OSPF - Router Hostname Exchange

A new RFC was just released: Dynamic Hostname Exchange Mechanism for OSPF - RFC 5642

A nice little addition that hopefully will make it into the future code versions of Cisco/etc devices. Much like the ISIS protocol that can pass along the hostname of the neighboring device, this RFC proposes the same concept for OSPF. Will be nice to not have to rely on DNS (often can be outdated, etc [at least where I work, hah]).

Now (hopefully) when you do a "sh ip ospf neigh" command (on code that actually implements this RFC), it will display the router hostname in addition to the peer IP. Could possibly eliminate the "ip ospf name-lookup" command that queries DNS for the peer IPs that match a DNS entry.

Just a little nicety...

More Space Networking

Came across another article about networking in space. This time it's NASA showing off that they have more bandwidth to the moon than I do at my house! 100Mbps speeds from a microwave amp made by L3 Comm and NASA, unbelievable! It will be able to transfer 461GB per day of images and data from the Moon back to Earth. That's a lot of Moon data!

Here's the link to the article: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/44529.

News

Been slacking lately with posting here, but in good reason I believe. A couple weeks ago I was promoted to the network design group, and have been tasked with researching WAN optimization products for our customer. Had to put my ISCW studying to the side for a bit while I get up to speed with WAN optimization.

Hopefully soon I'll have some good info about the intensive testing/evaluation I'm doing with Cisco WAAS and Riverbed solutions.

And a quick note about the book Deploying Cisco Wide Area Application Services is mainly good for getting a beginning to mid-level understanding of Cisco WAAS, but is lacking in the details of some important areas. It also is starting to become outdated as the screen captures are different than the latest code I've been using (4.1.3a), and never touches on designs for asymmetrical routing topologies (also a newer feature for Cisco). It does have some useful complex scenario examples though.