Industrial Network Infrastructure

The industrial business sector is evolving, for this reason, organizations need to upgrade their network infrastructure and connectivity between industrial assets, local, central applications, and systems. As they adapt, challenges arise from multiple domains, such as traffic visibility, network security, and performance.

Cable Troubleshooting Example

Another job and another example of an Ethernet coupler causing challenges.

In this case, we upgraded some old 10/100Mb switches to 1 Gb switches. As part of my methodology, I typically get all the devices connected in, make sure everything is up and running, then clear the port statistics (when possible), check the ports for speed/duplex and errors after a minimum of an hour or so of operation.

You can do this via CLI, web interface, customized scripts or SNMP. As long as you can reliably collect the data, you are in good shape. Don’t forget to document how you gathered the data, date, time, and collection period.

Wireshark File Merge

For those of you familiar with my articles, who worked with me, or who attended any of my sessions, you will quickly notice that I am not one for long flowery speeches. In my classes, I don’t start with the history of technology or networking and pretty well dive right in.

WiFi or LAN Traffic?

 I was working with a client on their proposed new laptop build and they brought up the topic of WiFi vs Lan. For those who are not familiar, we were wondering how does the laptop behave if it is connected to the network via WiFi, and then you connect the ethernet port, docking station or similar dongle.

Wireshark Windows Adapter Issue and Fix

I was trying to capture packets from my Network Critical SmartNA packet broker and only saw broadcast packets.

At first, I blamed the packet broker since I assumed I knew my laptop and Wireshark so well. Do you know what they say about the word 'assume'? ;)

Pros and Cons of Packet Slicing

Whenever I’m working with a client on packet analysis, I always ensure that I cover packet slicing concepts. It doesn’t matter if I am teaching, troubleshooting or baselining, I believe that packet slicing is an important part of packet capture.

One school of thought is to slice after the fact, which you can do with Wireshark’s editcap utility and the -s option and now you have the original trace and a sliced one. Unfortunately, depending on the size of the trace, you might find this a bigger job than you think and now you have to ensure you keep track of 2 files.

Creating A IPv4 Filter With Your Packet Broker

One of the challenges I encounter when capturing packets is the sheer volume of data on todays networks. Most workstations have a minimum of 1 Gb connections and switch trunks are mostly 10 Gb connections.

This results in 2 issues:
- With a high packet rate and using a laptop or desktop to capture packets, you stand a chance of dropping packets.
- Going though gigabytes of data, is incredibly difficult and mostly unusable.

One way to mitigate these issues is to simply use a capture filter to reduce the amount of traffic captured. Unfortunately this technique doesn’t change the amount of packets being received by your capture device.

Connections Are Everything

 

My doctor, my financial planner and my trust attorney all roll their eyes when I tell them I intend to live to 100, but I am dead serious. Although I have yet to become a germophobic vegan gym rat, I am still drawn to click-bait like “10 ways to Live Longer and Better.” Beyond the no-smoking, moderate drinking, green leafy vegetable edicts, one standout is connections – being connected through healthy relationships is essential to longevity. Seventeenth-century Englishman John Donne foretold this with his oft-quoted “No man is an island”, noting that we all rely on others in one way or another.

Whether you believe that the physical world we inhabit was intelligently designed, or that it arose spontaneously through some improbable coincidence, it’s impossible to overlook many of the connections that surround us. A few of them are fairly subtle and call for the discernment of experts.

One such legendary though elusive connection is explained by Dr. Ian Malcolm.

“It simply deals with unpredictability in complex systems,” says Dr. M. “The shorthand is ‘the butterfly effect.’ A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking, and in Central Park, you get rain instead of sunshine.”

Dr. Malcolm’s credentials are well-established - he is the character played by actor Jeff Goldblum in the movie Jurassic Park. Whether or not a fly can produce the same effect by flapping its wings is left unsaid.

The technical term for this connection is Chaos Theory, which is based on the sensitivity of complex deterministic non-linear systems to small changes in initial conditions. Some of the confusion with respect to winged insects can be traced to the ad hoc father of Chaos Theory, meteorologist Ed Lorenz. For the record, Ed actually said something to the effect that even if we could account for every single butterfly, we still couldn’t predict the weather. If the flap of a butterfly wing in the Amazon really does cause a tornado in Texas, we will probably never know.

The world is full of connections that are very real, but that took some time to unravel. A familiar classic is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge which opened on July 1, 1940, in Pierce County, Washington. Construction workers noted how the bridge moved around on windy days, giving it the nickname “Galloping Gertie.” Engineers and consultants tried unsuccessfully to stop the motion until, on November 7, 1940, the structure collapsed in high winds. It was a decade later that the symbiotic connection between wind and bridge, now known as aeroelastic flutter, was established and the bridge was reopened.

If you are one of those people like me who sometimes plays music on your computer while working, don’t – that is, if your computer’s local files are stored on an ancient relic known as a hard drive. In 2005, a major manufacturer of HDDs for laptops noticed, in their testing lab, that Janet Jackson’s 1989 hit “Rhythm Nation” would crash the hard drive in the computer playing it. The song was so catchy that even nearby drives would sometimes fail as well. This connection was issued an official Denial Of Service identifier (CVE-2022-38392) by the U.S. government agency responsible for tracking security vulnerabilities. Ms. Jackson, the alleged hacker, was never charged.

In retrospect - considering all that physics stuff about sound, vibration, and resonant frequencies – the Rhythm Nation connection seems unsurprising and avoidable. After all, isn’t that the reason marching soldiers break cadence when crossing a bridge? But crashing a disk drive isn’t the only concern, and data center disk arrays are carefully engineered such that a frantic search for files on one will not cause data transfer interruptions or delays on adjacent drives. In 2009, Sun Microsystems engineer Brendan Gregg put together a video highlighting the dangers of a similar but little-known connection – yelling at the equipment. Note: this is a PSA for those network data professionals who occasionally shout and verbally threaten the hardware only to wonder why latency is spiking. You know who you are.

The famously inquisitive Leonardo da Vinci had this advice –

“Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

Connections are everything for humans, machines, and combinations thereof. Discernment is key - not all humans, or computers, share your taste in music. Shouting at your human connections, or your data center hardware, can lead to poor performance or even catastrophic failure.

And perhaps most importantly, realize that not all connections are real – sometimes you are just flapping your wings.

Author Profile - Paul W. Smith - leader, educator, technologist, writer - has a lifelong interest in the countless ways that technology changes the course of our journey through life. In addition to being a regular contributor to NetworkDataPedia, he maintains the website Technology for the Journey and occasionally writes for Blogcritics. Paul has over 40 years of experience in research and advanced development for companies ranging from small startups to industry leaders. His other passion is teaching - he is a former Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Paul holds a doctorate in Applied Mechanics from the California Institute of Technology, as well as Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Check Client WiFi Loading

 

One thing about WiFi is that people take for granted that you will connect and have access. But what if you have multiple access points for a SSID and an access point is having an issue? Everyone will probably pile on to the working access point and you won’t notice a thing until the performance degrades.

Even with a fancy WiFi controller, I have seen access points reject connections and no problem alert was sent. No log entries identifying an issue was present and yes, you can still ping the access points.

That’s why every so often I encourage analysts to grab their WiFi tool of choice, or review their WiFi controller dashboard/portal to ensure that your access points are all working and that there isn’t an imbalance in client loads.

In this video I use my netAlly Aircheck G2 to check things out and find a misconfigured access point along the way.