Memorial Day 2015

For those who do not know, today, in the United States we hold a day of memory — Memorial Day — for those who have fallen in the defense of the freedom of our Nation. This is different from Veteran’s day, a day which honors those who either are or have served in the US Military, in that it is focused on those who have died in the actual service of the United States — in the course of duty, as it is often said. From the original Presidential proclamation —

On this Memorial Day, as we honor the memory of brave men who have borne our colors in war, we pray to God for His mercy. We pray for the wisdom to find a way to end this struggle of nation against nation, of brother against brother. We pray that soon we may begin to build the only true memorial to man’s valor in war–a sane and hopeful environment for the generations to Come.

As a veteran myself (9 years in the USAF), I find this day to be one of sadness and remembrance. My Grandfather died in the service, as have many of my other relatives, and almost Continue reading

Worth Reading — 0522

It’s Friday, which means it’s time to talk about some stuff around the ‘web that’s worth reading.

If you’ve not been asleep this week (most people seem to be, given the rate at which my emails are being answered!), then you’ve probably heard about logjam — a man in the middle attack against IKE and other DHE cypher suites. If you haven’t this is a really short (and cryptic) explanation of the attack, and how to mitigate it.

Bufferbloat has been in the news recently, with speedtest and other tools building in the ability to measure bufferbloat in DSL and cable connections. Buffers have always been a topic of hot discussion in the networking world — in fact, buffer size came up just this last week while in discussions in building an Ericsson reference design for data center fabric underlays. The point always comes down to this — can’t you just do better QoS and larger buffers, and skip all the 1:1 subscription rates? The answer I always give is a resounding NO!, but it’s hard to explain why without getting into an explanation of buffer bloat, and it’s effects on jitter (the often ignored step child of Continue reading

Virtualized

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Mailing List

I’m switching the updates mailing list to mailchimp so I can post emails with more “stuff” from time to time that’s not posted on the blog. The signup is under the “hamburger menu” on the top left corner.

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IT/IT: Data Can’t Lie?

A statistician is someone who can put their head in a hot oven, and their feet in a bucket of ice, and say, “on the average, I feel fine.”

Before we move completely into a world where people are counseled, “use the data, Luke,” disregarding their own beliefs and feelings, we need to have a little discussion. As an example of what we might get wrong, let’s take a look at some interesting problems in the polling from recent elections. According to one article (which happens to have all the numbers conveniently gathered in one place) —

• On May 7th, in an election in Britain, the pre-election polls showed conservatives would win around 280 seats. The exit polls during the election showed the conservatives would win around 316 seats. During the election, conservatives actually won 330 seats.
• In 1992, also in Britain, the pre-election polls showed the conservative and liberal parties in a dead heat. The conservatives actually won by 7.5 points.
• In the recent election in Israel, Likud was predicted, through polling, to win 22 seats. Likud actually won 30 seats.

These aren’t random events — they are repeated time and again in elections through the last Continue reading

BGP Security

I set up a set of slides on BGP security for some folks I know at Level 3 over the last couple of months, and then presented them to an internal Ericsson audience this week. I just posted them to Slideshare, as well —

I wrote an entire series on this same topic a while back on Packet Pushers, if you want commentary to go with the slides —

Part 1: Basic Operation
Part 2: Protections Offered
Part 3: Replays, Timers, and Performance
Part 4: Signatures and Performance
Part 5: Leaks

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Whirlwind

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Eschew Obfuscation (Communicate Clearly)

Many years ago, I worked for a manager who had two signs on his desk. The first was a pencil with the words, “Pencil 2.0″ printed above them. The rest of the sign went on to explain how the pencil had undo (the eraser), was renewable (it can be sharpened), etc. The second sign was simpler, just two black words printed across a white background.

Eschew Obfuscation

Being just out of the US Air Force, and not having quite the vocabulary I should have (have I ever told you that reading is the key to having a great vocabulary?), I didn’t really understand the point. Now I do. Okay, to make it more obvious, from the Collins English Dictionary, 8th edition:

eschew: tr to keep clear of or abstain from (something disliked, injurious, etc.); shun; avoid
obfuscation: the act or an instance of making something obscure, dark, or difficult to understand

Now do you see? Avoid using language people can’t understand. Far too often, in the technical world, we use abbreviations, acronyms, and all sorts of cute nonsense to say things. We pepper our language with shorthands and inside jokes (squirrel!). While this sometimes helps communication, Continue reading

Worth Reading

For whatever reason, we seem to have moved into the “summer doldrums” a bit early this year. Emails seem to just not being answered for weeks — if ever — several friends have emailed me in the last week or two ago asking if it was just them, or if the IT industry was going crazy. All that said, though, there is still a lot going on in the world of IT.

Geoff Huston — if you don’t follow the rantings of Geoff, you really should — makes a point I wish I’d thought of first. The Internet of Things isn’t necessarily a security risk so much as it’s just a stupidity risk. He uses the example of millions of smaller home based devices being shipped with hard coded IP addresses that impact time and DNS servers to make the point that once things are deployed, they don’t tend to be touched. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” He calls it the Internet of Stupid Things.

Along those same lines, I saw an article this week about how Microsoft is threatening the end of the world (or some such) because they’re ending support for Windows 2003 server. The Continue reading

Ambition

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Vendor Neutral

And then Bilbo held the router up to the light and wondered aloud… Whatever is, vendor neutral?

Vendor neutral certainly receives a lot of play in the world of network engineering. You might have even heard the words come out of my mouth during my case study on the Telepost Greenland network at Interop a couple of weeks ago. Maybe even more than once.

But what does vendor neutral actually mean?

Does it really mean, “Can I buy my next piece of equipment from any vendor I like, and not worry about it working in my network?” Or, perhaps, “Can I buy my next piece of equipment from any vendor I like, and not worry about it disrupting my network management and operations?” The second question is the harder, in the real world — and one we’re not likely to get an answer to any time soon.

What about an open API into every piece of equipment in your network? That would be nice — but how do we get from where we are today to that nirvana? We’ve had the drive towards a MIB based interface, a common set of command line configuration constructs, several API driven Continue reading

Bahrain

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General Howe’s Dog

The morning after a battle — one of the first won by the American army in its battle for freedom from the British Empire — if you happened to be on the scene, you might see an American soldier, under a white flag of truce, struggling with something small he is carrying between the lines. Approaching, you can see the package is, in fact, a small terrier — a dog. If you could read the note the carrier is holding there in his scrip, you would find it says —

General Washington’s compliments to General Howe, does himself the pleasure to return to him a Dog, which accidentally fell into his hands, and by the inscription on his collar, appears to belong to General Howe… October 6th, 1777

So — in the midst of a war that cut people down from their young lives, we find a singular scene of a man carrying a dog across a field to return it to the enemy’s commander. What has any of this to do with the life of an engineer? Perhaps more than you think.

Let me return to a much younger time in my technical life, a time when I was Continue reading

IT/IT: A GUI and a Wizard

One of the brilliant things about conferences like Interop is the hallways (and if you’re not going to Interop, this is why you should be!). It’s not that I don’t enjoy the sessions, but — like the IETF — I often get much more out of the conversations with folks who know networking, and yet have a completely different view of the problems we face in the networking industry, and hence completely different ideas about the way forward in resolving those problems. One of my major problems in life is I often can’t think of a solid answer when I’m sitting there in the conversation itself (one of the reasons I always converted TAC cases to email, rather than sitting on the phone with a customer).

One such conversation (with @cigoodwi) brought out a phrase I thought I’d never hear in the networking world — “a GUI and a wizard.” The context was this: what most x% (your beliefs about the percentage may vary) companies need is a network they can run with a GUI and a wizard. It’s a startling statement, of course, but — in reality — true in many respects. Given this is our Continue reading

Iceberg

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Face to Face, Machine to Machine

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Own the Problem

In the late 1990’s, I was on the routing protocols TAC team in Raleigh — which means I answered the phone, and said things like, “This is Russ from Cisco TAC, how can I help you?” Generally what followed was a crash, or, well, just about anything. The design on the left is what we had on the back of our shirts — including what we called ourselves, the Gateway of Last Resort.

Of course it’s a play on words, as you might imagine — where does a host send traffic it doesn’t know what to do with? The gateway of last resort. And what is the gateway of last resort? A router. And what the RP team worked on was, well, routers. But there’s another reason we adopted this slogan for ourselves — because it was, generally speaking, how the CRC (the folks who took the initial call and figured out which backline team to hand it off to) conceived of our little team. The PIX, the 7200, VIP cards, crashes, hangs, tracebacks, any sort of routing protocol problem, lots of hardware problems, anything to do with the forwarding path, memory fragmentation, and just about anything else. A Continue reading

IT/IT: Observations on Ownership

We are clearly moving to a software focused world — this conclusion is almost as inevitable and natural as taking your next breath (or eating that next Little Bits burger — but don’t get the big one unless you’re really hungry).

But, as with all things, there is a flip side to the world going to software. It could actually turn out that the IT world is on the path to becoming our own worst enemies. This, by the way, is what caught my eye this week, and what causes me to rant a little.

The cost and hassle of repairing modern tractors has soured a lot of farmers on computerized systems altogether. In a September issue of Farm Journal, farm auction expert Greg Peterson noted that demand for newer tractors was falling. Tellingly, the price of and demand for older tractors (without all the digital bells and whistles) has picked up. “As for the simplicity, you’ve all heard the chatter,” Machinery Pete wrote. “There’s an increasing number of farmers placing greater value on acquiring older simpler machines that don’t require a computer to fix.”

The issue at stake, at least in the United States, is the Digital Continue reading

The Net

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Williamsburg

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