Category: News

Interesting Network Infrastructure Developments

I was recently asked for a few bullet points on some recent “interesting network infrastructure developments”. In the five minutes I had, I offered the following:

  • TRILL – Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links – a new layer 2 routing protocol which promises to replace STP. What’s really interesting about TRILL is that it does not need to be loop free; there are no blocking ports; and frames can take the shortest path. See http://www.ipjforum.org/?p=582 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRILL_(computing). 
  • Open Networking Foundation – https://www.opennetworking.org/ – “The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is a non-profit consortium dedicated to the transformation of networking through the development and standardization of a unique architecture called Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which brings direct software programmability to networks worldwide. The mission of the Foundation is to commercialize and promote SDN and the underlying technologies as a disruptive approach to networking that will change how virtually every company with a network operates.” – members include Facebook, Google and Microsoft.
  • OpenFlow – http://www.openflow.org/ – “OpenFlow enables networks to evolve, by giving a remote controller the power to modify the behavior of network devices, through a well-defined “forwarding instruction set”. The growing OpenFlow ecosystem now includes routers, switches, virtual switches, and access points from a range of vendors.” – adopted by Googleand others. 
  • OpenCompute – slightly off networking but relevant – http://opencompute.org/ – “A small team of Facebook engineers spent the past two years tackling a big challenge: how to scale our computing infrastructure in the most efficient and economical way possible. … Everyone has full access to these specifications. We want you to tell us where we didn’t get it right and suggest how we could improve. And opening the technology means the community will make advances that we wouldn’t have discovered if we had kept it secret.”

Engineers Ireland – IPv6 Presentation

This evening I will be presenting the following to Engineers Ireland on behalf of INEX.

 

ViMbAdmin 2.1 Released – POP3/IMAP Access Restrictions

We’ve just pushed a new release of ViMbAdmin – version 2.1. The main highlights are:

  • it’s now possible to restrict access to a mailbox via either IMAP, POP3 or both. See this page on the wiki for more information.
  • it’s our first release requiring a database migration. But it’s really really easy – see this page for those instructions.

As always, a live demo is available at: http://www.opensolutions.ie/vimbadmin/.

TallyStick, ViMbAdmin and a CSS/JS Minify Tool

It’s been a busy few weeks:

  • We launched TallyStick – a time tracking and billing tool – two weeks ago and have pushed some bug fixes and updates. So far so good!
  • IXP Manager, an open source web application to assist in the management of Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) that we built over at INEX, got a complete UI refresh thanks to Twitter’s Bootstrap;
  • Similarly, our open source email domain / mailbox / alias management tool called ViMbAdmin got a major version bump, lots of new features and a UI refresh also;
  • We also just open sourced (BSD) our (admittedly small) Minify tool which makes minifying, bundling and versioning the manner JS and CSS files that make up websites these days a breeze. Check it out on GitHub: https://github.com/opensolutions/Minify.

Look What We Just Made: TallyStick

[TallyStick Logo]
Are you like I once was with scribbles in your diary to track what you were doing for whom and for how long on any given day? When you manage to remember to scribble that is.

I was once a member of your club. And I had enough. So we built TallyStick. Necessity, as the saying goes, is the mother of invention.

At Open Solutions, we manage networks, build Internet infrastructure, consult and develop web applications for many customers. Tracking the time our engineers spent on different projects – especially those on the front line hopping from customer to customer – was becoming an issue.

We believe in web applications that are simple, beautiful and functional. And after an exhaustive search, we couldn’t find one to fit our needs… so we built it. And who better to build a time tracking application for IT and other consulting professionals than those same professionals!

TallyStick allows you to focus on what you love to do while it takes care of tracking and accumulating the time you spend on projects. We believe it’s simple, efficient and quick. And we hope you agree.

As of today, TallyStick is live and open for business. Please sign up, take advantage of the one month’s free trial (with no credit card details required) and tell us what you think.

Also, all users signing up during the beta period will receive a lifetime discount of 10% on that account!

2011-12-20 – Today’s Links

  • Jenkins is an award-winning application that monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron. Among those things, current Jenkins focuses on the following two jobs: (1) building/testing software projects continuously; and (2) monitoring executions of externally-run jobs - http://jenkins-ci.org/.
  • Hubot – GitHub, Inc., wrote the first version of Hubot to automate our company chat room. Hubot knew how to deploy the site, automate a lot of tasks, and be a source of fun in the company. Eventually he grew to become a formidable force in GitHub. But he led a private, messy life. So we rewrote him. Today’s version of Hubot is open source, written in CoffeeScript onNode.js, and easily deployed on platforms like Heroku. More importantly, Hubot is a standardized way to share scripts between everyone’s robots. http://hubot.github.com/.
  • Jenkins is a continuous integration server built on top of Jenkins, controlled by Hubot, and designed for GitHub. https://github.com/github/janky.

 

We’ve Released Some of our Nagios Plugins

We create a lot of Nagios installations for our own systems over, for customer systems which we manage and as a service over at Open Solutions. We’ve written a lot of custom Nagios plugins over the years as part of this process.

We are now making a concerted effort to find them, clean them, maintain them centrally and release them for the good of others.

To that end, we have created a repository on GitHub for the task with a detailed readme file:

They main goal of Nagios plugins that we write and release are:

  • BSD (or BSD like) license so you can hack away to wield into something that may be more suitable for your own environment;
  • scalable in that if we are polling power supply units (PSUs) in a Cisco switch then it should not matter if there is one or a hundred – the script should handle them all;
  • WARNINGs are designed for email notifications during working hours; CRITICAL means an out of hours text / SMS message;
  • each script should be an independant unit with no dependancies on each other or unusual Perl module requirements;
  • the scripts should all be run with the --verbose on new kit. This will provide an inventory of what it finds as well as show anything that is being skipped. OIDs searched for by the script but reported as not supported on the target device should really be skipped via various --skip-xxx options.
  • useful help available via --help or -?

Three Rock Masts

Living below Three Rock mountain in Stepaside, I often look up the many communication masts. Today I trekked up on the bike and took a few (dark and bad) photos.

Data Centre Technical Services

We’ve added a new service to our website: Data Centre Services. In reality, this is a service we have been providing since our inception in 2007 and our employees have been doing for other companies long before that.

We’ve added a new service to our website: Data Centre Services. In reality, this is a service we have been providing since our inception in 2007 and our employees have been doing for other companies long before that.

By data centre technical services we mean that Open Solutions provides a full data centre service portfolio including:

  • data centre selection, negotiation and management;
  • supply and installation of all necessary data centre equipment including racks, patch panels, cable guides, optical distribution frames, managed and unmanaged PDUs (power distribution units);
  • IP transit provider selection, negotiation, set-up and management;
  • installation of a resilient fault tolerant network edge (see case study);
  • installation of management and out of band access;
  • remote hands for installation and configuration of customer kit;
  • consultancy and advice;

And, of course, intelligent engineers with problem solving ability!

We’re very familiar with all the carrier neutral data centres around Dublin as well as most of the carrier owned data centres. We also have good relationships and contacts with data centres in Cork and Galway.