Running Linux containers on a single host is relatively easy. Building private multi-tenant networks across multiple hosts immediately creates the usual networking mess.

Fortunately the Socketplane team did a pretty good job; for more details watch the video from Docker Networking Fundamentals webinar or listen to the podcast I did with them a year ago.

One of my readers sent me an interesting NSSA question (more in a future blog post) that sent me chasing for the reasons behind the OSPF Forwarding Address (FA) field in type-5 and type-7 LSAs.

This is the typical scenario for OSPF FA that I was able to find on the Internet:

The next session of the Network Automation Use Cases series will take place on January 24th. Dinesh Dutt will explain describe how you can use Ansible and Jinja2 to automate data center fabric deployments, and I’ll have a few things to say about automating network security.

If you think that what Dinesh will talk about applies only to startups you’re totally wrong. UBS is using the exact same approach to roll out their new data centers; Thomas Wacker will share the details in his guest presentation in the next Building Next-Generation Data Centers online course.

A blog post by Russ White pointed me to an article describing how IPv6 services tend to be less protected than IPv4 services. No surprise there, people like Eric Vyncke and I were telling anyone who was willing to listen that operating two-protocol networks isn’t the same thing as operating a single-protocol one (see also RFC 1925 rule 4).

I was discussing a totally unrelated topic with Terry Slattery when he mentioned a quote from the Mythical Man-Month. It got me curious, I started exploring and found out I can get the book as part of my Safari subscription.

From the moment Cisco and VMware announced VXLAN some networking engineers complained that they'd lose visibility into the end-to-end path. It took a long while, but finally the troubleshooting tools started appearing in VXLAN environment: NVO3 working group defined Fault Managemnet framework for overlay networks and Cisco implemented at least parts of it in recent Nexus OS releases.

You'll find more details in Software Gone Wild Episode 69 recorded with Lukas Krattiger in November 2016 (you can also watch VXLAN Technical Deep Dive webinar to learn more about VXLAN).

Ansible is great at capturing and using JSON-formatted data returned by REST API (or any other script or method it can invoke), but unfortunately some of us still have to deal with network devices that cannot even spell structured data or REST.

The featured webinar in January 2017 is the Introduction to Docker webinar, and in the featured video Matt Oswalt explains the basic Docker tasks. Other videos in this webinar cover Docker images, volumes, networking, and Docker Compose and Swarm.

To view the featured video, log into my.ipspace.net, select the webinar from the first page, and watch the video marked with star.

One of my subscribers sent me this question after watching the second part of Network Automation Tools webinar (or maybe it was Elisa Jasinska's presentation in the Data Center course):

Elisa mentions that for a given piece of data, there should be “one source of truth”. It gets a bit muddled when you have an IPAM tool and Git source control simultaneously. It is not hard to imagine scenarios where these get out of sync especially if you consider multi-operator scenarios.

Confused? He provided a simple scenario:

With January 6th the Christmas/New Year holidays are over even for most European countries, so it’s time to restart my blog and set some goals for 2017.

Webinars

2015 was year of SDN, 2016 was year of network automation, and 2017 is shaping up to be the year of the cloud.