Worth Reading: Converged systems hype

Converged systems are a hot commodity in the IT sector these days. But it looks to us like the hype over various kinds of integrated systems that weld servers and storage together into preconfigured stacks including hyperconverged stacks that literally merge the compute and storage layers on the same servers – is just a bit bigger than the appetite for such iron in the datacenters of the world. -The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: What’s the deal with online journalism?

Not very long ago I started answering questions on Quora, the question-and-answer site. My answers are mainly about aviation because that’s my great hobby and one of the few things besides high tech that I really know a lot about. But there was a question last week about Internet news coverage that I felt deserved better answers than it was getting. So I contributed an answer that has been read, so far, only 388 times. I don’t like making a real effort that is so sparsely read. So here, with a little mild editing, is my answer to “What are the flaws in online journalism and media today?” And “How can they be addressed?” -I, Cringely

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Short Cuts

It was going to be a long evening, anyway—the flight check bird was coming in, and both Instrument Landing Systems (ILSs) needed to be tuned up and ready for the test. So we took some downtime, split into two teams, and worked our way through each piece of equipment—Localizer, Glide Slope, each marker in turn, VOR, TACAN—to make certain each was, as far as we could measure, sending the right signals to the right places. If flight check found even the smallest variance off what the ILS systems were supposed to be providing, they could shut the airfield down “until further notice.”

The team I was on was driving across one of the many roads out on the airfield, trying to catch up with the other half of the shop to find out what they had done, and what needed to be done. Off in the distance, we noted someone standing in the middle of a field between the roads, waving vigorously. We changed direction, driving across the bumpy field, through grass as high as the top of the hood (Base Ops was planning a burn, so they’d left the grass to grow a bit higher than normal). As Continue reading

New Blog: Route-SPF

Johnny Britt has started blogging over at route-spf.net (I guess he’s just going to write about link state… ). He’s just put his first post up, linked below. This one is worth watching for good material.

After being recently promoted to a network architect position, I found myself on google attempting to understand what network architecture was really about. I was in this situation primarily because I couldn’t explain to someone outside of IT what I did. I wasn’t even clear if I could properly explain it to someone in the IT field either. Which brought up the real concern, how can I do my job if I don’t understand what my job is?

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Worth Reading: The great 21st century data rush

In the digital age, data is currency and information is the energy that drives the 21st century economy. Today, 46.1 percent of the world’s population is online. These 3.4 billion Internet users collectively generate a significant amount of commercial and personal data that can be stored, collated, and analyzed. This data is the lifeline that charts users’ online identities: it can also be monetized by Internet service providers, social media platforms, and end user applications. As a necessary corollary, control over data and the flow of information has become highly politicized. One who controls this data retains the power to shape the global geopolitical order. -Lawfare

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Worth Reading: Little bits of security

Cloud environments have made some things much easier for development teams and IT organizations. Self-service portals have cut down the amount of “hands on” intervention to spin up new environments for new products. Provisioning of new infrastructure has moved from weeks or days to minutes. One thing that barely changed with this transformation is security. But new techniques and tools are starting to emerge that are moving security to the next level in the Cloud. One of these technologies is called micro-segmentation. -Cloud Security Alliance

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BGP Code Dive (2)

Now that you have a copy of BGP in Go on your machine—it’s tempting to jump right in to asking the code questions, but it’s important to get a sense of how things are structured. In essence, you need to build a mental map of how the functionality of the protocol you already know is related to specific files and structure, so you can start in the right place when finding out how things work. Interacting with an implementation from the initial stages of process bringup, building data structures, and the like isn’t all that profitable. Rather, asking questions of the code is an iterative/interactive process.

Take what you know, form an impression of where you might look to find the answer to a particular question, and, in the process of finding the answer, learn more about the protocol, which will help you find answers more quickly in the future.

So let’s poke around the directory structure a little, think about how BGP works, and think about what might be where. To begin, what might we call the basic functions of BGP? Let me take a shot at a list (if you see things you think should be on here, Continue reading

So you want to be a better network engineer? …

Then you need to read the book Daniel Dib and I just published on LeanPub. It’s called Unintended Features.. From the Introduction:

So you’ve decided you want to be a network engineer—or you’re already you a network engineer, and you want to be a better engineer, to rise to the top, to be among the best, to… Well, you get the idea. The question is, how do you get from where you are now to where you want to be? This short volume is designed to answer just that question. If you’re expecting a book on technology, then you’re in the wrong place. Instead, this is a book about how to build a career in networking technology, including topics such engineering culture, being intentional about your education, thinking skills, and some basic skills you’ll want to develop.

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Worth Reading: Live streaming to 800,000 users

Fewer companies know how to build world spanning distributed services than there are countries with nuclear weapons. Facebook is one of those companies and Facebook Live, Facebook’s new live video streaming product, is one one of those services. -High Scalability

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Independence Day 2016

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Unintended Features

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Worth Reading: Alchemy can’t save Moore’s Law

We don’t have a Moore’s Law problem so much as we have a materials science or alchemy problem. If you believe in materials science, what seems abundantly clear in listening to so many discussions about the end of scale for chip manufacturing processes is that, for whatever reason, the industry as a whole has not done enough investing to discover the new materials that will allow us to enhance or move beyond CMOS chip technology. -The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: Open season

Let’s once more look at this topic again, and start with what we mean by the term “Open Internet.” The expression builds upon a rich pedigree of the term “open” in various contexts. It gives the impression that “open” is some positive attribute, and when we use the expression of the “open Internet”, it seems that we’re lauding it in some way. But are we, and if so, in what way? -CircleID

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Worth Reading: Independence from L2 data centers

We’ve all been there. That “non-disruptive” maintenance window that should “only be a blip”. You sit down at the terminal at 10pm expecting that adding a new server to the MLAG domain or upgrading a single switch will be a simple process, only to lose the rack of dual-attached servers and spend the rest of your Thursday night frantically trying to bring the cluster back online. If I never spend another evening troubleshooting an outage caused by MLAG, I’ll die happy! -Cumulus

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Launch

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Worth Reading: Fishing for a cure to DDoS attacks

There is no way you can equate the importance of the Internet to a vital source of daily nutrients for billions of people. Yet the Internet is no doubt a critical ingredient of modern society. And it’s far from being “overfished.” In fact, the Internet is exploding with promising new use cases. Sadly, the Internet is also exploding with menace. -Data Center Journal

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Worth Reading: APNIC’s cyber threat intellegence

Security automation and cyber threat intelligence can play a significant role by filtering out the noise floor created by unsophisticated and untargeted threats, providing insight to the evolution of sophisticated adversary tradecraft, and validating defensive security and response measures. -APNIC

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Split Tunnel Insecurities

I really dislike corporate VPNs that don’t allow split tunneling—disconnecting from the VPN to print on a local printer, or access a local network attached drive, puts a real crimp in productivity. In the case of services reachable over both IPv6 and IPv4, particularly if the IPv6 path is preferred, split tunneling can be quite dangerous, as explained in RFC7359. Let’s use the network below to illustrate.

In this network, host A is communicating with server B through a VPN, terminated by the VPN concentrator marked as “VPN.” Assume the host is reachable on both 192.0.2.1 and 2001:fb8:0:1::1. The host, the upstream router, the network in the cloud, and the server are all IPv6 reachable. When the host first connects, it will attempt both the IPv6 and IPv4 connections, and choose to use the IPv6 connection (this is what most current operating systems will do).

The problem is: the VPN connection doesn’t support IPv6 at all—it only supports IPv4. Because IPv6 is preferred, the traffic between the host and the server will take the local IPv6 connection, which is not encrypted—the blue dash/dot line—rather than the encrypted IPv4 tunnel—the red dashed line. The user, host, and Continue reading

Worth Reading: The great DevOps train wreck

Well, I see one coming, and I’m raising the alarm. Based on the conversations I’m hearing, it’s becoming dangerously fashionable to say: “All the interesting technology problems in DevOps are solved. We have Docker. We have Kubernetes. We have OpenStack. They’re stable, and they’re widely deployed. All that’s left to do is process transformation, teaching dullard enterprise IT teams how to consume the new-new IT.” -The New Stack

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Worth Reading: Aggregation pixies

What if we could magically fix de-aggregation in IPv4 address space that was handed out in needs-based chunks? You can visualise the magic fix for this being “prefix pixies”, that, every night, when we’re asleep and the Inter-tubes only carry trickles of IP packets, they go around every BGP speaker on the global Internet, and they swap addresses. -APNIC

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