Reaction; Do we really need a new Internet?

The other day several of us were gathered in a conference room on the 17th floor of the LinkedIn building in San Francisco, looking out of the windows as we discussed some various technical matters. All around us, there were new buildings under construction, with that tall towering crane anchored to the building in several places. We wondered how that crane was built, and considered how precise the building process seemed to be to the complete mess building a network seems to be.

And then, this week, I ran across a couple of articles arguing that we need a new Internet. For instance—

What we really have today is a Prototype Internet. It has shown us what is possible when we have a cheap and ubiquitous digital infrastructure. Everyone who uses it has had joyous moments when they have spoken to family far away, found a hot new lover, discovered their perfect house, or booked a wonderful holiday somewhere exotic. For this, we should be grateful and have no regrets. Yet we have not only learned about the possibilities, but also about the problems. The Prototype Internet is not fit for purpose for the safety-critical and socially sensitive types of Continue reading

Worth Reading: Mud Slinging

Network Engineers are redefining themselves, always learning, always trying to improve themselves and marketing still puts out things like this in 2017. Sales and marketing definitely need to up their game. As my CEO said the other day: “Business is not between companies, it’s between people”. This is exactly what it’s about. If you burn my confidence by putting up stupid stuff on social media, it will affect your sales. Endorse your product on its own merits. Don’t talk down other vendors. This only makes YOU look bad. —Lost in Transit

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Worth Reading: Putting ARM servers through the paces

When ARM officials and partners several years ago began talking about pushing the low-power chip architecture from our phones and tablets and into the datacenter, the initial target was the emerging field of microservers – small, highly dense and highly efficient systems aimed at the growing number of cloud providers and hyperscale environments where power efficiency was as important as performance. —The Next Platform

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Sphere in spheres

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Worth Reading: Extend your ITIL

Defining precise cybersecurity services in the context of an IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is very important. From my perspective, many organizations struggle with cybersecurity because they do not understand what these essential services are. In the first post of this series, I discussed how ITIL misses the mark when it comes to operational security. In this post, I will discuss the six essential cybersecurity services required to run a credible security operation and how you can implement them in security operations. —APNIC

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Worth Reading: Got a license for that YouTube channel?

Justin Chandler was shocked and confused when he was given a citation for operating a business out of his home without first obtaining a license. Unlike many people who run home-based businesses, Chandler doesn’t actually sell anything. In fact, he doesn’t even provide a service. He does, however, run a successful YouTube channel, which, according to officials in Cobb County, Georgia, means Chandler qualifies as a small business owner. —The Stream

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Triangle Network Engineers

I’m speaking at the Triangle Network Engineers meeting on the 9th of March; click below to find out more.

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Worth Reading: Intel’s ticking time bomb

It started somewhat innocently. Cisco released a field notice that there was an issue with some signal clocks on a range of their networking devices. This by itself was a huge issue. There had been rumblings about this issue for a few months. Some proactive replacement of affected devices to test things. Followed by panicked customer visits when the news broke on February 2nd. Cisco looked like they were about to get a black eye. —The Networking Nerd

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Worth Reading: How long does it take to steal a credit card number?

Using the discovered card details to make an international money transfer took just 27 minutes from creating the transfer account to cash in hand (in this case in India, from funds initiating in the UK). That’s fast enough that there’s very little time for a bank to detect fraud and reverse the payment. Digging a little deeper though, there are also some interesting lessons to be learned about unintended emergent behaviours in complex systems, misaligned incentives, and the state of card payment security in general. —The Morning Paper

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Metacognitive

If I could choose just a handful of skills you must learn to be a successful engineer, being metacognitive would certainly be among them. What is metacognition? OOne of my favorite books on the virtue ethic applied to mental skills defines it thus—

Metacognitive people are concerned not just with what they need to know but with what thinking strategies are best suited to achieve that end. —Philip Dow, Virtuous Minds

The concept is simple. Implementation, as always, is the hard part. Particularly as engineers, we spend a lot of time thinking about technique. We ask questions like—

• How do I configure this?
• How would I use this technology?
• What is the problem here?
• Why would I want to do it that way?

These technos focused questions are great for solving day to day, or even no-so-day-to-day problems. But they aren’t so great for mental growth? Why not? Imagine you are tasked with cutting wood for a living. You might start out by simply cutting the wood. You place a piece on the block, swing the axe, and the splits fall off. You can consider this the what of cutting wood (or, for those who are interested in philosophy, the Continue reading

Worth Reading: The inconvenience of privacy

Unfortunately, it is not easy to assess the weight of privacy losses. Typically, in the online world, no small privacy loss will create a catastrophe. One business tracking one click of yours is not a big deal. But privacy losses accumulate, and the entirety of what you have revealed online through browsing, clicking, buying and liking, can paint a frighteningly detailed portrait of you. Privacy losses are like ecologic damages or health deterioration: no one act of littering, no one puff of a cigarette will bring about disaster, but the sum of them through time might. —Connecting

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Worth Reading: IBM should buy…

We spend a lot of time contemplating what technologies will be deployed at the heart of servers, storage, and networks and thereby form the foundation of the next successive generations of platforms in the datacenter for running applications old and new. While technology is inherently interesting, we are cognizant of the fact that the companies producing technology need global reach and a certain critical mass. —The Next Platform

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On the ‘net: I2RS Architecture

The last post on the topic of interface to the routing system (I2RS) discussed use cases; this one will provide an overview of the I2RS architecture, and then consider some challenges in the neighborhood of I2RS. —ECI

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Worth Reading: A Field Guide to Internet Governance in 2017

The global debate on Internet Governance has come a long way since 2005. In the 12 years following the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, governments have paid more attention than ever to policies that can promote economic development, security, and innovation. You may not have felt the progress, however; if it is hard to see a reduction in the confusion and “soup of forums” described on this site nearly six years ago, this is because as we have made progress, the scope of the issues addressed have increased to match. On the spectrum between a sprint and a marathon, Internet Governance may have become the Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race. —CircleID

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Worth Reading: Inside the big Supermicro deal

Among the major companies that design and sell servers with their own brands, which are called original equipment manufacturers or OEMs, and those that co-design machines with customers and then make them, which are called original design manufacturers or ODMs, Supermicro stands apart. It does not fall precisely into either category. The company makes system components, like motherboards and enclosures, for those who want to build their own systems or those who want to sell systems to others, and it also makes complete systems, sold in onesies or twosies or sold by the hundreds of racks. —The Next Platform

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Blocking a DDoS Upstream

In the first post on DDoS, I considered some mechanisms to disperse an attack across multiple edges (I actually plan to return to this topic with further thoughts in a future post). The second post considered some of the ways you can scrub DDoS traffic. This post is going to complete the basic lineup of reacting to DDoS attacks by considering how to block an attack before it hits your network—upstream.

The key technology in play here is flowspec, a mechanism that can be used to carry packet level filter rules in BGP. The general idea is this—you send a set of specially formatted communities to your provider, who then automagically uses those communities to create filters at the inbound side of your link to the ‘net. There are two parts to the flowspec encoding, as outlined in RFC5575bis, the match rule and the action rule. The match rule is encoded as shown below—

There are a wide range of conditions you can match on. The source and destination addresses are pretty straight forward. For the IP protocol and port numbers, the operator sub-TLVs allow you to specify a set of conditions to match on, and whether to AND the Continue reading

Worth Reading: Outage at Git

A short outage this week on the GitLab hosted code service struck a combination of fear and sympathy across the tech community and offered a sharp reminder of the importance of testing your backups again and again (and again). On Tuesday, a GitLab administrator had accidentally erased a directory of live production data during a routine database replication. In the process of restoring from the last backup, taken six hours prior, the company had discovered that none of its five backup routines worked entirely correctly. The incident report, which GitLab posted online, noted that erasure affected issues and merge requests but not the git repositories themselves. —The New Stack

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Worth Reading: Dynamics on emerging spaces

The article (and the expectations set by the introduction to the paper itself) promise a little more than they deliver in my view – but what we do concretely get is a description of a generative process that can produce distributions like those seen in the real world, with new / novel items appearing at the observed rates and following observed distributions. Previous models have all fallen short in one way or another, so the model does indeed seem to teach us something about the process of generating the new. —The Morning Paper

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Barn Doors

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Worth Reading: There is no “normal” in microservices

There is no “normal” for a microservices environment. And if a groundbreaking November 2016 white paper [PDF], produced by a team of six researchers from the University of Messina, the U.K.’s Newcastle University, and IBM Research, is to be taken at face value, perhaps such a state of equilibrium may never be attained. Every data center, the researchers write, has unique operating requirements. Once microservices are deployed there, the configurations they require become not only unique, but baked into their respective systems. —The New Stack

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