On Python, Networks and the py-junos-eznc library

One of my recent forays into Increasing the Awesome has involved learning about NETCONF and the Python programming language. I was lucky enough to spend some time with Jeremy Schulman during my trip to Sunnyvale for the Juniper Ambassadors Summit, and he introduced me to the new py-junos-eznc Python library he has been working on. I had spent a little bit of time earlier in the year looking at the original Ruby library, and I was amazed at how much thought had been put into this new library - obviously Jeremy’s learned a lot on the way!

The Smartest Guy in the Room

There is one thing that anybody who has been in a room with me longer than 5 minutes can tell you - I am not a smart guy! I have lots of smart friends. I am not one of them. Sometimes I feel like I’ve done more stupid things, more often than I would like to admit, and its only that I have been stupid enough often enough that I have eventually learned “dont do that!”.

The VAR-y good upsides to being a consultant!

Earlier today Ethan Banks wrote a really good blog posts about “Thoughts on Working as a Consultant for a VAR”. I found his point of view quite interesting and I will say I can understand his points. I can also say that I would rather be a consultant than a full time engineer at a customer site. As a little bit of background I have spent most of my career working as a consultant. I did do a two year stint as network operations manager for a wireless ISP which itself was quite fast paced, but other than that Ive work as a consultant in one form or another.

Mentoring your way to better career happiness

Yesterday was possibly one of the proudest days in my professional life. My very good friend Anthony Burke sent me a text message just after 9am to tell me that he had passed his JNCIA-Junos exam. This is a close tie with when he earned his place as a delegate to Network Field Day 4 back in October.

So why am I so proud about this? Well Anthony and I have become great friends over the past 18 months all through the magic of social media. One day for no reason (as is the way of things) we just started talking. Tweets became skypes and in January, even though we had only ever met face to face once, my wife and I drove the 10 hour trip to Melbourne to attend his wedding. (Sitting at table answering the question of “So how do you know Anthony?” with “Oh. From the Internet” was a humorous experience)

Of all good things...

Well it appears that I am well on my way to holding onto the title for two years running, and once again, I haven’t posted anything for a couple of months. There have been a lot of changes going on around here in the past few months which have really taken me away from my “janitorial duties”.

There are three key items that I would like to take the time to update everyone on:

Wholesale Virtualisation and Selective QinQ

Recently I have been working on a solution to provide Wholesale Access to hosted VMs. Several of my customers have “Cloud Environments” - call it IaaS, virtualisation, a fad or whatever, this is something that I have been asked to come up with a solution for more than once.

To explain the requirements outlined in this article, I should give a little background on the design requirements and constraints. For some of my customers the standard build is to include 2x VLANs for each Customer - a Live VLAN, and an Internal/Backend network. If the customer has more than one VM in a cluster then all servers will share these VLANs. Unfortunately this quickly runs through the available VLANs (And we love that the Nexus 5k only supports 512 vlans). This limited the number of customers in a single VM cluster, due to VLAN limitations inherent in Data Centre switches.

Banished from Priv15

I was recently called into a new customer’s network to help recover some passwords on some Cisco switches and to map out the network structure. Unfortunately nobody had any idea of the last time the switches had had their configs saved or even when the last time the switches had been power cycled. From what I can gather the previous IT guy didnt leave any information for those who followed.

My favourite tool in my toolbag!

It’s seems to be the craze this week to write all about our tool bags. Stretch wrote an article on it, followed by Jeff Fry’s blog post and Tony Mattke over at Router Jockey. Not to be out done (and ever the trend setter) Jennifer Huber wrote her post 18 months ago!

So I guess to be just like the cool kids, I should write a post about my tool bag. Well I was going to, then I realised that despite how nerdy we all really are, there a limit to how many pictures of screwdrivers, cable testers and multimeters that we can actually all look at. Yes I carry the usual sorts of cables, screwdrivers, multimeters and crimping kit. I used to take my Leatherman everywhere until a run in with Airport Security on the way to Cisco Live in Melbourne (a moments silence please!).

Cambodia: Networking in a world of contrasts

As some of my readers may know, I have spent the last week and a bit in Phnom Penh (Cambodia), setting up the new office for my company (eintellego). I had never been to Asia before this trip - outside of a couple of lay-overs in Japan in 2002 and 2003, or the 45 mins sitting on the plane in Bangkok Airport on the way to Abu Dhabi last November. I had no idea what to expect when stepping out of the airport.

RADIUS "Auth-Type" Attribute

The Intro

One of the things I do regularly for my clients is to build LNS Infrastructure to take wholesale L2TP handoff. It is not uncommon to take these handoffs from several suppliers covering technologies such as DSL, Dialup ports, Wireless, 3G etc.

Wholesale pricing in Australia means that it is not unreasonable to take a wholesale L2TP handoff from an Aggregator company and to build your corporate WAN using wholesale DSL services. Often these networks are built for customers who’s primary business is not running networks, but rather delivering a service. I have an upcoming series of blog posts that will cover creating these services in more detail.