True old-timers might appreciate the analogies I got while writing the Network Infrastructure as Code article. Let’s start with “do you remember this thingy?”

Source: Wikipedia

If you recognized the state-of-the-art (in those days) box in the picture, you might be able to relate to this screenshot:

This is pretty close to some SDN architectures I was privileged to see in the last three years.

Source: strategic humor @ HBR

I was asked to do a presentation at the recent Slovenian NOG (SINOG) meeting. I did an SDN one at the previous meeting, making NFV the next obvious choice… but I decided to put an interesting spin on it and focused on virtual routers.

When I heard people talking about “networking infrastructure as code” I dismissed that as yet another Software-Defined-Everything one-controller-to-rule-it-all hype. Boy was I wrong.

Last September I received a peculiar tweet from Luke Gorrie pointing me to a software switch pushing 200 Gbps through an Intel server literally hours after I’d watched the Deutsche Telekom Terastream presentation, so I mentioned Luke’s Snabb Switch as a potential performance solution in an email to Ian Farrer… and before Ian managed to reply, Luke was already working for Deutsche Telekom.

Carlos Mendioroz sent me an interesting question about unnumbered interfaces in Cumulus Linux and some of the claims they make in their documentation.

TL&DR: Finally someone got it! Kudos for realizing how to use an ancient trick to make data center fabrics easier to deploy (and, BTW, the claims are exaggerated).

After the excellent IPv6 security presentation Eric Vyncke had @ 9th Slovenian IPv6 summit someone asked me: “Why is IPv6 first-hop security so complex? It looks like the developers of IPv6 protocol stack tried to make users anonymous and made everyone’s life complex while doing that.”

Well, he was totally surprised by my answer: “The real reason IPv6 first-hop security is so complex is the total mess we made of L2/L3 boundary.”

Tired of endless debates discussing trivial matters? You're not alone (bonus point: a few pop-up windows every mail client should have).

The “bring Amazon Web Services mentality back home” blog post generated the expected comments, from “developers have no clue about networking or network services” to “we went through the whole thing and failed badly.”

Well, even though it might have seemed so, I didn’t advocate letting the developers go unchecked, I was just pointing out that double standards make no sense.

After months of being on a back burner, my first self-publishing book is out: Data Center Design Case Studies are available on my web site (Amazon Kindle version coming whenever I find time to figure out all the details).

Subscribers can download the book immediately (you’ll find it in the new Books section), as can anyone who bought the Designing Private Cloud Infrastructure webinar (you’ll find it in the webinar materials), and you can buy a copy on my web site.

More information

Update 2014-06-18 05:13Z - We slashdotted Christoph's site yesterday. He moved to a new server during the night; the links should work now.

Christoph Jaggi focused on analyzing Metro Ethernet and Carrier Ethernet encryption gear. The introductory part of this year’s report has just been published and it’s definitely worth reading even if you have no immediate plans to buy such gear – it’s a nice overview document covering numerous encryption technologies, key distribution systems, network topologies, and operational aspects. If you want to get in-depth evaluation of individual vendors or solutions, you’ll obviously have to contact Christoph.

Most recently launched data center switches use the Trident 2 chipset, and yet we know almost nothing about its capabilities and limitations. It might not work at linerate, it might have L3 lookup challenges when faced with L2 tunnels, there might be other unpleasant surprises… but we don’t know what they are, because you cannot get Broadcom’s documentation unless you work for a vendor who signed an NDA.

Interestingly, the best source of Trident 2 technical information I found so far happens to be the Cisco Live Nexus 9000 Series Switch Architecture presentation (BRKARC-2222). Here are a few tidbits I got from that presentation and Broadcom’s so-called datasheet.

I found two interesting data center/virtualization blogs this week (can’t remember the last time I found two new blogs in a week):

• Pedro Marques’ blog – it focuses primarily on Open Contrail, but you’ll find interesting gems questioning the wisdom of OpenFlow and Segment Routing (among other things);
• Aldrin Isaac’s blog – unfortunately he stopped writing in the last months, but some of his older posts are pure gold.

Enjoy – and poke Aldrin to continue writing ;)

Jure Špiler, an old friend of mine (and my first boss) sent me a link to a fantastic YouTube video documenting how we did programming on PDP-11 computers when I started my programming career (note: I did not enter compiled assembly code with console switches on PDP-11, but I did do that on an 6800-based box with 2K of RAM).

Related videos tab revealed another gem: PDP-11/34 with RL-01 disk drives – the very same system where I started my IT career as a high-school kid. Enjoy!

A long while ago, I wrote about the brokenness of socket API and lack of session layer in TCP/IP stack.

It looks like I’m not the only one with heretic opinions; Fred Baker reached similar conclusions in his Happier Eyeballs draft and Brian Carpenter recently published a lengthy article title IP Addresses Considered Harmful which documents (among other things) the history of socket API and the reasons DNS isn’t tightly integrated with it. Both documents are definitely worth reading.