Worth Reading: Internet Performance Myths that Sabotage SaaS

Software as a Service has become the de facto delivery model for core business applications today. The most business-critical network between the end user and the application is now the public internet. —Pej Roshan @The New Stack

Worth Reading: eVPN Behind the Curtain

Is EVPN magic? Well, like Arthur C Clarke said, any considerable leap in technology is indistinguishable from magic. On that premise, moving from a traditional layer 2 environment to VXLAN driven by EVPN has much of that same hocus pocus feeling. —Rama Darbha and Eric Pulvino @Cumulus

BGP Security: A Gentle Reminder that Networking is Business

At NANOG on the Road (NotR) in September of 2018, I participated in a panel on BGP security—specifically the deployment of Route Origin Authentication (ROA), with some hints and overtones of path validation by carrying signatures in BGP updates (BGPsec). This is an area I have been working in for… 20 years? … at this point, so I have seen the argument develop across these years many times, and in many ways. What always strikes me about this discussion, whenever and wherever it is aired, is the clash between business realities and the desire for “someone to do something about routing security in the DFZ, already!” What also strikes me about these conversations it the number of times very fundamental concepts end up being explained to folks who are “new to the problem.”

Part of the problem here is Continue reading

Worth Reading: Internet Reliability Report

Internet connectivity at the inter-domain level is based on connectivity between Autonomous Systems (ASes). As the number of alternate routes between ASes increases, so does fault-resistance and the stability of the Internet in a given economy increase. However, some paths prove to be more important than others. —Alexander Azimov @APNIC

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Five of the largest U.S. technology companies pledged support this year for a dangerous law that makes our emails, chat logs, online videos and photos vulnerable to warrantless collection by foreign governments. Now, one of those companies has voiced a meaningful pivot, instead pledging support for its users and their privacy. EFF appreciates this commitment, and urges other companies to do the same. —David Ruiz @EFF

Quantum computing is a new way of computing — one that could allow humankind to perform computations that are simply impossible using today’s computing technologies. It allows for very fast searching, something that would break some of the encryption algorithms we use today. And it allows us to easily factor large numbers, something that would break the RSA cryptosystem for any key length. @Schneier on Security

If you manage Internet number resources in the APNIC Whois Database, you are requested to provide contact information so that people can contact you for network abuse or troubleshooting. You and your colleagues might have created person objects for this purpose. However, from time to time a person performing a role may change. If you have a lot of resource contacts to manage, updating person contacts can Continue reading

Grill

Worth Reading: IPv6 in a WISP

This guide is meant to give you an overview of an example IPv6 addressing plan for an entire WISP as well as the config needed in MikroTik to deploy IPv6 from a core router all the way to a subscriber device. —Kevin Myers @Stubarea51

History of Networking: DMVPN

Worth Reading: IPv6 Adoption through USGv6

The USGv6 Profile is a document created to help federal agencies plan for IPv6 technology acquisition. It’s based on the technical specifications that constitute the IPv6 standard and capabilities that aid in IPv6 deployment. @The Data Center Journal

Worth Reading: For Whom the Dell Tolls

We are going to look at Dell from just before the deal went down and up until its second quarter of fiscal 2019, which ended in early August, and using the characterizations it currently has when it talks to Wall Street. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @The Next Platform

On the ‘net: FDDI

Token Ring, in its original form, was clearly a superior technology. For instance, because of the token passing capabilities, it could make use of more than 90% of the available bandwidth. In contrast, Ethernet systems, particularly early Ethernet systems used a true “single wire” broadcast domain. The Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI), is like Token Ring in many ways.

Worth Reading: Verizon’s 5G/FTTN

The new Verizon service will apparently be offered at a 300 Mbps baseline speed, with higher speeds possible where customer location relative to the 5G/FTTN hybrid sites is favorable. You could, they say, get up to a gig, which for those prices would be a revolutionary bargain in itself. —Tom Nolle @CIMI

Worth Reading: Is Your Future Boss a Narcissist?

Brain teaser questions like “Calculate the angle of two clock pointers when time is 11:50” may actually say more about the interviewer than the interviewee. —Leslie Albrecht @Market Watch

Short Take: Time Management

Worth Reading: Complexity and Network Automation

Network automation of complex configurations is much, much harder than automation of simple configurations. What makes a configuration complex and what is required in an automation system to handle complex configurations? — Terry Slattery @Netcarftsmen

Worth Reading: The Most Fragile Engineers I Know

I’ve decided to make my own list from an IT engineering perspective. And instead of listing the smartest traits, I’ll explore the characteristics of the most fragile. —Ethan Banks @Packet Pushers

On the ‘net: Too Many Tools

Carpenters always remember one simple piece of advice when they are working on a job: Measure twice, cut once. It’s a little different in networking, though. In our industry, my advice is the following: Measure many times, but never cut. @Search Networking

Worth Reading: The Edge Computing Wedge

Like an amoeba the public cloud is extending fingerlike projections to the edge in a new kind of architecture that creates a world spanning distributed infrastructure under one centralized management, billing, and security domain. @High Scalability

Hall at St. Michael’s

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Security

You install a new app on your phone, and it asks for access to your email accounts. Should you, or shouldn’t you? TL;DR? You shouldn’t. When an app asks for access to your email, they are probably reading your email, performing analytics across it, and selling that information. Something to think about: how do they train their analytics models? By giving humans the job of reading it.

When you shut your computer down, the contents of memory are not wiped. This means an attacker can sometimes grab your data while the computer is booting, before any password is entered. Since 2008, computers have included a subsystem that wipes system memory before starting any O/S launch—but researchers have found a way around this memory wipe.

You know when your annoying friend talks about the dangers of IoT when you bragging about your latest install of that great new electronic doorlock that works off your phone? You know the one I’m talking about. Maybe that annoying friend has some things right, and we should really be paying more attention to the problems inherent in large scale IoT deployments. For instance, what would happen if you could get the electrical grid in Continue reading