Managing Network End of Life
Managing the lifecycle of your network equipment is a vital part of maintaining the security of your IT environment. Being able to verify that the equipment which underpins your IT is supportable, maintainable and replaceable should it fail is fundamental. But so few organisations really…
Verifying 802.1X configuration
Why 802.1X? There was a time when networks were secure islands, used to connect PCs to services they consumed and each other. The network was protected from the outside world by a perimeter firewall: there was only one way in and out. With the explosion…
Stopping Firewall Bypass Attempts
A network user – a senior manager in the business, in the process of writing a heavy report – knocks on the door of the security team’s office. He has an urgent request, to access a server that sits behind a firewall. He speaks to…
Troubleshooting Multicast Traffic Flows
Just what is multicast? How do you set up your network to handle multicast? And how do you troubleshoot it if it fails? Let’s start from the beginning. Unicast Forwarding Typical IP packet forwarding is considered “unicast” – a communication is broken up into IP…
Aligning Spanning Tree and FHRP in the campus LAN
The “typical” site LAN In most networks, a site LAN consists of a number of interconnected Ethernet switches in a regular partial mesh pattern. The topology typically enables high availability of the networked applications. We create redundant links which are not typically used but are…
OSPF Path Cost Consistency
What does OSPF do for me? Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is a standards-based routing protocol for IPv4. It is used to advertise paths to a network prefix between routers. As a router receives advertisements for prefixes, so it creates a representation of the network…
Multicast routing in IP Fabric 3.5
Multicast routing and related implementations can be a real pain. If you want to make a network engineer nervous (and it doesn’t matter whether managing enterprise or service provider networks), just whisper few evil words “PIM”, “distribution tree”, “IGMP”. And if it’s not enough and…
IP Fabric 3.3: Visual Intent Verification
IP Fabric version 3.3. adds capability to visually represent intent-based network verifications among other improvements.
IP Fabric 3.2: Visualization of Network Changes
For those who anticipated new release of the IP Fabric platform, the time is finally here. The IP Fabric version 3.2.0 is out. It has been a great journey so far and the platform stabilizes its position on the market of various network tools as a strong partner to various companies across industries.
Network Discovery Part 3 – it’s all about the documentation
Network documentation is a very complex and thorough topic – there are many guidelines, theories and even books that can help us with the process of creating and maintaining proper documents describing the network. The concept and execution may vary, but the purpose of the documentation should be unique – to represent the current state and settings of the network and all of the respective components.