Worth Reading: The languages that almost became CSS

When HTML was announced by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 there was no method of styling pages. How given HTML tags were rendered was determined by the browser, often with significant input from the user’s preferences. It seemed, however, like a good idea to create a standard way for pages to ‘suggest’ how they might prefer to be rendered stylistically. —Eager

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Worth Reading: Top performance items to watch

What’s eating your network? What is (quietly) killing performance? What performance items should you be watching, but probably are not? I’m a big fan of appropriate network management data, with the right tool(s). If you don’t monitor absolutely every interface, and capture historical data, you’re flying blind. —Netcraftsmen

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Buenos Aires

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Worth Reading: Hot Commodities

A Booz Allen Hamilton Industrial Cybersecurity Threat Briefing reports that cyber incidents targeting Integrated Control Systems (ICS), like the ones used to run the nation’s electric grid, reached an all-time high in 2015. The briefing also predicted that the number of these incidents will likely continue to increase, and cited nation-state backed groups as a key threat. —Lawfare

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Worth Reading: Real world security and the Internet of Things

Right now, the only way to patch most home routers is to throw them away and buy new ones. And the security that comes from replacing your computer and phone every few years won’t work with your refrigerator and thermostat: on the average, you replace the former every 15 years, and the latter approximately never. A recent Princeton survey found 500,000 insecure devices on the Internet. That number is about to explode. —Schneier on Security

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On the ‘net: The future of networking

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the future of networking and the career paths in this domain. As you probably know I like to guide and mentor people and with everything going on in the industry it can be confusing to find your way and to know what skills to work on to stay ahead of the curve. —Lost in Transit

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Worth Reading: Ten years of Cisco Live

Technology changes every day. We change from hardware to software and back again. Routers give way to switches. Fabrics rise. Analytics tell all. But all this technology still has people behind it. Those people make the difference. People learn and grow and change. They figure out how to make SDN work today after learning ISDN and Frame Relay yesterday. They have the power to expand beyond their station and be truly amazing. —Networking Nerd

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On the ‘net: Layered Control Planes

I was recently a guest on the Packet Pushers Podcast, where I talked with Ethan for a bit about the concept of layered control planes, and how the idea related to complexity.

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Worth Reading: The Self Taught Engineers of the Erie Canal

We often assume that a workforce needs to be highly educated to propel an economy forward. Often, it is the opposite, it is economic opportunity that compels a workforce toward more education. So it was with the Erie Canal, by far the greatest engineering project of its day, and one of the greatest in history to that point. The problem was that there were very few trained engineers… —Delaney Place

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Worth Reading: One second warning

Time, as measured according to the Earth’s rotation, is getting slower. If we want 86,400 seconds to measure precisely one rotation of the earth on its axis then over time each second will have to get shorter. Instead, we defined “one second” as a fixed unit of time based on atomic vibrations (9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation emitted by a caesium-133 atom in the transition between the two hyperfine levels of its ground state). But as the earth’s rotation slows, the fixed time period will mean that the time of day, the solar time, will drift. —potaroo

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Worth Reading: Learning from email breaches

It isn’t at all uncommon for people to share colorful thoughts about superiors, co-workers, subordinates and customers over email. But think for a moment: What business benefit does this add? Email is auditable. Having done some audits, I know there’s a lot of stuff people feel free to share on company email that can, and does, get them fired. —IT Business Edge

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Layer 2 Routing—Haven’t we been here before?

We often think the entire Internet, as we know it, just popped out of “thin air,” somehow complete and whole, with all the pieces in place. In reality, there have been many side roads taken, and many attempts to solve the problem of pushing the maximum amount of data across a wire along the way. One of these ways came to mind this last week, when I ran across this story—

Also on the virtualisation list is the customer premises equipment (CPE), and this deserves a little explanation. Obviously every premises needs some sort of physical connection to the network providing the services. What CPE virtualisation refers to is making the CPE as generic as possible. —The Register

Pulling layer 2 into the network to centralize the edge—where have I heard this before? Maybe it was all those years ago, when I was in TAC, and we used to support Cisco 1001’s, or the LEX—LAN Extenders. The promise then was the same as the promise now: a lightweight, easy to manage device that would relocate all the intelligence from the network edge into the access layer of the “mother ship,” where it could be properly managed.

Remember Rule 11? If Continue reading

Worth Reading: A Game of Pwns

Despite their perpetual status as old news, passwords and their security weaknesses continue to make headlines and disrupt security in ever-expanding ways, and the usual advice about better protection continues to go unheeded or, more worryingly, fails to address the threats any longer. As attacks continue to improve, they show that a cracked password for a given user account often has significant value beyond just the compromised environment. —Cloud Security Alliance

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Worth Reading: Days of the Week

With deep, purple bags under his eyes, Beagin Tiredly plops down into his swivel chair with a loud whoosh. His unsweetened, black coffee sloshes onto the desk as he sets it down, adding new spots to the coffee stains from previous mornings. Despite being at the ripe, young age of 25, this early hour has him looking twenty years older. —Nenshou Fire Continue reading

Worth Reading: Happy Eyeballs

A recent study to measure the impact of the Happy Eyeballs (HE) algorithm has shown that 18% of Alexa’s top 10,000 websites are faster over IPv6 than IPv4. —APNIC

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snaproute Go BGP Code Dive (6): Starting a Peer

In our last post on BGP code, we unraveled the call chain snaproute’s Go BGP implementation uses to bring a peer up. Let’s look at this call chain a bit more to see if we can figure out what it actually does—or rather, how it actually works. I’m going to skip the actual beginning of the FSM itself, and just move to the first state, looking at how the FSM is designed to move from state to state. The entire thing kicks off here—

func (st *IdleState) processEvent(event BGPFSMEvent, data interface{}) {
st.logger.Info(fmt.Sprintln("Neighbor:", st.fsm.pConf.NeighborAddress, "FSM:", st.fsm.id,
"State: Idle Event:", BGPEventTypeToStr[event]))
switch event {
case BGPEventManualStart, BGPEventAutoStart:
st.fsm.SetConnectRetryCounter(0)
st.fsm.StartConnectRetryTimer()
st.fsm.ChangeState(NewConnectState(st.fsm))
....
}

What we need to do is chase down each of these three calls to figure out what they actually do. The first is simple—it just sets a retry counter (connectRetryCounter) to 0, indicating we haven’t tried to restart this peer at all. In other words, this is the first attempt to move from idle to a full peering relationship. This counter is primarily used for telemetry, which means it’s a counter used to show you, Continue reading

Worth Reading: Learning is hard

Easy access to the tl;dr version of everything a google search away has eroded that foundation in the IT community. I can’t exclude myself from that either, having fallen into that trap of thinking that google will help me find the quick fix. It builds a hidden technical debt because the things we claim to understand are really just black boxes we know how to stack in a certain way. The idea of learning all these things is so that we can apply them to solve problems better. Despite evidence to the contrary there is an underlying presumption that the capacity for original, creative thought is a given. —route-spf

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Worth Reading: How to Interpret Cisco math

The attributes of transparency, choice, and degrees of freedom, not price, are driving all of the mega-scale customers to bare-metal networking solutions, whether they do it in house or leverage companies like Cumulus Networks. Make no mistake, ALL mega-scales have revolted and are somewhere on the path towards independence. —Cumulus

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Arm Chairs

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Worth Reading: Sniffing and censoring in real life

Airtel is sniffing and intercepting ALL unencrypted traffic going upstream from CloudFlare’s India data centres, irrespective of what ISP the user is on. This potentially affects everyone in India accessing ANY of the 2 million+ sites on CloudFlare. —Medium

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