Did you know that approximately 40% of BGP prefixes polluting your RIB and FIB are not needed, as they could be either aggregated or suppressed (because an aggregate is already announced)? We definitely need “driver’s license for the Internet”, but that’s not likely to happen, and in the meantime everyone has to keep buying larger boxes to cope with people who cannot configure their BGP routing correctly.

I got a follow-up question to the Should I use 6PE or native IPv6 post:

Am I remembering correctly that if you run IPv6 native throughout the network you need to enable BGP on all routers, even P routers? Why is that?

I wrote about BGP-free core before, but evidently wasn’t clear enough, so I’ll try to fix that error.

Imagine a small ISP with a customer-facing PE-router (A), two PE-routers providing upstream connectivity (B and D), a core router (C), and a route reflector (R). The ISP is running IPv4 and IPv6 natively (no MPLS).

Brad Hedlund wrote a thought-provoking article a few weeks ago, claiming that the horseshoes (or trombones) and spaghetti created by virtual workloads and appliances deployed anywhere in the network don’t matter much with new data center designs that behave like distributed switches. In theory, he’s right. In practice, less so.

One of my students was watching the Building IPv6 Service Provider Core webinar and wondered whether he should use 6PE or native IPv6 transport:

Could you explain further why it is better to choose 6PE over running IPv6 in the core? I have to implement IPv6 where I work (a small ISP) and need to fully understand why I should choose a certain implementation.

Here’s a short decision tree that should help you make that decision:

Anton sent me an interesting question:

Most IP phones have a network facing port and a port for user to connect the PC. Today a user plugged in both of these ports into the switch. It looks like phone filters out BPDUs, so the switch did not catch this loop. Do you know of a feature or design that would be able to catch/prevent this type of event?

My answer would be “no, there’s nothing you can do if you have a broken device that acts like a STP-less switch” but you know I’m not a switching or IP telephony guru. Any ideas?

Aleksej sent me an intriguing question: “Can the /48 PI block that a global company is assigned be attached to any region, or it is region-specific?”, or, more specifically:

Imagine a company with major DC with public services in EMEA. Centralized internet break-out in Europe fails and this DC must be reachable from Asia or America - but with the same IPv6 address? That would require Asia or America's ISPs to accept injection of this same subnet in their region. Do they do that?

In theory, the answer is yes. In practice, some global organizations are hedging their bets.

2011 was a fantastic year for a networking geek, and you were awesome – helping me figure out the intricacies of new technologies, fixing my errors, and asking so many great questions that prompted me to dive deeper into the rabbit holes. I owe you a huge Thank you!

I hope you’ll be able to shut down your smartphones and pagers in the next few days and spend a few relaxing moments with your families … and I wish you great networking in 2012!

To keep the geeky spirit: snow angel as seen by Hubble

After I published the Decouple virtual networking from the physical world article, @paulgear1 sent me a very valid tweet: “You seemed a little short on suggestions about the path forward. What should customers do right now?” Apart from the obvious “it depends”, these are the typical use cases (as I understand them today – please feel free to correct me).

15 years after NAT was invented, I’m still getting questions along the lines of “is NAT a security feature?” Short answer: NO!

Longer answer: NAT has some side effects that resemble security mechanisms commonly used at the network edge. That does NOT make it a security feature, more so as there are so many variants of NAT.

I’m planning a series of shorter (~ 1 hour) update-type webinars in 2012. Some of them will cover new features and technologies that have been introduced since the time I last updated some of the most popular webinars (Data Center, VMware networking), others will focus on emerging technologies.

I would appreciate if you could help me plan them by taking a short survey, telling me which of the topics I identified are most important for you, and adding your favorite topics to the list. The survey won’t take more than a few minutes of your time.

Start the survey ...

After a week of oversized articles, I’ll try to keep this one short. This is a true story someone recently shared with me (for obvious reasons I can’t tell you where it happened ... and no, I’m not making it up). Enjoy!

A few days ago I had the privilege of being part of an VXLAN-related tweetfest with @bradhedlund, @scott_lowe, @cloudtoad, @JuanLage, @trumanboyes (and probably a few others) and decided to write a blog post explaining the problems VXLAN faces due to lack of control plane, how it uses IP multicast to solve that shortcoming, and how OpenFlow could be used in an alternate architecture to solve those same problems.

Anyone serious about high-availability connects servers to the network with more than one uplink, more so when using converged network adapters (CNA) with FCoE. Losing all server connectivity after a single link failure simply doesn’t make sense.

If at all possible, you should use dynamic link aggregation with LACP to bundle the parallel server-to-switch links into a single aggregated link (also called bonded interface in Linux). In theory, it should be simple to combine FCoE with LAG – after all, FCoE runs on top of lossless Ethernet MAC service. In practice, there’s a huge difference between theory and practice.

Every time I write about IPv6 multihoming issues and the need for NPT66, I get a comment or two saying:

But I thought this is already part of IPv6 stack – can’t you have two or more IPv6 addresses on the same interface?

The commentators are right, you can have multiple IPv6 addresses on the same interface; the problem is: which one do you choose for outgoing sessions.

The source address selection rules are specified in RFC 3484 (Greg translated that RFC into an easy-to-consume format a while ago), but they are not very helpful as they cannot be influenced by the CPE router. Let’s look at the details.

Isn’t it amazing that we can build the Internet, run the same web-based application on thousands of servers, give millions of people access to cloud services … and stumble badly every time we’re designing virtual networks. No surprise, by trying to keep vSwitches simple (and their R&D and support costs low), the virtualization vendors violate one of the basic scalability principles: complexity belongs to the network edge.