Repost: VMware Fault Tolerance Woes

I always claimed that VMware Fault Tolerance makes no sense. After all, the only thing it does is protect a VM against a server hardware failure… in the world where software crashes are way more common, and fat fingers cause most of the outages.

But wait, it gets worse, the whole thing is incredibly complex – you might like this description Minh Ha left as a comment to my Fifty Shades of High Availability blog post.

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Build Virtual Lab Topology: Dual Stack Addressing, ArcOS and Junos Support

In mid-December I announced a set of tools that will help you build Vagrant-based remote labs much faster than writing Vagrantfiles and Ansible inventories by hand.

In early January I received a nice surprise: Dave Thelen not only decided to use the tool, he submitted a pull request with full-blown (and correctly implemented) ArcOS support. A few days later I managed to figure out what needs to be configured on vSRX to make it work, added Junos support, and thus increased the number of supported platforms to six (spanning five different operating systems).

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Video: Multi-Layer Switching and Tunneling

After discussing the technology options one has when trying to get a packet across the network, we dived deep into two interesting topics:

  • How do you combine packet forwarding at multiple layers of OSI stack (multi-layer switching)?
  • What happens when you do layer-N forwarding over layer-M transport core where N <= M (example: IPv6 packets over IPv4 packets) aka tunneling?

You’ll find more details (including other hybrids like Loose Source Routing) in Multi-Layer Switching and Tunneling video.

The video is part of How Networks Really Work webinar and available with Free ipSpace.net Subscription.
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Beware XML-to-JSON Information Loss (Junos with Ansible)

When you want to transport a complex data structure between components of a distributed system you’re usually using a platform-independent data encoding format like XML, YAML, or JSON.

XML was the hip encoding format in days when Junos and Cisco Nexus OS was designed and lost most of its popularity in the meantime due to its complexity (attributes, namespaces…) that makes it hard to deal with XML documents in most programming languages.

JSON is the new cool kid on the block. It’s less complex than XML, maps better into data structures supported by modern programming languages, and has decently fast parser implementations.

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Imperative and Declarative API: Another Pile of Marketing Deja-Moo

Looks like some vendor marketers (you know, the same group of people who brought us the switching/routing/bridging stupidity) felt the need to go beyond the usual SDN and intent-based hype and started misusing the imperative versus declarative concepts. Unfortunately some networking engineers fell for the ploy; here’s a typical feedback along these lines I got from one of my readers:

I am frustrated by most people’s shallow understanding API’s, especially the differences between declarative (“what”) and imperative (“how”) API’s, and how that impacts one’s operations. Declarative APIs are the key pillar of what many vendors call “policy” or “intent-based” networking.

Let’s try to unravel that.

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Automation Win: Chatops-Based Security

It’s amazing how quickly you can deploy new functionality once you have a solid foundation in place. In his latest blog post Adrian Giacometti described how he implemented a security solution that allows network operators to block source IP addresses (identified by security tools) across dozens of firewalls using a bot listening to a Slack channel.

Would you be surprised if I told you we covered similar topics in our automation course? 😇

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Webinars in 2021

After deciding to take a slightly longer coffee break I went through the list of outstanding projects trying to figure out which ones I could complete in first half of 2021, which ones I’ll get to “eventually” and what’s a lost cause.

This blog post is occasionally updated to track our progress (last update on June 26, 2021). Check the Revision History for details.

Guest Speakers

We squeezed as many guest speakers as we could into the first half of 2021. Here’s what we managed to do:

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Worth Reading: AI/ML/Space Predictions Scorecard, 2021 Edition

In January 2018 Rodney Brooks made a series of long-term predictions about self-driving cars, robotics, AI, ML, and space travel. Not surprisingly, his predictions were curmudgeonly and pessimistic when compared to the daily hype (or I wouldn’t be blogging about it)… but guess who was right ;)

He’s also the only predictor I’m aware of who is not afraid to compare what he wrote with how reality turned out years down the line. On January 1st he published the 2021 edition of the predictions scorecard and so far he hasn’t been too pessimistic yet. Keep that in mind the next time you’ll be listening to your favorite $vendor droning about the wonders of AI/ML.

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Video: Cisco SD-WAN Policies and Centralized Magic

Right after Cisco SD-WAN devices are onboarded, how are the control and data plane tasks started? In this section, David Penaloza covers how Cisco SD-WAN solution makes the most of its SDN nature: single point of policy application and centralized management platform. The types of policies, the plane on which they act, their application and the actions that can performed are the main focus in this part of the series.

You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video.
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Considerations for Host-based Firewalls (Part 2)

This is a guest blog post by Matthias Luft, Principal Platform Security Engineer @ Salesforce, and a regular ipSpace.net guest speaker.

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure to publish my first guest post here and, as to be expected from ipspace.net, it triggered some great discussion.

With this input and some open thoughts from the last post, I want to dive into a few more topics.

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IBGP, IGP Metrics, and Administrative Distances

TL&DR: If you run multiple IGP protocols in your network, and add BGP on top of that, you might get the results you deserve. Even better, the results are platform-dependent.

One of my readers sent me a link to an interesting scenario described by Jeremy Filliben that results in totally unexpected behavior when using too many routing protocols in your network (no surprise there).

Imagine a network in which two edge routers advertise the same (external) BGP prefix. All other things being equal, it would make sense that other routers in the same autonomous system should use the better path out of the autonomous system. Welcome to the final tie-breaker in BGP route selection process: IGP metric.

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Planning the Next Extended Coffee Break

Long story short: ipSpace.net is going on an extended coffee break on June 24th 2021 reducing the scope of activities on July 1st 2021. You can stop reading; the rest of the blog post is full of details you probably don’t care about.

What exactly does that mean? Since this blog post was published in January 2021, we pretty much figured out a way forward, and I’m glad we let engineers considering our subscriptions know months in advance what might happen.

Anyway, after investing two lifetimes into this project, and a few planned changes coming just before our regular summer hiatus (see below) it’s time for a longer break an adjustment. ipSpace.net will revert back to Ivan working on some interesting stuff.

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Reviving Old Content, Part 3

We had the usual gloomy December weather during the end-of-year holidays, and together with the partial lockdown (with confusing ever-changing rules only someone in Balkans could dream up) it managed to put me in OCD mood… and so I decided to remove broken links from the old blog posts.

While doing that I figured out how fragile our industry is – I encountered a graveyard of ideas and products that would make Google proud. Some of those blog posts were removed, I left others intact because they still have some technical merits, and I made sure to write sarcastic update notices on product-focused ones. Consider those comments Easter eggs… now go and find them ;))

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We're Done for This Year

As always, it’s time to shut down our virtual office and disappear until early January… unless of course you have an urgent support problem. Any paperwork ideas your purchasing department might have will have to wait until 2021.

I hope you’ll be able to disconnect from the crazy pace of networking world, forget all the unicorns and rainbows (and broccoli forest of despair), and focus on your loved ones – they need you more than the dusty router sitting in a remote office. We would also like to wish you all the best in 2021!

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What Exactly Happens after a Link Failure?

Imagine the following network running OSPF as the routing protocol. PE1–P1–PE2 is the primary path and PE1–P2–PE2 is the backup path. What happens on PE1 when the PE1–P1 link fails? What happens on PE2?

Sample 4-router network with a primary and a backup path

Sample 4-router network with a primary and a backup path

The second question is much easier to answer, and the answer is totally unambiguous as it only involves OSPF:

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