Live Webinar: How Routers Really Work

This Friday (the 12th) I’m presenting a live webinar on How Routers Really Work over at Pearson. From the description:

This training will peer into the internal components of a router, starting with an explanation of how a router switches packets. This walk through of a switching path, in turn, will be used as a foundation for explaining the components of a router, including the various tables used to build forwarding tables and the software components used to build these tables.

Please join me by registering here.

I’ve changed just a few of the slides from the last time I gave this talk and reordered some things.

Weekend Reads 110521

From Facebook to LinkedIn to Indeed, ads are popping up that promise well-paying jobs — if applicants provide their Social Security numbers and other details up front. Scammers then use the information to apply for unemployment benefits.

The coronavirus pandemic giveth to Amazon retail business and its Amazon Web Services cloud business, and the pandemic taketh away from the Amazon retail business.

Companies should recognize that collaboration platforms aren’t isolated, secure channels where traditional threats don’t exist.

The Federal Aviation Administration said on Tuesday it had issued a special information bulletin alerting manufacturers, operators, and pilots that action may be needed to address potential interference with sensitive aircraft electronics caused by the use of 5G telecommunications technology.

The holiday shopping season always means big business for phishers, who tend to find increased success this time of year with a lure about a wayward package that needs redelivery.

If not handled in time, the attacks can lead to IP reputation loss and blocklisting, causing severe and expensive damage to companies, but a few precautionary steps can help keep the threats at bay.

The following resources and tutorials will enhance your understanding of container network security and help you get started.

With Continue reading

Hedge 107: Career Advice with Terry Slattery

Whether you’re just starting in your technology career, or you’re an old hand who likes to go back to basics and understand how to move forward in your career, this episode of the Hedge is for you. Terry Slattery joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the things you can do to build a successful career as in the world of network engineering.

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If your organization includes Android devices as part of its bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy or uses embedded systems, then a recent root expiration for Let’s Encrypt digital certificates may potentially place your organization at risk.

In a threat hunting approach, when we find some malicious file, binary, or a program, we need to collect the artifacts from them and search within our whole environment to find any possible traces of malicious activity.

In other words, how to fool advanced threat detection systems, past the all-seeing eye of which, according to marketers, no extra byte can slip through. I am talking about systems that use big data analytics as one of the main tools for detecting suspicious activity like SIEM and XDR.

Intel Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud on Wednesday said they have worked together to create a new category of chip that Intel hopes will become a major seller in the booming cloud computing market.

Attacks involving SEO poisoning — where adversaries artificially increase the search engine ranking of websites hosting their malware to lure potential victims — are on the rise.

The National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have published cybersecurity guidance Continue reading

Master Class: Resilience in Large-Scale Fabrics

In the aftermath of a major network outage, the natural reaction of most network engineers is to find some way to avoid all future outages—regardless of the cost. The first line of defense against is future outages is redundancy, whether in the form of additional parallel links, new routers, new firewalls, new … whatever, so long as there is more of it so packets have more paths to make it from source to destination.

Please join me for this live webinar.

Hedge 106: Compositional Network Modeling and Zen

One topic of constant discussion among network engineers is the basic problems surrounding network modeling, which leads to configuration, telemetry, and troubleshooting. In this episode of the Hedge, Ryan Beckett, Tom Ammon, and Russ White discuss Zen, a general framework for compositional network modelling.

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On Thursday the 19th of October at 1PM ET, I’ll be joining Keith Bogart for the em>INE Live live stream. You can find the details on their web site.

In this session, Keith Bogart will interview prolific author and Network Architect, Russ White Ph.D. One of only a handful of people who have attained CCAr status, Russ White has authored several books such as “Practical BGP”, “The Art of Network Architecture” and “Computer Networking Problems And Solutions”. During this session we’ll find out about his journey to becoming a Network Architect and how his passion for technology can inspire you!

Between 0x2 Nerds on Network Complexity

On the 14th (this Thursday), I’ll once again be a guest on a live stream with Jeff T and Jeff D on Between -x2 Nerds.. I think this is the URL, but you can check on their web page later to make certain.

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first, a few interesting stories on the facebook outage

Facebook says that a configuration error broke its connection to a key network backbone, disconnecting all of its data centers from the Internet and leaving its DNS servers unreachable, the company said.

Following the Facebook outage that took place on 4 October, we saw people looking to BGPlay to get a better view of what went on. Here’s a look at what the RIPEstat visualisation has to show us about the event in question.

On October 4th Facebook managed to achieve one of the more impactful of outages of the entire history of the Internet, assuming that the metric of “impact” is how many users one can annoy with a single outage. In Facebook’s case the 6-hour outage affected the services it provides so some 3 billion users, if we can believe Facebook’s marketing hype.

But surely the bigger lesson is that we are all too dependent on too few Really Big providers. EU Competition Commissioner told Reuters “Facebook’s (FB.O) six-hour outage the previous day shows “the repercussions fn relying on just a few big players and underscores the need for more rivals.”

and other stories, as usual

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Between 0x2 Nerds Live Stream on Network Complexity

I’m sitting with Jeff Doyle and Jeff Tantsura to talk about network complexity on the Between 0x2 Nerds podcast today at 1PM ET today. The link is here—

Join us if you can.

Hedge 103: BGP Security with Geoff Huston

Our community has been talking about BGP security for over 20 years. While MANRS and the RPKI have made some headway in securing BGP, the process of deciding on a method to provide at least the information providers need to make more rational decisions about the validity of individual routes is still ongoing. Geoff Huston joins Alvaro, Russ, and Tom to discuss how we got here and whether we will learn from our mistakes.

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Bowles is showing off her whatever-it-takes strategy for narrowing the digital divide between people with reasonably speedy internet access and those without.

Articles 33 and 34 outline the requirements for breach notification; however, most businesses are still unaware of their responsibilities. Details such as what an organization should report, when, to whom it should be reported, and what should be included in the breach notification are some of the major aspects that businesses overlook.

The idea behind Security.txt is straightforward: The organization places a file called security.txt in a predictable place — such as example.com/security.txt, or example.com/.well-known/security.txt.

Air is an absolutely terrible medium with which to move or remove heat from a system, but it sure is a lot easier and cheaper (well, at least in terms of the cost of goods sold sense) than adding some sort of liquid cooling to a system.

The EU aims to have a common charging port for mobile phones, tablets, and headphones under a European Commission proposal presented on Thursday in a world first, with the move impacting iPhone maker Apple more than its rivals.

As we head toward the annual Supercomputing Conference season we wanted Continue reading

Hedge 102: BGP Security with Geoff Huston

Our community has been talking about BGP security for over 20 years. While MANRS and the RPKI have made some headway in securing BGP, the process of deciding on a method to provide at least the information providers need to make more rational decisions about the validity of individual routes is still ongoing. Geoff Huston joins Alvaro, Russ, and Tom to discuss how we got here and whether we will learn from our mistakes.

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Keith’s Law (1)

I sometimes reference Keith’s Law in my teaching, but I don’t think I’ve ever explained it. Keith’s Law runs something like this:

Any large external step in a system’s capability is the result of many incremental changes within the system.

The reason incremental changes within a system appear as a single large step to outside observers is the smaller changes are normally hidden by abstraction. This is, in fact, the purpose of abstraction—to hide small changes inside a system from external view. Keith’s law is closely related to Clarke’s third law that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” What looks like magic from the outside is really just a bunch of smaller things—each easier to understand on its own—combined into one single “thing” through abstraction.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably thinking—what does this have to do with network engineering?
Well, several things, really.

First—the network is just an abstraction that moves packets to its users. Moving packets seems so … simple … to network users. You put data in here, and data comes out over there. All the little stuff that goes into making a network work are lost in the abstraction of the virtual Continue reading

Controversial Reads 092521

Apple then made public what was private. The company, under CEO Tim Cook’s leadership, had actually been consulting the FBI on various methods for hacking the phone. In fact, the FBI had botched one of the suggested techniques after a mistake. The agency wasn’t willing to risk another gaffe.

Software locks, API restrictions, legal threats, forced downgrades and more – these are why Big Tech stays big.

Megan Borovicka joined Facebook in 2013 and then forgot she even had an account. But Facebook never forgot about her.

On May 27, 2020, in the French National Assembly, Cédric O, the French Secretary of State for Digital Economy, forcibly expressed his government’s frustration with Apple and Google in terms more appropriate to a cold war confrontation between superpowers.

Almost everything we do online today is designed to be addictive. The average American spent more than two hours a day on social media in 2020.

Gary Gensler, Joe Biden’s deeply establishmentarian SEC head, has dropped a bomb on the crypto community with his sudden attack on Coinbase, the leading crypto platform.

As the data these devices collect is sold and shared—and hacked—deciding what risks you’re comfortable with is a necessary part of making Continue reading