-over-DMVPN question after watching my DMVPN webinar:

In the DMVPN webinar you discuss OSPF design and configuration. However, Cisco design guide says you should use a different routing protocol from what you use on your LAN but you seem to suggest it is okay to extend your OSPF network out to the DMVPN edge by continuing to use OSPF albeit in a different area.

The main issue you face when running OSPF over DMVPN is scalability: OSPF does not scale as well as other routing protocols when used over DMVPN.

FullMesh added an excellent comment to my Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation (MLAG) and hot potato switching post. He wrote:

If there are two core routing switches and two access switches which are MLAGged together in both directions, and hosts that are dual-active LAGged to the pair of access switches, then the traffic would stay on whichever side the host places it.

He also opened another can of worms: load balancing in MLAG environment is dictated by the end hosts. It doesn’t pay to have fancy switches that support L3 or L4 load balancing; a stupid host implementing destination-MAC-address-based load balancing can easily ruin your day.

I published this blog post in December 2010. As I was cleaning it up 10 years later, only three out of original 11 links still worked. Whatever…

Some Internet Architectural Guidelines and Philosophy – a must-read for people inventing crazy schemes like load balancing based on unicast flooding or MAC-over-MAC proprietary network virtualization (you know who you are but I doubt you read RFCs or my blog).

Spoofing Google search history with CSRF – like we didn’t have enough security problems, here’s another one.

So what's the MTU on that? The MTU surprises never stop.

GigaOm published two interesting articles by Joe Weinman: in the first one, he describes why pay-per-use residential broadband Internet is probably inevitable, in the second one he predicts changes in user behavior if the service providers decide to implement it. I would also suggest you take time and read his in-depth Market for Melons article.

Obviously, collecting money costs money and the pay-per-use model is no exception (not to mention that most people would pay less), so the service providers prefer usage caps. There are numerous ways to implement usage caps, but implementing usage cap as an acceptable use policy and calling exceeding the cap policy violation is not the way to do it. Some people are truly trying to alienate the users.

Few days ago I had the honor of being the guest speaker at the graduation ceremony of my alma mater. Just in case you’re interested in what I told future Slovenian IT geeks, here’s a short summary.

A while ago I got an interesting challenge from one of my readers: “I would like to attend a few of your webinars, but the problem I have is that I’m interested in most of them. Is there something we can do?” After a few e-mails, we nailed down the concept I had been playing with for quite a while: yearly subscription package. It gives you three unlimited access to all live webinars and year-long access to all the materials and all the recordings I ever made for a fixed price. You can find a detailed description, list of all recordings and list of all available materials on my web site.

Buying the yearly subscription is easy: select the first webinar you’re interested in (the list of upcoming webinars is also on my web site) and buy the Yearly subscription ticket when registering; you can also buy directly from my web site. You’ll get access to the recordings and PDF materials a few minutes after the registration.