In almost every field of IT lots of people try to do their job relying on uncle Google and his friends (bloggers, forum wizards and other content producers) and cut-and-paste solutions found on the web into their programs, server- or device configurations. Here’s my theory why that might be the case; please feel free to shoot it down in flames.

My regular readers probably know that I’m running a 4-month course in scalable web application design at University of Ljubljana (everyone else will find more details here). I was extremely surprised when we started – I’d expected to see about a dozen students, and suddenly realized I was standing in front of a totally crowded classroom. The next amazing surprise was the students’ level of motivation, commitment, knowledge, and the quality of their questions. It’s definitely fun to have an audience like that.

HP has recently released OpenFlow support on a few more switches and some people think it’s a big deal. It just might be if you’re a researcher with limited grant budget (which seems to be one of the major OpenFlow use cases today); for everyone else, it’s a meh. Lacking a commercial-grade OpenFlow controller supported by HP (or at least tested with HP switches), OpenFlow on HP switches remains a shiny new toy.

When I was writing about the NEC+IBM OpenFlow trials, I figured out a perfect use case for OpenFlow-controlled network forwarding: SMB data centers that need less than a few hundred physical servers – be it bare-metal servers or hypervisor hosts (hat tip to Brad Hedlund for nudging me in the right direction a while ago)

Instead of drinking beer and lab-testing vodka during the PLNOG party I enjoyed DHCPv6 discussions with Tomasz Mrugalski, the “master-of-last-resort” for the ISC’s DHCPv6 server. I mentioned my favorite DHCPv6 relay problem (relay redundancy) and while we immediately agreed I’m right (from the academic perspective), he brought up an interesting question – is this really an operational problem?

One of the few presentations I could understand @ PLNOG meeting yesterday (most of them were in Polish) was the fantastic “Guide To Building Secure Network Infrastructures” by Merike Kaeo, during which she revealed an obvious but oft forgotten fact: by deploying IPv6 in your router, you’ve actually created a parallel entry into the management plane that has to be secured using the same (or similar) mechanisms as its IPv4 counterpart.

As you know, I’m back in Poland, this time attending PLNOG. Meeting the wonderful team of the PLNOG organizers brought back old memories and I figured out I haven’t blogged about the Euronog videos they started publishing late last year. The last time I checked their web site only a few videos were available. Imagine my surprise when I figured out almost all the presentations they recorded are now available for download.

While I was discussing the intricacies of Cisco’s IPv6 implementation with Gunter Van de Velde a while ago, he suddenly changed hats and asked me whether I would be willing to contribute to a BGP filtering best practices draft. I’m still too young to realize it’s not a good idea to say YES every time you see something interesting and immediately accepted the challenge.

Till a few weeks ago, you could get provider-independent (PI) IPv6 address space in RIPE region only if you “demonstrated that you’ll be multihomed”, which usually required having nothing more than an AS number. With the recent policy change, anyone can get PI address space (and this is why you should get it) as long as they have a sponsoring LIR, and the yearly fee for an independent resource (RIPE-to-LIR) is €50.

The 8th PLNOG meeting starts in less than a week and the fantastic Andrzej Targosz has yet again kindly invited me to talk about cloud networking and data center fabrics (the first session is on Monday afternoon, the second one on Tuesday morning). I’ll be in Warsaw from Sunday evening to late Wednesday morning, so if you’d like to meet me, ask me a really tough question (layer-2 DCI is off-limits), discuss your network design, or just drink a cup of coffee or a beer with me (please don’t mention vodka), send me an e-mail and we’ll figure out where and when to meet.

A reader of my blog sent me this question:

I am a Telecommunication Engineer currently preparing for the CCIE exam. Do you think that in a near future it will be worth to be a CCIE, due to the recent developments like Nicira? What will be the future of Cisco IOS, and protocols like OSPF or BGP? I am totally disoriented about my career.

Well, although I wholeheartedly agree with recent post from Derick Winkworth, the sky is not falling (yet):

I thought Edge Virtual Bridging (EVB) would be the technology transforming the kludgy vendor-specific VM-aware networking solutions into a properly designed architecture, but the launch of L2-over-IP solutions for VMware and Xen hypervisors is making EVB obsolete before it ever made it through the IEEE doors.

After all the laws-of-physics-are-changing hype it must have been anticlimactic for a lot of people to realize what Nicira is doing (although I’ve been telling you that for months). Not surprisingly, there were the usual complaints and twitterbursts:

I finally found just the right set of tools to draw and update webinar roadmaps without too much hassle, and updated all of them to include the webinars developed during late 2011 and planned for 2012:

• Data Center webinars
• Virtualization webinars
• IPv6 webinars
• Virtual Private Networks (VPN) webinars

I didn’t expect we’d see multi-vendor OpenFlow deployment any time soon. NEC and IBM decided to change that and Tervela, a company specialized in building messaging-based data fabrics, decided to verify their interoperability claims. Janice Roberts who works with NEC Corporation of America helped me get in touch with them and I was pleasantly surprised by their optimistic view of OpenFlow deployment in typical enterprise networks.