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…
Discover WLAN Access points and connected users with IP Fabric
Wireless LAN (Local Area Network) or WLAN access points are inevitably a stable part of enterprise networks. The number of connected devices has been growing exponentially during the past years. And the forecast says that more than 20 billion devices will be connected in 2021….
5 Ways To Sell Your Network Automation Project
Let’s face it, as network engineers, we get excited about connectivity. We care about the cool technologies we get to play with to connect users to apps, “things” to data stores. However, fundamentally “The Business” doesn’t care about switches and routers, circuits and routing protocols….
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…
Verify end-to-end QoS
Verifying Quality of Service is a complex task when delivering applications across a large network. It involves a detailed understanding of the behaviour of many different devices, often from different vendors. This post shows how IP Fabric can help with this onerous task. Quality of…
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…
Verifying 802.1x in enterprise networks
Companies are spending big money on defensive measures against the outside attackers — investing into Next-Generation Firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems and Proxies. The inner network, however, was considered safe place, where nothing bad can happen. This understanding has thankfully changed in recent years, especially with rise of…
Routing Protocol Visualization
Routing, one of the most important features in network world. It’s been at least a two decades since most of ISPs rely on Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) in their core, supported by Interior Gateway Protocols (IGP). Local area networks are running and routing with use…
Power over Ethernet endpoints in the IP Fabric platform
Many devices such as IP phones, wireless access points, IP cameras or even small switches may be powered via the data Ethernet cable (by one of the PoE standards). This approach saves a lot of issues with separate electric power infrastructure and eases device manageability…
Spanning Tree analytics with the IP Fabric platform v2.0
The IP Fabric platform is a network engineer’s best friend when performing deep network audits. For example, to verify root placement for overlapping VLANs in a LAN, I would normally need to look through the STP roots, and painstakingly trace L2 links, reconstructing the topology…