Shrouded in a unique CLI with its own Order of Operations the much-loved or loathe firewall rules a majority of networks with an iron fist. The adulation of this bastion of permission (or the chagrin of expensive DC heater) all…
ThousandEyes offer a different spin on SaaS monitoring. They deliver the ability to gain critical insight into SaaS applications from the Customer point of view and anywhere else you want too. Their distributed agent model allows business to gauge a…
IPv4 address depletion dates have passed. We are handing out the last of our /8’s across our regional internet registrars now. In the near future we should be almost completely depleted of IPv4. This is concerning. What is more concerning…
As some readers may note I have been using Juniper’s SRX-110 for my home firewall for some time. It is a very cool piece of kit and an extremely flexible, dynamic, and feature rich. In June, Brad Woodberg and Rob…
The Context aware modules for the Cisco ASA provide enhanced functionality for L7 services. These include but are not limited to URL category/reputation databases, HTTP inspections, AVC, TLS proxy, TCP Proxy, and Multiple Policy decision points. The management of these…
There have been a recent stir in networking. Overlays. There seems to be three camps on thought. Those for and evangelising overlay technology, those who are in between, and the others who refute the scalability and use of overlays. Since…
I was lucky enough to be award Junipers Fan of the Month award. I am the inaugural winner of this spotlight. I am very honoured. They asked me some questions that I thought some readers might be interested in. Once…
Here is the Juniper flavour of the FQDN access-list. The policy used references the dns-name and creates policy destination addresses accordingly. It is important, as noted in the optimisation and initial ASA FQDN configuration post, that you have a set…
A recent post by Greg Ferro over at Etherealmind exposed me to Sublime Text 2. This multiple format text manipulation software has seen some some great plugins. As pointed out by Greg, there is a Github hosted plugin for Cisco…
In light of Cisco Live Orlando, the biggest thing since sliced bread has hit the Cisco’s DC flagship Nexus series. This isn’t about a bigger box, a faster line card, or 100Gb everywhere – which they did do by the…
It is with much delight I received an email recently inviting me back to San Jose, California for Network Field Day 6 this September. Tech Field Day is described on the website as the following: Our Field Day events bring…
My previous post focused on using access-lists that we based upon Fully Qualified Domain Names. This recently has posed a solution for some works that have been undertaken. Even though it might seem quite straight forward to implement – there…
A recent change came through which required a geo-spatial map data server from an isolated network to cache maps from various public entities. The geo-spatial database calls upon various websites. The use of Bing, Google, government agencies, traffic management combine together…
I was sitting in a meeting today – generally a practical alternative to work – and my colleague in my team said something rather striking. “There are two types of people in the world – complexifiers and simplifiers.” This struck a…
The following is someone or something we can relate to. It’s close to 10 in the morning and you have three missed calls. You’ve had that damned phone vibrate with that distinct pattern of a Help desk email. A morose…
Gone are the days of where you pay once and ride off into the sunset. The industry is changing and renting virtual servers for a deterministic price per hour allows flexibility when investing in a cloud platform. But before you…
Tech Field Day changed my life. This is a big statement to make and now, given recent life events, something that holds true. This event which is organised by Stephen Foskett and his Tech Field Day group has gone from…
I have previously blogged here and over at Packet Pushers about EIGRP not really being open. Since then I have changed my mind and albeit EIGRP is not quite there, I would consider it moving forward in a next generation…
The practice of enterprise architecture is the translation of business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change. This is defining elements that contribute to the make up of the business and inter-link each business unit. The main pillars of this…
A metric of time measurement in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a ‘Valarian Age’. A Valarian Age is made up of 100 Valarian years. A Valarian year in turn is 10 mortal year. In the land of Tolkien, ‘In…
I was sitting with the wife watching Masterchef and debriefing about the day. Now I am not normally one to watch a lot of TV if at all and I found my self likening Masterchef to some Vendors. That could…
In some situations with various technologies you require ultra fast fail-over. There are design considerations in which you may require a lower fail-over than 200 millisecond. Lets look at how you can improve this. This post looks at L2 switch…
Network virtualization allows an abstraction from a physical topology. It takes the notion of a logical network further. Abstraction allows segregation of the routing table and can be used in a flexible way. The ability now to define a security…
It is that time of year again when Cisco increases output at Minitrue for Cisco Live on home soil. Cisco Live Orlando is around the corner and if you’re not in the USA like myself it is probable you aren’t…
So what is DHCPv6 client mode and why can this help me? A while back Ivan Pepelnjak commented on the blog asking if the SRX had DHCPv6 client features such as IA_PD and IA_NA. Now as of version 12.1×45-D10 these…