The Week in Internet News: A New Use for Blockchain
Blockchain takes on censorship: Students looking into sexual harassment accusations involving a professor at Peking University in China wrote a letter accusing the school of trying to silence one of them, but the letter was removed from social media outlets for “violating rules.” So some supporters distributed the letter using the Ethereum blockchain, reports Yahoo finance.
Why routing security matters: Hackers used a well-known weakness in Border Gateway Protocol routing to hijack Amazon Web Services’ DNS traffic for about two hours last Tuesday. Attackers were able to redirect an Ethereum wallet developer’s website to a phishing site and steal about $150,000 from MyEtherWallet.com users, ZDNet reports.
Hacking-for-hire site attacked: In this case, law enforcement agencies from 12 countries were the people who shut down hacking-for-hire site Webstresser.org. The site had 136,000 customers and its hackers launched more than 4 million DDoS attacks in recent years, according to Europol. GovTech.com has a story.
Inspecting the IoT: Researchers at Princeton University are launching IoT Inspector, an open-source tool designed to give Internet of Things users insight into the security of their devices. There’s even Raspberry Pi code for the project, says The Register.
Cryptocurrency for the suits: The Continue reading
6 Reasons SSDs Will Take Over the Data Center
Here's why you should expect to see solid-state drives supplant hard-disk drives for data center storage in the near future.
We Have to Learn How to Manage the Cattle
Not long after I published the blog post arguing against physical appliances, Oven wrote a very valid comment: "But then you'd have 20 individual systems to manage, add licenses to for additional features, updates etc."
Even though the blog post (and the comment) was written in 2013, not much has changed in the meantime.
Read more ...NetChain: Scale-free sub-RTT coordination
NetChain: Scale-free sub-RTT coordination Jin et al., NSDI’18
NetChain won a best paper award at NSDI 2018 earlier this month. By thinking outside of the box (in this case, the box is the chassis containing the server), Jin et al. have demonstrated how to build a coordination service (think Apache ZooKeeper) with incredibly low latency and high throughput. We’re talking 9.7 microseconds for both reads and writes, with scalability on the order of tens of billions of operations per second. Similarly to KV-Direct that we looked at last year, NetChain achieves this stunning performance by moving the system implementation into the network. Whereas KV-Direct used programmable NICs though, NetChain takes advantage of programmable switches, and can be incrementally deployed in existing datacenters.
We expect a lightning fast coordination system like NetChain can open the door for designing a new generation of distributed systems beyond distributed transactions.
It’s really exciting to watch all of the performance leaps being made by moving compute and storage around (accelerators, taking advantage of storage pockets e.g. processing-in-memory, non-volatile memory, in-network processing, and so on). The sheer processing power we’ll have at our disposal as all of these become mainstream is staggering to Continue reading
T-Mobile to Swallow Sprint and Form 5G Powerhouse
The combined company will be worth roughly $146 billion. T-Mobile CEO John Legere will lead the new firm and Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure will serve on the board.
Cloud Not Just Someone Else’s Computer
Cloud computing is a lot more than “someone else’s computer” and it annoys the hell out of me when people keep trotting out this tired old excuse. There is much more to service delivery than compute power. You do yourself and your customers a disservice if you don’t do your research.
A few years ago it was fashionable to dismiss cloud as “just someone else’s computer”, e.g.:
There is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer. pic.twitter.com/9d3S5chWQq
— David Whittaker (@rundavidrun) February 13, 2016
There’s T-shirts:
You can even buy coffee mugs.
In a time when most cloud computing was Infrastructure as a Service, there was an element of truth to it. But…
Times Change
The problem is that there’s still people thinking this. Check these recent tweets.
These people don’t realize that the world has moved on a long way. There is much more to cloud computing than just “someone else’s computer.”
Consider a simple example, like email. To provide email services from “my computer” I also need power, cooling, rack space, servers, storage, networking, operating system, software, application configuration and maintenance, etc…not to mention the operational expertise to keep it all going.
‘Balance’ Is An Excuse Not To Go All Out
When you have a goal in mind, sometimes work/life balance has to take a back seat to all-consuming effort.Getting started with Terraform and Cloudflare (Part 1 of 2)
As a Product Manager at Cloudflare, I spend quite a bit of my time talking to customers. One of the most common topics I'm asked about is configuration management. Developers want to know how they can write code to manage their Cloudflare config, without interacting with our APIs or UI directly.
Following best practices in software development, they want to store configuration in their own source code repository (be it GitHub or otherwise), institute a change management process that includes code review, and be able to track their configuration versions and history over time. Additionally, they want the ability to quickly and easily roll back changes when required.
When I first spoke with our engineering teams about these requirements, they gave me the best answer a Product Manager could hope to hear: there's already an open source tool out there that does all of that (and more), with a strong community and plugin system to boot—it's called Terraform.
This blog post is about getting started using Terraform with Cloudflare and the new version 1.0 of our Terraform provider. A "provider" is simply a plugin that knows how to talk to a specific set of APIs—in this case, Cloudflare, but Continue reading
Link Propagation 116
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 WISP Design – Building Highly […]A Review of RSA Conference
So, I recently went to my first RSA Conference. It’s something I’ve had on my radar for a while but never had the opportunity to do. However, with Security Field Day coming up later this year I thought it was high time I went to see what everything was about. Here are some ideas that I came up with during my pilgrimage to the big security conference.
- It’s Huge. Like, really big. I’ve never seen a bigger conference before. I haven’t gone to Oracle OpenWorld or Dreamforce, but the size of the RSA show floor alone dwarfs anything I’ve seen. Three whole areas, including one dedicated to emerging vendors. That’s big. Almost too big in fact.
- I Still Hate Moscone. It’s official. No conference should ever use this place again. It’s been 4 years since I railed against it and every word still applies. Doubly so this year, as RSA was being held during construction! Seriously. At this point, Moscone must be paying people to hold a convention there. RSA is too big. I don’t care if it’s cheap to ferry people up from Silicon Valley. Stop doing this to yourself and tarnishing your brand. Just go to Vegas if Continue reading
We’ve Launched Our New Bootcamps Site!
The INE Bootcamps site is finally here! We constantly strive to make our products and buying experience better, which is why we decided to give our bootcamps their very own website. As INE continues to grow, we plan on rolling out even more bootcamp dates, locations and types, all of which can now be found at bootcamps.ine.com.
What You’ll Find On Our Bootcamps Site:
- Full description and details about CCIE Routing and Switching, Data Center, Collaboration, Service Provider and Security certifications and exams
- Full description and details about CCNP and CCNA Routing & Switching certifications and exams
- Full description and details about GCP Cloud Architect certification and exam
- Detailed description of prerequisites for all tracks and vendors
- Recommended path, outlining exactly what products you’ll need for each track and in what order to use them to ensure you pass your exams the first time
- All of our bootcamp offerings for all tracks and vendors, including details about pricing, dates, and what to expect from each bootcamp
- Detailed descriptions of each of our bootcamp locations
Ready to get started on your certification journey? Check out our Bootcamps Site for yourself.
Celebrating ECMP in Linux — part two
In part one of our series on ECMP, we discussed the basics of ECMP, the recent changes that have been made and Cumulus’ part in moving the ball forward for Linux networking. Now, it’s time to get a little more technical and review how advancements in ECMP development for IPv4 and IPv6 have made ECMP what it is today — and what it can be in the near future.
Setting the stage: defining our terminologies
Hashing algorithms
Hashing algorithms are the biggest component of ECMP behavior, so it makes sense for us to talk for a moment about what we specifically mean when we refer to each one.
1.) Per-packet hash
This hash was the original hashing algorithm used in the kernel’s ECMP behavior. It is trivially simple to understand as it basically uses a pseudo random number in the kernel at the time packet is being processed (jiffies) to determine which link in an ECMP bundle the traffic will use for egress. With this algorithm in place, each packet for a single flow could use a different link to get to the destination. This leads to all kinds of bad behaviors in TCP and higher level applications/protocols Continue reading
Google Mimics Microsoft With Direct Kubernetes Link Into Its Cloud
The framework simplifies the connection between GCP services and a GCP-hosted Kubernetes cluster or an on-premises Kubernetes cluster.