Worth Reading: Slack is less bad than the rest

A topic I complain about with some regularity is my inability to keep up with incoming messages. I’m too busy creating something for someone else to consume to bother trying to keep up. That’s the way of things. If I successfully keep up with all the input, I never achieve useful output. In this world of message misery, Slack is my friend. I find that Slack is better at managing input than most other forms of communication. —Ethan Banks

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On the ‘net: Author Interview at the LeanPub Blog

Len: Hi, I’m Len Epp from Leanpub, and in this Leanpub podcast I’ll be interviewing Daniel Dib and Russ White. Russ is based in North Carolina and has been working with large-scale networks for more than 20 years and written a number of books, co-authored over 40 software patents, and spoken at many different venues around the world. His blog is called Network and you can find it at ntwrk.guru. He’s currently on the architecture team at LinkedIn, where he works on next-generation data-centric designs, complexity, security, and privacy. —LeanPub Blog

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Worth Reading: Cryptocurrency mining malware infecting NAS’

A malware variant named Mal/Miner-C (also known as PhotoMiner) is infecting Internet-exposed Seagate Central Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices and using them to infect connected computers to mine for the Monero cryptocurrency. Miner-C, or PhotoMiner, appeared at the start of June 2016, when a report revealed how this malware was targeting FTP servers and spreading on its own to new machines thanks to worm-like features that attempted to brute-force other FTP servers using a list of default credentials. —Softpedia

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Worth Reading: The lean and antifragile data center

Cloud is a new technology domain, and data centre engineering is still a developing discipline. I have interviewed a top expert in cloud infrastructure, senior leader and consultant, Pete Cladingbowl of Skozo. He has a vision of the ‘lean’ data centre and a better kind of Internet for users to reach it. He also has a roadmap for how these can be practically realised. The key is to apply established theories of value flow from more mature industries. —CircleID

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On the ‘net: White Box Switching at LinkedIn

When LinkedIn announced their Project Falco I knew exactly what one of my future Software Gone Wild podcasts would be: a chat with Russ White (Mr. CCDE, now network architect @ LinkedIn). It took us a long while (and then the summer break intervened) but I finally got it published: Episode 62 is waiting for you. —ipspace

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Worth Reading: Assessing the current state of container security

Any rational organization that wishes to run mission-critical services on containers will at some point ask the question: “But is it secure? Can we really trust containers with our data and applications?” Amongst tech folks, this often leads to a containers versus virtual machines (VMs) debate and a discussion of the protection provided by the hypervisor layer in VMs. —The New Stack

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Worth Reading: laptop killing USB stick

For just a few bucks, you can pick up a USB stick that destroys almost anything that it’s plugged into. Laptops, PCs, televisions, photo booths — you name it. Once a proof-of-concept, the pocket-sized USB stick now fits in any security tester’s repertoire of tools and hacks, says the Hong Kong-based company that developed it. It works like this: when the USB Kill stick is plugged in, it rapidly charges its capacitors from the USB power supply, and then discharges — all in the matter of seconds. —ZDNet

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Can I2RS Keep Up? (I2RS Performance)

What about I2RS performance?

The first post in this series provides a basic overview of I2RS; there I used a simple diagram to illustrate how I2RS interacts with the RIB—

One question that comes to mind when looking at a data flow like this (or rather should come to mind!) is what kind of performance this setup will provide. Before diving into the answer to this question, though, perhaps it’s important to ask a different question—what kind of performance do you really need? There are (at least) two distinct performance profiles in routing—the time it takes to initially start up a routing peer, and the time it takes to converge on a single topology and/or route change. In reality, this second profile can be further broken down into multiple profiles (with or without an equal cost path, with or without a loop free alternate, etc.), but for our purposes I’ll just deal with the two broad categories here.

If your first instinct is to say that initial convergence time doesn’t matter, go back and review the recent Delta Airlines outage carefully. If you are still not convinced initial convergence time matters, go back and reread what you can Continue reading

Worth Reading: Long secret Stingray manuals detail phone spying

Harris Corp’s Stingray surveillance device has been one of the most closely guarded secrets in law enforcement for more than 15 years. The company and its police clients across the United States have fought to keep information about the mobile phone-monitoring boxes from the public against which they are used. The Intercept has obtained several Harris instruction manuals spanning roughly 200 pages and meticulously detailing how to create a cellular surveillance dragnet. —The Intercept

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Worth Reading: Someone is learning how to take down the Internet

Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state. China and Russia would be my first guesses. —Lawfare

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Reaction: Devops and Dumpster Fires

Networking is often a “best effort” type of configuration. We monkey around with something until it works, then roll it into production and hope it holds. As we keep building more patches on to of patches or try to implement new features that require something to be disabled or bypassed, that creates a house of cards that is only as strong as the first stiff wind. It’s far too easy to cause a network to fall over because of a change in a routing table or a series of bad decisions that aren’t enough to cause chaos unless done together. —Networking Nerd

Precisely.

But what are we to do about it. Tom’s Take is that we need to push back on applications. This, also, I completely agree with. But this only brings us to another problem—how do we make the case that applications need to be rewritten to work on a simpler network? The simple answer is—let’s teach coders how networks really work, so they can figure out how to better code to the environment in which their applications live. Let me be helpful here—I’ve been working on networks since somewhere around 1986, and on computers and electronics since Continue reading

Worth Reading: Your comfort zone may destroy the world

Journalism has been on life support since the advent of social media, but this past year we have witnessed the quick, painful death of truth, and it may be gone forever. Put a comfortable lie in an echo chamber, and nobody will challenge it. It will reverberate until it is accepted as actually true. Then, the willfully ignorant will shout it as loudly as they can. It may be their truth, but that does not make it true. —Shelly Palmer

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Wroth Reading: Exascale might prove difficult

The supercomputing industry is accustomed to 1,000X performance strides, and that is because people like to think in big round numbers and bold concepts. Every leap in performance is exciting not just because of the engineering challenges in bringing systems with kilo, mega, tera, peta, and exa scales into being, but because of the science that is enabled by such increasingly massive machines. But every leap is getting a bit more difficult as imagination meets up with the constraints of budgets and the laws of physics. The exascale leap is proving to be particularly difficult, and not just because it is the one we are looking across the chasm at. —The Next Platform

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Spiral Windows

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Worth Reading: Joining forces against mass collection

Some of the world’s biggest companies and organizations joined forces with Microsoft to fend off the U.S. government’s habitual practice of demanding access to customers’ personal information. Microsoft filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in April, arguing it is unconstitutional to seize computer data from third parties and subsequently issue gag orders so companies cannot notify customers. Now a motley crew of institutions, organizations, and businesses — like Apple, Google, Delta Air Lines, Mozilla, The Washington Post, Fox News, the American Civil Liberties Union, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — have joined the cause by signing and submitting an amicus brief. —The Stream

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Worth Reading: IPv6 versus v4 performance map

This is a world map showing the average value of the relative performance of observed connections in IPv6 compared to IPv4. The values are in units of milliseconds. For each observed dual stack end device, the TCP SYN exchange connection times are recorded and the best IPv6 and IPv4 Round Trip Times (RTT) are retained. …. Where IPv6 is faster, the IPv6 RTT is smaller than the IPv4 RTT and the result of the subtraction is a negative number, displayed as a shade of green in the above map. Where IPv4 is faster the result of the subtraction is a positive number, displayed as a shade of red in the map. —APNIC

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Nenshou Fire: Recoil

My daughter has started a new fiction series on her blog; I’ll just link to it here for anyone who’s interested.

A cold circular object is pressed to my head, a hand reaching around to cover my mouth before I can make a sound. My eyes squeeze shut reflexively. Is this it? Is this how I’m going to die? After so much time of hiding, running, escaping the war around me, am I finally reaching the end of my life? My heart explodes inside me, waiting for the explosion of powder, marking the final moments of my life…but nothing comes. I open my eyes, surprised. What is this? Why hasn’t he made that one little motion that would end my life? —Nenshou Fire

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Worth Reading: Big buffers and reality

This whole big buffer nonsense has gotten out of hand (kinda like Trump and his H-yuge Border Wall or Clinton and her lack of ethics) and it’s time for this issue to be put to rest. For the last few years, the main messaging from Arista has been that you need big buffers for everything, especially for big data applications. I’m not saying it doesn’t make for a good marketing soundbite… —Packet Pushers

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Worth Reading: Binding to an IPv6 subnet

In the original framework of the IP architecture, hosts had network interfaces, and network interfaces had single IP addresses. The list of active network interfaces, and the manner in which they acquire IP addresses, either by a static configuration or by some dynamic mechanism via a query to the local network, is specified in a boot time configuration file. —Potaroo

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Enough with “firewalls”

A mythical conversation on firewalls, and some observations

“Let’s put the firewall here, so it can protect the servers in this part of the network.”
“How would you define a firewall?”
“You know, the appliance that, well, protects servers and other machines from outside threats…”
“And how does it do this?”
“By filtering the traffic using some sort of stateful mechanism, and network address translation, and deep packet inspection, and blocking certain ports, and…”
“In other words, it’s a bunch of services on a single device?”
“Yes…”
“Then maybe we should think in terms of services instead of appliances.”

I’ve never actually had this conversation, but I’ve had many similar ones across my times as a network engineer. I’ll admit, in fact, that it took a lot of conversations like this (with me on the receiving end) to grock the difference between a service and an appliance, and to see that my constant thinking in terms of appliances (or even devices) was actually hindering my ability to design networks. Let me give you two specific reasons you should think of security services, instead of security appliances.

First, When you disaggregate the “things a firewall Continue reading