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Category Archives for "Networking"

Hackathon@AIS: Summary report

The annual Hackathon@AIS, in its second year, is aimed at exposing engineers from the Africa region to open Internet Standards Development. This year, the event was held 9-10 May 2018 in Dakar Senegal at the Radisson Blu Hotel during the Africa Internet Summit (AIS-2018).

The event was attended by more than 75 engineers from 15 countries including 11 fellows who were supported to attend the event. The event featured participants with English and or French-speaking backgrounds encouraging collaboration to work. Organized into 3 tracks, the event allowed participants to choose which track they were interested in participating in. The tracks were as follows:

1. Network Time Protocol Track

Objectives:

  • Make NTP more secure (Privacy)
  • Using WireShark NTP Plugin to read/analyze NTP traffic
  • Code changes to NTP implementations to make them compliant with the draft
  • Read and understand Draft RFC

Facilitators:

  • Loganaden Velvindron (Mauritius)
  • Nitin Mutkawoa (Mauritius)
  • Serge-Parfait Goma (Congo)

Participants were introduced to NTP and asked to test out an IETF draft and implement it in open source NTP clients.

Outcome:

Participants were able to successfully implement draft and made presentations demonstrating their work and accomplishments.

2. Network Programmability

Objectives:

  • Introduce participants to Software Defined Networking (SDN)
  • Introduce network Continue reading

Worth Reading: Discovering Issues with HTTP/2

A while ago I found an interesting analysis of HTTP/2 behavior under adverse network conditions. Not surprisingly:

When there is packet loss on the network, congestion controls at the TCP layer will throttle the HTTP/2 streams that are multiplexed within fewer TCP connections. Additionally, because of TCP retry logic, packet loss affecting a single TCP connection will simultaneously impact several HTTP/2 streams while retries occur. In other words, head-of-line blocking has effectively moved from layer 7 of the network stack down to layer 4.

What exactly did anyone expect? We discovered the same problems running TCP/IP over SSH a long while ago, but then too many people insist on ignoring history and learning from their own experience.

Facebook releases its load balancer as open-source code

Google is known to fiercely guard its data center secrets, but not Facebook. The social media giant has released two significant tools it uses internally to operate its massive social network as open-source code.The company has released Katran, the load balancer that keeps the company data centers from overloading, as open source under the GNU General Public License v2.0 and available from GitHub. In addition to Katran, the company is offering details on its Zero Touch Provisioning tool, which it uses to help engineers automate much of the work required to build its backbone networks.To read this article in full, please click here

Facebook releases its load balancer as open-source code

Google is known to fiercely guard its data center secrets, but not Facebook. The social media giant has released two significant tools it uses internally to operate its massive social network as open-source code.The company has released Katran, the load balancer that keeps the company data centers from overloading, as open source under the GNU General Public License v2.0 and available from GitHub. In addition to Katran, the company is offering details on its Zero Touch Provisioning tool, which it uses to help engineers automate much of the work required to build its backbone networks.To read this article in full, please click here

VRF route leaking: time to get a little more social!

Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) is a ubiquitous concept in networking, first introduced in the late 1990s as the control and data plane mechanism to provide traffic isolation at layer 3 over a shared network infrastructure. VRF for Linux is an excellent blog that describes the technology behind VRFs, especially as it pertains to the Linux kernel. With the introduction of support for leaking of routes, VRFs get to enjoy their isolation while also having the nous to mix and mingle.

Wait, aren’t VRFs meant to be completely isolated?

You have a valid question there. That was certainly the initial use case for VRFs. Each VRF was intended to represent a customer of a service provider and isolation was a fundamental tenet. Each VRF had its own routing protocol sessions and IPv4 and IPv6 routing tables and route computation as well as packet forwarding was independent from other VRFs. All communication stayed within the VRF other than specific scenarios such as reaching the Internet. Hershey’s wouldn’t want to get too chatty with Lindt, right? No, VRFs weren’t meant to be gregarious.

As VRFs moved outside the realm of the service provider and started finding application elsewhere, such as in the Continue reading

Check Out Our New Software Testing Course – Software Testing QA: A Comprehensive Overview





Instructor: Justin Spears

Course Duration: 1hr 45min



About the Course

The modern accessibility of public, private and hybrid cloud environments has led rise to a bastion of cloud-centric practices. One of the most notable is the idea of QA and Testing in the cloud. This course will describe the concepts, methodologies and implementations of testing in a cloud environment. We will go through the full software QA lifecycle and describe where and how each component of that lifecycle can be offloaded into the cloud and further describe methods and mechanisms on how to do so effectively.

IDG Contributor Network: A new era of campus network design

Applications have become a key driver of revenue, rather than their previous role as merely a tool to support the business process. What acts as the heart for all applications is the network providing the connection points. Due to the new, critical importance of the application layer, IT professionals are looking for ways to improve the architecture of their network.A new era of campus network design is required, one that enforces policy-based automation from the edge of the network to public and private clouds using an intent-based paradigm. To read this article in full, please click here