Mark Baker left this comment on my Stretched Firewalls across Layer-3 DCI blog post:

Strange how inter-DC clustering failure is considered a certainty in this blog.

Call it experience or exposure to a larger dataset. Anything you build will eventually fail; just because you haven’t experienced the failure yet doesn’t mean that the system will never fail but only that you were lucky so far.

After covering the details of PCEP protocol in the BGP-LS and PCEP Deep Dive webinar Julian Lucek focused on how a controller would use PCEP to build MPLS TE paths across a network.

Oh, and don’t forget to explore the rest of the PCEP webinar and other SDN webinars after watching the video ;)

When I started thinking about my first online course, I decided to create something special – it should be way more than me talking about cool new technologies and designs – and the guest speakers are a crucial part of that experience.

The first guest speaker is one of the gurus of network design and complexity, wrote numerous books on the topic, and recently worked on a hardware-independent network operating system.

Russ White wrote a great response to my “Do You Really Want to Write that Book?” blog post and I couldn’t agree more with what he wrote. Unfortunately, he seems to be a bit over-idealistic when analyzing why the market for high-end content is so small.

You know I usually have a cynical explanation handy, so here it is: too many people calling themselves engineers for no particular reason simply don’t care. It’s way easier to Google-and-paste your way around than to invest time in understanding the fundamentals.

Oliver Steudler from Juniper sent me a link to an interesting Juniper blog post describing zero-bandwidth traffic engineering.

Read the blog post first and then come back for some opinionated rambling ;)

Is the problem real? Yes.

A few months ago I met a number of great engineers from Avaya and they explained to me how they creatively use Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) to create layer-2, layer-3, L2VPN, L3VPN and even IP Multicast fabrics – it was clearly time for another deep dive into SPB.

It took me a while to meet again with Roger Lapuh, but finally we started exploring the intricacies of SPB, and even compared it to MPLS for engineers more familiar with MPLS/VPN. Interested? Listen to Episode 54 of Software Gone Wild.

During one of my Network Automation workshops one of the attendees said: “Why are you using open-source software? It’s so poorly documented and impossible to set up.”

I totally understood what he was trying to say (I’ve seen too many examples of just read the code approach), but fortunately there are still people who understand the value of documentation.

Continuing our routing-on-hosts discussions, Enno Rey (of the Troopers and IPv6 security fame) made another interesting remark “years ago we were so happy when we finally got rid of gated on Solaris” and I countered with “there are still people who fondly remember the days of running gated on Solaris” because it’s a nice solution to host-to-network multihoming problem.

After I told you that I’m not going to Interop, I got numerous emails along the lines of “but I was really looking forward to attending your workshop” so I started looking for a solution that would combine the best of online and classroom worlds.

Here’s my first attempt: an interactive online course combining topics from two of my Interop workshops. I’m still working on the detailed agenda and plan to have it ready around May 1st. In the meantime, I’d really appreciate your feedback – leave a comment or send me an email.

Luka Manojlovič, a networking engineer with strong focus on Windows and IPv6 sent me a short status update on an enterprise IPv6 deployment:

Moved a whole enterprise network (central location + 17 remote locations) to dual-stack today. So far everything works.

While that sounds pretty easy, there was a lot of work going on behind the scenes. Here are some of the highlights: