Blogging Workflow

A lot of folks start out to blog, and then quit soon after. Since I started blogging mainly as a way to build some discipline in my writing, I was determined not to let my blog become a cob web, a page that was not updated on a regular basis, I started blogging determined to build a process, or a blogging workflow. I should emphasize at this point that blogging, as all writing, is a habit and a discipline. It’s not just “something that happens on its own.” If you are going to blog, start with the same mindset—focus on the habits and discipline first, the blog second.

I (mostly) build all the content for ‘net Work on Saturday mornings. Sometimes it slips to Sunday or Monday, depending on what is going on, but I normally spend no more than about 2 to 3 hours a week on keeping this blog up and running, including normal maintenance. There are times when I spend much more—for instance, if I’m switching platforms, or switching themes. There are other times when I need to spend time in code, or researching something specific, for a blog post (or a set of posts), but Continue reading

Worth Reading: how to wade through 100’s of articles

Know why you read. Ignore content that doesn’t align with your personal consumption goals. Ignore content with clickbait titles. These articles are purposely designed to drive traffic, generating salable ad impressions. Most of the time, they are content-free and safely ignored. Have no fear of declaring amnesty. Missing out doesn’t matter. Read it now; you probably won’t read it later. Don’t let articles pile up for when you have a better time. Use tools effectively. You can get through content more quickly and share or save the best stuff easily. —Ethan Banks

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Moving to a Single Domain

For various reasons, I’m changing my DNS provider; the new provider will not support the .guru TLD, so I’m going to drop it, and just stick with rule11.us. I think most folks are pointing to rule11.us anyway, but I thought I’d post this here so you’d see if it not.

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Moving to a Single Domain

For various reasons, I’m changing my DNS provider; the new provider will not support the .guru TLD, so I’m going to drop it, and just stick with rule11.us. I think most folks are pointing to rule11.us anyway, but I thought I’d post this here so you’d see if it not.

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Cisco Live Berlin

I will be speaking at the CCDE Techtorial at Cisco Live in Berlin February 20-24 (just a few short weeks away)! Come by and hang out, or meet Elaine and I for lunch on Tuesday to talk about the CCDE.

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Cisco Live Berlin

I will be speaking at the CCDE Techtorial at Cisco Live in Berlin February 20-24 (just a few short weeks away)! Come by and hang out, or meet Elaine and I for lunch on Tuesday to talk about the CCDE.

The post Cisco Live Berlin appeared first on 'net work.

Large Scale Network Design

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Large Scale Network Design

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Worth Reading: Tier 1 carrier performance report

As Noction continues to intelligently optimize routing for more and more networks around the world, we find ourselves in the unique position of having great insights into the general Internet performance as well as the performance of specific Internet carriers, when analyzing data collected by IRP Lite instances. Around 200 million successful probes performed by IRP instances over the previous weeks offered us plenty of data for analysis. The current report card covers the performance of major providers within the continental United States. —Noction

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Worth Reading: Tier 1 carrier performance report

As Noction continues to intelligently optimize routing for more and more networks around the world, we find ourselves in the unique position of having great insights into the general Internet performance as well as the performance of specific Internet carriers, when analyzing data collected by IRP Lite instances. Around 200 million successful probes performed by IRP instances over the previous weeks offered us plenty of data for analysis. The current report card covers the performance of major providers within the continental United States. —Noction

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Roof Charms in Seoul

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Roof Charms in Seoul

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Worth Reading: Class breaks

There’s a concept from computer security known as a class break. It’s a particular security vulnerability that breaks not just one system, but an entire class of systems. Examples might be a vulnerability in a particular operating system that allows an attacker to take remote control of every computer that runs on that system’s software. Or a vulnerability in Internet-enabled digital video recorders and webcams that allow an attacker to recruit those devices into a massive botnet. —Schneier on Security

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Worth Reading: Class breaks

There’s a concept from computer security known as a class break. It’s a particular security vulnerability that breaks not just one system, but an entire class of systems. Examples might be a vulnerability in a particular operating system that allows an attacker to take remote control of every computer that runs on that system’s software. Or a vulnerability in Internet-enabled digital video recorders and webcams that allow an attacker to recruit those devices into a massive botnet. —Schneier on Security

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Worth Reading: Elements and principles of graphic design

Knowing the key basics of design will help you to create better, more aesthetically pleasing works of art. When creating a design, there are both elements and principles to pay attention to. Knowing both pieces of the puzzle and how to successfully incorporate them into your designs will help you to create more beautiful pieces. —Line25

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Worth Reading: Elements and principles of graphic design

Knowing the key basics of design will help you to create better, more aesthetically pleasing works of art. When creating a design, there are both elements and principles to pay attention to. Knowing both pieces of the puzzle and how to successfully incorporate them into your designs will help you to create more beautiful pieces. —Line25

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Worth Reading: Let’s encrypt with DANE

If you looked at the realm of security, and X.509 certificate-based secure systems, we appear to be in the worst of all worlds: it can be expensive, inherently compromisable and slow to set up and access. So somehow, we’ve managed to achieve “Security: Poor, Slow and Expensive!”. However, this environment is changing, and it may no longer be the case. In this post, I’d like to walk through the process of setting up good, inexpensive and accessible security using several public tools. —APNIC

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Worth Reading: The state of DNS security

Did you know that 89% of top-level domains are now signed with DNSSEC? Or that over 88% of .GOV domains and over 50% of .CZ domains are signed? Were you aware that over 103,000 domains use DANE and DNSSEC to provide a higher level of security for email? Or that 80% of clients request DNSSEC signature records in DNS queries? All these facts and much more are available in our new State of DNSSEC Deployment 2016 report. —The Internet Society

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BGP Flowspec Indirection

While Flowspec has been around for a while (RFC5575 was published in 1999), deployment across AS boundaries has been somewhat slow. The primary concerns in deploying flowspec are the ability to shoot oneself in the foot, particularly as poening Flowspec to customers can also open an entirely new, and not well understood, attack surface, and the simple cost of filtering packets. In theory, ASICs can filter packets based on a variety of parameters cheaply. Theory doesn’t always easily translate to practice, however.

Regardless, recent work in Flowspec is quite interesting; particularly the ability to redirect flows, rather than simply filtering them. Of course, the original RFCs did allow for the redirection of flows into a VRF on the local router, but this leaves a good bit to be desired. To make such a system work, you must actually have a VRF into which to redirect traffic; for one-off situations, such as directing attack traffic to a honey pot, building the VRF and populating it can be more work than capturing the traffic is worth. A newer draft, draft-ietf-idr-flowspec-path-redirect, aims to resolve this.

Before getting to the draft specifics, however, it is useful to review the basic concept of Continue reading

Worth Reading: The FTC’s IoT challenge

One of the biggest cybersecurity stories of 2016 was the surge in online attacks caused by poorly-secured “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices such as Internet routers, security cameras, digital video recorders (DVRs) and smart appliances. Many readers here have commented with ideas about how to counter vulnerabilities caused by out-of-date software in IoT devices, so why not pitch your idea for money? Who knows, you could win up to $25,000 in a new contest put on by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). —Krebs on Security

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