TCP Slow Start And Wan Optimization Compression

This video looks like a good joke, but to be honest it explain in the most simple way how TCP Slow Start and Wan Optimization work. If you have problems explaining networks concepts, than for sure when somebody ask you about TCP Slow Start and Wan Optimization, you’ll remember the two guys running with oranges.

Combine the video below with some technical explanation and you can put together a nice presentation:

IPv4 Address Space Depleted

At a ceremony held on 3 February, 2011 the Internet Assigned
Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated the remaining last five /8s of
IPv4 address space to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) in
accordance with the Global Policy for the Allocation of the
Remaining IPv4 Address Space. With this action, the free pool of
available IPv4 addresses is now fully depleted. To read the full
text of this announcement please go to:

http://www.nro.net/news/ipv4-free-pool-depleted

Etherape – Real time network topology and traffic flow

There are numerous reasons why you would want to watch your network topology or the flow of traffic on your network. Say you are experiencing a bandwidth bottleneck. What is causing that bottleneck? Is it a particular user? A machine gone awry? How do you find out what is happening without having to walk around to every single machine on your network? Easy. The Etherape network monitor gives you a real-time graphical display of your network and the flow of traffic. Using this tool you can easily pinpoint suspect machines. Let’s take a look at exactly how you can use this tool to troubleshoot networking issues.

Installation

Etherape is only available for UNIX and UNIX-like OSs (such as Linux and even OS X). In order to use Etherape you will need:

  • libpcap
  • GTK+
  • Libglade 2
  • GNOME
  • Standard resolver library (name depends upon OS)

Read more here…

Java 4 Ever [video trailer]

Even if this has nothing to do with Cisco and the regular topics that I post here, I think is one of the best trailers that I’ve seen lately. Ever heard of Java or .NET? The one and one battle between closed source and open source? Then you’ll enjoy this for sure!


Fundamentals of SIP

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an IETF-defined signaling protocol, widely used for controlling multimedia communication sessions such as voice and video calls over Internet Protocol (IP). That the definition of SIP according to Wikipedia. This definition is only the beginning, as SIP is a very complex protocol.

You can check IETF RFC, Wikipedia, Cisco.com for details, but most probably you’ll not remember too much about SIP, except if you are dealing with this protocol daily in your work field. As a network engineer you should know at least what is SIP and what it does, so here is a short video that explain SIP fundamentals: