After explaining why you’d want to use BGP-LS and PCEP in your network, Julian Lucek did a quick deep dive into the intricacies of BGP-LS, including printouts relating BGP-LS updates to IS-IS topology database.

This part of the PCEP/BGP-LS webinar is already public, to watch the rest of it fill in a short form on the webinar description page.

A lot of people love to talk about ASICs and merchant silicon, but very few really understand the basics. Now there’s a quick way to fix that: watch the excellent Tech Field Day video with Dave Zacks from Cisco Systems.

Mr. A. Anonymous left this comment on my BGP in the data centers blog post:

BGP is starting to penetrate into servers as well. What are your thoughts on having BGP running from the servers themselves?

Finally some people got it. Also, welcome back to the '90s (see also RFC 1925 section 2.11).

Here’s another interesting coincidence:

• A few days ago I listened to excellent Full Stack Journey podcast with Scott Lowe and Matt Oswalt in which they discussed how some engineers fear moving into adjacent technologies because they would have to (yet again) start from scratch;
• This morning I was cleaning up some old presentations and stumbled upon a diagram I’ve “never seen before” (in the middle of a presentation I created – how’s that for reliable memory) which led me to an interesting article explaining how we have to jump into unknown territories to retain the thrill we get from mastering new skills.

Homework for today: listen to the podcast, read the article, and start exploring some new technology (network automation immediately comes to mind).

A while ago someone posted a link to an article that links to LinkedIn’s blog post describing their switch-building efforts to the LinkedIn SDN group (how’s that for a circular reference?), and a consultant from Brocade felt compelled to share his wisdom with the world. Unfortunately he got most of the facts wrong.

They made it all the way to Dilbert ;)

Source: Dilbert.com

Found this on Quora:

Money spoiled blogging. Why? Because people moved from doing great things for money and then talking about them on their free blogs, to people doing nothing but talking on their monetized blogs.

It’s not just blogs, and it’s not just cooking (the author's focus).

A few months ago VMware launched NSX version 6.2, and I asked my friend Anthony Burke to tell us more about the new features. Not surprisingly, we quickly started talking about troubleshooting, routing problems, and finished with route-health-injection done with a Python script. The end result: Episode 50 of Software Gone Wild. Enjoy!

One of the comments added to my Using BGP in Data Centers blog post said:

With symmetric fabric… does it make sense for a node to know every bit of fabric info or is reachability information sufficient?

Let’s ignore for the moment that large non-redundant layer-3 fabrics where BGP-in-Data-Center movement started don’t need more than endpoint reachability information, and focus on a bigger issue: is knowledge of network topology (as provided by OSPF and not by BGP) beneficial?

While the large data centers increasingly use BGP as the routing protocol within their fabrics, the enterprise engineers tend to shy away from that idea because they think BGP is too complex/scary/hard-to-configure/obsolete/unknown/whatever.

It’s time to fix that.