Category: Workshop

Did you know that many networking engineers use ipSpace.net webinars (and subscription) to prepare for the job interviews?

Here’s one of their success stories (name changed for obvious reasons):

Matt Oswalt made two great points while tweeting about my Automation Gone Wild blog post:

• Automation should be a strategy. You need management buy-in;
• You should have at least one person with strong software development experience in your automation team.

However, life is not always rosy, so @stupidengineer asked:

My “this is why you need automation” blog post triggered numerous comments and tweets. I loved this one:

What if the mistake was embedded into the automation process/tool (designed by humans) in the first place? Now you have a video series titled "Automation Gone Wild".

I guess this tweet is a priceless answer to that question:

One of my subscribers considered attending the Virtual Firewalls workshop on September 1st and asked:

Would it make sense to attend the workshop? How is it different from the Virtual Firewalls webinar? Will it be recorded?

The last answer is easy: No. Now for the other two.

I spent the last week creating numerous scenarios using Ansible networking modules for my upcoming Network Automation workshop. The scenarios use Cisco IOS and Nexus OS modules as I used VIRL for network simulation, but you could easily adapt them to other networking devices.

All the scenarios I’m covering in the workshop are available in my Github repository; to get the them explained you’ll have to attend the workshop. Enjoy!

I had a sweet problem with ipSpace.net webinars for quite a while: there are way more ideas than available time. However, a few days ago I stumbled upon a great tip on Trello blog and immediately decided to use it.

Result: list of future ipSpace.net webinars as a Trello board.

The featured webinar in March 2016 is the Leaf-and-Spine Designs update to the Leaf-and-Spine Fabrics webinar, and in the featured videos (the ones marked with a star) you'll find in-depth explanation of BGP features available in Cumulus Linux, including a cool trick that allows you to run EBGP sessions across unnumbered interfaces.

My friend Christoph Jaggi, the author of fantastic Metro Ethernet and Carrier Ethernet Encryptors documents, sent me this question when we were discussing the Data Center Fabrics Overview workshop I’ll run in Zurich in a few weeks:

When you are talking about large-scale VLAN-based fabrics I assume that you are pointing towards highly populated VLANs, such as VLANs containing 1000+ Ethernet addresses. Could you provide a tipping point between reasonably-sized VLANs and large-scale VLANs?

It's not the number of hosts in the VLAN but the span of a bridging domain (VLAN or otherwise).

One of the engineers watching the vSphere 6 Networking Deep Dive found it particularly useful:

There were pearls of knowledge in there which expanded my understanding of ESX and gave me more than a few "aha!" moments […] The course is worth the money and time for sections "uplink redundancy & load balancing" and "VLAN based virtual networks" alone.

Not convinced? Check out other reviews and survey results.

Five years after the SDN hype exploded, it remains as meaningless as Cloud, and it seems that all we’re left with is a plethora of vendors engaged in SDN-washing their products.

Even when a group of highly intelligent engineers considering these topics on a daily basis gets together they don’t get very far apart from a great question: “what business problem is it supposed to solve?” (or maybe they got distracted by irrelevant hot-air opinions).

Is it still worth trying to find a useful definition of SDN? It seems it’s easier to list what SDN is not like I’ll be doing in the free Introduction to SDN webinar on February 10th. Let’s see: