Worth Reading: Intel’s ticking time bomb

It started somewhat innocently. Cisco released a field notice that there was an issue with some signal clocks on a range of their networking devices. This by itself was a huge issue. There had been rumblings about this issue for a few months. Some proactive replacement of affected devices to test things. Followed by panicked customer visits when the news broke on February 2nd. Cisco looked like they were about to get a black eye. —The Networking Nerd

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Worth Reading: How long does it take to steal a credit card number?

Using the discovered card details to make an international money transfer took just 27 minutes from creating the transfer account to cash in hand (in this case in India, from funds initiating in the UK). That’s fast enough that there’s very little time for a bank to detect fraud and reverse the payment. Digging a little deeper though, there are also some interesting lessons to be learned about unintended emergent behaviours in complex systems, misaligned incentives, and the state of card payment security in general. —The Morning Paper

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Metacognitive

If I could choose just a handful of skills you must learn to be a successful engineer, being metacognitive would certainly be among them. What is metacognition? OOne of my favorite books on the virtue ethic applied to mental skills defines it thus—

Metacognitive people are concerned not just with what they need to know but with what thinking strategies are best suited to achieve that end. —Philip Dow, Virtuous Minds

The concept is simple. Implementation, as always, is the hard part. Particularly as engineers, we spend a lot of time thinking about technique. We ask questions like—

• How do I configure this?
• How would I use this technology?
• What is the problem here?
• Why would I want to do it that way?

These technos focused questions are great for solving day to day, or even no-so-day-to-day problems. But they aren’t so great for mental growth? Why not? Imagine you are tasked with cutting wood for a living. You might start out by simply cutting the wood. You place a piece on the block, swing the axe, and the splits fall off. You can consider this the what of cutting wood (or, for those who are interested in philosophy, the Continue reading

Worth Reading: The inconvenience of privacy

Unfortunately, it is not easy to assess the weight of privacy losses. Typically, in the online world, no small privacy loss will create a catastrophe. One business tracking one click of yours is not a big deal. But privacy losses accumulate, and the entirety of what you have revealed online through browsing, clicking, buying and liking, can paint a frighteningly detailed portrait of you. Privacy losses are like ecologic damages or health deterioration: no one act of littering, no one puff of a cigarette will bring about disaster, but the sum of them through time might. —Connecting

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Worth Reading: IBM should buy…

We spend a lot of time contemplating what technologies will be deployed at the heart of servers, storage, and networks and thereby form the foundation of the next successive generations of platforms in the datacenter for running applications old and new. While technology is inherently interesting, we are cognizant of the fact that the companies producing technology need global reach and a certain critical mass. —The Next Platform

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On the ‘net: I2RS Architecture

The last post on the topic of interface to the routing system (I2RS) discussed use cases; this one will provide an overview of the I2RS architecture, and then consider some challenges in the neighborhood of I2RS. —ECI

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Worth Reading: A Field Guide to Internet Governance in 2017

The global debate on Internet Governance has come a long way since 2005. In the 12 years following the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, governments have paid more attention than ever to policies that can promote economic development, security, and innovation. You may not have felt the progress, however; if it is hard to see a reduction in the confusion and “soup of forums” described on this site nearly six years ago, this is because as we have made progress, the scope of the issues addressed have increased to match. On the spectrum between a sprint and a marathon, Internet Governance may have become the Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race. —CircleID

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Worth Reading: Inside the big Supermicro deal

Among the major companies that design and sell servers with their own brands, which are called original equipment manufacturers or OEMs, and those that co-design machines with customers and then make them, which are called original design manufacturers or ODMs, Supermicro stands apart. It does not fall precisely into either category. The company makes system components, like motherboards and enclosures, for those who want to build their own systems or those who want to sell systems to others, and it also makes complete systems, sold in onesies or twosies or sold by the hundreds of racks. —The Next Platform

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Blocking a DDoS Upstream

In the first post on DDoS, I considered some mechanisms to disperse an attack across multiple edges (I actually plan to return to this topic with further thoughts in a future post). The second post considered some of the ways you can scrub DDoS traffic. This post is going to complete the basic lineup of reacting to DDoS attacks by considering how to block an attack before it hits your network—upstream.

The key technology in play here is flowspec, a mechanism that can be used to carry packet level filter rules in BGP. The general idea is this—you send a set of specially formatted communities to your provider, who then automagically uses those communities to create filters at the inbound side of your link to the ‘net. There are two parts to the flowspec encoding, as outlined in RFC5575bis, the match rule and the action rule. The match rule is encoded as shown below—

There are a wide range of conditions you can match on. The source and destination addresses are pretty straight forward. For the IP protocol and port numbers, the operator sub-TLVs allow you to specify a set of conditions to match on, and whether to AND the Continue reading

Worth Reading: Outage at Git

A short outage this week on the GitLab hosted code service struck a combination of fear and sympathy across the tech community and offered a sharp reminder of the importance of testing your backups again and again (and again). On Tuesday, a GitLab administrator had accidentally erased a directory of live production data during a routine database replication. In the process of restoring from the last backup, taken six hours prior, the company had discovered that none of its five backup routines worked entirely correctly. The incident report, which GitLab posted online, noted that erasure affected issues and merge requests but not the git repositories themselves. —The New Stack

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Worth Reading: Dynamics on emerging spaces

The article (and the expectations set by the introduction to the paper itself) promise a little more than they deliver in my view – but what we do concretely get is a description of a generative process that can produce distributions like those seen in the real world, with new / novel items appearing at the observed rates and following observed distributions. Previous models have all fallen short in one way or another, so the model does indeed seem to teach us something about the process of generating the new. —The Morning Paper

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Barn Doors

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Worth Reading: There is no “normal” in microservices

There is no “normal” for a microservices environment. And if a groundbreaking November 2016 white paper [PDF], produced by a team of six researchers from the University of Messina, the U.K.’s Newcastle University, and IBM Research, is to be taken at face value, perhaps such a state of equilibrium may never be attained. Every data center, the researchers write, has unique operating requirements. Once microservices are deployed there, the configurations they require become not only unique, but baked into their respective systems. —The New Stack

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Worth Reading: Evolving LTE for 5G

With 5G research progressing at a rapid pace, the standardization process has started in 3GPP. As the most prevalent mobile broadband communication technology worldwide, LTE constitutes an essential piece of the 5G puzzle. As such, its upcoming releases (Rel-14 and Rel-15) are intended to meet as many 5G requirements as possible and address the relevant use cases expected in the 5G era. —Ericsson

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Worth Reading: Security and the Internet of Things

Last year, on October 21, your digital video recorder ­- or at least a DVR like yours ­- knocked Twitter off the internet. Someone used your DVR, along with millions of insecure webcams, routers, and other connected devices, to launch an attack that started a chain reaction, resulting in Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, and many sites going off the internet. You probably didn’t realize that your DVR had that kind of power. But it does. —Schneier on Security

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Worth Reading: IPv6 for the Home Network Nerd

For the more tech savvy, IPv6 does indeed bring fifteen bajillion addresses, so to speak. And while that doesn’t seem like a big deal, it is. For example, most of us at home have gear obscured by NAT. This makes us feel more secure — all these addresses hidden behind a single address feels like a bit of anonymity, and we like that. But private address space and network address translation are features that were created because the Internet was quickly running out of address space. Not because the powers that were felt that a layer of indirection was required to make us more secure. —Ethan Banks

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Leave Your Ego at the Door

You are just about to walk into the interview room. Regardless of whether you are being interviewed, or interviewing—what are you thinking about? Are you thinking about winning? Are you thinking about whining? Or are you thinking about engaging? I have noticed, on many mailing lists, and in many other forums, that interviews in our world have devolved into a contest of egos.

The person on the other side of the table has some certification I don’t care about—how can I prove they are dumb, not as smart as their certification might indicate, or… The person on the other side of the table claims to know some protocol, can I find some bit of information they don’t know? These kinds of questions are really just ego questions—and you need to leave them at the door. This is particularly acute with certifications right now—a lot of people doubt the value of certifications, claiming folks who have them don’t know anything, the certifications are worthless, they don’t reflect the real world, etc.

I will agree that we have a problem with the depth and level of knowledge of network engineers at the moment. We all need to grow up a little, learn Continue reading

Worth Reading: ARM challenges x86 in the cloud

The idea of ARM processors being used in datacenter servers has been kicking around more most of the decade. The low-power architecture dominates the mobile world of smartphones and tablets as well as embedded IoT devices, and with datacenters increasingly consuming more power and generating more heat, the idea of using highly efficient ARM chips in IT infrastructure systems gained steam. —The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: Addressing in 2016

The process of exhausting the remaining pools of IPv4 addresses in each of the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) is continuing. Yet, despite this hiatus in the supply of IPv4 addresses, the Internet continues to grow. The reasons for this growth are changing, however. Personal computers have gone the way of mainframes and are no longer the staple of the consumer IT market. It looks as if laptops are now also feeling the pinch as the mainstream computer industry continues to focus on the smart device market. But even in the personal device sector, we see a market that is no longer expanding at massive rates. —APNIC

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Upcoming Webinar: Open Networking for Large Scale Networks

Shawn Zandi and I are doing a two part webinar over at ipspace.net—

Most modern data centers are still using vendor-driven “future proof” routers and switches with offering lots of (often unnecessary) capabilities. To build large, however, it is often better to build simple—radically simple. This webinar will cover the design components involved in building a data center or cloud fabric using a single, disaggregated device—the way some hyperscale and web scale operators build their networks. The first live session of the webinar will consider the benefits of disaggregated switch, focusing on the components, sources, and challenges in using disaggregated hardware and software in data center fabrics. The second live session will focus on the topologies and design concepts used in large scale data center fabrics using a single switching device as a leaf, spine and superspine switch.

Jump over to ipspace if you want to learn more.

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