SK Telecom Will Incorporate AI Into Its 5G Network
The South Korean operator plans to talk about 5G trials at the 5G New Horizon Symposium in Austin, Texas, next month.
The EIGRP SIA Incident: Positive Feedback Failure in the Wild
Reading a paper to build a research post from (yes, I’ll write about the paper in question in a later post!) jogged my memory about an old case that perfectly illustrated the concept of a positive feedback loop leading to a failure. We describe positive feedback loops in Computer Networking Problems and Solutions, and in Navigating Network Complexity, but clear cut examples are hard to find in the wild. Feedback loops almost always contribute to, rather than independently cause, failures.
Many years ago, in a network far away, I was called into a case because EIGRP was failing to converge. The immediate cause was neighbor flaps, in turn caused by Stuck-In-Active (SIA) events. To resolve the situation, someone in the past had set the SIA timers really high, as in around 30 minutes or so. This is a really bad idea. The SIA timer, in EIGRP, is essentially the amount of time you are willing to allow your network to go unconverged in some specific corner cases before the protocol “does something about it.” An SIA event always represents a situation where “someone didn’t answer my query, which means I cannot stay within the state machine, so I Continue reading
Pivotal Software Expects IPO to Raise up to $592M
The cloud-native software company said it will price 37 million Class A shares between $14 and $16 per share.
SDKLT
Building the Demo App describes how to get started using a simulated Tomahawk device. Included, is a CLI that can be used to explore tables. For example, the following CLI output shows the attributes of the sFlow packet sampling table:
BCMLT.0> lt list -d MIRROR_PORT_ENCAP_SFLOW
MIRROR_PORT_ENCAP_SFLOW
Description: The MIRROR_PORT_ENCAP_SFLOW logical table is used to specify
per-port sFlow encapsulation sample configuration.
11 fields (1 key-type field):
SAMPLE_ING_FLEX_RATE
Description: Sample ingress flex sFlow packet if the generated sFlow random
number is greater than the threshold. A lower threshold leads to
higher sampling frequency.
SAMPLE_EGR_RATE
Description: Sample egress sFlow packet if the generated sFlow random number is
greater than the threshold. A lower threshold leads to
higher sampling frequency.
SAMPLE_ING_RATE
Description: Sample ingress sFlow packet if the generated sFlow random number is
greater than the threshold. A lower threshold leads to
higher sampling frequency.
SAMPLE_ING_FLEX_MIRROR_INSTANCE
Description: Enable to copy ingress flex sFlow packet samples to the ingress
mirror member using the sFlow mirror instance configuration.
SAMPLE_ING_FLEX_CPU
Description: Enable to copy ingress flex Continue reading
Network Break 179: Microsoft Targets Edge Computing; HCI Revenues Boom
Take a Network Break! Edge computing is the new hotness for traditional IT vendors as Microsoft and HPE, via its Aruba business unit, target edge computing infrastructure and software for new growth.
Meanwhile, Intel sells embedded software developer Wind River to a private equity firm, and we review the potential financial impact to legacy networking vendors as AT&T plans a massive whitebox rollout.
HCI revenues skyrocket in 2017; Delta, Sears, and Sacks Fifth Avenue get hacked; and Panera Bread picks a security fight with the wrong person.
We’ve got links to all the stories we cover just after our sponsor messages.
Sponsor: InterOptic
InterOptic offers high-performance, high-quality optics at a fraction of the cost. Find out more at InterOptic.com, and if you re attending Interop 2018 in Vegas, stop by the InterOptic booth to learn how they can help you spec the right optics for your network.
Coffee Talk: Kentik
Stay tuned after the news for a Coffee Talk conversation with sponsor Kentik. Kentik makes a big data platform to provide actionable insight from network data. Our guest is co-founder and CEO Avi Freedman, and we talk about how to use network data for fun and packets!
Show Links:
Github Data Shows Some CNCF Projects Lack Core Committers
Analyst firm Redmonk found that many projects remain heavily reliant on the companies that initially donated code, though Kubernetes remains an exception.
Mellanox, Ixia and Cumulus: Part 1
When I saw that Mellanox was presenting at Networking Field Day 17, I was definitely curious. When I found out that I would in fact be watching a joint presentation by Mellanox, Cumulus Networks and Ixia, it is fair to consider my interest piqued. Why would these three companies present together?
It turns out that these three companies present quite a compelling story, both individually–as you would probably expect–but also when used in combination. This post looks at the role of Mellanox Ethernet switches in an Ethernet fabric.
Mellanox
To me, Mellanox has been one of those ‘behind the scenes’ companies whose hardware is all over the place but whose name, in Ethernet circles at least, is less well known. Storage and compute engineers on the other hand are likely more familiar with the Mellanox name, especially in the context of Infiniband switches and network interface cards (NICs). In 2016 Mellanox acquired EZchip, allowing the development of some very capable Ethernet switches and an expansion of the company’s portfolio; to paraphrase Amit Katz (VP, WW Ethernet Switch), Mellanox connects PCI-Express interfaces together by building NICs, cables and switches.
At the Networking Field Day event in February 2018, Continue reading
The Week in Internet News: AI Can Give Workers a Creative Boost, But Many Aren’t Ready
Mixed messages on AI: Artificial intelligence promises to make workers more creative in many fields, according to a story in Inc. AI is already writing scripts and music and designing websites, the story notes. Many workers aren’t quite ready for this assistance, however. About 60 percent of workers in the Washington, D.C., area say their jobs are not preparing them for collaboration with machine intelligence, a story in Washington Business Journal says.
AI inspects your roof: If you’re a homeowner, you know it’s expensive to replace your roof. A startup seeks to take some of the guesswork out of roof replacement decisions by using AI to examine the condition of a house’s roof, according to Forbes.com. The service could be particularly useful for people looking to buy a new home without a spending more money to repair the roof.
Blockchain and AI team up: Here’s a story combining two of our favorite topics: Blockchain and AI. Blockchain could help make AI smarter by ensuring the privacy and security of the data that it collects, according to a story in VentureBeat. Small retailers could get customers to tell them their preferences by using Blockchain technologies to build personalized Continue reading
Intent-Based Networking: 7 Things to Know
The hot trend aims to revolutionize networking. Here's a look at basic IBN concepts and how the technology promises to help your business.
Intent-Based Networking: 7 Things to Know
The hot trend aims to revolutionize networking. Here's a look at basic IBN concepts and how the technology promises to help your business.
Container Security through Segregation
One of my readers sent me a container security question after reading the Application Container Security Guide from NIST:
We are considering segregating dev/test/prod environments with bare-metal hardware. I did not find something in the standard concerning this. What should a financial institution do in your opinion?
I am no security expert and know just enough about containers to be dangerous, but there’s a rule that usually works well: use common sense and identify similar scenarios that have already been solved.
Read more ...Most Important Skills in Networking
It’s easy to get blinded these days by all the talk about cloud, SDN and automation leading both new and existing people in networking to make decisions in their career which may not be the best ones long term. I’ve had the pleasure of interacting and working together with a lot of prominent people in the industry. Based on this I have identified some skills that all of these people have to some degree and that I believe to be crucial to succeeding in the IT industry.
Ability to write – Many of the successful people in the industry like Ivan Pepelnjak, Russ White, Nick Russo and so on have either authored books, write blogs or both. The ability to put your thoughts down into writing is critical. For someone like me that is working in network design, it is probably the most important skill, not only to write technical documents but to interact with customers, colleagues, managers and so on. It doesn’t matter if you are a technical savant if you can’t put a brief document together describing why and how a certain technology should be implemented.
Ability to speak – A lot of people in IT are a Continue reading