PF_RING is a great open-source project that enables extremely fast packet processing on x86 servers, so I was more than delighted when Paolo Lucente of the pmacct fame introduced me to Luca Deri, the author of PF_RING.

When we started chatting, we couldn’t resist mentioning ntopng, another open-source project Luca is working on.

My “What Is Layer-2 and Why Do You Need It?” blog post generated numerous replies, including this one:

Pretend you are a device receiving a stream of bits. After you receive some inter-frame spacing bits, whatever comes next is the 2nd layer; whether that is Ethernet, native IP, CLNS/CLNP, whatever.

Not exactly. IP (or CLNS or CLNP) is always a layer-3 protocol regardless of where in the frame it happens to be, and some layer-2 protocols have no header (apart from inter-frame spacing and start-of-frame indicator).

The VMware Networking Deep Dive webinar was getting pretty old and outdated, but I always managed to get an excuse to postpone its refresh – first it was lack of new features in vSphere releases, then bad timing (doesn’t make sense to do a refresh in June with new release coming out in August), then lack of documentation (vSphere 6 was announced in August 2014; the documentation appeared in March 2015).

Network Computing recently published my “Yes, NFV Is Important For The Enterprise” article. Short summary: NFV is (like BGP and MPLS) yet another technology that is considered applicable only to service provider networks but makes great sense in some enterprise contexts.

I’ll talk about enterprise aspects of NFV at Interop Las Vegas, and describe some NFV technical details and typical use cases in an upcoming webinar.

An interesting message appeared on v6ops mailing list a few days ago: the first interconnect between independent IPv6 implementations was established 20 years ago. No wonder some youngsters who don't know any better treat this venerable protocol like a modem and ignore it in favor of IPv4 ;)

I was talking and writing about IPv6 myths for years, but like any good myth they tend to be pretty robust. Unfortunately, as I explained in the IPv6 Myths and Reality part of IPv6 High Availability Strategies webinar, the reality seems pretty bleak: all we got are longer addresses, half-baked protocols, unsolved challenges, and heaps of confusion.

I’m constantly ranting against large layer-2 domains; recently going as far as saying “we don’t really need all that stuff.” Unfortunately, the IP+Ethernet mentality is so deeply ingrained in every networking engineer’s mind that we rarely ever stop to question its validity.

Let’s fix that and start with the fundamental question: What is Layer-2?

A few months ago Gigamon did the right thing: they figured out that their true value lies not in the hardware boxes, but in the software running on them, and decided to start offering their GigaVUE-OS on whitebox switches.

So far, Arista is the only other networking vendor that figured out it doesn't make sense to resist the tide - Arista EOS is now available on Open Compute Networking whitebox switches.

Update 2015-04-02: If you followed the links in this blog post, you probably figured out that it’s an April Fools’ one. However, that’s not the end of the story…

The video of my Automating Network Security talk @ Troopers 15 has been published on YouTube. They used fixed camera and the slides are a bit hard to read; you’ll find a better copy of the slide deck on my content web site.

For a bit of fun, turn on closed captions (CC) – public cloud became public lout.

The IPv6 Security Summit at the Troopers conference always has a few awesome IPv6 presentations (many people claim Troopers is the conference to attend if you’re serious about IPv6), and this year was no exception. A day after the MLD bashing, Enno Rey delivered a great in-depth presentation on DHCPv6 features and shortcomings.

It seems the DHCPv6 intricacies presented in that talk were too much for some of the attendees – that afternoon I accidentally stumbled upon a visibly distressed gentleman who started our chat with “How could anyone expect us to deploy IPv6 in a production environment?”