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Whither Network Engineering? (Part 3)

In the previous two parts of this series, I have looked at the reasons I think the networking ecosystem is bound to change and why I think disaggregation is going to play a major role in that change. If I am right about the changes happening, what will become of network engineers? The bifurcation of knowledge, combined with the kinds of networks and companies noted in the previous posts in this series, point the way. There will, I think, be three distinct careers where the current “network engineer” currently exists on the operational side:

  1. Moving up the stack, towards business, the more management role. This will be captured primarily by the companies that operate in market verticals deep and narrow enough to survive without a strong focus on data, and hence can survive a transition to black box, fully integrated solutions. This position will largely be focused on deploying, integrating, and automating vertically integrated, vendor-driven systems and managing vendor relationships.
  2. Moving up the stack, towards software and business, the disaggregated network engineering role (I don’t have a better name for this presently). This will be in support of companies that value data to the point of focusing on its management Continue reading

Whither Network Engineering? (Part 2)

In the first post of this series at the turn of 2019, I considered the forces I think will cause network engineering to radically change. What about the timing of these changes? I hear a lot of people say” “this stuff isn’t coming for twenty years or more, so don’t worry about it… there is plenty of time to adapt.” This optimism seems completely misplaced to me. Markets and ideas are like that old house you pass all the time—you know the one. No-one has maintained it for years, but it is so … solid. It was built out of the best timber, by people who knew what they were doing. The foundation is deep, and it has lasted all these years.

Then one day you pass a heap of wood on the side of the road and realize—this is that old house that seemed so solid just a few days ago. Sometime in the night, that house that was so solid collapsed. The outer shell was covering up a lot of inner rot. Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argues this is the way ideas always go. They appear to be solid one day, and then Continue reading

Whither Network Engineering? (Part 1)

An article on successful writers who end up driving delivery trucks. My current reading in epistemology for an upcoming PhD seminar. An article on the bifurcation of network engineering skills. Several conversations on various slacks I participate in. What do these things have in common? Just this:

What is to become of network engineering?

While it seems obvious network engineering is changing, it is not so easy to say how it is changing, and how network engineers can survive those changes. To better understand these things, it is good to back up and take in a larger view. A good place to start is to think about how networks are built today.

Networks today are built using an appliance and circuit model. To build a network, an “engineer” (we can argue over the meaning of that word) tries to gauge how much traffic needs to be moved between different points in the business’ geographical space, and then tries to understand the shape of that traffic. Is it layer 2, or layer 3? Which application needs priority over some other application?

Once this set of requirements is drawn up, a long discussion over the right appliances and circuits to purchase to Continue reading

Merry Christmas!

We are now at the 22nd of December, and it is time to take a break to spend time with family and friends (as well as prepping up a lot of work for next year). From my family to yours, we wish you the merriest of Christmas’, and a very happy new year.

Remember, at this time of year, “He who made the blind men see, and the lame men walk,” as Tiny Tim would say.

A bit of retrospect from 2018, and prospect for 2019…

  • I posted 295 items (not including worth reading) here on Rule11 in 2018.
  • Rule11 had more than 128,000 views in 2018.
  • I am shifting roles in the new year; you can expect to see more on this in early January.
  • I am planning to move rule11 off WordPress in 2019; I am trying to find a developer to help me do the initial work to move to either Ghost or Craft, but have not had any luck in finding someone to kick start the process.

As Marley might say: “Look to see me no more, and expect the first post in the new year…”

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A recent phishing campaign targeting US government officials, activists, and journalists is notable for using a technique that allowed the attackers to bypass two-factor authentication protections offered by services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail, researchers said Thursday. The event underscores the risks of 2fa that relies on one-tap logins or one-time passwords, particularly if the latter are sent in SMS messages to phones. —Dan Goodin @arstechnica.com

After a year rife with security scandals, high-profile hacks, and data breaches, Congress is starting to take steps toward protecting the privacy of people who use the internet or smartphone apps — in other words, nearly every single American. —Kari Paul @marketwatch.com

According to the APWG’s new Phishing Activity Trends Report released today, phishers are using new techniques to carry out their attacks and hide their origins in order to make the most of every phishing campaign. @circleid.com

With Microsoft’s decision to end development of its own Web rendering engine and switch to Chromium, control over the Web has functionally been ceded to Google. That’s a worrying turn of events, given the company’s past behavior. —Peter Bright @arstechnica.com

The greeting starts out routine. You bump into a friend at Continue reading

On the ‘net: ATM

Asynchronous Transfer Mode, or ATM, was widely seen as a compromise technology that would provide the best circuit and packet switching in a single technology. Data would be input into the network in the form of either packets or circuits. The data would then be broken up into fixed sized cells, which would then be switched based on a fixed label-based header. This would allow hardware to switch the cells in a way that is like circuit switching, while retaining many of the advantages of a circuit switched network. In fact, ATM allowed for both circuit- and packet-switched paths to be both be used in the same network. @ECI’s LighTALK

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Australia’s House of Representatives has finally passed the “Telecommunications Assistance and Access Bill 2018,” also known as the Anti-Encryption Bill, on Thursday that would now allow law enforcement to force Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, Signal, and other tech giants to help them access encrypted communications. —Swati Khandelwal @thehackernews.com

Equifax could have prevented a breach of its systems and the resulting leak of sensitive information on nearly 148 million people by focusing more heavily on security, creating a clear hierarchy of responsibilities, and reducing complexity in its infrastructure, a congressional committee concluded in a report released on Dec. 10. —Robert Lemos @darkreading.com

Small and home office routers are becoming major targets for criminals seeking to steal banking and other online account credentials belonging to Internet users. The latest indication of the trend is “Novidade,” a dangerous new exploit kit that multiple attack groups appear to be using to target routers belonging to millions of users in Brazil and, to a lesser extent, other parts of the world. —Jai Vijayan @darkreading.com

Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) originally aimed to keep local traffic local and reduce dependence on third parties. However, ever-increasing traffic volumes create pressure for more dense and diverse peering, Continue reading

Optimal Route Reflection: Next Hop Self

Recently, I posted a video short take I did on BGP optimal route reflection. A reader wrote in the comments to that post:

…why can’t Router set next hop self to updates to router E and avoid this suboptimal path?

To answer this question, it is best to return to the scene of the suboptimality—

To describe the problem again: A and C are sending the same route to B, which is a route reflector. B selects the best path from its perspective, which is through B, and sends this route to each of its clients. In this case, E will learn the path with a next hop of A, even though the path through C is closer from E’s perspective. In the video, I discuss several ways to solve this problem; one option I do not talk about is allowing B to set the next hop to itself. Would this work?

Before answering the question, however, it is important to make one observation: I have drawn this network with B as a router in the forwarding path. In many networks, the route reflector is a virtual machine, or a *nix host, and is not capable of forwarding the traffic Continue reading

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Paris Traceroute allows you to deterministically measure particular paths by setting particular flow IDs — effectively setting combinations in packet headers to be treated consistently by routers on a path. Using this trick to run many traceroutes with different flow IDs to a target may reveal an entire topology, but without extra logic, it may involve tens of thousands of traceroute packets to do so. Many of those packets will be sent over hops that never change, making those packets redundant while also consuming bandwidth and time. —Kevin Vermeulen @APNIC

So, when people talk about serverless, what does it mean? Well, it doesn’t mean servers are GONE. Of course not: That “client-server model” is still the backbone of how things are getting done. Serverless refers to a developer’s ability to code, deploy, and create applications without having to know how to do the rest of it, like rack the servers, patch the operating system, and create container images. —Jen Wike Huger @opensource.com

The average size of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks — where attackers seek to take down a website, application, or infrastructure by flooding it with requests — increased by 24% in 2018. In addition, the attack Continue reading

Research: BGP Routers and Parrots

The BGP specification suggests implementations should have three tables: the adj-rib-in, the loc-rib, and the adj-rib-out. The first of these three tables should contain the routes (NLRIs and attributes) transmitted by each of the speaker’s peers. The second table should contain the calculated best paths; these are the routes that will be (or are) installed in the local routing table and used to build a forwarding table. The third table contains the routes which have been sent to each peering speaker. Why three tables? Routing protocols standards are (sometimes—not always) written to provide the maximum clarity to how the protocol works to someone who is writing an implementation. Not every table or process described in the specification is implemented, or implemented the way it is described.

What happens when you implement things in a different way than the specification describes? In the case of BGP and the three RIBs, you can get duplicated BGP updates. What do parrots and BGP have in common describes two situations where the lack of a adj-rib-out can cause duplicate BGP updates to be sent.

David Hauweele, Bruno Quoitin, Cristel Pelsser, and Randy Bush. 2016. “What Do Parrots and BGP Rotuers Have in Common?” Continue reading

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