Rick Mur is a network engineer and the CTO and cofounder of GNX. He writes about the internet, connectivity and building GNX.https://rickmur.com/enhttps://rickmur.com/the-internet-is-no-longer-built-for-humans/https://rickmur.com/the-internet-is-no-longer-built-for-humans/Recently a headline number stopped me in my tracks: automated traffic now officially exceeds human traffic on the internet. Not in some niche corner. Across the entire Internet.Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTinternetconnectivityairick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/what-is-the-best-network-for-a-gamer/https://rickmur.com/what-is-the-best-network-for-a-gamer/Recently I walked by an ad of a cable internet provider claiming their network is the best choice for gamers. That stopped me. Not because I game competitively, but because I have spent 20 years building networks and doubted the claim.Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMTinternetconnectivitypeeringgamingrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/transform-isp-choice-from-anecdote-to-evidence/https://rickmur.com/transform-isp-choice-from-anecdote-to-evidence/Have you ever had to defend your choice of internet service provider? All you can say is: "Everyone says they're reliable", "My buddy recommended them.", "They are the incumbent player". But when pressed about frequent connectivity issues, then what? Sound familiar? This plays…Thu, 14 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMTinternetconnectivityispgnxrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/blog-reboot/https://rickmur.com/blog-reboot/When I first launched this site, many years ago, it served as a humble lab notebook and sharing short personal stories from my working life. I shared diagrams, Junos configs , and field notes written after late night maintenance windows or proof of concepts.Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMTpersonalgnxrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/jncie-dc-lab-experience/https://rickmur.com/jncie-dc-lab-experience/After plenty of hours of studying and labbing the wide ranging topics on the JNCIE-DC blueprint, I took the JNCIE-DC lab exam and passed! I can proudly say I'm JNCIE-DC #389. In this conclusion of the previous JNCIE-DC blogs about my lab setup and about the remote lab…Tue, 04 May 2021 00:00:00 GMTcertificationjnciejuniperdatacenterevpnrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/jncie-dc-remote-lab-exam-resources/https://rickmur.com/jncie-dc-remote-lab-exam-resources/Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the exam centers of Juniper are at time of this writing closed for external visitors. Fortunately the Juniper Education team did a great job and made JNCIE lab exams available from your own home!Thu, 25 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMTcertificationrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/jncie-dc-lab-in-eve-ng-tips-and-tricks/https://rickmur.com/jncie-dc-lab-in-eve-ng-tips-and-tricks/After having some feedback regarding my previous post on running the JNCIE-DC self-study workbook in EVE-NG. I wanted to share some of the most common questions I personally experienced while using the lab and general things to be aware of and some tips!Fri, 22 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMTcertificationhome labrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/jncie-dc-lab-in-eve-ng/https://rickmur.com/jncie-dc-lab-in-eve-ng/As explained in my previous post on my home servers, I have a bare metal system deployed with EVE-NG Pro installed. As I'm (slowly) preparing for the JNCIE-DC certification I wanted to share the topology that I'm using.Thu, 24 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMTcertificationrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/home-network-2020/https://rickmur.com/home-network-2020/Recently I moved to a new house and as a lot of reconstruction was done to bring the house up to date. I took the opportunity to have something I've always wanted in my home: a server rack! In my previous lab set-ups they were either located in my employers lab location or placed…Tue, 03 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMThome labrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/vsrx-policy-based-ipsec-vpn-over-gre-part-2-2-the-workaround/https://rickmur.com/vsrx-policy-based-ipsec-vpn-over-gre-part-2-2-the-workaround/After discussing the issue I'm running into in my home lab set-up in the previous post"). This post will outline configuration and some final testing to confirm a succesful workaround.Fri, 16 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMThome labrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/vsrx-policy-based-ipsec-vpn-over-gre-part-1-2/https://rickmur.com/vsrx-policy-based-ipsec-vpn-over-gre-part-1-2/During the implementation of using my own public IP space on my home server I ran into a weird issue of not being able to pass traffic between hosts on either side of the VPN. After investigation it seems to be a combination of factors by using GRE tunneling, a policy based…Mon, 12 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMThome labrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/using-my-own-public-ip-space-on-a-regular-internet-connection-with-a-juniper-srx/https://rickmur.com/using-my-own-public-ip-space-on-a-regular-internet-connection-with-a-juniper-srx/Recently I purchased new servers for my home lab (topic for more posts to follow when everything is fully done). I wanted to use these servers to run a number of workloads (mainly virtual machines) and I wanted to use the public IP space I recently got for that. Of course my…Fri, 24 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMThome labrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/my-favorite-podcasts/https://rickmur.com/my-favorite-podcasts/After my last blog about reading books I received a lot of good recommendations from people to have a good list of books to read! I figured it would be good to share my list of favorite podcasts as well.Fri, 23 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMTpersonalrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/read-a-book/https://rickmur.com/read-a-book/At the start of this year I set myself a number of goals. One of them was to read at least 1 book a month. I tried to accomplish a number of things with that. The first was to get the amount of screen time down. This also means reading books on paper, which I actually prefer over…Fri, 02 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMTpersonalrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/new-beginnings/https://rickmur.com/new-beginnings/After long consideration I decided to take on a new role back at Juniper Networks! Over the past few months I have thought a lot about what I want in the future and how I can get there. When I had a chat with an ex-colleague at Juniper, he told me that they were looking to set-up…Thu, 25 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMTworkrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/next-generation-global-connectivity/https://rickmur.com/next-generation-global-connectivity/Technologies like SDWAN have fundamentally changed the way we think about WAN infrastructures for enterprise IT environments over the past few years. Global WAN offerings are no longer a necessity as pretty much 'any' connectivity will do. You are no longer bound to private…Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMTpersonalworkrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/why-leave-a-vendor-job-twice/https://rickmur.com/why-leave-a-vendor-job-twice/Over the past few months I’ve been working hard on my new start-up company PeakFactory, it’s going really well, but for this post I want to focus on the reason why I chose to leave the companies I used to work for. I thought this was relevant, as many people have asked me why…Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMTpersonalrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/what-is-p4/https://rickmur.com/what-is-p4/Recently I attended a workshop organised by the Open NFP organisation about Data Plane acceleration. The primary goal of the workshop was to get students and researchers (why was I there you may think) familiar with the P4 programming language.Sun, 25 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMTsdnrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/vmware-nsx-101/https://rickmur.com/vmware-nsx-101/Today I want to explain the basic components and the set-up of VMware NSX. In this case I’m referring to NSX for vSphere or NSX-V for short. I want to explain what components are involved, how you set them up for an initial deployment and what the requirements are.Sat, 11 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMTsdnrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/evpn-configuration/https://rickmur.com/evpn-configuration/In my last blog I explained the features and use cases of the EVPN technology. In this blog I want to show how easy it is to configure, enable and expand EVPN. The configuration is focused on the Juniper MX platform, but as Junos is the single operating system across the entire…Wed, 18 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMTevpnrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/evpn-rfc-7432-explained/https://rickmur.com/evpn-rfc-7432-explained/EVPN or Ethernet VPN is a new standard that has finally been given an RFC number. Many vendors are already working on implementing this standard since the early draft versions and even before that Juniper already used the same technology in it's Qfabric product. RFC 7432 was…Thu, 26 Feb 2015 00:00:00 GMTdata centerevpnrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/nested-virtualization/https://rickmur.com/nested-virtualization/A typical Network Virtualization demo is difficult as you need quite some hypervisor hosts to run some VMs on and interconnect them using Overlays. I solve this using nested virtualization. This means that I run a hypervisor running on another. This gives me the flexibility that…Sun, 08 Feb 2015 00:00:00 GMThome labrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/using-the-junos-space-rest-api/https://rickmur.com/using-the-junos-space-rest-api/Automation is going to be fundamental in all networking products. I've been working a lot on integrating Juniper products in existing and standard software. There are many different ways to automate something on a network running Junos. Using REST (or RESTful) APIs is one way of…Fri, 02 Jan 2015 00:00:00 GMTsdnrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/home-lab-server/https://rickmur.com/home-lab-server/Currently I’m doing a lot of testing at home on Network Virtualization solutions, like VMware NSX, Juniper Contrail, etc. Therefore I was stressing my current single home server quite a lot. Which is a custom build Xeon E3-1230 quad core with 32GB of RAM and 128GB SSD. I built…Thu, 13 Nov 2014 00:00:00 GMThome labrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/the-double-switch/https://rickmur.com/the-double-switch/It's been a very long time since I last wrote anything on my blog. Since that last post, so many things have changed that it's really time to shed some light on these things. A lot of people have been asking me regarding my recent job changes, so I figured it was time to clearify…Fri, 24 Oct 2014 00:00:00 GMTpersonalrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/passed-ccie-data-center/https://rickmur.com/passed-ccie-data-center/After a number of months studying and final 2 weeks full 100% dedicated preparation I passed the CCIE Data Center Lab exam last week on April 25th in Brussels at first attempt!!!Fri, 17 May 2013 00:00:00 GMTccieccie datacentercertificationipexpertrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/what-about-2013/https://rickmur.com/what-about-2013/Happy new year to you all! I truly hope that all your dreams for 2013 may come true and maybe even more. For the first time I didn't really made a to-do list for 2013, but in my head I'm still working on things I want to have accomplished by the end of the year. I wanted to…Sun, 06 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMTpersonalrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/cisco-live-2012-san-diego/https://rickmur.com/cisco-live-2012-san-diego/That was it! My work life has an absolute peak every year and that's when I'm again fortunate enough to visit Cisco Live in the US. This year it was held in San Diego, California. I flew in on Saturday with 2 colleagues on LA and drove to San Diego after a quick tour around…Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMTciscolivenetworkerssan diegoworkrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/ccie-datacenter-techtorial-notes/https://rickmur.com/ccie-datacenter-techtorial-notes/The CCIE Datacenter techtorial was a very good session giving a good overview about the contents of the exam. I will not focus on the technologies in this article, but only on the specifics that I wrote down during the session. This means you will only find details about the exam…Wed, 13 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMTcciecertificationciscodatacenterliverick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/bras-on-juniper-mx/https://rickmur.com/bras-on-juniper-mx/One of the latest features on the Juniper MX-series devices is the BRAS functionality. The first functionality (automatically configuring interfaces) has been available since a long time, but most BRAS features have been introduced last year in JUNOS 11.x releases. With JUNOS…Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMTbngbrasbsrdhcpdynamichqosjunipermxqosradiusservice providerservice provider environmentstriorick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/cciedatacenter/https://rickmur.com/cciedatacenter/The long rumored, highly expected and very desired has finally been released and it’s a beast! Since the release of the Nexus platform there has been talk about when these platforms were to be introduced in a CCIE track. With the introduction of UCS in 2009 this became an even…Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMTccieccie datacenterccie dccertificationdatacenterfcnexusstoragetroubleshootingucsvicvmwarevnicrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/fast-restoration-on-ip-mpls-fast-reroute/https://rickmur.com/fast-restoration-on-ip-mpls-fast-reroute/Service providers that have a lot of real-time traffic through their network, like mobile network operators (MNOs), are very keen on a fast restoration of service once a failure occurs in the network. In the past a lot of networks were based on SDH/SONET transport networks, which…Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMTautomatic failoverfrriosjunosmobile network operatorsmplsrsvp protocolservice providerservice provider networkrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/jncie-ent-lab-set-up/https://rickmur.com/jncie-ent-lab-set-up/As I’m preparing for the various exams (up to the Expert lab) of the Enterprise Routing & Switching track of Juniper I needed a lab to support this. In this blogpost I would like to explain my choice of hardware and software and how I’m going to use this set-up to prepare for the…Sun, 11 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMTcertificationexj-netjnciejncie-entjuniperlabpacket-modeset-upsrxrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)https://rickmur.com/my-certification-journey-j-net/https://rickmur.com/my-certification-journey-j-net/This blog has also been published to the Juniper J-Net community portal In 2005, when I was 18 years old, I finished high school I already knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to start a career in IT! The only thing I didn’t know was in what direction I wanted to go. So, I did a…Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMTcertificationcompany networkstechnical certificationsrick@mur.eu (Rick Mur)