Thought provoking article on DevOps and some possible down falls...

DevOps Is BS: Why One Programmer Doesn’t Do It Anymore

Having experienced the friction between Dev & Ops departments and the path of least resistance leading to bypassing of policy and guidance I have some sympathy with the author.  He makes some good points near the end but if your easily offended but frank and fruity language you might want to skip this one......   

TCP congestion control Reno, CUBIC, Vages & BBR

This was a really good article to help decipher the hype behind BBR with lots of back ground and well written.

https://blog.apnic.net/2017/05/09/bbr-new-kid-tcp-block/

Cisco Nexus NX-OS command shortcuts and scripting

Over your time with a Cli you get to know the shortcuts and useful but lightly published commands and shortcuts to proficient and fast access to info you need when trouble shooting.  The following link to firewall.cx is a greate article bring a wide ranging subset of these most useful commands all tougher in one place.

NEXUS NX-OS: USEFUL COMMANDS, CLI SCRIPTING, HINTS & TIPS, PYTHON SCRIPTING AND MORE

Team "Chaos" day

My team took part in a couple of Chaos days in getting ready to support the first fully in house production work load on AWS.  This has resulted in our partner Cloud Reach putting out a blog on the experience of facilitation of the chaos! This also resulted in some further press articles below.

CloudReach Blog

http://diginomica.com/2017/07/06/met-office-chaos-welcome-new-cloud/

http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/hr/training/6904/met-office-asks-cloudreach-to-purposefully-break-its-systems

4 Best Practices for Web Browser Security on Your Linux Workstation

New GCHQ CyberChef Open Source tool has some useful networking elements.

Just played with the new CyberChef tool GCHQ has put up on GitHub, Just had a quick play with the "Parse IPv6 address" & "Change IP Format" functions also useful for embedding IPv4 into IPv6 and checking IPv6 addressing among other things!

It runs in Chrome or Firefox, give it a go! CyberChef - The Cyber Swiss Army Knife

Troubleshooting BGP Neighbor Establishment

This is the most through explanation and has a really logical flowchart for troubleshooting, BGP neighbour issues that I have found, hope its helpful to you also.

Why Do BGP Neighbors Toggle Between Idle, Connect, and Active States?

Troubleshooting BGP Flow Charts

Simulating Emulating WAN Latency in Linux - Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control

Needing to simulate delay to test an application ability to fill a pipe in the prototype lab, I needed to emulate the latency to get a more realistic view.  The blog post from Benjamin Cane (tc: Adding simulated network latency to your Linux server) got me onto this method.  I also found tc man page & ArchLinux Advanced Traffic Control Wiki useful for a deeper dive.
Also see my previous post on Toxiproxy - WAN simulator of sorts!

Foundation of setting up a CloudOps team

I found this useful and reassuring that we are going down the right route in the new challenge I have taken on.

4 Foundational Investments for Your Cloud Journey

The Jump Box/Jump Server is Not Dead – it is more necessary than ever

worth a read :-) http://skyportblog.com/2015/08/27/the-jump-boxjump-server-is-not-dead-it-is-more-necessary-than-ever/

How to receive a million packets per second

Interesting blog post with help with my understanding of the design of a Linux networking stack.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-to-receive-a-million-packets/

Ostinato - packet crafter/traffic generator

Ostinato aims to be "Wireshark in Reverse" and become complementary to Wireshark.

http://ostinato.org

Toxiproxy - WAN simulator of sorts!

Toxiproxy is a framework for simulating network conditions. It's made specifically to work in testing, CI and development environments, supporting deterministic tampering with connections, but with support for randomized chaos and customization.

https://github.com/shopify/toxiproxy 

Time isnt money

Interesting take on meetings and their true cost "People say "time is money," but they are wrong; time is much more valuable" 

http://boz.com/

Also found some resonance with Ethan C Banks post in his news letter “The Hot Aisle Newsletter” under “Behind The Tweet”

"when I don't meet my productivity goals by the end of the week, despite an enormous amount of expended energy. It's disheartening to feel mentally exhausted, and yet still have the roughly the same list of tasks I started with."

The plan of action, time to make some changes!

Multigigabit (mGIG) - NBASE-T – IEEE 802.3bz - 2.5 and 5 Gigabits per second over 100m of Cat 5e cable.

Pre standards alliance of companies have created NBASE-T, it can increase network speeds of existing Cat 5e/Cat 6 cables up to 5 Gbps at lengths up to 100m. It seems to have now been resently pickup by the IEEE IEEE 802.3 Next Generation Enterprise Access BASE-T PHY Study Group

Cisco multigigabit will be supported on... (as of 02/02/2015)

Cisco Catalyst 4500

Cisco Catalyst 3850

Cisco Catalyst 3560-CX and possibly the 2960-CX?

Cisco Catalyst 4500 current apparent caveats

“The Cisco Catalyst 4500 product family supports the technology with a new 48-port line card that supports 12 multigigabit switch ports. All the ports, including the multigigabit ports, support POE, POE+, and UPOE. Furthermore, line cards offer significant investment protection by supporting the new multigigabit technology on both types of Cisco Supervisor Engines - Supervisor 7 and Supervisor 8.”

It has been driven by the up coming 802.11ac Wave 2 where the use of extended 5G range will allow for speeds wireless speeds greater than 1 Gigabit.  With AP's currently cabled with CAT5e/6 the cabling back to the NER would become the bottle neck, the cost of upgrading this cable to CAT6a/7 would slow adoption for sure.

What I cant find is a Server/Workstation NIC that will support this technology at this time?  I can see a demand for this with from our power workstation users, as even with port channels of bonded at 1 Gigabit the links limit the flows to the individual channel that flow takes. The cost of replacing floor plate copper is mostly prohibitive at this time this could provide an acceptable compromise if the tech does migrate beyond it current exclusive use for networking hardware?  

Other useful links.....

http://www.cisco.com/go/multigigabit

http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/switches/catalyst-4500-series-switches/at-a-glance-c45-733656.pdf

If you know of any NIC vendors that are planning to support please comment below!

40 Gbps & 100 Gbps cabling infrastucture

I have been working on putting in the new Nexus equipment with 40/100 Gbps capability over the past few months.  After searching around today I found this link this page, wish I had found it earlier!  Good summary of technology and infrastructure requirements including Link Loss Budgets.

http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/print/volume-18/issue-11/features/data-center-migrating-to-40-and-100g-with-om3-and-om4-connectivity.html

VRF Lite on Nexus 5600

We are using 5696Q with VRF-Lite with BGP as the routing protocol, stumbled upon this from Ian Pepenlnjak, hes found similar findings so that's good! Anyway not worth rewriting his post either as it will be much better than anything I could put out right now.
VRF Lite on Nexus 5600

Chistmas Linux Media server build

Over Christmas brake I have been playing with a Linux media server build as I haven't had much chance lately at work to keep my Linux skills up.

Basic Build HP Micro server NL54 + 4 Gig ECC Ram.

OS Ubuntu 14.04 (Should have gone for Mint)
Plex - Media libary + trans coder and DNLA - some fun making profile work for Bravia TV but forums are good.
CatFish File search - cli locate + grep also good!
Thunar File Manager - Batch rename with Regex to assist in getting library clear for Plex.

Greyhole - Redundant Storage Pooling using Samba

Graphical System monitoring tool quick Google and found 5 System Monitoring Tools for Ubuntu & A List Of Best System Monitoring Applications (GUI & CLI) For Ubuntu 12.04/Linux Mint 13,  I Picked Open System Monitor.

So far so good no real issues and I hadn't got as rusty as I had feared!  Trans coding well even though its only a little AMD 1.5 dual core.

Privacy Badger - Stop Third Party Trackers

Privacy Badger is a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web.  If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple websites without your permission, Privacy Badger automatically blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your browser.

Its in Beta but I have been running it in Firefox and Chrome and its working well, limiting the tracking for Ads and webpages are loading faster so check it out!

https://www.eff.org/privacybadger

Forget the Nexus 6001 the Nexus 5600 just replaced it! well kind of....

Cisco look to have rebranded the Nexus 6001 in to the Nexus 5672 platform but added Fibre Channel support.

They have also released a 2U logical replacement for the Nexus 5596 called the Nexus 56128, somewhat confusing for the customer and kind of brakes there numbering schema they have been running, Cisco a bit more planning, Prior Planning Prevent Poor Performance? Bit harsh but hay, they were announced at Cisco Live Europe, the Data Sheet is out at Cisco.com but the from my CCO login I can’t get a price on anything other than software upgrades as yet!

Well the upshot, can’t see why you would buy a Nexus 5500 or the Nexus 6001 over the new Nexus 5600’s once you can actually get a price for them ;-)

Also announced the Cisco Nexus 3172 it’s a 10-Gbps SFP+-based ToR switch with 48 SFP+ ports and 6 QSFP ports, allot of forwarding power to Top of Rack!