FlowBAT is a graphical flow based analysis tool. FlowBAT is a very snappy UI which wraps flow collection software called SiLK. My interests with FlowBAT and SiLK are around using Open vSwitch to push sFlow data to SiLK and FlowBAT to quickly query that data. Hopefully I’ll get around to posting about OVS, sFlow, SiLK and FlowBAT. While I was getting started with FlowBAT (and SiLK) I saw there weren’t any ansible roles for either component....
LLDP is a wonderful protocol which paints a picture of datacenter topology. lldpd is a daemon to run on your servers to receive LLDP frames outputs network location and more. There’s also a recently patched lldp Ansible module. Like all tools, using LLDP/lldpd has had some issues. Here’s the ones I’ve seen in practice, with diagnosis and resolution: Switch isn’t configured to send LLDP frames Diagnosing: [code] tcpdump -i eth0 -s 1500 -XX -c 1 ’ether proto 0x88cc' [/code]...
Recently, I began a deep dive into more SDN and OpenFlow. Overall I was very happy with the process and quality of the material out there for newcomers. However, I noticed a gap when I hit my first stumbling block. I set up a mininet instance, noticed it was running Open vSwitch (OVS) v2.0. I needed a newer version of OVS, and turfed the mininet instance while the upgrading OVS. It quickly became apparent that I needed a repeatable development environment setup....
Operating Open vSwitch brings a new set of challenges. One of those challenges is managing Open vSwitch itself and making sure you’re up to date with performance and stability fixes. For example, in late 2013 there were significant performance improvements with the release of 1.11 ( flow wildcarding!) and in the 2.x series there are even more improvements coming. This means everyone running those old versions of OVS (I’m looking at you, <=1....