Layer 2 is the great equalizer. It’s where all data goes before it heads out on the wire. Well, except in the public cloud. Ivan Pepelnjak has a great reminder that what we know of as Layer 2 doesn’t exist in the public cloud. And that’s for the best.
@IOSHints
Figure Out What Problem You’re Trying to Solve
You’ve got your solution and you’re ready to implement it. Now, stop and ask yourself what you’re actually trying to accomplish. Ivan Pepelnjak takes a look at the reasons why you really want to make sure that you’re actually trying to solve the right problem with the solution in your hands.
BGP and Car Safety
Security BGP should be as easy as fastening your seat belt, right? Except no one will give you a ticket for having insecure BGP. Ivan Pepelnjak explores this idea and some others when it comes to mandatory BGP practices in a great blog post.
TCP Is the Most Expensive Part of Your Data Center
TCP is the protocol that runs the Internet. So why are we acting against it in such a way as to make software cost a fortune to do something TCP does for free? Check out this post courtesy of Ivan Pepelnjak and Dan Hughes that talks about TCP being the most expensive part of your data center.
How Did We End With 1500-Byte MTU?
Ever wondered why the MTU for Ethernet is 1500 bytes? Ivan Pepelnjak teaches us a bit about why we have this relic of the early days of networking still hanging around in our lives today.
White Boxes and Cultural Lock-in
Gian Paolo Boarina and Nicola Arnoldi have an interesting exchange going on the role of white box networking in the enterprise and the exodus of intelligence from organizations to vendors.
Flatland 2: Railroad Boogaloo
Water planes, trains, and automobiles, that’s the fantasy allegorical landscape consuming this post by Ivan Pepelnjak. He paints a landscape where trains have consumed all transportation, to the point that there are no roads, only rails, and on it run electric trains. Cars do exist in this realm, but run on the rails, and are beholden to the train vendors for their efficient electric engines. But now the landscape is changing. New cheap gravel roads allows for inefficient gas cars to run at dirt cheap, and travel places the trains can’t. Ivan wants to know how the train manufacturers will do?
Yeah, Blame It on Cisco
Ivan Pepelnjak of ipSpace.net comments: A Technology Market Builder (in his own words) from a major networking vendor decided to publish a thought leadership article (in my sarcastic words) describing how Cisco’s embrace of complexity harmed the whole networking industry. Let’s see how black this kettle-blaming pot really is ;), and make sure to have […]
What Are The Problems with Broadcom Tomahawk? We Don’t Know
Ivan Pepelnjak of ipSpace.net comments: One of my readers has customers that already experienced performance challenges with Tomahawk-based data center switches. He sent me an email along these lines: My customers are concerned about buffer performance for packets that are 200 bytes and under. MORE IMPORTANTLY, a customer informed me that there were performance issues […]
What Is Layer-2 and Why Do We Need It?
Ivan Pepelnjak of ipSpace.net comments: I’m constantly ranting against large layer-2 domains; recently going as far as saying “we don’t really need all that stuff.” Unfortunately, the IP+Ethernet mentality is so deeply ingrained in every networking engineer’s mind that we rarely ever stop to question its validity. Let’s fix that and start with the fundamental […]