Network Refresh: Why You Need a Second Opinion

How to check your network connections on Linux

The ip command has a lot to tell you about the configuration and state of your network connections, but what do all those words and numbers mean? Let’s take a deep dive in and see what all the displayed values are trying to tell you.When you use the ip a (or ip addr) command to get information on all the network interfaces on your system, you're going to see something like this:$ ip a 1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000 link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00 inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever inet6 ::1/128 scope host valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever 2: enp0s25: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP group default qlen 1000 link/ether 00:1e:4f:c8:43:fc brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff inet 192.168.0.24/24 brd 192.168.0.255 scope global dynamic enp0s25 valid_lft 57295sec preferred_lft 57295sec inet6 fe80::2c8e:1de0:a862:14fd/64 scope link valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever The two interfaces on this system — the loopback (lo) and network (enp0s25) — are displayed along with a lot of stats. The "lo" interface is clearly the loopback. We can see the loopback IPv4 address (127.0.0.1) and the loopback Continue reading

LIVE in 1 hour, CCNA/CCNP Q&A!

Don’t forget to watch Keith Bogart’s live CCNA/CCNP Q&A session TODAY at 1pm!

During this live Q&A Keith bogart will answer all of your questions about the Cisco CCNA and CCNP Routing and Switching exams. Check back at 1 pm (EST) to get all of your questions answered by an industry expert.

Ansible for Extreme Devices

Here’s something I’ve been working on recently: Ansible modules for Extreme SLX switches & routers. Ansible is a popular automation framework, and with good reason: it has a low barrier to entry. Time to usefulness is short. But you need device-specific modules to work with networking devices. Finally we have some modules for SLX. Read on for how to use them.

This blog is not an intro to Ansible in general. There’s plenty of good intros out there. This is specifically about demonstrating Ansible with SLX switches.

Background

Ansible is an agent-less configuration management system. It uses “playbooks”, written in YAML, to define desired configuration state. “modules” written in Python translate this into whatever is needed to configure the system, application, database or network device.

Ansible has been making great strides in adding network automation capabilities. But we haven’t had any modules for working with ~Brocade~ Extreme devices. That is now changing.

PaulQuack has contributed MLXe (Ironware) modules, which will go GA in Ansible 2.5 (due for release in March 2018). And I’ve been working on modules for the SLX, with my colleagues. These have not yet been merged upstream, but it’s Open Source, so you can grab Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: The delivery challenges every SD-WAN project must consider

It’s no secret that enterprises are looking at SD-WAN as the means for evolving their networks. The technology improves on MPLS with better agility, more capacity increased resiliency and, of course, cost savings. Those advantages are in much need; just ask anyone who’s runs an MPLS network. They’ll tell you about its high costs, long provisioning times, and susceptibility to last-mile failures.But keep listening and MPLS customers are also bound to talk about the technology’s rock-solid reliability. They’ll hate the price and delays, but they’ll love their SLA-backed performance and how the MPLS provider takes care of everything — the last mile connectivity, managing the backbone, consolidated billing and more.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The delivery challenges every SD-WAN project must consider

It’s no secret that enterprises are looking at SD-WAN as the means for evolving their networks. The technology improves on MPLS with better agility, more capacity increased resiliency and, of course, cost savings. Those advantages are in much need; just ask anyone who’s runs an MPLS network. They’ll tell you about its high costs, long provisioning times, and susceptibility to last-mile failures.But keep listening and MPLS customers are also bound to talk about the technology’s rock-solid reliability. They’ll hate the price and delays, but they’ll love their SLA-backed performance and how the MPLS provider takes care of everything — the last mile connectivity, managing the backbone, consolidated billing and more.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How edge computing makes voice assistants faster and more powerful

Voice is becoming a pervasive way to manage and interact with everyday tech devices, going from initial adoption in phones and smart speakers toward smartwatches, cars, laptops, home appliances and much more.Cloud platforms take most of the praise for enabling voice assistant services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant or Microsoft Cortana – neglecting due credit to the increasing role that edge computing plays in enabling voice interfaces. A substantial amount of processing and analysis occur on devices themselves to allow users to interface with them by simply talking.Keyword detection Voice-enabled devices are not constantly recording audio and sending it to the cloud to determine if someone is giving them an instruction. That would not only be a privacy concern, but also a waste of energy, computing and network resources. Having to send all words to the cloud and back also introduces latency and slows the responsiveness of the system. Today’s voice interfaces typically use keyword or “wake-word” detection, dedicating a small portion of edge computing resources (i.e. computing done on the device itself or “at the edge”) to process microphone signals while the rest of the system remains idle. This is a power-efficient approach particularly important Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: How edge computing makes voice assistants faster and more powerful

Voice is becoming a pervasive way to manage and interact with everyday tech devices, going from initial adoption in phones and smart speakers toward smartwatches, cars, laptops, home appliances and much more.Cloud platforms take most of the praise for enabling voice assistant services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant or Microsoft Cortana – neglecting due credit to the increasing role that edge computing plays in enabling voice interfaces. A substantial amount of processing and analysis occur on devices themselves to allow users to interface with them by simply talking.Keyword detection Voice-enabled devices are not constantly recording audio and sending it to the cloud to determine if someone is giving them an instruction. That would not only be a privacy concern, but also a waste of energy, computing and network resources. Having to send all words to the cloud and back also introduces latency and slows the responsiveness of the system. Today’s voice interfaces typically use keyword or “wake-word” detection, dedicating a small portion of edge computing resources (i.e. computing done on the device itself or “at the edge”) to process microphone signals while the rest of the system remains idle. This is a power-efficient approach particularly important Continue reading

Marvell revs up Ethernet to 400Gbps with new ‘Alaska’ chips

Marvell Semiconductor is the first semiconductor to ship networking chips supporting the 802.3cd standard that will pump up Ethernet ports to 400Gbps max.The 802.3cd standard is designed to eventually replace the current physical Ethernet ports, which run at 25Gbps to 100Gpbs, with ports that will run at 50Gbps, 200Gbps, and 400Gbps.And Marvell is the first chip vendor out of the gate with support for the standard in its Alaska C 88X7120 transceivers. The chips aren’t fully cooked, but they are sampling to customers. Sampling is to semiconductors what beta testing is to software.To read this article in full, please click here

Marvell revs up Ethernet to 400Gbps with new ‘Alaska’ chips

Marvell Semiconductor is the first semiconductor to ship networking chips supporting the 802.3cd standard that will pump up Ethernet ports to 400Gbps max.The 802.3cd standard is designed to eventually replace the current physical Ethernet ports, which run at 25Gbps to 100Gpbs, with ports that will run at 50Gbps, 200Gbps, and 400Gbps.And Marvell is the first chip vendor out of the gate with support for the standard in its Alaska C 88X7120 transceivers. The chips aren’t fully cooked, but they are sampling to customers. Sampling is to semiconductors what beta testing is to software.To read this article in full, please click here

Weekend Reads 030918: Botnet Avalanche, DNS Security, and IoT Privacy

It’s been a busy few weeks in cybercrime news, justifying updates to a couple of cases we’ve been following closely at KrebsOnSecurity. In Ukraine, the alleged ringleader of the Avalanche malware spam botnet was arrested after eluding authorities in the wake of a global cybercrime crackdown there in 2016. @Krebs on Security

Reflection amplification is a technique that allows cyber attackers to both magnify the amount of malicious traffic they can generate, and obfuscate the sources of that attack traffic. For the past five years, this combination has been irresistible to attackers, and for good reason. —Carlos Morales @Arbor

For years, we’ve been pioneering the use of DNS to enforce security. We recognized that DNS was often a blind spot for organizations and that using DNS to enforce security was both practical and effective. Why? Because DNS isn’t optional. It’s foundational to how the internet works and and is used by every single device that connects to the network. If you’re considering using DNS for security, it’s important to understand the facts so you can combat the fiction. —Kevin Rollinson @Cisco

Attackers have seized on a relatively new method for executing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks of unprecedented disruptive power, using Continue reading

Enhanced Layer 7 Routing for Swarm in Docker Enterprise Edition Beta

 The beta release of Docker Enterprise Edition has seen incredible activity. The highlight of the upcoming Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE) release is the integration of Kubernetes and bringing all of the advanced security, RBAC and management capabilities of Docker EE to Kubernetes. At the same time, we have been working to improve Swarm, delivering the only container platform that allows you to run both orchestrators in the same cluster. In this blog post, we’ll highlight some the key new capabilities around application-layer (Layer 7) routing and load balancing for Swarm-deployed applications. These enhancements come from the new Interlock 2.0 architecture which provides a highly scalable and highly available routing solution for Swarm. The new architecture brings some additional features to the platform, including path-based routing and SSL termination.

Path-Based Routing

Layer 7 load balancing allows traffic going to host domains like acme.com to be distributed across specific containers in your environment. With path-based routing, traffic headed to sub-domains within acme.com (eg. acme.com/app1 or acme.com/app2) can be separately routed to different sets of containers. This can be especially useful for optimizing application performance by driving different requests to different groups of containers.

Read Continue reading

A Collaborative Effort for pretty Easy privacy (p≡p)

Since the 2013 Snowden revelations of mass surveillance, the level of trust in Internet services has plunged. While discussions around privacy protection have advanced considerably, little progress has been achieved in designing operational tools that can be used on a daily basis by citizens around the world without a need to reconfigure their digital communications or change their behavior online. At the Internet Society, we believe such solutions need to be developed in a collaborative and multistakeholder fashion to be effective.

In July 2017, the Internet Society Switzerland Chapter (ISOC-CH) and the Swiss p≡p foundation teamed up to provide a practical solution, namely to implement privacy-enhancing standards at the basic level of Internet protocols and document them in the work of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the main organization creating voluntary standards to maintain and improve the usability and interoperability of the Internet.

In the framework of a two-year Beyond the Net project with funding from Internet Society (‘Implementing Privacy via Mass Encryption’), we will formalize and help in standardizing the pretty Easy privacy (p≡p) protocols, which can be deployed automatically via encrypted means in order to provide the user with a secure and trustworthy Continue reading

Cisco’s intent-based networks now available for the WAN

If you read my Valentine’s Day post, you know I love intent-based networks (IBN), as the technology is the biggest change in networking in decades.Cisco wasn’t the first vendor to offer an IBN solution, but they’ve certainly been the most vocal about the need and has been the network industry's biggest evangelist. Also read: Getting grounded in intent-based networking The value proposition of IBN is to simplify networking dramatically with the long-term vision of having a fully autonomous network. With IBN, the operations of the network are driven by business intent to ensure policies are adhered to and application performance remains optimized.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco’s intent-based networks now available for the WAN

If you read my Valentine’s Day post, you know I love intent-based networks (IBN), as the technology is the biggest change in networking in decades.Cisco wasn’t the first vendor to offer an IBN solution, but they’ve certainly been the most vocal about the need and has been the network industry's biggest evangelist. Also read: Getting grounded in intent-based networking The value proposition of IBN is to simplify networking dramatically with the long-term vision of having a fully autonomous network. With IBN, the operations of the network are driven by business intent to ensure policies are adhered to and application performance remains optimized.To read this article in full, please click here

Short Take – Side Channel Attack

Do you know what a side channel attack is? Do you know how it relates to you as a Network Engineer? In today’s Network Collective Short Take, Russ White helps explain what a side channel attack is, how it works, and some of the challenges that are inherent in defending against it.

Russ White

The post Short Take – Side Channel Attack appeared first on Network Collective.

CEO Succession at the Internet Society – Open Call for CEO Candidates

As I discussed in my notes to the community during the last months, at our last board meeting Kathy Brown, ISOC’s (Internet Society’s) President & CEO, informed the Board of Trustees that she will not seek another extension of her contract. Consequently, the board formed a CEO Search Committee, which is a subset of the board. The CEO Search Committee selected Perrett Laver as the search firm that will support the committee and the board during the whole process. Please, read my last note for further background information.

Per our plan, we are launching the Open Call for Candidates today, Friday, 9 March 2018.

The deadline for applications is 23:59 UTC on Friday, 6 April 2018.

If you would like to download the Candidate Pack or apply for the position, please visit the Perrett Laver web site using the following link:

https://candidates.perrettlaver.com/vacancies/726/ceo/

Per the web page above, if you would like to have a conversation with Perrett Laver regarding the role, please email the lead researcher on this search, Daniel Flynn:

[email protected]

The search firm will generate a short list of candidates so that the CEO Search Committee can make a final decision and select one. Continue reading

Cisco attacks SD-WAN with software from Viptela, Meraki acquisitions

Cisco this week took the wraps off new software packages it claims will help customers manage their biggest networking blind spot: the software-defined wide area network or SD-WAN.The SD-WAN is typically made of diverse networks and technologies that many times are outside the control of IT.  Add to that the increased use of multi-cloud services and other advances, and the traditional complexity of the WAN has been increased, Cisco stated.+RELATED: SD-WAN: What it is and why you'll use it some day; How to negotiate a Cisco Enterprise Agreement that works for you+To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco attacks SD-WAN with software from Viptela, Meraki acquisitions

Cisco this week took the wraps off new software packages it claims will help customers manage their biggest networking blind spot: the software-defined wide area network or SD-WAN.The SD-WAN is typically made of diverse networks and technologies that many times are outside the control of IT.  Add to that the increased use of multi-cloud services and other advances, and the traditional complexity of the WAN has been increased, Cisco stated.+RELATED: SD-WAN: What it is and why you'll use it some day; How to negotiate a Cisco Enterprise Agreement that works for you+To read this article in full, please click here

Advancing Federal Data Center Modernization