Category: IP services

Traditional networking engineers, or virtualization engineers familiar with vSphere or VMware NSX, often feel like Alice in Wonderland when entering the world of Amazon Web Services. Everything looks and sounds familiar, and yet it all feels a bit different

I decided to create a half-day workshop (first delivery: June 13^th in Zurich, Switzerland) to make it easier to grasp the fundamentals of AWS networking, and will publish high-level summaries as a series of blog posts. Let’s start with an overview of what’s different:

I stumbled upon a fantastic RFC - Evolution of IP Model (RFC 6250) - that should be made mandatory reading for everyone remotely involved with networking. It describes numerous "truths" (politely called misconceptions) that everyone from programmers to network designers still rely upon. Some of my favorites: reachability is symmetric and transitive, loss is rare, addresses are stable, each host has a single interface and a single IP address ... Enjoy!

This (not so very) short video explains what TCP MSS clamping is and why we’re almost forced to use it on xDSL (PPPoE) and tunnel interfaces.

TL&DW summary: because Internet-wide Path MTU Discovery rarely works.

Yesterday I described how the IPv6 architects split the functionality of IPCP into three different protocols (IPCPv6, RA and DHCPv6). While the split undoubtedly makes sense from the academic perspective, the service providers offering PPP-based services (including DSL and retrograde uses of PPP-over-FTTH) went berserk. They were already using RADIUS to authenticate PPP users ... and were not thrilled by the idea that they should deploy DHCPv6 servers just to make the protocol stack look nicer.

A while ago I was criticizing the network-blindness of the storage industry that decided to run 25-year old protocol (SCSI) over the most resource-intensive transport protocol (TCP) instead of fixing their stuff or choosing a more lightweight transport mechanism.

My argument (although theoretically valid) became moot a few months ago: Intel and Microsoft have demonstrated an iSCSI solution that can saturate a 10GE link and perform more than 1 million I/O operations per second. Another clear victory for the Moore’s Law.