IU Networking

Networking & DevOps: Getting Back to Our Roots !

2011-10-26T13:44:00.000-04:00

I spent last week at the Open Networking Summit and Open Networking Foundation Member Workday and came home with a head full of ideas to write about. Here's my first set.... At ONS I heard the term DevOps mentioned many times. In fact, Stacy Higginbotham from GigaOM (who btw was an excellent moderator for the panel I participated in) wrote a post about it as well (See "Does networking need a

GEC10 Demo Night

2011-03-16T13:10:00.000-04:00

After multiple cab rides and a scenic tour of several areas of San Juan I wouldn't dare go after dark, I made it to the Sheraton Conference Center (not to be confused with the Sheraton Old Town) in time to setup for the Tuesday night demos. IU had 3 demos last night: GENI Meta Operations Center (GMOC), KetKarma and Openflow Campus Trials. I was responsible for the Openflow Campus Trials Demo

Openflow and Vendor Lock-In

2011-03-14T14:06:00.000-04:00

Openflow is really just one piece in a much broader architecture known as Software-Defined Networking (SDN). The concept of SDN is actually very simple and is explained quite clearly in a number of presentations by Nick McKeown from Stanford - amongst others. See http://tinyurl.com/4ekzb9w The basic idea is that today's networking products mirror the mainframe computer industry of decades past

Openflow @ Internet2 Joint Techs in Clemson

2011-01-31T21:22:00.000-05:00

Indiana University hosted a BoF session on Openflow this afternoon at the Internet2 Joint Techs Workshop in Clemson, SC. Chris Small did an excellent job organizing the session and pulled off a great demo of VM mobility. I presented the intro slides and did a short demo of an Openflow controller from Big Switch Networks. We counted 60+ people in the room they scheduled for us. It was packed

Proposal Preparation !

2010-08-19T12:59:00.000-04:00

That pretty much sums up the last 4 weeks of my life. GENI Solicitation 3 proposals are due by 5pm tomorrow. The IU GlobalNOC is leading or partnering on several different proposals for various parts of the solicitation. I'm personally working on 2 proposals, PI on one and Co-PI on the other. I'm looking forward to getting back to "normal" after tomorrow and there's no shortage of other work

Openflow @ Internet2 Joint Techs

2010-07-13T09:29:00.000-04:00

Internet2 is holding their summer Joint Techs Workshop at Ohio State this week and Openflow was featured prominently on yesterday's afternoon's agenda. At 3:00 Srini Seeththaraman from Stanford gave an excellent overview of Openflow. I followed that up with a talk at 4:30 that was focused on the practical aspects of potential Openflow applications in R&E network and what network engineers can

Openflow Wish List

2010-06-17T16:17:00.000-04:00

There are very smart people involved in the development of Openflow. However, I suspect very few of them actively manage networks on a day-to-day basis. Now that the code is in the hands of network engineers, we can see what's needed to actually get this running in production networks. When it comes to emerging technologies, this space between the development and actual production use -

Grab bag

2010-05-27T13:28:00.000-04:00

A little trivia about myself. When I was much younger, I taught myself how to juggle for a talent show. The grand finale was to juggle 3 apples while taking a bite out of one of them each time it came around. Well, right now I feel a bit like a juggler with a dozen apples in the air, desperately trying not to drop one, so here are some snippets of what I'm up to... - Openflow. We have our "

Hotel California

2010-05-04T23:58:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm spending another week in a hotel in California (Sunnyvale this time). Juniper yesterday, HP today, and Cyan Optics tomorrow. Cyan makes an interesting product in the packet/optical space. It's potentially a very good match for RONs and Statenets that don't need a lot of wave services (< 8 waves) and want a low-cost Ethernet services platform that is well integrated with the DWDM

Openflow Testbed Taking Shape

2010-04-20T22:54:00.000-04:00

I started my morning with a nice walk across campus to Lindley Hall for a meeting with Rob Henderson. I have to interject that it was a great morning to walk across campus - 60 degrees and sunny ! It sure beats 10th and the Bypass !! Anyway the primary topic of the meeting was our Openflow testbed, but we wondered off on a number of different topics. We need to get people to help us test

NSF Campus Bridging Workshop

2010-04-08T09:53:00.000-04:00

I spent yesterday at the IUPUI Conference Center attending an NSF "Campus Bridging" workshop. Your first response will likely be the same as everyone I've spoken to - "What the heck is that ?". Well, this was the first one I attended, but I believe this is one track in a series of workshops to help the NSF decide how to structure it's future Cyberinfrastructure (CI) funding programs. The

Visit to Ball State

2010-04-01T17:29:00.001-04:00

I spent yesterday afternoon at Ball State University in Muncie, IN. For those non-Hoosiers out there, Ball State is named after te Ball Family as in the jars you can tomatoes in ! I met with Steve Jones who is the director of their CICS program. Hopefully I don't butcher the acronym, but IIRC it stands for Center for Information and Communications Sciences. It's a very cool program and as

Announcing the GlobalNOC Summer of Networking Program

2010-03-24T19:03:00.000-04:00

The GlobalNOC has a long history of hiring students to work on projects during the summer. In fact, many of our software developers and system administrators started with us as students. This summer we anticipate having about 8-10 students working in multiple areas of the GlobalNOC including Systems Engineering, Service Desk and Network Architecture. With such a large group of students, we

Openflow Trip

2010-03-22T13:57:00.000-04:00

Nothing like back-to-back weeks of travel ! This week we're headed to Silicon Valley for a series of meetings related to Openflow including stops at Stanford University and HP Labs. Actually, last week's trip to GEC7 at Duke University was related to Openflow as well. If you haven't checked out Openflow yet, I'd encourage you to do so (www.openflowswitch.org). It's a standard API that

Heading to GEC 7

2010-03-15T12:32:00.000-04:00

I'm heading to GEC 7, the 7th GENI Engineering Conference, tomorrow with several colleagues from the IU GlobalNOC. IU has received multiple GENI grants so far including one for the Openflow Campus Trials which I'm working on along with the PI, Chris Small. Tomorrow night we'll be doing a demo of our current Openflow deployment that includes 6 HP switches running Openflow capable code along with

Back in the Saddle Again !

2010-01-05T16:06:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year ! Hopefully everyone enjoyed the holidays. I hardly looked at email for 2 full weeks which was very nice ! 2010 promises to be as busy and eventful as 2009, if not more ! We are in the midst of two separate beta testing programs right now along with an RFP. I'm actively working on two grant proposals, a major project to provide a more seamless networking experience across

The Lab Experiment

2009-12-10T11:41:00.000-05:00

I've mentioned our new testlab in a couple of tweets, so I thought I'd post some more information about what we're doing. The MDF in our new data center is quite spacious and well equipped. It includes 45 heavy-duty 2-post Panduit racks, overhead infrastructure for power cables, low-voltage copper cables (ie Cat5/6) and fiber, 36 inch raised floor and 1,800 AMPs of DC power. The production

Yeah, we can do that !

2009-11-20T16:29:00.005-05:00

Do you ever read about a new technology and go, "Man, that's so cool ! We should be doing that !". Only to be disappointed once you started digging into it a bit ? That's exactly what happened to me after I read the following whitepaper...Connecting to the Cloud with F5 BIG-IP Solutions and VMware VMotionSome of you may have read my post a while back about how cool Application Delivery

What's up with IPv6 ?

2009-10-21T09:22:00.003-04:00

I'm in Dearborn Michigan this week for the NANOG and ARIN meetings. NANOG = North American Network Operators Group. NANOG is very much like the Internet2 Joint Techs Workshops for the commercial sector. It's where network engineers get together to discuss cool new things they're doing. And, like most of these things, it's a lot about social networking - a chance to meet face-to-face with

Duct work !

2009-09-28T07:10:00.000-04:00

I remember the first time I was in a meeting about the deployment of a computer system and there were plumbers at the meeting ! Now there's more plumbing under the raised floors than anything else. Well, last week I got to work with the guys from the sheet metal shop while they fabricated duct work for our Cisco Nexus 7018 switches. This turns the side-to-side airflow into front-to-back

Video Killed the Radio Star

2009-09-21T11:28:00.002-04:00

Okay, now I'm sure you're thinking, what the heck does that great Buggles hit from 1980 have to do with networking ? Or you may be cursing me because you'll be hearing "oh, uh oh" in that annoying high pitched female voice ALL DAY !!Regardless, after years of anticipation (7 to be exact), on Friday Sept. 11th, the IEEE finally ratified the 802.11n standard. Of course, quite a few enterprises,

Why Load-Balancers are Cool !

2009-04-13T12:28:00.002-04:00

I suppose the term "load-balancer" is out of date and has been replaced by the term "Application Delivery Controller", but regardless of what you call them, they are pretty powerful and can do a lot of cool things ! Sysadmin types have known this for years, but as a network guy who just recently started digging into these, I'm a bit geeked about what you can do with these.The background here is

The IP Timemachine

2009-02-24T21:00:00.001-05:00

I started working when I was 15 years old. It was at the trucking company my dad worked for. I finished all the manual labor they gave me by the middle of the summer, so I got sent into the office to do data entry. That got me started on computers and the rest is history. I bet you're wondering what this has to do with networking? Well, I remember clearly taking my timecard to the time clock

Solving Cross Data Center Redundancy

2009-02-24T16:03:00.002-05:00

First things first. Yes, I realize it's been almost 3 months since my last post...shame on me ! The good news is that we've been quite busy working on lots of new things, so I have plenty of material to keep me writing for a while !I'd like to start with a topic I've been thinking about a lot lately (today in particular) that I think many people are interested in. That topic is how do you

MPLS: The only hammer you'll ever need !

2008-11-20T10:04:00.003-05:00

Once you learn how to use the MPLS hammer, you'll suddenly see a million nails you could whack with your shiny new hammer !We deployed MPLS and MPLS Layer3 VPNs on the IU campus network this past Monday morning. It was VERY anticlimactic ! We cut and pasted some relatively minimal configs into the routers and it all just worked. What is probably the single largest change in how we do

2 down, 3 more to go !

2008-11-09T09:53:00.002-05:00

We had 5 major network maintenances planned in order to complete the core upgrade project and deploy MPLS VPNs. The first 2 are done: The first was disabling the IS-IS routing protocol (OSPF has been deployed along side IS-IS for some time). This was completed last Thursday. The second was replacing our primary border router (a Juniper M10) with a Cisco 6500. This was completed this

"Not quite dead yet !"

2008-11-07T09:01:00.003-05:00

In case you were worried about my untimely demise, no worries, I'm still alive. I've just been so busy doing that I haven't been writing about what I'm doing :) I'll attempt to catch you up and then will try to get a post out at least once a week from now on.Wireless:We deployed about 3,000 Access Points over the summer - roughly an average of 200-250 every week. We also rolled out WPA2

I Love My PCI

2008-08-06T06:26:00.003-04:00

PCI as in PCI-DSS as in Payment Card Industry Data Security StandardsWe met with a QSA on Monday. Don't me what QSA stands for - their the official PCI auditors. The killer statement from the meeting was that every network device we manage which forwards a packet with payment card data in it - even if that data is encrypted - is within scope for PCI compliance. My understanding is that this

iPhone + Streaming Radio

2008-07-29T11:10:00.003-04:00

Okay, this is not really about networking or IU, but I thought it was pretty cool so I figured I'd share it with all of you (which hopefully includes a few more people than I've already told this to in person). *AND* it did involve 1 piece of network equipment owned by IU, so....Like many people, I'm amazed by many of the 3rd party applications for the iPhone. I was very busy preparing for

Internet2 Joint Techs

2008-07-23T09:05:00.003-04:00

I'm at the Internet2 Joint Techs Workshop in Lincoln Nebraska this week. The primary reason I'm attending is actually for 2 events that were "tacked-on" to the main workshop: The MPLS Hands-On Workshop on Sunday and the Netguru meeting today and tomorrow. The MPLS workshop was a 1 day workshop meant to educate campus network engineer about MPLS and it's application on campus networks.

Catching up (again)...

2008-07-17T06:07:00.002-04:00

Well, it's been 3 weeks since my last post, but I assure you we have not been sitting around twiddling our thumbs ! Here's a summary of what's been going on...The wireless and core upgrade projects are moving along smoothly. About 1,000 of the 1,200 APs in Bloomington have been replaced. We're also starting to complete some of the dorms in Bloomington as well - so some of the dorm rooms

Data Center - Take 2

2008-06-27T06:42:00.002-04:00

Shortly after my last post - actually it was the next morning in the shower, which is where I do my best thinking - I was hit by the thought, "doesn't CX4 reach 15 meters instead of 10?". So when I got to work that morning, I looked it up and, sure enough, 10GBASE-CX4 has a 15 meter (49 foot) reach. And that, my friends, makes all the difference !15 meter reach makes it possible to use CX4

Networking the Data Center

2008-06-24T12:56:00.002-04:00

As if we had nothing else to do this year, we're busy planning for our new data center in Bloomington that will come on-line in the spring of 2009. I spent the better part of the afternoon yesterday working through a rough cost analysis of the various options to distribute network connectivity into the server racks, so I thought I'd share some of that with all of you. I'll start with a

Distributing Control

2008-06-18T06:32:00.002-04:00

One thing I've done quite a bit of since taking on the network architect role last summer is meet with LSPs to discuss their networking needs. Just yesterday we met with the Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics, this morning we're meeting with the Computer Science department, and Friday with University College @ IUPUI. What I've learned is that there are many excellent LSPs and that

Where’s Matt ?

2008-06-18T06:27:00.002-04:00

Well, the last two weeks were very hectic on a number of fronts and I didn’t get a chance to post.The Friday before last was the networking “all-hands” meeting. This was a meeting for *everyone* in UITS that is involved in supporting networks. My back-of-the-envelope head-count was up over 70, but with vacations, 24x7 shift schedules and whatnot, we ended up with about 40. I babbled on

Status Update: 05/29

2008-05-29T07:34:00.002-04:00

We're in the middle of our 2 weeks of "downtime" before the full-scale deployment starts. So far everything is running fairly smoothly. We did a fail-over test of a primary WESM controller with 151 APs associated with it and that went very well. It's summer so of course, although we have 200+ of the new APs deployed, the total number of simultaneous users is still quite low. We won't

We're on the down slope...

2008-05-22T06:55:00.003-04:00

...or at least it feels like we are ! If you couldn't guess from my posts, last week was a tough week for us. But the team put in a lot of hard work and preparation and our first full week of wireless upgrades is going very smoothly ! (He says as he raps hardily on a nearby wooden table)We upgraded Geology and Geological Survey on Monday, Psychology and Business Grad on Tuesday, Business

14 Down - Only 4,786 to go !!

2008-05-16T06:53:00.004-04:00

This morning we completed the core upgrade transition and wireless upgrade for essentially 2 buildings - the UITS Comm Services building and WCC. The team put in 3 very long days getting ready, but it was definitely worth the effort as the changes this morning went off without a hitch (well, almost) !!The 2 things we caught this morning were that the WESM's (aka controllers) had redundancy

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

2008-05-15T07:46:00.003-04:00

Unfortunately yesterday dealt us mostly the latter two !! After 12 years in the networking field, I've found some days everything seems to just go your way and some days...well...some days everything that can go wrong does and you wish you'd just stayed in bed !For example, what's the chance of a compact flash card - one that worked perfectly fine all day long the day before - being corrupted

Those 3 Magic Words

2008-05-09T11:41:00.002-04:00

OUT FOR DELIVERY I don't know about you, but when I'm waiting for that next cool gadget to arrive in the mail, those 3 words always trigger a little burst of excitement...sort of like Christmas morning when I was 6 years old :) But today it's 255 new little gadgets !

The APs are coming, the APs are coming !!

2008-05-08T09:39:00.002-04:00

That's right, we just received confirmation that our first 255 Access Points arrived at Fedex in Columbus Indiana just a couple of hours ago. We'll take a few of these APs to install in all the UITS buildings later next week and another 190 of them to install in 8 buildings in Bloomington starting on May 19th. We also received 14 WESM modules (aka controllers) earlier in the week, so we

Oops, forgot to mention the core upgrade

2008-05-06T06:29:00.003-04:00

The core upgrade project is moving along smoothly as well. We received the last few bits of the equipment yesterday - a shipment of XENPACK modules - so we have everything we need to move full steam ahead. Thanks to some hard work over the weekend, all of the new 24-port and 48-port gigabit ethernet modules are installed in the core switches in Bloomington. This Thursday and Friday

Checking in

2008-05-06T06:12:00.002-04:00

I know....it's been a whole week since my last post...I'm a slacker ! Jason and I attended a meeting of the CIC schools in Chicago last week to talk about wireless. For those of you who don't know, the CIC is *roughly* the BigTen Conference schools. It was great to hear what other schools are doing and to share information and ideas. One thing was definitely clear from the meeting -

That Other Big Project !

2008-04-28T07:39:00.007-04:00

I've alluded to our other big summer project a couple of times, but now I'm finally going to give you the low-down on it !When I returned from vacation in early January, I fully anticipated that the core of our network would remain fairly static until the summer of 2009. This is when, according to the 10-year network plan we had been developing (a topic for another post), we would do a "

The Cast of Characters

2008-04-28T07:18:00.003-04:00

I thought I should introduce some of the people working on the project so, when I say Jason did this or Dwight did that, you'll know who I'm talking about ! There's a core engineer group that is working through the myriad of engineering issues involved in getting the project from the RFP stage to the full-scale deployment phase. This is by no means a complete list of people working on the

Equipment is rolling in...

2008-04-22T10:00:00.002-04:00

It's always an exciting part of a project when those emails titled "packing at the dock" start rolling into my inbox :) Last Friday a small box with about 80 LX SFPs arrived. These are for the upgrade of the core switches we're working on (I promise I'll put up a post describing what we're doing there soon). Yesterday I got a "package at the dock" email that said there were 16 boxes

Update from the road

2008-04-21T13:53:00.002-04:00

I know you're all dying to hear what's been going on...and a LOT has happened since my last post on Thursday morning. I'm at the Internet2 Member's Meeting in Arlington, VA this week and will try to make use of what free time I have to check up again.We met with the Messaging team last week to discuss the impact of the wireless project on DHCP and ADS. The biggest issue perhaps is the need

But what about NAT ?

2008-04-17T13:17:00.001-04:00

Okay, I know all the smart kids out there are screaming, "But why aren't you using NAT?" The short answer is *time* - or the lack thereof. The HP WESMs (Wireless Edge Services Modules) do have NAT support built-in. We could also use an external firewall placed in front of the WESMs to perform NAT - or rather PAT since we really want all the wireless users to shared a small pool of

Where have all the IPs gone....

2008-04-17T06:55:00.001-04:00

...to all the wireless users, of course ! Several weeks ago I went looking for IP subnets to assign to our new wireless SSIDs. What I discovered is that we do NOT have the vast amounts of unused IP space we once thought.But first things first... the first step was to move our IP allocation documentation from spreadsheets and flat files into a database. Fortunately, we already developed

Thick and Thin

2008-04-16T13:28:00.002-04:00

Back in the good old days, when you had to carry around a PCMCIA card in order use Wifi, and even before the term "Wifi" was coined, Wireless Access Points (WAPs or just APs) provided all the functionality of 802.11 wireless in a single device. Each AP minded it's own business and did it's own thing - communicating with clients over radio frequencies, encrypting and de-encrypting packets if

What's this all about ?

2008-04-16T13:15:00.002-04:00

Well, we really have a few main goals associated with upgrading the wireless network.1) Replace the old wireless hardware that is now 6+ years old with a "modern" system that is much more capable. If you stay tuned, I'll cover what a lot of those new capabilities are...2) Expand coverage area especially in the Bloomington Halls of Residence, but also in other areas of the IUB and IUPUI campuses

Let the fun begin !

2008-04-16T09:48:00.003-04:00

After MANY months of working on the RFP for IU's next-generation wireless network, we FINALLY made an award this past Monday !! Of course that means now the REAL work starts !Starting very soon now (soon = about 3-4 weeks from today) we will start deploying a new, improved and much larger wireless network using HP ProCurve's ZL wireless system. I know, I know - you probably have all