Worth Reading: BGP as a southbound API

BGP is a very scalable protocol. It’s used the world over to exchange routes and keep the Internet running smoothly. But it has other power as well. It can be extended to operate in other ways beyond the original specification. Unlike rigid protocols like RIP or OSPF, BGP was designed in part to be extended and expanded as needs changes. IS-IS is a very similar protocol in that respect. It can be upgraded and adjusted to work with both old and new systems at the same time. —Networking Nerd

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Worth Reading: Are NVMe fabrics in your future?

NVMeF promises both a huge gain in system performance and new ways to configure systems. To understand what this means, we have to separate NVMe from its current implementation that uses direct PCIe connects. The PCIe approach arose a few years back from the then top-tier persistent storage, the flash card, which had reached the limit of SCSI-based operations due to IO stack overhead and interrupt handling problems. —Network Computing

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Hilton Head

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Worth Reading: You can’t do everything yourself

You’ve become an operational bottleneck, slowing down all of IT. Projects and change requests stack up at your desk because you have reached your scaling limit. You’re overworked and stressed out from all the things you’ve taken on. —Packet Pushers

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Worth Reading: The bias built in at Facebook

But “surfaced by an algorithm” is not a defense of neutrality, because algorithms aren’t neutral. Algorithms are often presented as an extension of natural sciences like physic or biology. While these algorithms also use data, math and computation, they are a fountain of bias and slants — of a new kind. —NYT

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What is a Failure Domain?

“No, I wouldn’t do that, it will make the failure domain too large…”
“We need to divide this failure domain up…”

Okay, great—we all know we need to use failure domains, because without them our networks will be unstable, too complex, and all that stuff, right? But what, precisely, is a failure domain? It seems to have something to do with aggregation, because just about every network design book in the world says things like, “aggregating routes breaks up failure domains.” It also seems to have something to do with flooding domains in link state protocols, because we’re often informed that you need to put in flooding domain boundaries to break up large failure domains. Maybe these two things contain a clue: what is common between flooding domain boundaries and aggregating reachability information?

Hiding information.

But how does hiding information create failure domain boundaries?

If Router B is aggregating 2001:db8:0:1::/64 and 2001:db8:0:2::/64 to 2001:db8::/61, then changes in the more specific routes will be hidden from Router A. This hiding of information means a failure of one of these two more specific routes does not cause Router A to recalculate what it knows about reachability in the network. Hence a Continue reading

Worth Reading: Inside the million machine clickfraud botnet

Online advertising is a multi-billion dollar business mostly ran by Google, Yahoo or Bing via AdSense-like programs. The current generation of clickbots such as the Redirector.Paco Trojan have taken abuse to a whole new level, burning through companies’ advertising budget at an unprecedented pace. —Bitdefender

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Worth Reading: The spam value chain

There’s much more to spam than just the email! There are three key stages – advertising, click support, and realization – supported by a whole value chain. —the morning paper

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BGP Security and SPAM

Spam might seem like an annoyance in the US and other areas where bandwidth is paid for by the access rate—and what does spam have to do with BGP security? In many areas of the world, however, spam makes email practically unusable. When you’re paying for Internet access by the byte transmitted or received, spam costs real money. The normal process for combating spam involves a multi-step process, one step of which is to assess the IP address of the mail server’s previous activity for a history of originating spam. In order to avoid classifiers that rely on the source IP address, spammers have turned to hijacking IP address space for short periods of time. Since this address space is normally used for something other than email (or it’s not used at all), there is no history on which a spam detection system can rely.

The evidence for spam related hijacking, however, is largely anecdotal, primarily based in word of mouth and the rare widely reported incidents. How common are these hijacks, really? What sort of address space is really used? To answer this question, a group of researchers from Symantec and the Qatar Computing Research Center undertook a project Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Cloud Pendulum

The cloud as we know today will change, morph from one form into something else. The cloud computing will disaggregate in the not too distant future back to a world of distributed computing. And then go back to centralize. Like a pendulum. —New Stack

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Worth Reading: What network management can learn from Google Maps

Those of you who have been following my blog posts know that I find Network Management tools intensely frustrating, basically because in 25+ years they seem to have evolved so little. I comprehend the economics behind network management products; it is a small market compared to Servers and now Security, so budgets cap R&D. Even so, I’m left feeling that surely we could do better, a lot better! —NetCraftsmen

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What Language Should You Learn?

So you’ve decided, for all the reasons given in my last post on this topic, that you want to learn to code. The next, obvious, question is: what language should you learn? Remember the goal isn’t just to learn to code, but to learn the mindset, tools, and structure of coding; to dog past the simple ability to kick off scripts, and actually pick up an overview of the ground level “stuff” necessary, the “stuff” that is going to transfer from being able to code to being a good engineer. You don’t want to waste your time just learning a new skill, you want to what you learn to intersect with what your main learning goals are in a way that ultimately supports them.

If you’re a bit confused by all this mumbo-jumbo, go back and take a look at one of the first posts on this blog: Jack of All Trades.

To answer the question—which languages should I learn—I need to look beyond what’s “easiest to learn,” or “most popular right now,” or any of the “standard” ways people make this sort of decision. To relate this back to network engineering terms, I want to learn routing, not how Continue reading

Worth Reading: Ambry Open Source Object Store

Today, we are announcing that Ambry is now available as an open source project under the Apache 2.0 license. Ambry is optimized to store and serve media. Media content has become critical for any website to increase user engagement, virality and monetization. Media pipelines will need to be supported by more companies, especially with the advancement of video and virtual reality. -LinkedIn Engineering Blog

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Worth Reading: Moore’s law is dead

But in a few years technology companies may have to work harder to bring us advanced new use cases for computers. The continual cramming of more silicon transistors onto chips, known as Moore’s Law, has been the feedstock of exuberant innovation in computing. But it looks to be slowing to a halt. —Technology Review

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Worth Reading: the “buy now” button

Enter the “Buy Now” button. A team of researchers from UC Berkeley and Case Western have published a study showing that customers think they are getting traditional ownership rights when they buy digital media online, even when a vendor’s site includes legal terms (often buried in click-wrap agreements) purporting to limit those rights. —deeplinks

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Worth Reading: IPv6 at LinkedIn

One of the advantages of end-to-end control with a mobile product is the ability to do effective measurements at scale. I wanted to share our RUM-based measuring techniques and also encourage other folks in the content/application space to do so. As a summary, we are seeing 10% adoption of IPv6 from our member base which is very much in line with what Google is reporting as well. —APNIC

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Beach Bench

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Worth Reading: The death of TRILL

Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) was proposed as a solution to the complexity of spanning tree. Radia Perlman realized that her bridging loop solution wouldn’t scale in modern networks. So she worked with the IEEE to solve the problem with TRILL. We also received Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) along the way as an alternative solution to the layer 2 issues with spanning tree. The motive was sound, but the industry has rejected the premise entirely. —Networking Nerd

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Worth Reading: The API fight everyone loses

Attorneys for the Oracle and Google companies presented opening statements this week in a high-stakes copyright case about the use of application-programming interfaces, or APIs. As Oracle eagerly noted, there are potentially billions of dollars on the line; accordingly, each side has brought “world-class attorneys,” as Judge William Alsup noted to the jury. And while each company would prefer to spend their money elsewhere, these are businesses that can afford to spend years and untold resources in the courtroom. -via deeplinks

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Universal Scaling and Complexity

The universal scaling law is a model designed to help engineers understand transaction based systems, particularly databases and applications. What could a transaction based system have to do with network design? After all, networks aren’t really transaction based, are they? Or maybe they are…

Let’s ignore the data flowing through the network for a moment (though the universal scaling law might provide an interesting way to look at packets or flows per second as transactions), and focus just on the control plane. When we look at the control plane, we find a routing protocol or a centralized controller that accepts information about changes in the network topology (and other data points), and builds a model of the network topology which can be used to forward traffic. Questions we can ask about the state being handled by the control plane include things like: How many changes are there? What is the rate at which this information arrives? How many changes might be present in the system at any given time? How many devices participate in the control plane?

If these all sound like questions about state, one of the three “legs” of the complexity model (state, optimization, surface), that’s because they Continue reading