Architect & DE Discussions

As for the last 11 years Cisco sponsored the FOSDEM 2020 conference in Brussels. This is one of the largest, if not the largest, open source conference in the world with this year 872 events spread over 2 days. From a network point of view the important part is that the main SSID at the conference i…

Cisco has gone all-in on model-driven management across all major operating systems. Modern versions of IOS-XE, IOS-XR, and NX-OS all support YANG-powered NETCONF with IOS-XE and NX-OS also supporting RESTCONF and IOS-XR supporting gNMI. Moreover, in addition to pushing configuration changes and pul…

FOSDEM 2017 was again a great success. We did a bit less analysis compared to 2016, but the numbers we got indicate the number of visitors grew significantly compared to last year: the total number of unique MAC addresses went from 9711 to a stunning 11918, an increase of 22.7%.…

This blog describes some of the opensource tools around YANG. While there exist some tools around the YANG language validation, I want to cover the bigger landscape of data modeling-driven management tools. Data modeling-driven management is built on the idea of applying modeling languages to formal…

Now in part 4 we can combine the the IP to MAC address tables together with the user agents, captured by NBAR2 and  exported using netflow. The result of all this logging is a list of MAC addresses, the IPs a particular MAC address was using at a certain time, and the user agents we saw for this IP…

In the last part we used NBAR2 to classify traffic. To do this the router need to investigate every traffic flow which it sees. Of course, it would be interesting to get this information out of the router and into some logs. This is the ‘how we did this’ post and it is a bit technical. I…

Software automation and data analytics are changing the face of computer networks. They are radically transforming how networks are built and operated. We are rapidly moving away from a world where a network operator manages tenths of network devices.  Instead, one individual can deploy and manage h…

Continuing the analysis of the data collected during Fosdem 2016. This year, we replaced the router with a more powerful model: an ASR 1006 with RP2 and SIP20 modules. This allowed us to enable the NBAR 2 feature to analyse the traffic crossing the router. NBAR 2 is a traffic analysis engine which a…

As is our tradition by now a team of volunteers helped out with the network setup and operation of Free and Open-source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM). The network was very similar to the one used over the last two years and we wanted to report on the evolution of the traffic we meas…