Introduction - Who Am I (Networking)


Hello, I'm Daryl. This is my blog. The aim here is to jot down some ideas I have about technology. I'd like to increase my online presence where possible, but at the end of the day I'm only trying to satisfy myself with this blog. Currently, I work in the network virtualization space. If that means nothing to you, maybe this type of tech blog is not your speed. I plan to write about general business computing topics with an emphasis on computer networks. My interest in networking honestly started circa 2000 when I was a sophomore in high school and a buddy told me about an online shooter game allowing 10 versus 10 player matches. At the time, I was skeptical that it was technically feasible to play a video game with more than 4 people at once. Nintendo 64 was the only multiplayer I knew about at the time. I'm not sure if I looked up the game online or not, Internet in the home was still a bit of a novelty back then. I do know that at some point I went to my local Babbages and plunked down $50 on the Half-Life Platinum Pack. I was itching to try some 10 vs 10 online play!

I played my first online game roughly in the year 2000, and my trajectory towards becoming a network engineer was set. My first online game was played using a Pentium II 233 MHz processor, 4 MB of ram, a CRT monitor, mechanical mouse, and a dial-up modem with transfer rate of 33.6 Kb/s! My first 8 months to a year of online gaming saw regular latency of 700 - 800 milliseconds of latency. I remember some servers in those days would kick you off for having a connection that was too slow. In those days, the idea was one slow connection on the server would slow things down for everyone. However, I enjoyed every minute of my 700 millisecond connection. The sheer novelty of playing games with people at a distance, regardless of the quality of the experience, was enchanting at the time. Nowadays such experiences are ubiquitous. High speed Internet is in all but the most rural areas in the United States. Computers are thousands, if not millions of times superior in their processing power, storage capacity and memory!

 Over those years with Half-Life, and Counter-Strike, I found the motivation to maintain and improve that computer. I was playing games, but also learning. I upgraded the ram so I could include more bots to play with offline. I bought a better video card so I could increase the resolution from 640x480 to 1024x768. It was the first time I was motivated to learn a command line interface, the notorious Half-Life console. I could change game attributes, play voices, add and remove bots, or even change the intensity of gravity. From this experimentation in game, I found a deep similarity once I was exposed to Cisco IOS command line interface. It was just my luck that people actually paid you to do things I was doing for fun to enable my online gaming appetite.


My Experimental Website: elegant network design.com
My Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daryl-allen-85b98363/
My Github Repository: https://github.com/allend2092
Email: daryl.allen.jr@gmail.com

I went on to acquire:
  • BS in Information Systems & Minor in Computer Science from University of Colorado Denver      
  • Cisco Certified Networking Professional - Routing & Switching
  • Cisco Certified Networking Professional - Security
  • VMware Certified Professional6 - Network Virtualization
  • Cisco Certified Networking Associate - Wireless 














Location: Colorado, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

VXLAN versus GENEVE (NSX-V vs. NSX-T)

Image
  August 14th, 2021 With the ramp-up of NSX-T overlay networks and transition away from NSX-V overlay networks, it's a good time to look at one of the fundamental differences between them. NSX-V uses VXLAN as its encapsulation protocol while NSX-T uses the more recent GENEVE encapsulation protocol. Each require the physical networking devices have their MTU adjusted to 1600 bytes or greater. We'll take a detailed look at why that is. First, the basics: VXLAN is: short for Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network Is defined in rfc 7348 - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7348 Uses UDP port 4789 8 byte header GENEVE is: short for Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation Is defined in rfc 8926 -  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8926 Uses UDP port 6081 16 byte header From the prospective of the physical network, an overlay network is essentially an application. NSX-T is an application using well known UDP port 6081. Switching perspectives to the overlay's
Read more

"Twice NAT" with NSX-T T0 Gateway

Image
  Network address translation, or more commonly NAT, is most often used to do source NAT or destination NAT. In rare instances, SNAT or DNAT isn't enough to get ip packets to their destination. Enter twice nat. While twice NAT isn't a function I've needed often, it was a function drilled into me while studying for various Cisco exams. I used to watch Christian Matei explain it over at INE and it really helped me to understand what twice NAT is and how to configure it on Cisco devices. Previous to my time working with NSX-T, I'd only utilized twice NAT once. A few years back, a customer wanted to build and IPsec tunnel from the organization HQ to a branch office. The private ip space used by HQ and the branch used overlapping ip space. We used twice NAT to NAT the source and destination ip address in a single NAT rule ( similar to this guy ) before shoving it all into an IPsec tunnel. Previous to working with NSX, circumstances requiring twice NAT were uncommon.  While w
Read more

Packet Capture Network Traffic Inside ESXi Hypervisor

Image
The three components of computer infrastructure are considered compute, storage, and networking. When applications don't work properly, its often the case that networking is the first component to receive blame for failed application performance. In the case of virtualized workloads (i.e. applications running on virtual machines), we are fortunate to have a powerful troubleshooting tool which allows us to packet capture network traffic in an ESXi hypervisor. For this blog, I'm going to use an Hands On Lab (HOL) from the VMware website to demonstrate the process of doing a quick live packet capture. The output of the packet capture will be sent to the shell of the hypervisor. There are ways to sent the network traffic to a file so it can be extracted and analyzed by a packet analyzer tool, but that will be for another post. First, lets start with heading over to the HOL website:  https://labs.hol.vmware.com/ For this lab, I'm going to type NSX in the search bar to find
Read more