There are a few different types of connectivity. Internet exchanges, or IXs, are a common way for networks to reach a large number of other networks, all via a single router interface. Today I want to discuss the economics of IX connectivity, and how many IXs haven’t kept up with the commercial terms offered in the broader connectivity market.

I’m going to avoid the topic of per-unit costs. This is something that would usually need to be negotiated between the parties involved, and much like transit, there are always a number of unique factors that must be considered. If you’re interested in this topic, Dave Temkin gave a presentation on transit vs IX pricing trends at NANOG 67, and while the numbers have changed, the theme remains the same. (Here are links to Dave’s slides and presentation.)

Multi-factor authentication, or MFA, was introduced sometime in the mid-late 1980s, and was initially aimed at the defense industry. It was originally referred to as 2FA, or two factor authentication.

Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen adoption pick up, and many popular applications and web-based services now support, or even mandate, use of a second factor when logging in, or accessing sensitive data. Also over the past many years, we’ve seen methods for authentication evolve.

Growing up, I was taught that a host was responsible for their guests. Leaders were to act as positive role models for those who looked up to them. Teams worked best when united.

So here we are, Trump has been back in office for a week. He’s off to a busy start, which is a nice change from the many of his predecessors who spend time celebrating their victory before starting work. But that’s about where my positive outlook ends.

Every few years I get the idea of migrating various management interfaces on different network devices to a single stacked IPv6 configuration. Most recently this has been Juniper EX series vme interfaces. I wanted to write about what appears to be a Junos bug, for which I haven’t been able to locate a Juniper PR.

What’s the VME interface?

VME stands for “virtual management ethernet”. It’s present on Juniper EX and QFX switches, since those are the models that support Juniper’s virtual chassis. This interface takes the physical me0 (management ethernet) interface, and virtualizes the configuration across the entire virtual chassis.

(Update: The following information also applies to Juniper’s MX204 routers. While the output will be a little different than the examples I provided, the same commands can be used to identify the HMC version.)

I’ve spent the past several years managing a fleet of several hundred Juniper QFX10000 switches. These have primarily been the QFX10002 fixed switches, but there’s been a few chassis switches in there too. As more and more of these were deployed, I started to notice an increasing number of hardware failures, specifically with the HMC. (HMC stands for “hybrid memory cubes”, which is the memory used by the forwarding plane.)