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Category Archives for "Networking"

Show 401: A Deeper Understanding Of Free Range Routing (FRR)

Free Range Routing (FRR) is an open source routing project. It’s designed to provide a full routing stack that can run on top of a network OS. FRR is itself a fork from the Quagga routing project.

On today’s Weekly Show, recorded live from IETF 102, we talk with Donald Sharp to learn about FRR, understand its capabilities, and get an update on roadmap features.

We also get a behind-the-scenes look at how new features are chosen, architectural issues that can lead to performance bottlenecks (and how to overcome them), and the challenge of making a programmatic interface for a project that was not originally conceived with that in mind.

We also discuss open source communities–how to understand them, the sorts of people that are involved with them, and the role a developer plays vs. a product consumer.

Then we get specific as to how someone with no previous project involvement can vet the community, decide to become involved, and add value to the group at large–even if they aren t developers.

Donald Sharp is Principal Engineer at Cumulus Networks and a lead contributor to the FRR project.

Show Links:

Free Range Routing Home Page – frrouting.org

FRR Mailing Continue reading

Container Conference Presentation

This week, I did a presentation in Container Conference, Bangalore. The conference was well conducted and it was attended by 400+ quality attendees. I enjoyed some of the sessions and also had fun talking to attendees. The topic I presented was “Deep dive into Kubernetes Networking”. Other than covering Kubernetes networking basics, I also touched … Continue reading Container Conference Presentation

Arm flexes flexibility with Pelion IoT announcement

The pervasiveness of Arm-based silicon – it’s everywhere from cars to signage to smartphones to supercomputers – makes the company a natural fit for an internet of things platform like the one it just announced.The Pelion IoT Platform's main selling point is its universality – the company boasts that it’s able to handle “any device, any data, any cloud” – in a marketplace overflowing with vertical-specific solutions. (GE and Siemens make industrial IoT products, other companies make platforms designed specifically to work well in healthcare, fleet management, or agricultural environments, and so on.)[ Check out our corporate guide to addressing IoT security. ] Pelion can sit on an edge device, in a data center, or even in an endpoint, integrating devices into a working ecosystem, although the focus is on the edge.To read this article in full, please click here

The one thing private equity firms typically overlook when funding startup WISPs…professional network engineers.

22893884 - telecommunications radio tower or mobile phone base station with engineers in concept background

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Funding a new WISP

There are a number of ways to fund a startup Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP), but the two we most commonly see as network engineering consultants at IP ArchiTechs are self funded by individuals/partners or by leveraging private equity (PE) money.

Private equity has become increasingly popular in the last few years if we are to use our consulting clients as a basis for comparison.

It’s not hard to see why, while you can (and many do) start a WISP on a shoestring budget, getting a significant chunk of initial funding to cover the costs of tower construction/leasing, network equipment, sales/marketing, etc is very attractive as it allows a WISP to build a network that might otherwise take several years of organic growth to achieve.

 

Network Engineering – the missing ingredient

Many startup WISPs are often borne out of necessity – fast, reliable or economical Internet access – one or more of these is missing in the areas we see WISPs develop.

Typically the stakeholders come from a variety of backgrounds some of which are technical and some aren’t – all of them, however, share a vision of building out Internet access and solving problems Continue reading

The one thing private equity firms typically overlook when funding startup WISPs…professional network engineers.

22893884 - telecommunications radio tower or mobile phone base station with engineers in concept background

.

Funding a new WISP

There are a number of ways to fund a startup Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP), but the two we most commonly see as network engineering consultants at IP ArchiTechs are self funded by individuals/partners or by leveraging private equity (PE) money.

Private equity has become increasingly popular in the last few years if we are to use our consulting clients as a basis for comparison.

It’s not hard to see why, while you can (and many do) start a WISP on a shoestring budget, getting a significant chunk of initial funding to cover the costs of tower construction/leasing, network equipment, sales/marketing, etc is very attractive as it allows a WISP to build a network that might otherwise take several years of organic growth to achieve.

 

Network Engineering – the missing ingredient

Many startup WISPs are often borne out of necessity – fast, reliable or economical Internet access – one or more of these is missing in the areas we see WISPs develop.

Typically the stakeholders come from a variety of backgrounds some of which are technical and some aren’t – all of them, however, share a vision of building out Internet access and solving problems Continue reading

Cisco and the Two-Factor Two-Step

In case you missed the news, Cisco announced yesterday that they are buying Duo Security. This is a great move on Cisco’s part. They need to beef up their security portfolio to compete against not only Palo Alto Networks but also against all the up-and-coming startups that are trying to solve problems that are largely being ignored by large enterprise security vendors. But how does an authentication vendor help Cisco?

Who Are You?

The world relies on passwords to run. Banks, email, and even your mobile device has some kind of passcode. We memorize them, write them down, or sometimes just use a password manager (like 1Password) to keep them safe. But passwords can be guessed. Trivial passwords are especially vulnerable. And when you factor in things like rainbow tables, it gets even scarier.

The most secure systems require you to have some additional form of authentication. You may have heard this termed as Two Factor Authentication (2FA). 2FA makes sure that no one is just going to be able to guess your password. The most commonly accepted forms of multi-factor authentication are:

  • Something You Know – Password, PIN, etc
  • Something You Have – Credit Card, Auth token, Continue reading

ISOC advocating IoT Trust at APAN 46

APAN 46 is being held on 5-9 August 2018 in Auckland, New Zealand, with the Internet Society being one of the sponsors. I’ll also be talking about IoT Security and the OTA IoT Trust Framework, as well as using the opportunity to continue to raise awareness of the MANRS Routing Security Initiative amongst network operators in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) supports the research and education networks in the region to help them to connect to each other and to other R&E networks around the world, provides opportunities to exchange knowledge, and coordinates common activities, services and applications for its membership. It was established back in 1997, and this is the second of its two annual meetings for 2018.

I’ll be speaking during the Internet-of-Things session next Wednesday (8 August 2018 @ 09.00-10.30 UTC+12), and will discuss how IoT is responsible for huge growth in the number of unmanaged or minimally-managed devices connected to the Internet, but do we really know who or what is communicating with them, and the information they are collecting and sending? I’ll also present ISOC’s Online Trust Alliance’s initiative to develop the IoT Trust Framework which is backed Continue reading

Network World: Edge, Intent-based networking are all the rage; IT networking budgets rise

As distributed resources from wired, wireless, cloud and Internet of Things networks grow, the need for a more intelligent network edge is growing with it.Network World’s 8th annual State of the Network survey shows the growing importance of edge networking, finding that 56% of respondents have plans for edge computing in their organizations. [ Related: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ] Typically, edge networking entails sending data to a local device that includes compute, storage and network connectivity in a small form factor. Data is processed at the edge, and all or a portion of it is sent to the central processing or storage repository in a corporate data center or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

Network World: Edge, Intent-based networking are all the rage; IT networking budgets rise

As distributed resources from wired, wireless, cloud and Internet of Things networks grow, the need for a more intelligent network edge is growing with it.Network World’s 8th annual State of the Network survey shows the growing importance of edge networking, finding that 56% of respondents have plans for edge computing in their organizations. [ Related: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ] Typically, edge networking entails sending data to a local device that includes compute, storage and network connectivity in a small form factor. Data is processed at the edge, and all or a portion of it is sent to the central processing or storage repository in a corporate data center or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud.To read this article in full, please click here

Network World: Edge, Intent-based networking are all the rage; IT networking budgets rise

As distributed resources from wired, wireless, cloud and Internet of Things networks grow, the need for a more intelligent network edge is growing with it.Network World’s 8th annual State of the Network survey shows the growing importance of edge networking, finding that 56% of respondents have plans for edge computing in their organizations. [ Related: How to plan a software-defined data-center network ] Typically, edge networking entails sending data to a local device that includes compute, storage and network connectivity in a small form factor. Data is processed at the edge, and all or a portion of it is sent to the central processing or storage repository in a corporate data center or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud.To read this article in full, please click here