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7 Guiding Principles for Leading Data Center Networks

Whether you’re starting out on a fresh playing field or diving into a mud pool of decades-old complexity, designing and deploying a new or modernized data center is a rewarding endeavor; not just for the engineers and architects, but also for the businesses that reap the benefits of agility, scalability, and performance that come along with it.

And the first step on that road is to talk. The initial conversations with thought leaders, business strategists, and technical architects are the most pivotal in the discovery phase of any large project. It is at this phase that the box is forming, and questions must be asked outside of it to shape its dimensions. To transform the network, you must be prepared to ask challenging questions that drive conversations around open networking, automation, modularity, scalability, segmentation and re-usability. Before vendor selection, it is essential to compile a list of business and technical requirements founded upon a set of guiding principles.

Here are seven to keep in your pocket:
1. The network architecture should use standards-based protocols and services
2. The network should be serviceable without downtime
3. The network architecture should promote automation
4. The network should be consumable
5. Physical boundaries Continue reading

What to expect from Wi-Fi 6 in 2019

Wi-Fi 6 – aka 802.11ax – will begin to make its way into new installations in 2019, bringing with it a host of technological upgrades aimed at simplifying wireless-network problems.The first and most notable feature of the standard is that it’s designed to operate in today’s increasingly congested radio environments. It supports multi-user, multiple-input, multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technology, meaning that a given access point can handle traffic from up to eight users at the same time and at the same speed. Previous-generation APs still divide their attention and bandwidth among simultaneous users.[ Also see Wi-Fi 6 is coming to a router near you. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Better still is orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), a technology borrowed from the licensed, carrier-driven half of the wireless world. What this does is subdivide each of the available independent channels available on a given AP by a further factor of four, meaning even less slowdown for APs servicing up to a couple dozen clients at the same time.To read this article in full, please click here

Internet Freedom Declines Again, with ‘Polarized Echo Chambers’ Aiding Censorship Efforts

The amount of freedom on the global Internet has declined for the eighth straight year, with a group of countries moving toward “digital authoritarianism,” according to a new report from Freedom House.

A number of factors, including the spread of false rumors and hateful propaganda online, have contributed to an Internet that “can push citizens into polarized echo chambers that pull at the social fabric of the country,” said the report, released Thursday. These rifts often give aid to antidemocratic forces, including government efforts to censor the Internet, Freedom House said.

During 2018, authoritarians used claims of fake news and of data breaches and other scandals as an excuse to move closer to a Chinese model of Internet censorship, said the report, cosponsored by the Internet Society.

“China is exporting its model of digital authoritarianism throughout the world, posing a serious threat to the future of free and open Internet,” said Sanja Kelly, director for Internet Freedom at Freedom House. “In order to counter it, democratic governments need to showcase that there is a better way to manage the Internet, and that cybersecurity and disinformation can be successfully addressed without infringing on human rights.”

Thirty-six countries sent representatives Continue reading

Future Thinking: Natali Helberger on the Impact of Consolidation on Media Diversity

Last year, the Internet Society unveiled the 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The interactive report identifies the drivers affecting tomorrow’s Internet and their impact on Media & Society, Digital Divides, and Personal Rights & Freedoms. We interviewed Natali Helberger to hear her perspective on the forces shaping the Internet’s future.

Natali Helberger is a professor of Information Law at the University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Law. She researches how the role of information users is changing under the influence of information technology, and the regulation of converging information and communications markets. Focus points of her research are the interface between technology and information law, user rights and the changing role of the user in information law and policy. Natali has conducted research for the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, and national governments and is a regular speaker at national and international conferences. Among others, she is member of an Expert Committee of the Council of Europe on AI and Human Rights, and one of the leaders of the Dutch VSNU Citizenship & Democracy research agenda.

The Internet Society: You recently wrote a chapter for Damian Tambini and Martin Moore’s book Digital Continue reading

LEDE on Raspberry PI

In December 2017, I created a home router based Linux piCore installed on Raspberry PI3. I use this router in everyday life in order to provide Internet connection for my home devices. So far I have not noticed any issues. However, the router offers only basic functionality. The number of packages that extends router's functionality is limited by the number of available PiCore extensions in repository. Therefore, it is better to load Raspberry with a advanced network distribution that provides a better customization of embedded netwrok devices with many available packages.

The article discusses an installation and configuration of Linux Embedded Development Environment (LEDE) on Raspberry PI3. LEDE is an opensource project that was created in 2016 as a fork of OpenWrt - Linux OS for embedded devices. In 2018, LEDE and OpenWrt projects reemerged and they announced their unification  under OpenWrt name .

1.  LEDE Installation

The part 1 discusses installation of LEDE on Raspberry Pi3 and resizing LEDE image. After copying LEDE to SD card, we need to resize file system in order to use full capacity of SD card.

1.1 Downloading and Extracting LEDE for Raspberry PI3

$ wget https://downloads.lede-project.org/releases/17.01.4/targets/brcm2708/bcm2710/lede-17.01.4-brcm2708-bcm2710-rpi-3-ext4-sdcard.img.gz

$ Continue reading

Site Work

I spent some time this week moving to a new theme, specifically Beaver Builder. It was a bit more work than I expected because of some serious limitations with the way Beaver Builder works—had I known about these limitations, I probably would have worked with another product, but by the time I discovered them, it was either find a way around the limitations, or spend a lot more time and/or money working through them.

In the process, I completely rebuilt the menu, and cleaned up the categories.

The site should be a good bit faster now. I’m not entirely certain the social sharing bits are working, and I will likely find a few things wrong here and there that need to be fixed over the next few weeks. I just discovered, for instance, that I lost all the work on the papers and topical pages I’d done earlier today, so those need to be redone, which will take a good bit of time.

Terraform Azure Provider Setup

Microsoft Azure is one of the worlds leading cloud providers. While it is possible to point and click your way though the web interface to manage your Azure environment that is not how I want to live my life. This post will cover how to prepare your local development machine to enable ...

Education Service Center Region 11 Protects Student Data with VMware NSX Data Center

Rory Peacock is the Deputy Executive Director of Technology at Education Service Center Region 11, where he oversees all technology services provided to Region 11 schools.

Region 11 is one of 20 education service centers throughout the State of Texas. In Texas, an education service center manages education programs, delivers technical assistance, and provides professional development to schools within its region. With regards to technology, education service centers assist their schools with hosted services and technical support.

Education Service Center Region 11 serves 70,699 educators and almost 600,000 students across 10 urban and rural counties.

I had the opportunity to talk to Rory about some of his largest technology challenges since he joined Region 11 in 2015.

 

Day Zero

Region 11 is a long-time VMware customer, introducing VMware vSphere in 2009. Since then, Region 11 has virtualized over 95% of their server environment. They’ve also made the move to virtual desktops utilizing VMware Horizon to support their 200 employees.

On the very day in 2016 that a meeting was set with the VMware NSX Data Center team to demo the product, Region 11 was hit with a zero-day attack of ransomware. A legacy system was hit in its demilitarized Continue reading