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The AWS VPC and the Network Engineer
Amazon AWS is doing amazing things with its IaaS platform. As a networking guy, I find the networking features very impressive. AWS made a wise choice in using Layer 3 as the networking foundation. I...
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A Milestone for my Business
January 2012 marks the three-year anniversary of striking out on my own under the Brooks Consulting moniker. I’ve had a blast providing services to companies such as Clearwire, T-Mobile,...
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IPv6 – Just 96 More Bits?
My favorite professor in college joked that the answer to most questions in computer science is, “It depends.” How true. I’ve found few absolutes in my years working on IP networks. If you compare IPv6...
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Layer 2 Oriented Designs Fail at Internet Scale
This post’s title summarizes a tenet of designing large IP networks. Layer 3 networks have numerous advantages in efficient use of available paths, troubleshooting (think visibility), and fault domain...
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Don’t Upgrade to VMware Workstation 8
In a previous post, I recommended VMware Workstation 7 for performing network proof-of-concept testing. The Teams feature allows users to easily configure virtual labs with multiple tiers. I was very...
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A Press Release is Not an IPv6 Network Strategy
A strategy for enabling your network for IPv6 requires significant planning. The planned future state must be an IPv6-only network rather than dual stack. How do you get from an IPv4-only network to...
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Cloud Panic – A Cautionary Tale
For almost an hour yesterday, I thought my AWS instance that hosts my company website was irrecoverable. Randy Bias suggested that virtual servers should be like cattle- when they get sick, you shoot...
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Why I Use AWS EC2 Reserved Instances
Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 reserved instances provide a simple-to-use method for reducing AWS costs for small business like mine. When my free tier expired last year, I’d heard of reserved instances...
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The Glorious Return of End-to-end Connectivity with IPv6
For almost 15 years, I relied on hacks and trickery to get servers in my residence to communicate with Internet hosts. I used DMZ hosts, port forwarding, and a variety of tunneling mechanisms. The...
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James Hamilton’s Failures at Scale and How to Ignore Them at AWS re: Invent 2012
We know that James Hamilton is a bright guy. His On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services paper and Datacenter Networks Are In My Way presentation are fascinating for those interested in data...
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IPv6 in XCP 1.6
The intent of this post is to document how to enable IPv6 in XCP 1.6 and manage the host using IPv6 transport. I hope Google leads many people to this page, as I wasn’t able to find anything else on...
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Simplifying Your Junos SLAX Development Environment
I’m excited by the possibilities that network programmability offers network operators. Through JUNOS SLAX scripts, Juniper has offered a simple mechanism for programming its routers for many years....
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L2TPv3 in Linux Using IPv6 Endpoints
Pseudowires have traditionally been deployed in ISP and wireless provider networks to carry Ethernet and TDM frames across an IP/MPLS network. Now you can find an implementation of L2TPv3 in the Linux...
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Peter Löthberg’s Terastream Presentation at RIPE 67
Do you ever wonder why the industry keeps layering complexity on top of complexity to scale IP networks? Perhaps you feel like there must be a better way to build IP networks. Peter describes an...
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Five Years of Going Solo
About six years ago, I knew my career needed a change in direction. What I expected in the change at the time resembled nothing close to what transpired. In the fall of 2008, my circumstances were such...
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IPv6 in Docker Containers on DigitalOcean
This post details how I enabled IPv6 addresses in docker containers on DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean supports IPv6 in its London 1 and Singapore 1 data centers as of July 2014. Create a droplet using the...
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Executing Arbitrary Junos ‘Show’ Commands with PyEZ and ncclient
Still screen scraping routers with Expect scripts? It’s time to move to NETCONF, the industry standard for communicating with network infrastructure. The protocol was heavily influenced by Juniper’s...
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Native IPv6 Functionality in Docker
The days of kludgy hacks for IPv6-connected docker containers are over. A recent PR merged native IPv6 functionality into the docker daemon. The new bits have not yet made it into the docker ppa...
View ArticleInstalling Python 3.6 for AWS Lambda Development
Python 3.6 is currently the only python 3.x version that AWS Lambda supports. I’m writing this post to document the installation process on the linux distributions I use. Amazon Linux AMI 2017.09 or...
View Article5 Minutes to Firecracker with Packet
I was eager to try Firecracker after hearing about its release at re:Invent 2018. The microVM technology require access to the hardware; a bare metal server is needed. GCP and AWS both offer bare metal...
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