‘net Neutrality Collection

I’ve run across a lot of interesting perspectives on ‘net Neutrality; to make things easier, I’ve pulled them onto a single page. For anyone who’s interested in hearing every side of the issue, this is a good collection of articles to read through.

The page is here.

Worth Reading: Operational Excellence in April Fools Jokes

At 10:23 UTC on April 1, 2015, stackoverflow.com enabled an April Fools’ prank called StackEgg.1 It was a simple Tamagotchi-like game that appeared in the upper right corner of the website. Though it had been tested, we didn’t account for the additional network activity it would generate. By 13:14 UTC the activity had grown to the point of overloading the company’s load balancers, making the site unusable. All of the company’s web properties were affected. The prank had, essentially, created a self-inflicted denial-of-service attack. —Thomas A. Limoncelli @ ACM Queue

Worth Reading: Barefoot Releases Per Packet Network Monitoring

Barefoot Networks, maker of the programmable Tofino silicon for network devices, has released a new network monitoring application for Tofino switches called Deep Insight. Deep Insight, which is built from the open source P4 programming language, lets administrators and operators monitor Tofino-based switches down to individual packets. —Drew Conry-Murray @ Packet Pushers

History of Networking: The Early Years of Voice Over IP

Worth Reading: The Costs and Concerns of Cloud

Moving large-scale enterprise operations into the cloud is not a decision to be made lightly. There are engineering and financial considerations, and the process of determining the costs pros and cons of such a move is significantly more complex than simply comparing the expense of running a workload on-premises or in a public cloud. —Jeffrey Burt @ The Next Platform

Worth Reading: Dim Fiber

Perhaps you have not yet heard the term “dim fiber services”. If so, allow me to introduce you to a concept that is growing in popularity among fiber network owners. Dim services fall in between lit services and dark fiber services (hence the name) and provide network operators with an additional revenue stream while providing end users a more transparent and flexible service choice. &#8212s;Scott Wilkinson @ ECI

Reaction: AT&T’s Paper on dNOS

The AT&T White Paper: What they get Right, what they get Wrong

AT&T recently published a paper on dNOS, an open, disaggregated, Network Operating System for any kind of hardware. They list three primary purposes for their effort at helping the networking industry build an open source dNOS:

• To improve the rate of innovation and introduction of new features
• To provide more flexibility in network design
• To reduce costs where possible by taking advantage of purchasing “at scale”

How could disaggregation help with these three goals? The first of these, the rate of innovation, is really about packaging and perception, but we often forget that perception is a large part of innovation. If software developers always believe they must wait on the hardware, and hardware developers always feel like they must wait on the software, then the two teams develop an interlocking system that can slow down the pace at which either team can operate. One certain way to drive innovation is to break up such interconnected systems, allowing each one to use the features of the other in ways not originally intended, or drive the other team to create new features through competition. For instance, if the software team Continue reading

Worth Reading: Battle of the Infinibands

When it comes to HPC, compute is like the singers in a rock band, making all of the noise and soaking up most of the attention. But the network that lashes the compute together is literally the beat of the drums and the thump of the bass that keeps everything in synch and allows for the harmonies of the singers to come together at all. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

Worth Reading: Big Data and Social Change

Our authors will argue the big data challenge is the not technical problem of moving the maximum amount of bits in the minimum amount of time, but the scientific challenge of formulating methods to represent the complex and entangled systems that we must design and manage to run the modern world. This goes beyond “computational analytics” that abstract statistics from large data sets; “data mining” that discovers useful structures in combined data streams; and “visual analytics” that display multisource data as ingenious maps, color-coded images, and multidimensional videos to aid understanding and inform decisionmaking. —David Sousa-Rodrigues @ ACM

Do What You Love?

Worth Reading: VXLAN Designs

With VXLAN design, the easiest thing to overlook is how communication occurs between subnets. I think many times, network engineers take for granted that our traffic will flow in a VXLAN environment. And it’s also easy to get confused when trying to figure out traffic routing path between your overlay and underlay. —Rama Darbha @ Cumulus

Computer Networking Problems and Solutions on Sale

For anyone who would like to pick up a copy of Ethan and I’s latest work, it’s currently on prepublication special over at InformIT. Click on the image below for the sale price.

Weekend Reads: The Relay Box Attack

West Midlands Police believe it is the first time the high-tech crime has been caught on camera. Relay boxes can receive signals through walls, doors and windows but not metal. The theft took just one minute and the Mercedes car, stolen from the Elmdon area of Solihull on 24 September, has not been recovered. @BBCWest Midlands Police believe it is the first time the high-tech crime has been caught on camera. Relay boxes can receive signals through walls, doors and windows but not metal. The theft took just one minute and the Mercedes car, stolen from the Elmdon area of Solihull on 24 September, has not been recovered. @BBC

There’s rising worry that corporations are taking over America. But after reviewing a slew of the bids by cities and states wooing Amazon’s massive second headquarters, I don’t think “takeover” quite captures what’s going on. More like “surrender.” Last month Amazon announced it got 238 offers for its new, proposed 50,000-employee HQ2. I set out to see what’s in them, but only about 30 have been released so far under public-record acts. @The Seattle Times

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Carpenter v. United States on November Continue reading

Church

Worth Reading: Are you a genius or a fraud?

One time, when I was a small child, I saw Hank Aaron go to bat. He had already hit his 500th home run. I was looking forward to seeing this genius do his thing. I was devastated when he struck out. Some genius, I recall thinking. As an eight-year-old, my first thought was that I could have done exactly what he did. Of course, Hank knew something that I, at the time, did not. Genius is about averages, not every time at bat. If every time you strike out, you imagine that you might be a fraud, you will make yourself insane. —Jeffery Tucker @ The Stream

Worth Reading: The Future is Conversational Systems

It’d be difficult to downplay the impact Amazon Web Services has had on the computing industry over the past decade. Since launching in 2006, Amazon’s cloud computing division has become the set the pace in the public cloud market, rapidly growing out its capabilities from the first service – Simple Storage Service (S3) – it rolled out to now offering thousands of services that touch on everything from compute instances to databases, storage, application development and emerging technologies like machine learning and data analytics. —Jeffery Burt @ The Next Platform

Worth Reading: Let’s talk about RFC6980

Following my work with the FreeBSD implementation of RFC 6980 I was happy to present my work at last week’s DENOG 9 meeting.
To make it available to anyone who did not meet me there and go into some more detail that would have exceeded the boundaries of the talk, I will cover the topic here. After the preceding work on Windows Server 2016 and the FreeBSD testing, as a Linux user, lover and administrator, I of course wanted to take a look at how different Linux systems complied with the RFC 6980 standard. —Jacky Hammer @ Insinuator

Deconstructing the Meaning of Tunneling in Networks

Worth Reading: Debating Exascale Commodity Hardware

Building the first exascale systems continues to be a high-profile endeavor, with efforts underway worldwide in the United States, the European Union, and Asia – notably China and Japan – that focus on competition between regional powers, the technologies that are going into the architectures, and the promises that these supercomputers hold for everything from research and government to business and commerce. —Jeffery Burt @ The Next Platform

Reaction: Science and Engineering

Are you a scientist, or an engineer? This question does not seem to occur to most engineers, but it does seem science has “taken the lead role” in recent history, with engineers being sometimes (or perhaps often) seen as “the folks who figure out how to make use of what scientists are discovering.” There are few fields where this seems closer to the truth than computing. Peter Denning has written an insightful article over at the ACM on this topic; a few reactions are in order.

Denning separates engineers from scientists by saying:

The first concerns the nature of their work. Engineers design and build technologies that serve useful purposes, whereas scientists search for laws explaining phenomena.

While this does seem like a useful starting point, I’m not at all certain the two fields can be cleanly separated in this way. The reality is there is probably a continuum starting from what might be called “meta-engineers,” those who’s primary goal is to implement a technology designed by someone else by mentally reverse engineering what this “someone else” has done, to the deeply focused “pure scientist,” who really does not care about the practical application, but is rather simply searching Continue reading