By accident, I found a heartbeat/ VLAN issue on a NetScaler cluster at one of my customers. The NetScaler ADC appliances have three interfaces connected to a switch stack. Two of the three interfaces were configured as a channel (LAG). This is a snippet from the config:
set channel LA/1 -tagall ON -throughput 0 -lrMinThroughput 0 -bandwidthHigh 0 -bandwidthNormal 0 ... bind vlan 10 -ifnum 1/3 bind vlan 10 -ifnum LA/1 -tagged bind vlan 54 -ifnum LA/1 -tagged bind vlan 55 -ifnum LA/1 -tagged On the switch stack, the port to which interface 1/3 is connected, is configured as an access port.
Last friday I passed the 1Y0-351 (Citrix NetScaler 10.5 Essentails and Networking) exam with a pretty good score. The exam was necessary, not only because I will do much more NetScaler projects in the future, but also because Citrix has made it mandatory to have a CCP-N in your company to to sell Citrix NetScaler.
Preparation My employer booked me a 5-day course (CNS-220 Citrix NetScaler Essentials and Traffic Management). Very nice, although I already had experience with NetScaler deployments.
Open network ports in offices, waiting rooms and entrance halls make me curious. Sometimes I want to plugin a network cable, just to see if I get an IP address. I know many companies that does not care about network access control. Anybody can plugin any device to the network. When talking with customers about network access control, or port security, I often hear their complains about complexity. It’s too complex to implement, to hard to administrate.
Starting with release 11.1, NetScaler ADC offers an easy way to redirect traffic from HTTP to HTTPS within the configuration of a load-balanced vServer. With 11.1, Citrix introduced the paramter -redirectFromPort and -redirectURL.
While playing with a NetScaler ADC in my lab, I discovered a strange error message as I tried to configure the redirect.
Patrick Terlisten/ vcloudnine.de/ Creative Commons CC0
Internal vserver couldn’t be set?! Okay, there was already a vServer, that was listening on port 80.
I don’t like to use untrusted networks. When I have to use such a network, e.g. an open WiFi network, I use a TLS encrypted tunnel connection to encrypt all web traffic that travels through the untrusted network. I’m using a simple stunnel/ Squid setup for this. My setup consists of three components:
Stunnel (server mode) Squid proxy Stunnel (client mode) What is stunnel? Stunnel is an OSS project that uses OpenSSL to encrypt traffic.
I switched my mobile carrier and my new carrier doesn’t offer multi SIM (but hey, it’s cheap and sufficient for my needs). Now I have to use my iPhone as WiFi hotspot. No big deal, works perfect. Except one thing: When I was using the built-in 4G modem in my laptop, Windows 10 knew that it was using a mobile (metered) connection, and suspended some services like OneDrive sync, download of Windows Updates etc.
When I talk to customers and colleagues about cloud offerings, most of them are still concerned about the cloud, and especially about the security of public cloud offerings. One of the most mentioned concerns is based on the belief, that each and every cloud-based VM is publicly reachable over the internet. This can be so, but it does not have to. It relies on your design. Maybe that is only a problem in germany.
The HPE OfficeConnect 1920 switch series is designed for SMBs. The switch is perfect for small environments, that require features like VLANs, routing or 802.1x. This switch is smart-managed, so it has “only” a web interface and only a limited CLI.
I have two switches in my lab: A 1910-8G and the successor, a 1920-24G. Although the device supports IPv6, it doesn’t support SLAAC (Stateless Address Autoconfiguration) by default. The switch does not send router advertisements (RA).
In my last post (Routed Port vs. Switch Virtual Interface (SVI)), I have mentioned a consequence of using routed ports to interconnect access and core switches:
You have to route the traffic on the access switches.
Routing on the network access, the edge of the network, is not a question of performance. It is more of a management issue. Depending on the size of your network, and the number of subnets, you have to deal with lots of routes.
Many years ago, networks consisted of repeaters, bridges and router. Switches are the successors of the bridges. A switch is nothing else than a multiport bridge, and a traditional switch doesn’t know how to pass traffic to a different broadcast domains (VLANs). Passing traffic between different broadcast domains, is a job for a router. A router has an IP interface in each broadcast domain, and the IP interface is used by the clients in the broadcast domain as a gateway.
