Worth Reading: Is Openstack becoming Trumpstack?

Tired of hearing about Pets vs. Cattle? Most of us are. The underlying concept is important. While OpenStack, and most private and public cloud platforms, is geared towards workloads that have resiliency build into the application, many of the folks in the industry just aren’t there yet. The question comes to OpenStack advocates now: Should we push away potential adopters of the platform because they may have workloads that aren’t entirely appropriate for a typical “cloud” infrastructure? —DiscoPosse

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Agile

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Worth Reading: Go versus Python performance

It may be that I’m doing something in Python that’s an obvious don’t do or that I’m simply using a very computationally expensive way to achieve my goal, and any experienced Python programmer would suggest I did it a different way. However, for something so simple to see an order of magnitude difference between the two languages either makes Python look very slow, or Go look very fast, or maybe a bit of each, at least for this particular calculation. —Moving Packets

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Worth Reading: Remember the lead time

Disaster recovery is one of those important things that seldom seems to get the attention it deserves. My experience is that most large organizations, and some smaller organizations, have disaster recovery plans that at least get partial testing. —Netcraftsmen

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Reaction: Forced Updates

The controversy over Microsoft forcing upgrades on users is in the news again, as the EFF has posted an article once again about the forced upgrades to Windows 10, and the various data collection schemes Microsoft has put in place. I understand the concern, but… A couple of points to consider, starting with forced upgrades—

When I worked in customer support I sometimes wished we had forced upgrades (rather than paid ones, in fact). There are so many times someone doesn’t upgrade past an obvious bug. We would spend hours working around the bug because they didn’t want to upgrade. It probably cost the company I worked for millions of dollars in support a year so we could refrain from saying, “take two upgrades and call me in the morning.”

As an operator, I see the other side of this story—if I don’t need the upgrade, or I’m not hitting the bug, I shouldn’t need to upgrade.

The world of IoT—in fact, the world in which we live, where millions of machines are used as botnets without the knowledge of their owners—is pretty frightening without forced upgrades. I wonder how many millions of dollars a year machines with Continue reading

Worth Reading: Apcera NATS messaging service

With the ever-increasing amounts of data sent and received by today’s applications, developers are turning to tried-and-true technologies to help them address message brokering across different applications, or between different microservices within an application. Stripping the complexity from message brokering at scale is something which Apcera aims to accomplish with its Go-based message broker service NATS. —The New Stack

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Worth Reading: One old guy’s advice

Having grown in my career since college, I have learned many lessons. I started out in computers back in 1986, at the precipice of the “Clone” era. I cut my teeth and my hands by installing chips on memory cards and motherboards, replacing 5.25” floppy discs, and dealing with the jumble of cables on Dual 5MB Winchester hard drives that cost and weighed an arm and a leg. —virtually tied to my desktop

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Worth Reading: IPv6 performance (again)

Every so often I hear the claim that some service or other has deliberately chosen not to support IPv6, and the reason cited is not because of some technical issue, or some cost or business issue, but simply because the service operator is of the view that IPv6 offers an inferior level service as compared to IPv4, and by offering the service over IPv6 they would be exposing their clients to an inferior level of performance of the service. But is this really the case? Is IPv6 an inferior cousin of IPv4 in terms of service performance? —CircleID

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On the ‘net: I2RS on Packet Pushers

While Greg was at the IETF in Berlin, Sue Hares and I—the two current co-chairs of the I2RS working group—had a general discussion around what the big idea is and where the working group is headed. You can listen to the recording at Packet Pushers.

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VIRL on Packet Cloud—Some thoughts

For the last couple of days I’ve been messing with Cisco’s VIRL on Packet’s bare metal service. I don’t do enough labbing now to spend multiple thousands of dollars building a lab in my house, and I want something that I can use from anywhere without opening a lot of holes in my home network when I’m on the road, so the Packet service seems like something useful to get running.

Forthwith, some observations and hints for those who might be thinking about doing this. Some of this might be obvious to other folks, I know, but—maybe me writing them down here will be somehow helpful, and save other folks some time.

An observation—this all feels a little (okay, maybe a lot) clunky’ish. There’s a lot of steps, it takes a long time to set up, etc. There are a lot of moving parts, and they interconnect in interesting ways. Maybe this will all get better over time, but for now, if you’re going to do this, plan on spending at least a half a day, probably more, just getting all the pieces to work.

Some places I ran into trouble, and things I needed to configure that I had Continue reading

Worth Reading: Photographing the Internet

Shuli Hallak photographs the Internet. And when we say she photographs it, we’re not just talking about cool pictures of wires (although those are in her portfolio) but entire worlds that are up and running right under our noses but remain invisible. Her work is helping to demystify the sometimes complicated language surrounding the open Internet and is building a new understanding of how important the open Internet is for people everywhere. —Internet Society

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Do what you love?

How many times have you heard this? Or this?

Two of the most oft repeated, and driven home, ideas in modern times are be true to yourself and do what you love. But just because they’re oft repeated and driven home doesn’t mean they are actually true. The problem with both statements is they have just enough truth to sound really plausible—and yet they are both simplistic enough to be dangerous when taken raw.

Or maybe it’s just that I’m a grumpy old man who’s been in a bad mood for the last couple of weeks, and misery likes company.

Let’s try to put some reality into the do what you love statement.

Sometimes you’re just not very good at what you love to do. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an artist. And then a musician. Apparently there are no real jobs for artists or musicians with my somewhat mediocre skills in these two areas. I just have to face it—I’m never going to be a professional basketball player, either. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you love something, you just don’t have the skills to master it.

Sometimes there’s just no market for what you Continue reading

Worth Reading: A new bit flipping attack

We introduce Flip Feng Shui (FFS), a new exploitation vector which allows an attacker to induce bit flips overarbitrary physical memory in a fully controlled way. FFS relies on hardware bugs to induce bit flips over memoryand on the ability to surgically control the physical memory layout to corrupt attacker-targeted data anywhere inthe software stack. We show FFS is possible today with very few constraints on the target data, by implementingan instance using the Rowhammer bug and memory deduplication (an OS feature widely deployed in production).Memory deduplication allows an attacker to reverse-map any physical page into a virtual page she owns as long as the page’s contents are known. Rowhammer, in turn, allows an attacker to flip bits in controlled (initially unknown) locations in the target page. -(PDF) Usenix via Schneier on Security

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Worth Reading: Big data is making us more more boring

The world today is awash in data. In 2015, mankind produced as much information as was created in all previous years of human civilization. Every time we send a message, make a call, or complete a transaction, we leave digital traces. We are quickly approaching what Italian writer Italo Calvino presciently called the “memory of the world”: a full digital copy of our physical universe. —MarketWatch

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DC Fabric Segment Routing Use Case (4)

In the last post in this series, I discussed using SR labels to direct traffic from one flow onto, and from other flows off of, a particular path through a DC fabric. Throughout this series, though, I’ve been using node (or prefix) SIDs to direct the traffic. There is another kind of SID in SR that needs to be considered—the adj-sid. Let’s consider the same fabric used throughout this series—

So far, I’ve been describing the green marked path using the node or (loopback) prefix-sids: [A,F,G,D,E]. What’s interesting is I could describe the same path using adj-sids: [a->f,f->g,g->d,d->e], where the vector in each hop is described by a single entry on the SR stack. There is, in fact, no difference between the two ways of describing this path, as there is only one link between each pair of routers in the path. This means everything discussed in this series so far could be accomplished with either a set of adj SIDs ore a set of node (prefix) SIDs.

Given this, why are both types of SIDs defined? Assume we zoom in a little on the border leaf node in this topology, and find—

Assume—

• Router E, a ToR on the Continue reading

Worth Reading: What Sauron Tells Us

Last week, both Symantec and Kaspersky released a series of reports on a nation-state malware attacker dubbed alternately “Strider” or “Sauron.” Although neither formally attributes the attack to any particular country, reading between the lines it is pretty clear: The U.S. was Here. Attributing malcode is always questionable, and there is some possibility this is not the (rather excellent) work of the NSA but instead some the efforts of a FVEY ally. But—given the quality, the modular nature, target selection, and lots of other details—the smart money is on this being from our friends at Fort Meade. If we assume that it is, what does this mean? —Lawfare

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Worth Reading: Lawless government hacking

In our society, the rule of law sets limits on what government can and cannot do, no matter how important its goals. To give a simple example, even when chasing a fleeing murder suspect, the police have a duty not to endanger bystanders. The government should pay the same care to our safety in pursuing threats online, but right now we don’t have clear, enforceable rules for government activities like hacking and “digital sabotage.” And this is no abstract question—these actions increasingly endanger everyone’s security. —Deep Links

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Pelican

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Worth Reading: Hosts versus the network

There are a number of ways to view the relationship between hosts and the network in the Internet. One view is that this is an example of two sets of cooperating entities that share a common goal: hosts and the network both want content to be delivered. Both have an interest in seeing this delivery happen quickly, efficiently and without fuss. This leads to one view of the relationship between hosts and the network: the more the elements of the network provide the host with a description of their capabilities and connectivity, and the more the host provides the network with a description of the desired treatment of their traffic flow, the more harmonious the relationship, and the better the carriage service can attune its service response to match the host’s requirements, and vice versa. —Potaroo

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Worth Reading: Reopening the going dark debate

Just over a week ago, at the BlackHat hacker convention in Las Vegas, Ivan Krstić, Head of Security Engineering and Architecture at Apple gave a talk entitled “Behind the scenes of iOS Security,” the slides of which are available here. It’s a historic talk for a couple of reasons. First, Apple is traditionally very secretive about how it technically does security on its devices. Apple also announced its first bug bounty program. So far, so newsworthy. But something else happened at that talk. Unbeknownst to the presenter or anybody in the audience, Apple just reopened the “Going Dark” dispute between the FBI and the privacy community, and it turned the entire dispute on its head. —Lawfare

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