The IETF works on many things beyond IP and routing—the Media Operations (MOPS) working group is gathering input on media-related operational issues and practices, including “proposed technologies related to the deployment, engineering, and operation of media streaming and manipulation protocols and procedures in the global Internet (inter-domain) and within-domain networking.” Leslie Daigle and Eric Vyncke, the co-chairs of the MOPS working group, join Alvaro Retana and Russ White to discuss the work they are doing.
There was a time when Software Defined Networking was going to take over the entire networking world—just like ATM, FDDI, and … so many others before. Whatever happened to SDN, anyway? What is its enduring legacy in the world of network engineering? Terry Slattery, Tom Ammon, and Russ White gather at the hedge to have a conversation about whatever happened to SDN?
MultiPath TCP (MPTCP) is an effort towards enabling the simultaneous use of several IP-addresses/interfaces by a modification of TCP that presents a regular TCP interface to applications, while in fact spreading data across several subflows. Benefits of this include better resource utilization, better throughput and smoother reaction to failures.
According to the recent SONAR report, 52% of respondents reported they are using Software Defined Networking (SDN) tools to automate their networks, while 57% reported they are using network management tools. The report notes “52% may be slightly exaggerated, depending on how one defines SDN…” Which leads naturally to the question—what the difference between SDN and DevOps is, and how does AI figure into both or either of these. SDN, DevOps, and AI describe separate and overlapping movements in the design, deployment, and management of networks. While they are easy to confuse, they have three different origins and meanings.
Software Defined Networking grew out of research efforts to build and deploy experimental control planes, either distributed or centralized. SDN, however, quickly became associated with replacing some or all the functions of a distributed control plane with a centralized controller, particularly in order to centralize policy related to the control plane such as traffic engineering. SDN solutions always work through a programmatic interface designed to primarily supply forwarding information to network devices.
In this episode of the Hedge, Geoff Huston joins Tom Ammon and I to finish our discussion on the ideas behind DNS over HTTPS (DoH), and to consider the implications of its widespread adoption. Is it time to bow to our new overlords?
In this episode of the Hedge, Geoff Huston joins Tom Ammon and I to discuss the ideas behind DNS over HTTPS (DoH), and to consider the implications of its widespread adoption. Is it time to bow to our new overlords?
The Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is one of the foundational technologies of packet switched networks. TCP not only provides windowed flow control, it also manages the retransmission of data when errors are detected, and sockets for addressing individual applications on a host. Doug Comer was involved in the early development of TCP/IP.
We all use the OSI model to describe the way networks work. I have, in fact, included it in just about every presentation, and every book I have written, someplace in the fundamentals of networking. But if you have every looked at the OSI model and had to scratch your head trying to figure out how it really fits with the networks we operate today, or what the OSI model is telling you in terms of troubleshooting, design, or operation—you are not alone. Lots of people have scratched their heads about the OSI model, trying to understand how it fits with modern networking. There is a reason this is so difficult to figure out.
The OSI Model does not accurately describe networks.
What set me off in this particular direction this week is an article over at Errata Security:
When a recursive resolver receives a query from a host, it will first consult any local cache to discover if it has the information required to resolve the query. If it does not, it will begin with the rightmost section of the domain name, the Top Level Domain (TLD), moving left through each section of the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN), in order to find an IP address to return to the host, as shown in the diagram below.
This is pretty simple at its most basic level, of course—virtually every network engineer in the world understands this process (and if you don’t, you should enroll in my How the Internet Really Works webinar the next time it is offered!). The question almost no-one ever asks, however, is: what, precisely, is the recursive server sending to the root, TLD, and authoritative servers?
YANG is a data modeling language used to model configuration data, state data, Remote Procedure Calls, and notifications for network management protocols, described in RFC7950. The origins of YANG are rooted in work Phil Shafer did in building an interface system for JUNOS. Phil joins us on this episode of the History of Networking to discuss the history of YANG.