Howdy!

Looking for some tips on staying sane during a 3 month project with early hours mixed with normal hours I’m about to start.

I am about to kick off a 3 month project where I will be replacing switches at all of our locations. Due to business requirements the maintenance windows will be starting around 3AM and will go till 6AM. This will be 2-3 days a week, sometimes 4 days a week, so I typically will be starting the week off with normal hours on Monday, and then come Tuesday/Wednesday I need to flip my schedule to accommodate the early start, and then go back to a “normal” schedule Thursday/Friday.

Is there really anything I can do to make this adjustment a little easier on my body/mental or do I just need to suck it up for the few months and then take time off at the end to recover lol? I’m already starting to absolutely dread this and it hasn’t even started yet. I’m no stranger to working weird hours but this is the first time where it will be going on weekly for around 3 months and I’m trying to mentally prepare for the fucked up sleep I’m about to endure.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I’m reviewing a network diagram for a hotel infrastructure and I’m a bit confused about the role of the Collect Switch 1 & 2 (both Sw-24). My questions:

1. What is the exact role of the Collect Switches in this design?
2. Why do we need them? What benefits do they provide?
3. Why not connect the Router Load Balancing directly to Firewall #1 and #2? Would that break something (redundancy, scalability, security, management…)?

I’ve attached the diagram for reference.

Thanks in advance for any insights!

https://i.postimg.cc/QdLdpnyN/Topo-nw.jpg

i work in a small company but things have been great recently so we decided to open a small warehouse in another country, we have figured out everything but this is our first oversea branch and we are really trying to make it as smooth as possible. the setup is great so far, offices and staff etc and the regulation side is good we are good to go but again the issue of internet connectivity. I was discussing with our IT team and they said we can internet from a local ISP at the new warehouse and manage the connection separately from our existing locations, to me this seems like the most easy and quick option to get us running but my manager insists on centralizing connectivity for easy monitoring, security and troubleshooting etc, well i see sense but again i am not convinced that we need that whole complex setup when we have few international locations, actually one so far. i am asking if we can really face any issues if we use local ISPs in our new location, do we really need global connectivity for now?

After a switch firmware upgrade, users started having intermittent wireless connectivity issues, with brief disconnects and reconnects while connected to the corporate Wi-Fi network. Multiple access points are repeatedly losing and re-establishing their CAPWAP connection to the wireless controller. While the affected APs remain powered on and do not reboot, their CAPWAP association uptime continuously resets, causing APs to temporarily enter FlexConnect standalone mode before rejoining the controller. Controller logs show repeated DTLS tunnel disconnects, while AP logs indicate CAPWAP restarts due to missed data keepalives ("data keepalive not received").

I ruled out AP reboots, PoE issues, interface errors, STP. Physical switch ports are operating normally with no CRC, discards, or link errors. Opened Cisco TAC case but they're taking long so looking to the masses for help. I'm hoping someone experienced something similar that can throw in their two cents.

Anyone here doing Fortigate installations? I have been running into an oddity where if I have a location of lets say 10 switches that you would assume fits nicely in /28 pool, at around switch 8 or 9 once new switches go online previous switches start appearing as offline, and seemingly needing to be assigned a new IP from the pool.

Similiar issues happen when you do actually run out of IP addresses in the pool, which is why im thinking the issue is related to the IP pool. Anyone else noticed the same issue? (afaik it doesnt affect functionality since last migration I had the main switch appear as offline while all the switches connected to it remained online, and looking from CLI even the main one appeared online).

The issue I am running into is that the full configuration is not being saved once the pull is complete. I have checked the most recent pull and it is grabbing the whole config, but when I open the config in the webUI I am only getting about 80 - 90 lines in the file. I'm currently trying to backup configs for Extreme 4850GTS switches (formerly Avaya). Using model Boss. Wondering if anyone has encountered this issue with the same switches are other models? If so, were you able to find a resolution?

Thank you.

I came across an interesting discussion on LowEndTalk about pricing differences on the IPXO marketplace.

Someone managing IPv4 space for multiple owners compared prices for the same subnets across different accounts and noticed some unexpected differences.

Here's what was reported:

• A /24 subnet listed by its owner at $60/month normally appeared at $69/month to buyers, including a $9 platform fee.
• The same subnet reportedly showed $87/month when viewed from an account that had previously rented IPs through IPXO.
• The difference matches the formula: $60 × 1.30 + $9 = $87.
• Another /24 was listed at $59/month for some accounts and $74/month for others, showing a similar pattern.

According to the original report, accounts with previous rental activity appeared to see higher prices than accounts without rental history.

The report also raises questions about whether address owners are aware of these pricing differences and how any additional charges are handled.

Original discussion with screenshots:

https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/222031/ipxo-loyalty-program-rent-once-see-a-30-markup-even-on-your-own-subnet

I'm curious whether anyone else has observed similar pricing differences on IPXO.

Could this be related to a specific pricing policy, account settings, or something else?

Would be interested in hearing from other users or IPXO representatives who can clarify how this works.

Olá colegas. Atualmente trabalho no NOC de um provedor local da minha região. Recentemente, me cadastrei em uma pós-graduação da instituição Hackone e me deparei com a disciplina de infraestrutura e arquitetura de redes e sobre o método PPDIOO da cisco. Eu sou muito problemático em não saber fazer as coisas da maneira correta então sempre pesquiso bit a bit de tudo, porém o PPDIOO não me parece ter muita documentação atual na internet e parece que ele está sendo descontinuado. Com isso, queria me certificar se alguém com experiÊncia no mercado em empresas de NOC ou de TI costuma usar essa metodologia para desenvolver infraestruturas de redes para atender demandas de empresas dos mais diversos tamanhos.

Entre outras dúvidas:

Além do PPDIOO há outro framework para desenvolver redes?
Quais as metodologias são empregadas em cada etapa? (sendo o PPDIOO ou não)
Como posso chegar o mais perto possível de entender como se defini os requisitos de um negócio e transormá-los em redes?

Além de ser problemático com o "bit a bit" também sou problemático com a prática, mesmo se eu souber exatamente toda a teoria e não ter a prática eu não considero que sei fazer "aquilo". Como posso obter prática em desenvolver arquiteturas de redes e implementá-las? Mas antes de tudo desenvolver uma arquitetura do zero de maneira racional e sistemática é o meu foco.

If you were designing a service provider network and had to use segment routing, what data plane would you use and why? (SR-MPLS or SRv6)

Currently my company uses solarwinds for monitoring firewall and switches. I am using snmp traps for alerting and I have netflow setup. I am not thrilled with solarwinds since the traps are tied to a node so its harder to reset the snmp traps as well as well as their support is extremely hit or miss. I also do not like the fact that NCM does not do API for individual firewalls and switches unless I have an orchestrator or something cloud based like meraki. Who do you guys use for network monitoring?

Just trying to understand how this makes sense. We have a defective fan on a Aruba 7240 Controller. As part of the RMA, we received a brand new controller, instead of just the replacement fan. We are supposed to return the defective fan with the brand new controller. Why wouldn't they just send the replacement fan? Just doesn't make sense to me.

I’m senior level with advanced certs and 15 yeo. I’m looking at AI capability exploding and just an overall simplification of networking in general via abstraction e.g SDWan, ACI etc.

Yes, orgs will always need someone who knows what’s going on under the hood but they aren’t going to need dozens of people. And yes someone will need to be physically present but why pay someone 100k for that?

I realize this isn’t just a networking issue but a societal order issue as this same thing will happen to all other fields but at end of day nobody is coming to save us.

I’ve got 20+ years left in the game so I ask you what is our strategy to continue to earn income for next two decades? Should we just accept reality and pivot into AI now and forget networking? Worth pursuing MS in AI or perhaps some relevant certs?

Edit: Yall 50+ graybeards are lucky bastards to be able to peace out right at this shit takes over and after a historic market run. I’m jealous.

Achei o portal Aruba Central Greenlak muito básico. Existe alguma API para coletar dados relacionados à utilização de canais, tentativas de reconexão, etc., no Aruba Central? Também não consegui encontrar um campo para capturas PCAP.

Existe alguma API?

Obrigado

What Product are most people using, the company I work for uses Palo Alto’s Ion product and it has been nothing short of trash, from bugs, to the sase connection being more sketchy than dollar store pills. It seems like the product is simply not mature, is that the norm or did we just get sold an awful product? We did a POC with other products (Fortinet & Cisco) and the decision was made to go with Ion. What’s the consensus on SD-WAN?

I'm running ntopng Enterprise L with nProbe on Ubuntu. My Palo Alto PA-460 exports NetFlow v9 to nProbe, which forwards flows to ntopng over ZMQ.

The setup is working: ntopng identifies applications such as Microsoft 365, Teams, Cloudflare, Facebook, and Google.

My requirement is to see current throughput per application (Mbps) and each application's percentage of a 1 Gbps Internet circuit, ideally with one-minute historical timeseries. The view could also be in the past as well. Sometimes we will be asked "how much traffic did Teams suck up yesterday"? And they normally want to know in terms of overall percentage of the link.

I've enabled:

• Flow Exporters L7 Application: Per Application
• Flow Exporters/nProbes Timeseries Resolution: 1 minute
• Flow Exporters Interface Usage: enabled

The Live Flows page shows Actual Thpt per flow, and Aggregation shows application-level traffic totals, but I haven't found a view that shows aggregate current throughput per application and its percentage of circuit capacity.

Is this supported directly in ntopng 7.1 when the input is NetFlow via nProbe/ZMQ? If so, which page or configuration is required? If not, what is the recommended way to obtain this report?

The ask is coming from upper management. It seems like a simple ask, but I have not been able to get ntopng to produce the visual.

I operate a fleet of these diminutive serial console servers made by Opengear. Great devices, does exactly what it is supposed to do and very little else.

Also very, very resilient devices. If LEDs fire up, they can normally be recovered from a "it is dead, Jim"-state.

They are getting old, though. I don't trust Opengear to continue the product line. And very recently, software updates for these devices was locked behind their support portal. "To protect our customers" or something equally inane.

Dimwits.

I'd like to know what alternatives there are, and I struggle to find something comparatively small and simple as the ACM7000. (And various rebranded variants,)

Requirements: - 4-8 RJ45 serial ports - LTE connectivity - Dual Ethernet ports - CLI managment as a supported, practical option (serial console, ssh) - A vendor honoring the GPL

Suggestions, anyone?

Looking for recommendations for a wireless point to point bridge. Currently using ignitenet metrolinq 2.5 60-35. It's about 8 years old and I think one of the radios are going bad. I have spares but would rather replace with something new. This is for a business, and it is critical that I replace with something reliable. I'm familiar with ubiquiti, cambium, and mimosa, but looking for suggestions on what has worked for anyone else. The distance is a little over a mile. Thanks!

Hey folks,
I am labing l2vpn EVPN with cisco modeling labs,

I am running a mix of XR and IOS-XE. I have everything set up for MP-BGP EVPN but I can't get my CE's to ping each other. Is this just a limitation of CML?

BGP's l2vpn evpn are up and healthy, Bridge-domain has the correct config, interfaces are encapulating the right vlan... I am stumped

Hi
we are a Hyper V site, running Azure Local. ive got 2 clusters and have built 2 WLC VMs, following the documentation from Cisco about 3 nics, and labelling them trunking etc etc. upon a fresh build of the WLCs we seem to be happy. However when VMs migrate from one host to another within the cluster (as they will do for either performance reasons, or if you are taking a host down to perform maintenance on it), the HA seems to break. and the only way weve been able to get back is to tear down the WLCs and build them again.

currently, ive got one VM that only has 2 nics, its lost its HA one, and my other VM has somehow managed to change the naming of the nics that it has, so whilst they are still eth1, eth2 and eth3 at the hyper-visor level, they are 4 5 and 6.

does anyone have any ideas as to what might be happening. ive got a case logged with TAC, but we seem to be going round in circles a bit at the moment, and looking like i may need to build the WLCs again from scratch..... so figured id throw out to a wider audience.

I've recently been informed that my networking team is taking over responsibility of the security camera and building automation networks that were previously operated by our facilities team. Upper management decided that IT needed to take ownership of the infrastructure after months of battling what facilities reported to be "unsolvable" issues that kept crippling their system.

As one would expect, everything is in a terrible state. I'm not sure if there are 2 of the same make/model of switch in the environment. Growth was never planned, and was always organic. Facilities didn't understand how fiber worked and all of the cabling is exclusively some flavor of unshielded copper, even to external structures (light poles, signs, etc.). We operate in the former lightning capital of the world, so when we inevitably take a nearby strike, it would take out almost an entire facility's worth of equipment (network and industrial devices) at a time. The facilities team would then just buy whatever they could get their hands on in attempt to slap the network back together as fast as possible.

We already have a decent plan in place to upgrade the switches to a common platform with management, replace all of the copper uplinks with fiber, and home-run (de-daisy-chain) as many of the connections as possible, but my team isn't otherwise accustomed to operating equipment in industrial environments or outdoors.

I am trying to get up to speed as to which technologies would work best to protect these environments, and my primary concern is to limit/contain the amount of damage that occurs. The fiber and new switches have consumed most of my budget this fiscal year, so I'm looking to knock out the low hanging fruit as fast as I can, then propose a future budget item for the remaining improvements.

Do you find shielded cable to be effective for switch to device runs?

Do you find Ethernet surge to be effective? Do you recommend install them on one side of the connection or both? Do you have a preferred brand?

Any other tips/tricks/design considerations would be greatly appreciated.

I have a single Aruba CX8100 switch and have configured it via GUI or CLI as necessary. I rarely ever touch it these days, it just works. Is having an Aruba Central license worth it? Seems a waste for a single switch. I already monitor it with Auvik.

Hey everyone. Just wanting to get thoughts on a setup I was considering for my Nexus pairs at 2 DC's. They are in a back to back vPC.

I've got 2 datacenters with multiple outlying buildings connecting to one or the other. Each of these DC's have 2 ISP's, firewalls in H/A, and a pair of Nexus switches. The ISP's come into an edge switch stack that's vPC'd back to the Nexus pair in their respective DC and carries the ISP vlan back to the firewall.

The only scenario where this becomes an issue is when I need to upgrade the edge stack. Since that stack has both primary and secondary ISP connections, that DC completely loses internet along with any buildings that are uplinked to that DC.

To deal with this I was thinking I'd add an SLA to the Nexus at each DC and track something public like 8.8.8.8 . Then I could use that to pull the static default and send traffic the other DC Nexus pair.

Thoughts? Is this the appropriate way to do this?

I considered just splitting the edge stack apart but there are a few other things attached to it that are lagged across the stack. Also, in the scenario I lose both ISP's at one DC I'd like to be able to easily send traffic to the other DC.

It's Monday, you've not yet had coffee and the week ahead is gonna suck. Let's open the floor for a weekly Stupid Questions Thread, so we can all ask those questions we're too embarrassed to ask!

Post your question - stupid or otherwise - here to get an answer. Anyone can post a question and the community as a whole is invited and encouraged to provide an answer. Serious answers are not expected.

Note: This post is created at 01:00 UTC. It may not be Monday where you are in the world, no need to comment on it.