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10 posts are filed under: October 07

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October 07 Archives - Geek Speak Blog
31 Oct 2007
Traffic Generation
by: Josh Stephens  |  Filed Under: Planning & Design, Traffic and Performance
As you know, we've been doing some testing lately of some WAN accelerators from different hardware vendors. This has caused me to to need to generate traffic of varying types and weight and has got me to thinking about traffic generators in general. The SolarWinds Toolset has a great tool for generating UDP or TCP echo and discard traffic (WAN Killer) but in this case I needed to generate some more specific types of traffic and to generate some specific TCP transaction types. So, we're going to write some utilities for generating test traffic here in-house and I'm also...
25 Oct 2007
Managing Riverbed Steelhead Devices
by: Josh Stephens  |  Filed Under: WAN, Traffic and Performance
As I mentioned, we are doing some testing this week in the lab on WAN acceleration and optimization devices and most recently we've been working with some Riverbed devices. I must say, I'm impressed with the manageability of these devices. Out of the box. Orion was able to collect stats on CPU, memory, swap, buffer allocation, interface traffic, and interface errors. Additionally, I'm getting NetFlow information directly from this device and it seems to be working swimmingly. It's not often that I see a device that is as easy to manage as these, so I'm impressed...
24 Oct 2007
ICMP Packet Payload
by: Josh Stephens  |  Filed Under: WAN, Traffic and Performance
An interesting thing happened to us this week that I thought I'd share here. As a general troubleshooting step when working with Orion customers, I commonly remove the data from within the payload portion of ICMP packets that Orion sends. I've seen a lot of situations over the years where this helped. For instance, I've seen firewalls that wouldn't pass packets with content in the payload, I've seen ethernet switches that would drop ICMP packets with an odd byte count (meaning 17 bytes vs. 16), and I've seen situations where when sending a high load of ICMP...
22 Oct 2007
WAN Performance, Optimization, and Acceleration
by: Josh Stephens  |  Filed Under: Planning & Design, WAN
This week we're testing some WAN acceleration gear in the lab and since its on my mind now and has been for a few weeks I thought I'd spend some time talking about WAN performance, optimization, and acceleration. Management of WAN connections can be a real bugger. Many of us "cut our teeth" as network engineers troubleshooting WAN circuit problems, arguing with our service providers about link states, and trying to figure out DLCI problems on frame-relay PVCs. Seems like nowadays the problems we see on WAN circuits are different. It's not so much that the links...
16 Oct 2007
Securing SNMP
by: Josh Stephens  |  Filed Under: Planning & Design, Security
I get asked a lot about the security implications of enabling SNMP. With most technology, there is a security cost in enabling any non-security related feature. This is true just about anytime you enable a service on a piece of hardware that allows people to access it from the network. So sure, the network would be more secure if we disabled all of the management protocols, web interfaces, and root passwords on our network devices. Problem is, we need to be able to manage and monitor these devices... There are many ways to help secure SNMP on your network. I won't go into a lot...





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