The History of Networking: John Chapman and Cable Networks

Before the large cable providers came on the scene, most people accessed the Internet through dial-up MODEMS, connecting to services like America Online, across plain old telephone lines. The entrance of cable providers, and cable MODEMs, allowed the edge of the Internet to explode, causing massive growth. Join Donald Sharp and I on this episode of the History of Networking as John Chapman discusses the origins of the cable MODEM, and the origins of the DOCSIS standards.

The collection of technical papers discussed on the show is here: https://www.nctatechnicalpapers.com.

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Random Thoughts on IoT

Let’s play the analogy game. The Internet of Things (IoT) is probably going end up being like … a box of chocolates, because you never do know what you are going to get? a big bowl of spaghetti with a serious lack of meatballs? Whatever it is, the IoT should have network folks worried about security. There is, of course, the problem of IoT devices being attached to random places on the network, exfiltrating personal data back to a cloud server you don’t know anything about. Some of these devices might be rogue, of course, such as Raspberry Pi attached to some random place in the network. Others might be more conventional, such as those new exercise machines the company just brought into the gym that’s sending personal information in the clear to an outside service.

While there is research into how to tell the difference between IoT and “larger” devices, the reality is spoofing and blurred lines will likely make such classification difficult. What do you do with a virtual machine that looks like a Raspberry Pi running on a corporate laptop for completely legitimate reasons? Or what about the Raspberry Pi-like device that can run a fully operational Continue reading

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One of the most common ways such access is monetized these days is through ransomware, which holds a victim’s data and/or computers hostage unless and until an extortion payment is made. But in most cases, there is a yawning gap of days, weeks or months between the initial intrusion and the deployment of ransomware within a victim organization.

There is a lot of discussion about the Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP) Phase 2 report on evaluating a System for Standardized Access/Disclosure (SSAD) to non-public gTLD registration data after the decisions taken by the GNSO Council on September 24th.

Nvidia’s announcement a month ago of a plan to acquire Arm Holdings for $40 billion was followed last week by reports of another towering deal in semiconductors: Advanced Micro Device’s prospective purchase of Xilinx for about $30 billion.

For a long time, datacenter compute has been the very picture of stability – Intel-based servers running enterprise workloads in central facilities. The workloads are changing fast and the datacenter is dissolving, and this is all having a ripple effect throughout the infrastructure, from the servers and storage appliances down to the components, most notability the silicon that is powering the systems.

Booter services Continue reading

This is totally random … The Art of Charity

I don’t normally do this, but … I’d like to share a couple of images of watercolors by a friend of mine. She really does do whimsical and impressive work. Links to her site off the images below.

The Hedge Podcast #57: Brian Trammell and PANRG

Brian Trammell joins Alvaro Retana and Russ White to discuss the Path Aware Research Group in the IRTF. According to the charter page, PANRG “aims to support research in bringing path awareness to transport and application layer protocols, and to bring research in this space to the attention of the Internet engineering and protocol design community.”

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Technologies that Didn’t: Network Operating Systems

For those with a long memory—no, even longer than that—there were once things called Network Operating Systems (NOS’s). These were not the kinds of NOS’s we have today, like Cisco IOS Software, or Arista EOS, or even SONiC. Rather, these were designed for servers. The most common example was Novell’s Netware. These operating systems were the “bread and butter” of the networking world for many years. I was a Certified Netware Expert (CNE) version 4.0, and then 4.11, before I moved into the routing and switching world. I also deployed Banyan’s Vines, IBM’s OS/2, and a much simpler system called LANtastic, among others.

What were these pieces of software? They were largely built around providing a complete environment for the network user. These systems began with file sharing and directory services and included a small driver that would need to be installed on each host accessing the file share. This small driver was actually a network stack for a proprietary set of protocols. For Vines, this was VIP; for Netware, it was IPX. Over time, these systems began to include email, and then, as a natural outgrowth of file sharing and email, directory services. For some time, there Continue reading

Hints and Principles: Applied to Networks

While software design is not the same as network design, there is enough overlap for network designers to learn from software designers. A recent paper published by Butler Lampson, updating a paper he wrote in 1983, is a perfect illustration of this principle. The paper is caleld Hints and Principles for Computer System Design. I’m not going to write a full review here–you should really go read the paper for yourself–but rather just point out some useful bits of the paper.

The first really useful point of this paper is Lampson breaks down the entire field of software design into three basic questions: What, How, and When (or who)? Each of these corresponds to the goals, techniques, and processes used to design and develop software. These same questions and answers apply to network design–if you are missing one of these three areas, then you are probably missing some important set of questions you have not answered yet. Each of these is also represented by an acronym: what? is STEADY, how? is AID, and when? is ART. Let’s look at a couple of these in a little more detail to see how Lampson’s system works.

STEADY stands for simple, timely, efficient, Continue reading

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As software engineers, our industry may be competitive, but we need to remove the stigma associated with failing. One way of doing that is to talk about our failures. The more we hear and talk about failures, the more acceptable it becomes. We need to think about failures as learning opportunities, not a time to shame and ridicule others (or ourselves).

As the data keep growing in volume, the data analytics pipelines have to be scalable to adapt the rate of change. And for this reason, choosing to set up the pipeline in the cloud makes perfect sense (since the cloud offers on-demand scalability and flexibility).

We tactfully crafted emails and had reassuring phone calls with them. We updated them often and gave them the right amount of transparency and technical insight. But here are the truths that we couldn’t tell them.

A majority of security tools that organizations use to defend against malware attacks are themselves vulnerable to exploits that allow attackers to escalate privileges on a compromised system, a new CyberArk study has found.

If the best platforms are more than matchmakers, then the best open source projects are more than utilities. It wouldn’t be incorrect or inconceivable Continue reading

Hedge Podcast #56: Lysa Myers on Burnout and Good People

PTSD is a real thing in the information technology world; it impacts the ability to keep and manage good people. In this episode of the Hedge, Lya Myers joins Eyvonne Sharp, Tom Ammon, and Russ White to discuss PTSD, burnout, and strategies for dealing with them.

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History of Networking: Mark Nottingham and HTTP

The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) carries the vast majority of all the traffic on the Internet today, and even the vast majority of traffic carried on private networks. How did this protocol originate, and what was the interplay between standards organizations in it’s creation, curation, and widespread deployment? Mark Nottingham joins Donald and I on this episode of the History of Networking to answer our questions.

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Underhanded Code and Automation

So, software is eating the world—and you thought this was going to make things simpler, right? If you haven’t found the tradeoffs, you haven’t looked hard enough. I should trademark that or something! While a lot of folks are thinking about code quality and supply chain are common concerns, there are a lot of little “side trails” organizations do not tend to think about. One such was recently covered in a paper on underhanded code, which is code designed to pass a standard review which be used to harm the system later on. For instance, you might see at some spot—

if (buffer_size=REALLYLONGDECLAREDVARIABLENAMEHERE) {
/* do some stuff here */
} /* end of if */

Can you spot what the problem might be? In C, the = is different than the ==. Which should it really be here? Even astute reviewers can easily miss this kind of detail—not least because it could be an intentional construction. Using a strongly typed language can help prevent this kind of thing, like Rust (listen to this episode of the Hedge for more information on Rust), but nothing beats having really good code formatting rules, even if they are apparently arbitrary, for catching Continue reading

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In 2007, ICANN’s Generic Names Supporting Organization Committee on New Top-Level Domains confirmed its rationale for the introduction of new Top Level Domains. It included a number of reasons, such as “to promote competition in the provision of registry services, and to add to consumer choice new gTLDs.”

Companies victimized by ransomware and firms that facilitate negotiations with ransomware extortionists could face steep fines from the U.S. federal government if the crooks who profit from the attack are already under economic sanctions, the Treasury Department warned today.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) have jointly released an in-depth guide that not only includes recommendations on how you can reduce the chances of being the next ransomware victim, but also provide a step-by-step checklist for how to respond.

A not-so-funny thing has happened as organizations have transitioned to the cloud: In many instances, they have also lost accountability and forgotten about critical responsibilities.

Every time a government passes a law that affects the Internet, tech companies must ask themselves a critical question: can they still properly provide their services while protecting user privacy under the new rules?

Facebook recently Continue reading

Link State in DC Fabrics

If you don’t normally read IPJ, you should. Melchoir and I have an article up in the latest edition on link state in DC fabrics.

To make a case for linkstate protocols in DC fabric underlays, an extensive examination of the positive and negative aspects of BGP—and the other available protocols—is essential. Ultimately, it is up to individual operators to decide which protocol is “the best” for their application, a decision based on business and operational—as well as technical—reasons.

Read the whole thing here.

The Hedge Podcast #55: Nick Carter and Flock Networks

Nick Carter joins Tom and I to discuss Flock Networks. What is Flock Networks?

The Flock Networks IP routing suite is designed for unparalleled performance and massive scale. It has been implemented from scratch so it can excel on modern hardware. Each component of the IP routing suite is able to run in parallel, without being slowed down or interrupted by any other component.

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RFC1925 Rule 2

According to RFC1925, the second fundamental truth of networking is: No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority, you can’t increase the speed of light.

However early in the world of network engineering this problem was first observed (see, for instance, Tanenbaum’s “station wagon example” in Computer Networks), human impatience is forever trying to overcome the limitations of the physical world, and push more data down the pipe than mother nature intended (or Shannon’s theory allows).

One attempt at solving this problem is the description of an infinitely fat pipe (helpfully called an “infan(t)”) described in RFC5984. While packets would still need to be clocked onto such a network, incurring serialization delay, the ability to clock an infinite number of packets onto the network at the same moment in time would represent a massive gain in a network’s ability, potentially reaching speeds faster than the speed of light. The authors of RFC5984 describe several attempts to build such a network, including black fiber, on which the lack of light implies data transmission. This is problematic, however, because a lack of information can be interpreted differently depending on the context. A pregnant pause has far different meaning Continue reading

Reducing Complexity through Interaction Surfaces

A recent paper on network control and management (which includes Jennifer Rexford on the author list—anything with Jennifer on the author list is worth reading) proposes a clean slate 4d approach to solving much of the complexity we encounter in modern networks. While the paper is interesting, it’s very unlikely we will ever see a clean slate design like the one described, not least because there will always be differences between what the proper splits are—what should go where.

There is one section of the paper that eloquently speaks to current architecture, however. The authors describe a situation where routing and packet filters are used together to prevent one set of hosts from reaching another set of hosts. Changes in the network, however, cause the packet filters to be bypassed, opening up communications between these two sets of hosts.

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Equinix is not just about colocation anymore. The company is reinforcing that reality with new branding that positions Equinix as “the world’s digital infrastructure company.”

An FPGA is a chip that is programmed by a circuit. It is said to “emulate” that circuit. This emulation runs slower than the actual circuit would run if it were implemented in an ASIC—it has a slower clock frequency and uses more power, but it can be reprogrammed every few hundred milliseconds.

If I could change one thing in the minds of all programming language designers, it would be to impress upon them—forcefully—the idea that anything that is significant to the syntactic or structural meaning of a program must be easily visible to the human reader, as well as easily understood by the systems used by developers.

The same attributes that give deep learning its ability to tell images apart are helping attackers break into the cryptoprocessors built into integrated circuits that were meant improve their security. The same technology may provide the tools that will let chip designers find effective countermeasures, but it faces an uphill struggle.

If your broadband keeps going haywire, maybe someone nearby is using an ancient television set.

Continue reading

The Hedge Podcast 54: Bob Friday and AI in Networks

AI in networks is a hotly contested subject—so we asked Bob Friday, CTO of Mist Systems, to explain the value and future of AI in networks. Bob joins Tom Ammon and Russ White for this episode.

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History of Networking: Heather Flanagan on Identity

While identity is adjacent to networking, it is an important part of the network engineering world—and is not well understood. Heather Flanagan joins Donald Sharp and Russ White to talk about SAML, unified identity, and some of the practical aspects of verifying a person’s identity.

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Random Thoughts

This week is very busy for me, so rather than writing a single long, post, I’m throwing together some things that have been sitting in my pile to write about for a long while.

From Dalton Sweeny:

A physicist loses half the value of their physics knowledge in just four years whereas an English professor would take over 25 years to lose half the value of the knowledge they had at the beginning of their career. . . Software engineers with a traditional computer science background learn things that never expire with age: data structures, algorithms, compilers, distributed systems, etc. But most of us don’t work with these concepts directly. Abstractions and frameworks are built on top of these well studied ideas so we don’t have to get into the nitty-gritty details on the job (at least most of the time).

This is precisely the way network engineering is. There is value in the kinds of knowledge that expire, such as individual product lines, etc.—but the closer you are to the configuration, the more ephemeral the knowledge is. This is one of the entire points of rule 11 is your friend. Learn the foundational things that make learning the ephemeral things Continue reading