Understanding equal-cost multipathing in Brocade’s VCS Fabric is a bit tricky, not because it would be a complex topic, but because it’s a bit counter-intuitive (while still being perfectly logical once you understand it). Michael Schipp tried to explain how it works, Joel Knight went even deeper, and I’ll try to draw a parallel with the routed networks because most of us understand them better than the brave new fabric worlds.

A while ago I was writing about the behavior of Microsoft’s Network Load Balancing, the problems it’s causing and how Microsoft tried to hack around them using multicast MAC addresses as the hardware address of sender in ARP replies (which is illegal). A few days ago one of my readers asked me whether I know which RFC prohibits the use of multicast MAC address in ARP replies.

A quick consultation with friendly Google search engine returned this web page, which contained the answer: section 3.3.2 of RFC 1812 (Requirements for IP Version 4 Routers):

This topic has been on my to-write list for over a year and its working title was phrased as a question, but all the horror stories you’ve shared with me over the last year or so (some of them published in my blog) have persuaded me that there’s no question – it’s a fact.

If you think I’m rephrasing the same topic ad nauseam, you’re right, but every month or so I get an external trigger that pushes me back to the same discussion, this time an interesting comment thread on Massimo Re Ferre’s blog.

No comment necessary.

We knew Brocade has OpenFlow support in its devices for at least a year; now it’s official: OpenFlow is supported on its MLX-series routers. But wait, there’s more: that’s just the first step in Brocade’s long-term SDN strategy, according to their press release. Let’s take a deeper look at that strategy.

When I mentioned the uselessness of stateless NAT64, I got in nice discussion with Tore Anderson who wanted to use stateless NAT64 in reverse direction (stateless NAT46) to build an IPv6-only data center. Some background information first (to define the context of his thinking before we jump into the technical details):

Some of you have noticed that I’d changed the commenting system on my blog recently. Here’s the full story (with a question for you at the very end).

I was totally fed up with Blogger comments years ago and decided to look for an alternative. JS-Kit was a perfect solution and it even allowed me to import Blogger comments and synchronize new entries with Blogger (so I could turn it off at any time and retain my comments).

Stumbled across this marvel while updating my IPv6 presentations for a 2-day seminar in Milano and Rome (straight from 15.2M&T command reference):

With IPv6 support added in Cisco IOS Release 12.2(2)T, the ip http server command simultaneously enables and disables both IP and IPv6 access to the HTTP server. However, an access list configured with the ip http access-class command will only be applied to IPv4 traffic. IPv6 traffic filtering is not supported.

Wait ... WHAT? I cannot control who can access the HTTP(S) server running in Cisco IOS over IPv6 (apart from kludges like ingress ACLs on all interfaces or CoPP), and this stupidity has been left unfixed for nine(9) years?. Are we really in 2012, less than a month away from World IPv6 Launch or have I been transported to 1990’s?

Google unveiled some details of its new internal network at Open Networking Summit in April and predictably the industry press and OpenFlow pundits exploded with the “this is the end of the networking as we know it” glee. Unfortunately I haven’t seen a single serious technical analysis of what it is they’re actually doing and how different their new network is from what we have today.

Brad Hedlund did an excellent analysis of fixed versus chassis-based switches in his Interop presentation and concluded that fixed switches offer higher port density and lower per-port power consumption than chassis-based ones. That’s true when comparing individual products, but let’s ask a different question: how much does it take to implement a 384-port non-blocking fabric (equivalent to Arista’s 7508 switch) with fixed switches?