This week two different folks have asked me about when and where I would split up a flooding domain (IS-IS) or area (OSPF); I figured a question asked twice in one week is worth a blog post, so here we are… Before I start on the technical reasons, I’m going to say something that might…
If you look across a wide array of networking problems, you will see what is an apparently wide array of dissimilar and unrelated problems engineers deal with on a daily basis. For instance— Should I split this flooding domain into multiple parts? If so, where should I divide it? Which routing protocol should I use…
Nerd Knobs (or as we used to call them in TAC, knerd knobs) are the bane of the support engineer’s life. Well, that and crashes. And customer who call in with a decoded stack trace. Or don’t know where to put the floppy disc that came with the router into the router. But, anyway… What…
Furthering the thoughts I’ve put into the forthcoming book on network complexity… One of the hardest things for designers to wrap their heads around is the concept of unintended consequences. One of the definitional points of complexity in any design is the problem of “push button on right side, weird thing happens over on the…
“Judge me by my size, do you?” I’ve had several discussions with people over the years about the concept of scale in the world of network engineering. Most often, when network engineers think of a “large scale network,” they used to mention large service providers. Now they tend to think of some large cloud provider.…
Much of our life, as engineers, is about building, manipulating, and using abstractions. For instance, C is nothing but an abstraction on top of the actual register set provided by a particular processor. HTML is nothing but an abstraction for formatting and display (a markup language), implemented in — well, C. There is a lot…
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