Rehashing Certifications

While at Cisco Live in Barcelona this week, I had a chat with someone—I don’t remember who—about certifications. The main point that came out of the conversation was this:

One of the big dangers with chasing a certification is you will end up chasing knowledge about using a particular vendor feature set, rather than chasing knowledge about a technology.

At some point I’m going to edit a post a video short on engineering versus meta-engineering (no, it won’t be next week), but the danger is real. For instance, in an article I’ve had in my bookmarks pile for a long while, the author says—

My boss advised me that getting my WPCE (WordPerfect Certified Resource) cert would accomplish two things: 1. It would establish my credibility as a trainer; and 2. If I didn’t know a feature before the test, I sure as heck would afterward.

I’m not going to name the author, because this is his description of thinking through a certification many years ago, rather than his current thinking on certifications—but the example is telling. I know a lot of folks studying for certifications. They mostly spend their time labbing up various protocols and… features. The temptation to Continue reading

Worth Reading: Addressing 2017

Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself. —Geoff Huston @APNIC

Is Networking Becoming a Commodity?

Worth Reading: TCP Congestion Signatures

Congestion in the Internet is an age-old problem. With the rise of broadband networks, it had been implicitly accepted that congestion is most likely to occur in the ‘last mile’, that is, the broadband link between the ISP and the home customer. This is due to service plans or technical factors that limit the bandwidth in the last mile. —Srikanth Sundaresan @APNIC

Giving the Monkey a Smaller Club

Over at the ACM blog, there is a terrific article about software design that has direct application to network design and architecture.

The problem is that once you give a monkey a club, he is going to hit you with it if you try to take it away from him.

What do monkeys and clubs have to do with software or network design? The primary point of interaction is security. The club you intend to make your network operator’s life easier is also a club an attacker can use to break into your network, or damage its operation. Clubs are just that way. If you think of the collection of tools as not just tools, but also as an attack surface, you can immediately see the correlation between the available tools and the attack surface. One way to increase security is to reduce the attack surface, and one way to reduce the attack surface is tools, reduce the number of tools—or the club.

The best way to reduce the attack surface of a piece of software is to remove any unnecessary code.

Consider this: the components of any network are actually made up of code. So to translate this to Continue reading

Worth Reading: Ruru

With the increasing number of real-time applications (online games using virtual reality, multi-site financial transaction processing) and the radically new business models and use cases introduced by the 5G mobile architecture (robotics, tactile Internet) requiring interactive back-and-forth communication, user-perceived end-to-end latency is becoming an all-important factor for both users and network providers. —Richard Cziva @APNIC

Worth Reading: A constructive guide to upskilling

For years now, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to go about investing in myself. —Diane Mawer @Web Designer Depot

Learning to Ask Questions

A lot of folks ask me about learning theory—they don’t have the time for it, or they don’t understand why they should. This video is in answer to that question.

Worth Reading: GDPR meets whois

Many ICANN stakeholders are concerned that access to the public WHOIS database could change [because of GDPR]. —Jerry Malcom @EFF

Weekend Reads 012618: Mostly Security and Legal Stuff

Before we begin, its worth mentioning that yes, yesssssssssssssssssssss, I did not have enough protection around my Gmail account. I’ve used Google Authenticator before, for my personal account and for various work emails, but I stopped using it at a certain point out of convenience. —Cody Brow @Medium

This report assesses the impact disclosure of data breaches has on the total returns and volatility of the affected companies’ stock, with a focus on the results relative to the performance of the firms’ peer industries, as represented through selected indices rather than the market as a whole. financial performance is considered over a range of dates from 3 days post-breach through 6 months post-breach, in order to provide a longer-term perspective on the impact of the breach announcement. —Russell Lange & Eric W. Burger @Journal of Information Privacy and Security

If it were not for the insatiable bandwidth needs of the twenty major hyperscalers and cloud builders, it is safe to say that the innovation necessary to get Ethernet switching and routing up to 200 Gb/sec or 400 Gb/sec might not have been done at the fast pace that the industry as been able to pull off. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @The Continue reading

Blue Ridge Mountains

Worth Reading: Quantum Computing and Cryptography

All encryption is based on substitution, from simple schemes we did as kids to complex non-repeating patterns based on a long numerical key. Modern encryption systems construct these keys using a combination of private and public keys with mathematical one-way functions. —Jonathan Homa @ECI

One Weird Trick

I’m often asked what the trick is to become a smarter person—there are many answers, of course, which I mention in this video. But there is “one weird trick” many people don’t think about, which I focus on here.

Worth Reading: Real Time Wide-Area TCP Latency Monitoring

With the increasing number of real-time applications and the radically new business models and use cases introduced by the 5G mobile architecture requiring interactive back-and-forth communication, user-perceived end-to-end latency is becoming an all-important factor for both users and network providers. —Richard Cziva @APNIC

Worth Reading: Enabling Dual Stack on LinkedIn CDNs

A few months ago, LinkedIn surpassed the 50% IPv6 traffic milestone. In this post, we will look into the methodology we adopted to measure performance as we enabled IPv6 on our content delivery networks (CDNs), and share some key results of our performance analysis. —Erin Atkinson and Bhaskar Bhowmik @LinkedIn

Responding to Readers: How are these thing discovered?

A while back I posted on section 10 routing loops; Daniel responded to the post with this comment:

I am curious how these things are discovered. You said that this is a contrived example, but I assume researchers have some sort of methodology to discover issues like this. I am sure some things have been found through operational mishap, but is there some “standardized” way of testing graph logic for the possibility of loops? I trust this is much easier to do today than even a decade ago.

You would think there would be some organized way to discover these kinds of routing loops, something every researcher and/or protocol designer might follow. The reality is far different—there is no systematic way that I know of to find this sort of problem. What happens, in real life, is that people with a lot of experience at the intersection of protocol design, the bounds of different ways of finding loop free paths (solving the loop free path problem), and a lot of experience in deploying and operating a network using these protocols, will figure these things out because they know enough about the solution space to look for them in the first Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Architecture of RIPE ATLAS

It has been fun figuring out how to build [RIPE ATLAS] over the last seven years. Although there are other measurement networks out there besides RIPE Atlas, the unique features for each of these mean that there’s no single best practice on how to build one … —Robert Kisteleki @APNIC

Worth Reading: Spotlight on Tetration

My first impression: Tetration is clearly evolving and improving. It may be just me, but I think I heard more emphasis on agents and third-party sources, and less on Nexus 9K hardware. That makes sense in terms of not holding up purchase until hardware refresh time — something that previously may have deferred some/many ACI and Tetration buying decisions. Admittedly, hardware-based approaches have fewer touch points. —Pete Welcher @Netcraftsmen

Responding to Readers: Automated Design?

Deepak responded to my video on network commodization with a question:

What’s your thoughts on how Network Design itself can be Automated and validated. Also from Intent based Networking at some stage Network should re-look into itself and adjust to meet design goals or best practices or alternatively suggest the design itself in green field situation for example. APSTRA seems to be moving into this direction.

The answer to this question, as always, is—how many balloons fit in a bag? I think it depends on what you mean when you use the term design. If we are talking about the overlay, or traffic engineering, or even quality of service, I think we will see a rising trend towards using machine learning in network environments to help solve those problems. I am not convinced machine learning can solve these problems, in the sense of leaving humans out of the loop, but humans could set the parameters up, let the neural network learn the flows, and then let the machine adjust things over time. I tend to think this kind of work will be pretty narrow for a long time to come.

There will be stumbling blocks here that need to be Continue reading

Worth Reading: Can routing be oversimplified?

Hiding the networking infrastructure from the end user is nothing new. It’s a trick that has been used for years to allow infrastructures to be tuned and configured in such a way as to deliver maximum performance without letting anyone tinker with the secret sauce under the hood. —The Networking Nerd