Worth Reading: ONIE in the Data Center

ONIE stands for Open Networking Install Environment; it allows a network operating system (NOS) to be installed on any white-box switch hardware that supports this technology. Essentially it’s an extremely lightweight Linux implementation that is put on the mass-storage device in the switch during the manufacturing process, enabling automation of discovery and installation of a NOS image once installed on the customer network. ONIE supports installation from a variety of sources over a network using IPv4, IPv6 and tFTP, or even locally from a USB flash drive. Not only does this technology ease data center administration, it gives the end user a broader choice in software and hardware combinations. —Data Center Journal

The post Worth Reading: ONIE in the Data Center appeared first on 'net work.

Sunset over the Salt Marsh

The post Sunset over the Salt Marsh appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Ten Buzzwords to Avoid in your Profile

It’s 2017: this could be the year to start something big. If you’ve thought about pursuing a new career direction or a challenge, you’re not alone — this week marks the busiest week of the year (so far) to update your LinkedIn profile and we want to help you start the year off right. The first place to start is a stand-out LinkedIn profile. But to help you make it truly shine, we took our annual look at the most overused words in profiles around the world and found the top 10 words you should avoid this year… —LinkedIn

The post Worth Reading: Ten Buzzwords to Avoid in your Profile appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Intel Defends Chip Innovation

With absolute dominance in datacenter and desktop compute, considerable sway in datacenter storage, a growing presence in networking, and profit margins that are the envy of the manufacturing and tech sectors alike, it is not a surprise that companies are gunning for Intel. They all talk about how Moore’s Law is dead and how that removes a significant advantage for the world’s largest – and most profitable – chip maker. After years of this, the top brass in Intel’s Technology and Manufacturing Group as well as its former chief financial officer, who is now in charge of its manufacturing, operations, and sales, pushed back today with its first event dedicated explicitly to its chip factories and the processes they use to etch devices. —The Next Platform

The post Worth Reading: Intel Defends Chip Innovation appeared first on 'net work.

Openfabric: A Short Video of the IETF Presentation

The most current version of the draft can be found here. There is one more comment from Uma that still needs to be addressed, and one more section that needs to be added. There will probably be more changes, as well, over time. These sorts of drafts do not happen through one person; a number of folks have worked on various bits of the draft, including Shawn, Nikos, Ivan, Les, Naiming, Uma, and others—the folks who have added ideas, etc., are included in the contributors section, which is always worth paying attention to!

The post Openfabric: A Short Video of the IETF Presentation appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: A Case to Further Registrar Self Regulation

In most industries, businesses that blatantly act against the interests of their customers to favor their own internal profit centers would either not be allowed or else subject to controls and oversight by the government. It is universally regarded as an unfair and deceptive business practice. In the domain name registrar business, however, the normal practices of legitimate business dealings and customer protection seem woefully wanting. Kelly’s Case described here illustrates the point, and it provides the opportunity for ICANN to demonstrate it can be responsive to egregious registrar behavior without government agencies or juridical bodies becoming engaged. —CircleID

The post Worth Reading: A Case to Further Registrar Self Regulation appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Security Orchestration and Incident Response

Last month at the RSA Conference, I saw a lot of companies selling security incident response automation. Their promise was to replace people with computers ­– sometimes with the addition of machine learning or other artificial intelligence techniques ­– and to respond to attacks at computer speeds. While this is a laudable goal, there’s a fundamental problem with doing this in the short term. You can only automate what you’re certain about, and there is still an enormous amount of uncertainty in cybersecurity. Automation has its place in incident response, but the focus needs to be on making the people effective, not on replacing them ­ security orchestration, not automation. —Schneier on Security

The post Worth Reading: Security Orchestration and Incident Response appeared first on 'net work.

Todo List

The post Todo List appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Microservices to the Edge

There’s a hidden tension here. Once you put code at the edge you violate two of Lambda’s key assumptions: functions are composed using scalable backend services; low latency messaging. The edge will have a high latency path back to services in the datacenter, so how do you make a function based distributed application at the edge? Does edge computing argue for a more retro architecture with fewer messages back to a more monolithic core? —High Scalability

The post Worth Reading: Microservices to the Edge appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: IPAM and RIRs

In terms of the strategy surrounding IPAM, most of the thinking was focused on a ‘downward’ approach, in as much as you define a pool of IP addresses and the role of IPAM is to manage its application to devices and systems in your network: configure bindings to customer accounts, billing, assign maps between device identifier and IP, size pools to reflect DHCP requirements, and configure the CGN. —APNIC

The post Worth Reading: IPAM and RIRs appeared first on 'net work.

On the ‘net: CAP and SDN

The CAP theorem essentially states that consistency, accessibility, and portioning are three sides of a tradeoff triangle. Much like quick, cheap, and quality; or state, optimization, and surface; CAP posits that you can choose “two out of three.” To illustrate, it is often helpful to consider a database in various stages of being partitioned, and consider the impact on consistency and accessibility, the other two sides of the triangle. The figure below will be used as a reference. —ECI

The post On the ‘net: CAP and SDN appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Botnets in the Cloud

The arms race between data security professionals and cybercriminals continues at a rapid pace. More than ever, attackers exploit compute resources for malicious purposes by deploying malware, known as “bots”, in virtual machines running in the cloud. Even a conservative estimate reveals that, at least, 1 in every 10,000 machines are part of some known Botnet. —Azure Blog

The post Worth Reading: Botnets in the Cloud appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: QoS Marking is an Application Problem

I was so delighted to hear someone finally realized how to handle QoS properly: the responsibility lies with the applications on the host; the network should just provide what it was asked to do, not try to reverse-engineer application intent based on TCP/UDP port numbers or haruspicy. —IPSpace

The post Worth Reading: QoS Marking is an Application Problem appeared first on 'net work.

Distributed Denial of Service Open Threat Signaling (DOTS)

When the inevitable 2AM call happens—”our network is under attack”—what do you do? After running through the OODA loop (1, 2, 3, 4), used communities to distribute the attack as much as possible, mitigated the attack where possible, and now you realist there little you can do locally. What now? You need to wander out on the ‘net and try to figure out how to stop this thing. You could try to use flowspec, but many providers do not like to support flowspec, because it directly impacts the forwarding performance of their edge boxes. Further, flowspec, used in this situation, doesn’t really work to walk the attack back to its source; the provider’s network is still impact by the DDoS attack.

This is where DOTS comes in. There are four components of DOTS, as shown below (taken directly from the relevant draft)—

The best place to start is with the attack target—that’s you, at 6AM, after trying to chase this thing down for a few hours, panicked because the office is about to open, and your network is still down. Within your network there would also be a DOTS client; this would be a small piece of software running Continue reading

Worth Reading: A Guide to Private VPN Services

Many readers are understandably concerned about recent moves by the U.S. Congress that would roll back privacy rules barring broadband Internet service providers (ISPs) from sharing or selling customer browsing history, among other personal data. Some are concerned enough by this development that they’re looking at obfuscating all of their online browsing by paying for a subscription to a virtual private networking (VPN) service. This piece is intended to serve as a guidepost for those contemplating such a move. —Krebs on Security

The post Worth Reading: A Guide to Private VPN Services appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Is Enterprise Networking Lost in the Cloud?

In the end, only a combination of private, public and hybrid networking can deliver the levels of reliability, security, scalability and flexibility that today’s enterprises require. Traditional private WANs are simply too slow, inflexible and expensive for the multitude of cloud-based applications. Typically, the data center becomes the central gateway for security, Internet breakout and data exchange. —Data Center Journal

The post Worth Reading: Is Enterprise Networking Lost in the Cloud? appeared first on 'net work.

Garden Gate

The post Garden Gate appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: The Story of an RFC about Alternative Networks

During IETF 89 in March 2014, the first meeting of the Global Access to the Internet for All (GAIA) Working Group drew members from academia, industry, and the breadth of nongovernmental organisations interested in providing universal Internet access for a wider community—all of whom were eager to help in bridging the digital divide. The outcomes of that first meeting can be summarized by three types of challenges: geographic, motivated by the need to connect rural and remote areas; technological, given the need for a common set of technologies that enable a better utilization of scarce resources; and socioeconomic, based on the need to study affordability models for disconnected people. —The IETF Journal

The post Worth Reading: The Story of an RFC about Alternative Networks appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: It’s Personal

Meeting people we’ve talked about, directly or not, brings a poignant perspective to creating content for a wide audience. It’s personal. Somebody made a decision to create the product that way. Some group of humans worked on that standard. Real people decided on that process. Is it appropriate to cast those people in a negative light and share that opinion with an audience? Sometimes…yes, at times even crucially necessary, if unfortunate. Sometimes…maybe not. Sometimes it’s okay to shut up. To show restraint. To chain the snark monster. —Ethan Banks

The post Worth Reading: It’s Personal appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: Is Adobe plotting the end of web designers?

Adobe is one of the most well-known software companies whose tools are used by numerous web designers. Many reading this article likely use or have used Adobe at some point in their careers. That’s why it’s not without irony that Adobe is now dabbling in a hush-hush project that seeks to automate many of the tasks that designers regularly do as part of their jobs. —Web Designer Depot

The post Worth Reading: Is Adobe plotting the end of web designers? appeared first on 'net work.