Flashback - ok? who had one?

 

i am this old..  and I remember selling these when I worked at Radio Shack.

What is IP SLA (Internet Protocol Service LevelAgreement) How to configure IP SLA?

 

IP SLA (Internet protocol service level agreement) is a great feature of the Cisco

Internetwork Operating System (Cisco IOS). It is used to measure the ongoing behavior of

the network. the measurement can be simple as using ping where we check the round-trip

time or something more advanced like a VoIP RTP packet where we check the delay, and

jitter and calculate a MOS score that gives you an indication of what the voice quality will be.

IP SLA primarily acts as a tool and gathers data about a network.

https://www.internetworks.in/2023/05/what-is-ip-sla-internet-protocol.html

Drive Testing and Ventoy

Have you ever started doing something and it branches off to something else?

Well, here is a great example of that exact scenario.  I wanted to show you a cool piece of software called Ventoy (www.ventoy.net). From the website:

“Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.

With ventoy, you don't need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly.

You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them (screenshot).

You can also browse ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files in local disks and boot them.”

This is pretty cool because there are certain things you cant do from a VM. In those scenarios, the operating system needs to see the actual hardware.

But before I can put Ventoy or an ISO image on a drive, I should find out which of my USB drives would be the best candidate. Of course I have a drawer with a bunch of USB drives, so lets find out.

I used CrysatlMarkDrive (https://sourceforge.net/projects/crystaldiskmark/) to test the drives out.

I labelled the drives, Blue, Black and Purple to make things easy.

Spoiler alert Black outperformed the other two drives. Now I install Ventoy on the USB drive, simply drag the ISO’s to the drive, and tada, done.

I can see this being a pretty helpful in field.  The only challenges I can think of is if the computer has a power on password, cant boot from USB or compatibility issues with some computers booting from a usb drive larger than 128 GB.

another expert prediction

 another expert prediction

Measuring IOTA Tool Behavior

 

The video pretty well speaks for itself, so I will just toss in a few points worth mentioning and a link to hrping.

Hrping can be downloaded at https://www.cfos.de/en/ping/ping.htm

Even though I tested packet loss when I rebooted the IOTA, you can conduct tests with more scenarios, like applying a software update, applying a firmware update, starting and stopping a capture, etc…

I created the video for you to think about testing your inline tools and thinking about their behavior, so please don’t get all caught up with the details of my specific results.

You can use the same methodology to test failover topologies or similar scenarios with other equipment.

Quick disclaimer; i was not paid by Profitap to create this video, nor do i sell, or resell their products.