Contrail’s Founder Raises $25M for Volterra, a New Startup Focused on Business Use Cases
Ankur Singla says that solving business problems has more value than simply selling a technology.
Trump Intervenes in ZTE Drama to Get Company ‘Back in Business, Fast’
President Donald Trump tweeted Sunday that he and Chinese President Xi were in talks to resolve, or potentially lessen, the ban imposed on the Chinese firm last month.
Research: Bridging the Air Gap
Way back in the old days, the unit I worked at in the US Air Force had a room with a lot of equipment used for processing classified information. Among this equipment was a Zenith Z-250 with an odd sort of keyboard and a very low resolution screen. A fine metal mesh embedded in a semi-clear substrate was glued to the surface of the monitor. This was our TEMPEST rated computer, on which we could type up classified memos, read classified email, and the like. We normally connected it to the STU-3 through a modem (remember those) to send and receive various kinds of classified information.
Elovici, Mordechai Guri, Yuval. “Bridgeware: The Air-Gap Malware.” Accessed May 13, 2018. https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/4/226377-bridgeware/abstract.
The idea of TEMPEST begins way back in 1985, when a Dutch researcher demonstrated “reading” the screen of a computer using some relatively cheap, and easy to assemble, equipment, from several feet away. The paper I’m looking at today provides a good overview of the many ways which have been discovered since this initial demonstration to transfer data from one computer to another across what should be an “air gap.” For instance, the TEMPEST rated computer described Continue reading
Creating Infrastructure for Self-Sovereign Identity Online
Several organizations are assembling the technologies to enable self-sovereign identity, a way for individuals to control who they are online. Blockchain is one of those essential components.
Network Break 184: Arista’s Core Switch Challenges Cisco; Qualcomm Reconsiders Servers
Take a Network Break! Arista challenges Cisco in the campus with a new a new core switch, Qualcomm is reportedly considering backing away from data center server processors, and a security survey shows woeful patching habits.
Another security survey reveals that three quarters of respondents have been breached at least once in 2017, Apple abandons a planned data center site in Ireland, and ZTE halts major operations because of a US export ban on parts and software from American companies.
Finally, Google acquires cloud onboarding startup VeloStrata, while Google’s Duplex voice assistant raises hackles.
Get links to all these stories 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.
Sponsor: Cisco Systems
Find out how Cisco and its trusted partners Equilibrium Security and ePlus/IGX can help your organization tackle the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. Tune into Packet Pushers Priority Queue episode 147 to get practical insights on how to get your arms around these wide-ranging rules.
Coffee Continue reading
EXFO Ontology’s Benedict Enweani on Service Assurance Automation
In this interview, Benedict Enweani, director of business development, systems and analytics at EXFO Ontology, discusses challenges in achieving effective and efficient service assurance in modern service provider networks, as well as the benefits of automation.
Tracking CDN Usage Through Historical DNS Data
With Mother’s Day having just passed, some e-commerce sites likely saw an associated boost in traffic. While not as significant as the increased traffic levels seen around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, these additional visitors can potentially impact the site’s performance if it has not planned appropriately. Some sites have extra infrastructure headroom and can absorb increased traffic without issue, but others turn to CDN providers to ensure that their sites remain fast and available, especially during holiday shopping periods.
To that end, I thought that it would be interesting to use historical Internet Intelligence data (going back to 2010) collected from Oracle Dyn’s Internet Guide recursive DNS service, to examine CDN usage. As a sample set, I chose the top 50 “shopping” sites listed on Alexa, and looked at which sites are being delivered through CDNs, which CDN providers are most popular, and whether sites change or add providers over time. Although not all of the listed sites would commonly be considered “shopping” sites, as a free and publicly available list from a well-known source, it was acceptable for the purposes of this post.
The historical research was done on the www hostname of the listed Continue reading
End-to-End Segmentation with NSX SD-WAN and NSX Data Center
As you may have read earlier this month, NSX Data Center and NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud are part of the expanded VMware NSX portfolio to enable virtual cloud networking. A Virtual Cloud Network provides end-to-end connectivity for applications and data, whether they reside in the data center, cloud or at the edge. I wanted to follow up, and walk through an example using NSX Data Center and NSX SD-WAN of how one could build an end to end segmentation model from the data center to the branch.
NSX SD-WAN Segmentation
NSX SD-WAN SegmentationBeyond lowering cost and increasing agility and simplicity of branch connectivity, one of the key values provided by NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud is enterprise segmentation, which provides isolated network segments across the entire enterprise, enabling data isolation or separation by user or line of business, support for overlapping IP addresses between VLANs and support for multiple tenants. NSX SD-WAN provides this segmentation using a VRF-like concept with simplified, per-segment topology insertion. This is accomplished by inserting a “Segment ID” into the SD-WAN Overlay header as traffic is carried from one NSX SD-WAN Edge device to another Edge. Networks on the LAN-side of an NSX SD-WAN Edge with different Continue reading
The Week in Internet News: Artificial Intelligence Heads to the Final Frontier
Coming to a space station near you: Artificial intelligence is going to space – maybe not a space station, but a satellite – predicts an aerospace executive, quoted in SpaceNews.com. So-called geospatial intelligence, housed on satellites, will collect massive amounts of data in space and analyze it, she says.
More blockchain believers: Tech giant Oracle plans to release its own blockchain software with a platform-as-a-service product coming this month and decentralized ledger-based applications coming next month, Bloomberg notes. Oracle is working with Banco de Chile to log inter-bank transactions on a hyperledger and with the government of Nigeria to document customs and import duties on blockchain.
Does blockchain even lift? Blockchain can help improve the sports and fitness industry by allowing instructors to securely stream workouts, allowing customers to avoid that annoying trip to the gym, Forbes suggests.
Social media eyes encryption: Facebook and Twitter are both looking at encrypting some user communications, according to news reports. Facebook has voiced support for end-to-end encryption on its blog, apparently in response to concerns it was moving to weaken encryption on its WhatsApp messaging service, BGR.com notes. However, Facebook hasn’t enabled encryption by default on it Messenger service, the story Continue reading
5 Campus Network Upgrade Planning Tips
Campus network design has become complex with cloud adoption and increased telecommuting. Here are some top considerations for ensuring a high-performing network.
What Is EVPN?
EVPN might be the next big thing in networking… or at least all the major networking vendors think so. It’s also a pretty complex technology still facing some interoperability challenges (I love to call it SIP of networking).
To make matters worse, EVPN can easily get even more confusing if you follow some convoluted designs propagated on the ‘net… and the best antidote to that is to invest time into understanding the fundamentals, and to slowly work through more complex scenarios after mastering the basics.
Read more ...Tracing System CPU on Debian Stretch
This is a heavily truncated version of an internal blog post from August 2017. For more recent updates on Kafka, check out another blog post on compression, where we optimized throughput 4.5x for both disks and network.
Photo by Alex Povolyashko / Unsplash
Upgrading our systems to Debian Stretch
For quite some time we've been rolling out Debian Stretch, to the point where we have reached ~10% adoption in our core datacenters. As part of upgarding the underlying OS, we also evaluate the higher level software stack, e.g. taking a look at our ClickHouse and Kafka clusters.
During our upgrade of Kafka, we sucessfully migrated two smaller clusters, logs and dns, but ran into issues when attempting to upgrade one of our larger clusters, http.
Thankfully, we were able to roll back the http cluster upgrade relatively easily, due to heavy versioning of both the OS and the higher level software stack. If there's one takeaway from this blog post, it's to take advantage of consistent versioning.
High level differences
We upgraded one Kafka http node, and it did not go as planned:
Having 5x CPU usage was definitely an unexpected outcome. For control datapoints, we Continue reading
Networking With Fish: YouTube Channel
Blogging, originally, was my go to and preferred method for sharing information to others – teaching, sharing, etc. For a few corner case type things I found video (YouTube) to be a better tool for those specific items. Recently, however, I am finding about half of my ideas of things I want to “pass on” to others… would be best (in my opinion) via video.
I’ve been trying to figure out and think about how best to have the two sharing tools – this blog site and the YouTube channel – best compliment each other. So I have been experimenting with this. What I have come up with that I like and works for me is the following…..
- “Standalone Video” – If the YouTube is really a “standalone” and blogging with additional text around it here doesn’t “help” communicate what I’m trying to get across… then I won’t be blogging about it here.
- “Video Series” – There will be series that will be building on each other – like the videos in the playlist “BGP Show and Tell: Beginners” and the playlist “Label Swapping Fun”. Video series, I believe, would definitely benefit from larger big Continue reading
Worth Reading: Cognitive Dissonance
I always wondered why it’s so hard to accept that someone might not find your preferred solution beautiful but would call it complex or even harmful (or from the other side, why someone could not possibly appreciate the beauty of your design)… and then stumbled upon this blog post by Scott Adams describing cognitive dissonance (the actual topic they’re discussing in the mentioned video doesn’t matter – look for the irrational behavior).
You might say “but we could politely agree to disagree” but unfortunately that implies that at least one of us is not fully rational due to Aumann’s Agreement Theorem.
Link Propagation 118
Welcome to Link Propagation, a Packet Pushers newsletter. Link Propagation is included in your free membership. Each week we scour the InterWebs to find the most relevant practitioner blog posts, tech news, and product announcements. We drink from the fire hose so you can sip from a coffee cup. Blogs Foundations of MPLS: Label Switching […]Time To Get Back To Basics?
I’ve had some fascinating networking discussions over the past couple of weeks at Dell Technologies World, Interop, and the spring ONUG meeting. But two of them have hit on some things that I think need to be addressed in the industry. Both Russ White and Ignas Bagdonas of the IETF have come to me and talked about how they feel networking professionals have lost sight of the basics.
How Stuff Works
If you walk up to any network engineer and ask them to explain how TCP works, you will probably get a variety of answers. Some will try to explain it to you in basic terms to avoid getting too in depth. Others will swamp you with a technical discussion that would make the protocol inventors proud. But still others will just shrug their shoulders and admit they don’t really understand the protocol.
It’s a common problem when a technology gets to the point of being mature and ubiquitous. One of my favorite examples is the fuel system on an internal combustion engine. On older cars or small engines, the carburetor is responsible for creating the correct fuel and air mixture that is used to power the cylinders. Getting that Continue reading