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Category Archives for "Networking"

Five Stages of Automation Grief

As I’m doing occasional consulting for large enterprises redesigning their data centers, I encounter a wide range of network automation readiness, from “we don’t need that” to “how could we automate as much as possible”.

Based on the pervasiveness of “we don’t need that” responses it looks like many enterprise network engineers still have to go through the five stages of automation grief.

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Containers are here to stay, who has the right skill set?

Who controls containers: developers, or operations teams? While this might seem like something of an academic discussion, the question has very serious implications for the future of IT in any organization. IT infrastructure is not made up of islands; each component interacts with, and depends on, others. Tying all components of all infrastructures together is the network.

If operations teams control containers, they can carefully review the impact that the creation of those containers will have on all the rest of an organization’s infrastructure. They can carefully plan for the consequences of new workloads, assign and/or reserve resources, map out lifecycle, and plan for the retirement of the workload, including the return of those resources.

If developers control containers, they don’t have the training to see how one small piece fits into the wider puzzle, and almost certainly don’t have the administrative access to all the other pieces of the puzzle to gain that insight. Given the above, it might seem like a no-brainer to let operations teams control containers, yet in most organizations deploying containers, developers are responsible for the creation and destruction of containers, which they do as they see fit.

This is not as irrational as it Continue reading

Multi-Vendor Network Simulations at Scale with meshnet-cni and vrnetlab

In the previous post I’ve demonstrated how to build virtual network topologies on top of Kubernetes with the help of meshnet-cni plugin. As an example, I’ve shown topologies with 50 cEOS instances and 250 Quagga nodes. In both of these examples virtual network devices were running natively inside Docker containers, meaning they were running as (a set of) processes directly attached to the TCP/IP stack of the network namespace provided by the k8s pod. This works well for the native docker images, however, the overwhelming majority of virtual network devices are still being released as VMs. In addition to that, some of them require more than one VM and some special bootstrapping before they can they can be used for the first time. This means that in order to perform true multi-vendor network simulations, we need to find a way to run VMs inside containers, which, despite the seeming absurdity, is quite a common thing to do.

Option 1 - kubevirt

Kubevirt is a very popular project that provides the ability to run VMs inside k8s. It uses the power of Custom Resource Definitions to extend the native k8s API to allow the definition of VM parameters (libvirt domainxml) same Continue reading

IoT for retailers: opportunities and challenges

The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) is already having a profound impact on the world of retail, both online and in the brick-and-mortar world. But according to Darin Archer, chief marketing officer of ecommerce software vendor Elastic Path, we haven’t seen nothing yet.Via email, I asked Archer about the opportunities and challenges the IoT poses for retailers, and he offered some illuminating answers, including how IoT devices are “especially useful for routine purchases” and how they will increasingly pit retailers against manufacturers.[ Read also: 6 ways IoT is transforming retail ] Opportunity in the home, the car, online, and IoT devices That retailer/manufacturer competition will play out in four key fields, Archer said: the home, the car, online and social media, and from devices themselves.To read this article in full, please click here

On the ‘net: ARCnet

ARCnet was not an accidental choice in the networks I supported at the time. While thinnet was widely available, it required running coax cable. The only twisted pair Ethernet standard available at the time required new cables to be run through buildings, which could often be an expensive proposition. For instance, one of the places that relied heavily on ARCnet was a legal office in a small town in north-central New Jersey. @ECI’s LighTALK

One-Click DNSSEC with Cloudflare Registrar

One-Click DNSSEC with Cloudflare Registrar
One-Click DNSSEC with Cloudflare Registrar

When you launch your domain to the world, you rely on the Domain Name System (DNS) to direct your users to the address for your site. However, DNS cannot guarantee that your visitors reach your content because DNS, in its basic form, lacks authentication. If someone was able to poison the DNS responses for your site, they could hijack your visitors' requests.

The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) can help prevent that type of attack by adding a chain of trust to DNS queries. When you enable DNSSEC for your site, you can ensure that the DNS response your users receive is the authentic address of your site.

We launched support for DNSSEC in 2014. We made it free for all users, but we couldn’t make it easy to set up. Turning on DNSSEC for a domain was still a multistep, manual process. With the launch of Cloudflare Registrar, we can finish the work to make it simple to enable for your domain.

You can now enable DNSSEC with a single click if your domain is registered with Cloudflare Registrar. Visit the DNS tab in the Cloudflare dashboard, click "Enable DNSSEC", and we'll handle the rest. If you are Continue reading

History Of Networking – WHOIS – Mark Kosters

Being able to discover the person or entity behind an IP address or domain name has been a critically important feature of the Internet from the start. In this episode, Mark Kosters from ARIN joins us to talk about the history of the WHOIS protocol.
Mark Kosters
Guest
Russ White
Host
Donald Sharp
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post History Of Networking – WHOIS – Mark Kosters appeared first on Network Collective.

Last Month in Internet Intelligence: December 2018

Closing out 2018, in December the Oracle Internet Intelligence team observed Internet disruptions in countries around the world due to power outages, government direction, technical faults, and possible issues relating to satellite connectivity. While these causes have become relatively common, it is interesting to note that other common reasons for Internet disruptions, including severe weather (such as typhoons and hurricanes), concerns over cheating on exams, and denial-of-service attacks did not appear to drive significant Internet disruptions observed in Oracle’s Internet Intelligence Map during the month. And while we tend to focus on Internet disruptions, it is also important to highlight that after several rounds of testing, nationwide mobile Internet access was finally activated across Cuba.

Cuba

In three tranches (based on the first two digits of a subscriber’s mobile phone number) over December 6, 7, and 8, ETECSA, Cuba’s national telecommunications company, enabled nationwide mobile Internet access. The rollout was reportedly stable, in contrast to the congestion experienced during the trials conducted several months prior. The figure below shows the gradual adoption of this newly available connectivity through changes in the DNS Query Rate. As seen in the graph, the query rate was comparatively low in the days ahead of Continue reading

Zipping files on Linux: the many variations and how to use them

Some of us have been zipping files on Unix and Linux systems for many decades — to save some disk space and package files together for archiving. Even so, there are some interesting variations on zipping that not all of us have tried. So, in this post, we’re going to look at standard zipping and unzipping as well as some other interesting zipping options. [ Two-Minute Linux Tips: Learn how to master a host of Linux commands in these 2-minute video tutorials ] The basic zip command First, let’s look at the basic zip command. It uses what is essentially the same compression algorithm as gzip, but there are a couple important differences. For one thing, the gzip command is used only for compressing a single file where zip can both compress files and join them together into an archive. For another, the gzip command zips “in place”. In other words, it leaves a compressed file — not the original file alongside the compressed copy. Here's an example of gzip at work:To read this article in full, please click here

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