Obama and the Internet
I debated whether to write this post at all. Doing so means letting some of my political views show, and I wasn’t sure whether that would be appropriate for this blog. But in the long run it’s really...
View ArticleThe Internet and Obama
In the previous post I discussed how the Internet influenced the American presidential election. (Okay, okay, how in my opinion it influenced the election.) In this post, I'd like to flip the...
View ArticleHigh Availability Does Not Always Mean High Cost
“High availability” has been a technical and marketing buzzword for a number of years, and lately infrastructure equipment vendors have made “HA” a feature set. In that regard HA has come to mean a...
View ArticleIPv6 in the Enterprise: Why You Should Care
If you have followed this blog for very long you know that I post pretty regularly (far too regularly, some might say) on the fast-approaching depletion of the remaining pool of public IPv4...
View ArticleAdventures in IPv6 Web Hosting
My last post talked about the need for enterprise network operators, even if they think they will not need IPv6 for their internal networks in the foreseeable future, to take into account their...
View ArticleUnderstanding 4-Byte Autonomous System Numbers
For all the harping I do on this blog about IPv4 address depletion and the need to prepare yourselves for IPv6, there is another number resource that is also being quickly depleted, and that I haven’t...
View ArticleTaking the Android Plunge
I picked up a G1 yesterday. It was a big step for me, because I’ve never really wanted a mobile phone that does more than make phone calls (and text messaging, since my teenagers seem to have lost the...
View Article2008 IPv4/IPv6 Update
2008 was sort of a milestone year for IPv6. Foremost there was the much-touted US OMB Mandate which everyone got excited about back about 2005: By June of this year all federal agencies’...
View ArticleTaking the Art Out of Networking
It’s been a long tradition around our house that I cook the Christmas dinner. I enjoy cooking but don’t get the time to do it as often as I would like; my wife does the great majority of day-to-day...
View ArticleJeff Doyle Joins Synergy Research
I’ll get back to the discussion of quantifying intangibles in a couple of days, but I wanted to let you know that I have joined Synergy Research as a Vice President of Research, focused on IP...
View ArticleClose Enough
In the previous post I wrote about the difficulty – quite common among networking and IT engineers – of expressing concepts that we understand in quantifiable terms that have meaning to the CFO or...
View ArticleMeasuring the Immeasurable
I’ve been an avid skier for more than half my life. When we get our first light October snowfalls here in Colorado, I start getting serious about getting in shape. Sadly, this winter my consulting...
View ArticleConfidence Levels and Calibration
Over the past several posts I’ve been discussing how networkers can reduce supposed “immeasurables” or “intangibles” to something that can in fact be measured, and I’ve been using Douglas Hubbard’s...
View ArticleThe Value of Information
One of my favorite stories (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) concerns an aged power station. One day the station failed, leaving the small town it served completely without electricity. The...
View ArticleThe Dual Stack Dilemma
We are entering the transitional period between IPv4 andIPv6, and things are going to get awkward for a while. IPv4 addresses will officially be used up in the next couple of years, although for most...
View ArticleUnderstanding Carrier Grade NAT
Any general-use IP protocol stack that supports IPv6 also supports IPv4. That is, it is dual stack capable. “General-use” is an important qualifier here: Certainly there will be specialized devices...
View ArticleLarge Scale NAT Architectures
Traditional NAT, as discussed in the previous article, has been used for fifteen or so years to enable the sharing of a small number of public IPv4 addresses by a larger number of privately-addressed...
View ArticleUnderstanding Dual-Stack Lite
The previous article examined a couple of basic Large Scale NAT (LSN) architectures – NAT444 and NAT464 – for creating dual stacked networks in the face of a depleted IPv4 address pool. The focus is...
View ArticleCan Large Scale NAT Save IPv4?
I've written previously that as we make the slow - and long overdue - transition from IPv4 to IPv6, we will soon be stuck with an awkward interim period in which the only new globally routable...
View ArticleIPv6 Address Design
There are a few culprits that regularly contribute to delayed or failed IPv6 deployment projects, such as poor DNS planning, insufficient testing, unanticipated application behavior, and poor IPv6...
View ArticleIPv4: The Beginning of the End
As predicted, IANA has allocated two /8 IPv4 blocks to APNIC. That brings the remaining IANA pool down to five, which triggers a plan to evenly allocate the remaining five /8s to the five RIRs. With...
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Goodbye to a Couple of Old Friends
I have a couple of charts on IPv4 address depletion that I’ve used in presentations and customer reports for years. With today’s allocation of the last five IANA /8 blocks to the five RIRs, I’ve...
View ArticleHow Are Your Hexadecimal Skills?
I ended my post on IPv6 address design saying I would follow up by showing you a few simple tricks for working with hexadecimal numbers. Then the long-predicted depletion of the IANA pool of IPv4...
View ArticleWhat's Next with IPv6?
We recently held the annual executive meeting of the Rocky Mountain IPv6 Task Force – which primarily consisted of eating sandwiches around Scott Hogg’s kitchen table – and a topic on the agenda was a...
View ArticleThe Case for Enterprise IPv6
The business case for IPv6 in service provider networks – particularly broadband service provider networks – is all about the address supply, and you know the routine well: The IANA IPv4 address pool...
View ArticleIPv6 in the Enterprise May Happen Unexpectedly Fast
As I write this blog I’m sitting in the Rocky Mountain IPv6 Summit. Specifically, I’m sitting in the Enterprise track. And listening to an excellent lineup of speakers, I’m shifting some of my...
View ArticleThe Logic of Bad IPv6 Address Management
I've written about IPv6 address design previously, and in that post I briefly touched on the fact that our long-ingrained habits of IPv4 address design can lead us astray when working with IPv6. I'd...
View ArticleThe Case for /127 Subnets
In my previous post I wrote about all the positives we get from the almost incomprehensibly massive IPv6 address space, all there for our enjoyment if we will just break free of our long-ingrained IPv4...
View ArticleLessons from Altoona: What Facebook's newest data center can teach us
Over the past year, Facebook has thrown some interesting wrenches into the gears of the traditional networking industry. While mainstream thinking is to keep most details of your network operations...
View ArticleClearing the fog around open switching terminology
The networking industry is making a decisive move toward open switches. Much of the media's attention is on mega-scale operators' do-it-yourself switches, such as Facebook's Wedge and 6-Pack or...
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