Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

So yes – spending a lot of time with the new load balancers and finding out all sorts of things about their operation I didn’t know about, that (at least in this case) were fairly easy to fix.

The thing is carrying actual, important, production traffic now.  Most if it is short lived web-based stuff; short enough that the transfer completes well before a failed session establishment on the firewall is noticed.  But someone was noticing, and it took me doing many packet captures to figure out exactly what was going wrong (and realize it was actually my fault).

One of my worst weaknesses as a network admin is that (mostly due to a weird conflux of laziness and time restrictions) I tend to not read up on a topic as much as I should before I implement; or at the very least, I don’t retain what I do read and put certain settings in without considering that there might be serious ramifications. Such is the case with vPC; I don’t know it as well as I should, and I trust it even less, but it’s being used in our data center (DC) networks heavily. So it was that during the load balancer migration I’m in the middle of, I came across a case where vPC made a packet capture lie.