OpenConfig, RESTCONF, and Automated Cable Verification at iNOG9

Last week I was in Dublin for business which just so happened to overlap with iNOG9, which was last Wednesday. As luck would have it, I had the opportunity to speak at iNOG9 about network automation.

You can watch the video if you want to see the presentation, but the three mini demos I gave were:

  1. Cable verification on Juniper vMX devices using Ansible
  2. Automating BGP on IOS-XR using OpenConfig BGP models using Ansible
  3. Using Postman to explore and demo the new RESTCONF/YANG interface on IOS XE.

Few words about each.

Cable verification

Usually when the topic of network automation comes up, configuration management is assumed. It should not be as there are so many other forms and types of automation. Here I showed how we can verify cabling (via neighbors) is accurate on a Junos vMX topology. Of course, the hard part here is having the discipline to define the desired cabling topology first. Note: links for sample playbooks can be found below on the GitHub repo.

OpenConfig BGP Automation with Ansible

I built a custom Ansible module built around NETCONF (ncclient), but uses the OpenConfig YANG model for global BGP configuration. For example, this is the Continue reading

A Triple-Provider Vagrant Environment

In this post, I’d like to share with you some techniques I used to build a triple-provider Vagrant environment—that is, a Vagrant environment that will work unmodified with multiple backend providers. In this case, it will work (mostly) unmodified with AWS, VirtualBox, and the VMware provider (tested with Fusion, but should work with Workstation as well). I know this may not seem like a big deal, but it marks something of a milestone for me.

Since I first started using Vagrant a couple of years ago, I’ve—as expected—gotten better and better at leveraging this tool in a flexible way. You can see this in the evolution of the Vagrant environments found in my GitHub “learning-tools” repository, where I went from hard-coded data values to pulling data from external YAML files.

One thing I’d been shooting for was a Vagrantfile that would work with multiple backend providers without any modifications, and tonight I managed to build an environment that works with AWS, VirtualBox, and VMware Fusion. There are still a couple of hard-coded values, but the vast majority of information is pulled from an external YAML file.

Let’s take a look at the Vagrantfile that I created. Here’s Continue reading

OpenConfig, RESTCONF, and Automated Cable Verification at iNOG9

Last week I was in Dublin for business which just so happened to overlap with iNOG9, which was last Wednesday. As luck would have it, I had the opportunity to speak at iNOG9 about network automation.

You can watch the video if you want to see the presentation, but the three mini demos I gave were:

  1. Cable verification on Juniper vMX devices using Ansible
  2. Automating BGP on IOS-XR using OpenConfig BGP models using Ansible
  3. Using Postman to explore and demo the new RESTCONF/YANG interface on IOS XE.

Few words about each.

Cable verification

Usually when the topic of network automation comes up, configuration management is assumed. It should not be as there are so many other forms and types of automation. Here I showed how we can verify cabling (via neighbors) is accurate on a Junos vMX topology. Of course, the hard part here is having the discipline to define the desired cabling topology first. Note: links for sample playbooks can be found below on the GitHub repo.

OpenConfig BGP Automation with Ansible

I built a custom Ansible module built around NETCONF (ncclient), but uses the OpenConfig YANG model for global BGP configuration. For example, this is the Continue reading

The Yahoo-email-search story is garbage

Joseph Menn (Reuters) is reporting that Yahoo! searched emails for the NSA. The details of the story are so mangled that it's impossible to say what's actually going on.

The first paragraph says this:
Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails
The second paragraph says this:
The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts
Well? Which is it? Did they "search incoming emails" or did they "scan mail accounts"? Whether we are dealing with emails in transmit, or stored on the servers, is a BFD (Big Fucking Detail) that you can't gloss over and confuse in a story like this. Whether searches are done indiscriminately across all emails, or only for specific accounts, is another BFD.

The third paragraph seems to resolve this, but it doesn't:
Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency's request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.
Who are these "some surveillance experts"? Why is the Continue reading

Applied Micro Finds ARM Server Footing, Reaches Higher

One of the frustrating facts about peddling any new technology is that the early adopters that discover a strategic advantage in that technology want to keep that secret all to themselves. Word of mouth and real-world use cases are big factors in the adoption of any new technology, and anything that hampers this actually causes the adoption to move slower than it otherwise might.

But eventually, despite all of the secrecy, there comes a time when the critical mass is reached and adoption proceeds apace. We have been waiting for that moment for a long time now for 64-bit ARM …

Applied Micro Finds ARM Server Footing, Reaches Higher was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

WikiLeaks plans to dump more sensitive files on US election

WikiLeaks is promising to release secret documents relating to the U.S. election, at a time when there are already questions over whether Russian hackers are feeding the site information.WikiLeaks will publish the documents "every week for the next 10 weeks" and the topics include the U.S. election, war, arms, Google, and mass surveillance, site founder Julian Assange said on Tuesday in a press conference.  All the U.S. election documents will be released before Nov. 8, when voters cast their ballots. The leaks pertain to "U.S. power factions and how they operate," Assange said. However, he denied deliberately trying to sabotage Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's election chances.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WikiLeaks plans to dump more sensitive files on US election

WikiLeaks is promising to release secret documents relating to the U.S. election, at a time when there are already questions over whether Russian hackers are feeding the site information.WikiLeaks will publish the documents "every week for the next 10 weeks" and the topics include the U.S. election, war, arms, Google, and mass surveillance, site founder Julian Assange said on Tuesday in a press conference.  All the U.S. election documents will be released before Nov. 8, when voters cast their ballots. The leaks pertain to "U.S. power factions and how they operate," Assange said. However, he denied deliberately trying to sabotage Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's election chances.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM invests $200 million in Watson IoT AI business

The venerable 105-year-old IBM may be a global company, but while it has operated important labs and offices overseas, its business units have always been headquartered in the U.S. Until December of last year, that is, when it opened the new global headquarters for the IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) unit in Munich, Germany. Now, faced with dramatically increasing global demand for Watson IoT solutions and services, Big Blue is doubling down on that investment.On Tuesday, IBM announced a $200 million investment in the Watson IoT headquarters, marking one of the company's largest investments in Europe in its history. The investment is part of the $3 billion IBM has earmarked to bring Watson cognitive computing to IoT. IBM says the move is a response to escalating demand from customers who are looking to transform their operations using a combination of IoT and artificial intelligence technologies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CIO eyes digital services in SD-WAN push

Earlier this year, Earthlink CEO Joe Eazor realized he needed a CIO to upgrade the company’s clunky legacy software and make its sales process more appealing to business customers browsing the website. Enter Jay Ferro, who led a digital transformation at the American Cancer Society (ACS) before joining EarthLink in July.Serving in a dual role as CIO and chief product officer, Ferro will also help develop and pitch peers on EarthLink’s managed network products, including a new software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CIO eyes digital services in SD-WAN push

Earlier this year, Earthlink CEO Joe Eazor realized he needed a CIO to upgrade the company’s clunky legacy software and make its sales process more appealing to business customers browsing the website. Enter Jay Ferro, who led a digital transformation at the American Cancer Society (ACS) before joining EarthLink in July.Serving in a dual role as CIO and chief product officer, Ferro will also help develop and pitch peers on EarthLink’s managed network products, including a new software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows 10 growth comes to screeching stop

Microsoft's Windows 10 beat a retreat last month, losing user share for the first time since its debut more than a year ago.According to U.S. metrics vendor Net Applications, Windows 10 lost half a percentage point in user share during September, ending the month on 22.5% of all personal computers.Windows 10 powered 24.8% of all machines running Windows: The difference between the user share of all PCs and only those running Windows originated with the fact that Windows powered 91% of all personal computers, not 100%.September's decline was the first since Microsoft officially launched Windows 10 in July 2015, and the only since January 2015, months before when Microsoft offered only a preview to beta testers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ITC probes Apple memory supplier for patent infringement

The International Trade Commission (ITC) has opened a patent infringement investigation on SK hynix, the world's second largest memory chip manufacturer, based on claims that it infringed on six U.S. patents.Second only to Samsung in global market share for DRAM shipments, Hynix is also the world's fifth-largest semiconductor company. SK hynix memory is used by Apple in some MacBook and MacBook Pro computers and in its iPhones. The memory is also in Asus' Nexus 7 tablet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5G will need small cells, so Nokia is sending in the drones

If you want 5G, there’s a good chance you'll need a small cell nearby to deliver it. Putting up that cell may be hard because of a host of problems, but Nokia Bell Labs thinks it can solve some of them with drones and tiny solar panels.Nokia's F-Cell is an experimental LTE small cell that doesn't need any wires. It gets power from solar panels on its surface and communicates with the carrier's core network over a high-speed wireless connection. No one even needs to climb up on a roof to install it: The company recently delivered an F-Cell to the roof of one of its buildings in Sunnyvale, California, using a drone.F-Cells won’t start showing up everywhere tomorrow, but anything to speed up small-cell deployment could make a big difference when 5G starts going live in 2020. The next generation of cellular will probably require dense networks of small cells to deliver the gigabit speeds being promised, and carriers will face both legal and technical hurdles when they try to put them up.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New insulin pump flaws highlights security risks from medical devices

Medical device manufacturer Animas, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, is warning diabetic patients who use its OneTouch Ping insulin pumps about security issues that could allow hackers to deliver unauthorized doses of insulin.The vulnerabilities were discovered by Jay Radcliffe, a security researcher at Rapid7 who is a Type I diabetic and user of the pump. The flaws primarily stem from a lack of encryption in the communication between the device's two parts: the insulin pump itself and the meter-remote that monitors blood sugar levels and remotely tells the pump how much insulin to administer.The pump and the meter use a proprietary wireless management protocol through radio frequency communications that are not encrypted. This exposes the system to several attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New insulin pump flaws highlights security risks from medical devices

Medical device manufacturer Animas, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, is warning diabetic patients who use its OneTouch Ping insulin pumps about security issues that could allow hackers to deliver unauthorized doses of insulin.The vulnerabilities were discovered by Jay Radcliffe, a security researcher at Rapid7 who is a Type I diabetic and user of the pump. The flaws primarily stem from a lack of encryption in the communication between the device's two parts: the insulin pump itself and the meter-remote that monitors blood sugar levels and remotely tells the pump how much insulin to administer.The pump and the meter use a proprietary wireless management protocol through radio frequency communications that are not encrypted. This exposes the system to several attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel looks beyond x86, puts 64-bit ARM processor in new FPGA chip

It seems like the chip war between Intel and ARM is slowly winding down, at least for the time being.Intel for decades has doggedly sworn by chips based on its homegrown x86 architecture, but the company is putting a 64-bit ARM processor in its new Stratix 10 FPGA (field-programmable gate array), which was announced on Tuesday.The FPGA -- based on Altera technology -- can be reprogrammed to do a wide variety of server or network tasks. It can also run algorithms for machine learning.In a larger context, the chip points to a long-term strategy of Intel thinking beyond x86 and warming up to other architectures as it looks to shed its reliance on PCs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel looks beyond x86, puts 64-bit ARM processor in new FPGA chip

It seems like the chip war between Intel and ARM is slowly winding down, at least for the time being.Intel for decades has doggedly sworn by chips based on its homegrown x86 architecture, but the company is putting a 64-bit ARM processor in its new Stratix 10 FPGA (field-programmable gate array), which was announced on Tuesday.The FPGA -- based on Altera technology -- can be reprogrammed to do a wide variety of server or network tasks. It can also run algorithms for machine learning.In a larger context, the chip points to a long-term strategy of Intel thinking beyond x86 and warming up to other architectures as it looks to shed its reliance on PCs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: The telco quality transformation

The telecoms industry has two fundamental issues whose resolution is a multi-decade business and technology transformation effort. This re-engineering programme turns the current “quantities with quality” model into a “quantities of quality” one. Those who prosper will have to overcome a powerfully entrenched incumbent “bandwidth” paradigm, whereby incentives are initially strongly against investing in the inevitable and irresistible future.Recently I had the pleasure of meeting the CEO of a fast-growing vendor of software-defined networking (SDN) technology. The usual ambition for SDN is merely internal automation and cost optimisation of network operation. In contrast, their offering enables telcos to develop new “bandwidth on demand” services. The potential for differentiated products that are more responsive to demand makes the investment case for SDN considerably more compelling. —CircleID

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