Headcount: The Latest in Hirings, Firings, and Retirings — March 12, 2018
Palo Alto loses exec to Apstra; CenturyLink speeds up retirement of CEO; Nokia names new president of global services.
Sprint Slashes 500 Jobs in Move to Divert Spend to Network, Sales
The layoffs will be completed over the next four weeks.
Broadcom Accelerates Move Back to U.S. as Part of Qualcomm Quest
Intel worries about a combined Broadcom-Qualcomm.
Low Latency Networking
Low latency is coming to a network near you. In fact, it’s probably coming to your network, whether or not you realize it.
While bandwidth has always been the primary measure of a network, and cross sectional or non-contending bandwidth for data center fabrics, further research and reflection has taught large scale network operators that latency is actually much more of a killer for application performance than lack of bandwidth—and not only latency, but its close cousin, jitter. Why is this?
To understand, it is useful to return to an example given by Tanenbaum in his book Computer Networks. He includes a humorous example of calculating the bandwidth of a station wagon full of VHS tapes, with each tape containing the maximum amount of data possible. For those young folks out there who didn’t understand a single word in that last sentence, think of an overnight delivery box from your favorite shipping service. Now stuff the box full of high density solid state storage of some kind, and ship it. You can calculate the bandwidth of the box by multiplying the number of devices you can stuff in there by the capacity of each device, and then dividing by roughly Continue reading
AT&T Touts Cross-Vendor OpenROADM Success
The next step is to integrate with SDN controller as part of ECOMP.
Nutanix’s Second Acquisition This Month Is Cloud App Monitoring Startup Netsil
The purchase will make container management native to Nutanix’s software stack.
‘Slingshot’ Cyber Espionage Campaign Hacks Routers
Security researchers uncover advanced hacking group targeting MikroTik routers in Africa and Middle East.
Deprecating TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on api.cloudflare.com
On June 4, Cloudflare will be dropping support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on api.cloudflare.com. Additionally, the dashboard will be moved from www.cloudflare.com/a to dash.cloudflare.com and will require a browser that supports TLS 1.2 or higher.
No changes will be made to customer traffic that is proxied through our network, though you may decide to enforce a minimum version for your own traffic. We will soon expose TLS analytics that indicate the percent of connections to your sites using TLS 1.0-1.3, and controls to set a specific minimum version. Currently, you may enforce version 1.2 or higher using the Require Modern TLS setting.
Prior to June 4, API calls made with TLS 1.0 or 1.1 will have warning messages inserted into responses and dashboard users will see a banner encouraging you to upgrade your browser. Additional details on these changes, and a complete schedule of planned events can be found in the timeline below.
Background
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the protocol used on the web today to encrypt HTTPS connections. Version 1.0 was standardized almost 20 years ago as the successor to SSL Continue reading
Space To Think My Own Thoughts
Everyone Creates
A challenge for people who make things is living in a world where everyone else makes things, too. On the Internet, everyone seems to be making something they want you to consider and approve of.
Sometimes, that Internet creation is as simple as a tweet or Facebook post. Like it! Share it! Retweet it! More complex creations, like this blog post, are still easy enough to make and share that there are likely hundreds of new articles you might be asked to read in a week.
If you were to carefully keep up with everything you subscribe to or follow, your mind would never have time to itself. You’d never be able to think your own thoughts. You’d be too busy chewing on the thoughts of other people.
Overconsumption
For this reason, I believe constant consumption damages productivity. Designers, architects, artisans, writers, and other creators need time to think through what they are making. Writers need a subject and word flow to clearly communicate. Technology architects need to deeply consider the implications of their designs from multiple angles.
Deep consideration takes contiguous blocks of time. Achieving a flowing state of mind takes uninterrupted time. Thoughts build one on Continue reading
Space To Think My Own Thoughts
Everyone Creates
A challenge for people who make things is living in a world where everyone else makes things, too. On the Internet, everyone seems to be making something they want you to consider and approve of.
Sometimes, that Internet creation is as simple as a tweet or Facebook post. Like it! Share it! Retweet it! More complex creations, like this blog post, are still easy enough to make and share that there are likely hundreds of new articles you might be asked to read in a week.
If you were to carefully keep up with everything you subscribe to or follow, your mind would never have time to itself. You’d never be able to think your own thoughts. You’d be too busy chewing on the thoughts of other people.
Overconsumption
For this reason, I believe constant consumption damages productivity. Designers, architects, artisans, writers, and other creators need time to think through what they are making. Writers need a subject and word flow to clearly communicate. Technology architects need to deeply consider the implications of their designs from multiple angles.
Deep consideration takes contiguous blocks of time. Achieving a flowing state of mind takes uninterrupted time. Thoughts build one on Continue reading
Cyber Espionage Campaign ‘Slingshot’ Targets Victims Via Routers – Threatpost
Mikrotik routers as an attack vector
Network Break 175: Viptela, Meraki Get Upgrades; Scrupulous Ransomware Criminals
Today's Network Break looks at new products for Viptela & Meraki, Cisco hints at selling products online, switch & router revenues grows, and more tech news The post Network Break 175: Viptela, Meraki Get Upgrades; Scrupulous Ransomware Criminals appeared first on Packet Pushers.
The Week in Internet News: AI Ain’t Gonna Steal My Job
AI on the job: Many U.S. residents believe that artificial intelligence will replace some workers over the next decade or so, but it won’t take theirs, according to a story in the New York Times. But it’s not all doom and gloom, because advances in AI and robotics can actually create more jobs, Tim Johnson, CEO of IT staffing firm Mondo, writes in Forbes.
Fixing the IoT: The U.K. government issued a set of guidelines for Internet-of-things device makers to better secure their products. Among the recommendations: Issue regular software updates, get rid of default passwords, and warn customers promptly about vulnerabilities. Ok, so it’s not rocket science, but it seems that some IoT device makers haven’t done some of these things in the past. Some critics also believe the guidelines lack teeth, according to a story in ITpro.
The Blockchain election: The use of Blockchain technologies could help resolve some continuing problems with voting, according to a story by Bitcoin Magazine run on Nasdaq.com. The use of a Blockchain ledger could address the old “hanging chad” problem from the 2000 U.S. election, and it could bring new privacy and security to elections, according to the Continue reading
ONF Launches New Open Source SDN Switching Platform – Stratum
Google pines for a truly programmable data plane.
Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW) Call for Papers Due 20 April
We’re excited to share news of the third edition of the Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW2018), which will take place in Montreal, Quebec, on Monday, July 16 at the venue of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 102 meeting. The workshop program already includes some great invited talks and the Call for Papers is open now, with a deadline of 20 April.
ANRW2018 will provide a forum for researchers, vendors, network operators and the Internet standards community to present and discuss emerging results in applied networking research. The workshop will also create a path for academics to transition research back into IETF standards and protocols, and for academics to find inspiration from topics and open problems addressed at the IETF. Accepted short papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.
ANRW2018 particularly encourages the submission of results that could form the basis for future engineering work in the IETF, that could change operational Internet practices, that can help better specify Internet protocols, or that could influence further research and experimentation in the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF).
If you have some relevant work and would like to join us in Montreal for the workshop and maybe stick Continue reading
Top Trends Impacting Enterprise Infrastructure
Interop ITX Infrastructure Chair Keith Townsend provides guidance on hyperconvergence, cloud migration, network disaggregation, and containers.
Rough Guide to IETF 101: Internet Infrastructure Resilience
In this post of the Internet Society Rough Guide to IETF 101, I’ll focus on important work the IETF is doing that helps improve security and resilience of the Internet infrastructure.
BGP
What happens if an IXP operator begins maintenance work on the switches without ensuring that BGP sessions between the peers have been shut down? A network disruption and outage. A draft now in the RFC editor queue, “Mitigating Negative Impact of Maintenance through BGP Session Culling”, provides guidance to IXP operators on how to avoid such situations by forcefully tearing down the BGP sessions (session culling) affected by the maintenance before the maintenance activities commence. This approach allows BGP speakers to pre-emptively converge onto alternative paths while the lower layer network’s forwarding plane remains fully operational.
Another draft also in the RFC editor queue, “Graceful BGP session shutdown”, addresses issues related to planned maintenance. The procedures described in this document can be applied to reduce or avoid packet loss for outbound and inbound traffic flows initially forwarded along the peering link to be shut down. These procedures trigger, in both Autonomous Systems (AS), rerouting to alternate paths if they exist within the Continue reading