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Category Archives for "Networking"

Meltdown and Spectre: How much are ARM and AMD exposed?

As the chip vendors wrestle to get their arms around the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, we’re slowly determining the exposure of AMD and ARM to the exploit. Intel, unfortunately, is totally vulnerable. With AMD and ARM, though, it gets complicated.First, let’s go over the Spectre exploit, which is a second class of attacks similar to Meltdown, the one we all know. Like Meltdown, Spectre exploits speculative execution in order to root out information from a CPU’s cache. Spectre is different because of how it runs.Also read: Meltdown and Spectre exploits: Cutting through the FUD While Meltdown is based on a specific implementation of speculative execution, Spectre exploits a risk to speculative execution that requires more work to exploit but is also considered harder to mitigate. Because it’s more obscure and arcane, it’s not as well understood. That’s why Meltdown is considered the bigger risk.To read this article in full, please click here

Meltdown and Spectre: How much are ARM and AMD exposed?

As the chip vendors wrestle to get their arms around the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, we’re slowly determining the exposure of AMD and ARM to the exploit. Intel, unfortunately, is totally vulnerable. With AMD and ARM, though, it gets complicated.First, let’s go over the Spectre exploit, which is a second class of attacks similar to Meltdown, the one we all know. Like Meltdown, Spectre exploits speculative execution in order to root out information from a CPU’s cache. Spectre is different because of how it runs.Also read: Meltdown and Spectre exploits: Cutting through the FUD While Meltdown is based on a specific implementation of speculative execution, Spectre exploits a risk to speculative execution that requires more work to exploit but is also considered harder to mitigate. Because it’s more obscure and arcane, it’s not as well understood. That’s why Meltdown is considered the bigger risk.To read this article in full, please click here

Promoting routing security in Middle East R&E

The Internet Society continues to deepen its engagement with the Middle East by participating in the e-AGE 2017 Conference. This was held on 2-4 December 2017 at the Arab League in Cairo, Egypt, and was organised by the Arab States Research and Education Network (ASREN) and co-sponsored by the Internet Society and ICANN.

ASREN is a non-profit association of National Research and Education Networks in the Middle East that aims to connect institutes to enable access to services, applications and computing resources within the region and around the world, and to boost scientific research and cooperation amongst its members. Its mandate covers 22 countries, and it has partnered with the major regional R&E networking initiatives elsewhere in the world, including GÉANT (Europe), Internet2 (United States), CANARIE (Canada), WACREN (West Africa) and RedCLARA (Latin America). International connectivity is supported by the EU-funded EUMEDConnect3 and EUMEDGrid projects.

There were two main themes to the conference – that NRENs were access pathways to global knowledge, and that NRENs needed to distinguish themselves by doing things that were not or could not be provided by commercial ISPs. Michael Foley (World Bank) highlighted how the NRENs had played a key role in the evolution of Continue reading

BGP Route Selection: a Failure of Intent-Based Networking

It’s interesting how the same pundits who loudly complain about the complexities of BGP (and how it will be dead any time soon and replaced by an SDN miracle) also praise the beauties of intent-based networking… without realizing that the hated BGP route selection process represents one of the first failures of intent-based approach to networking.

Let’s start with some definitions. There are two ways to get a job done by someone else:

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Domain Name System (DNS) Cheat Sheet Released

Here is the Cheat Sheet for DNS, an Internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses. Because domain names are alphabetic, they're easier to remember. The Internet however, is really based on IP addresses. Every time you use a domain name, therefore, a DNS service must translate the name into the corresponding IP address. For example, the domain name www.cloudpacket.com might translate to 104.27.143.238.

The DNS system is, in fact, its own network. If one DNS server doesn't know how to translate a particular domain name, it asks another one, and so on, until the correct IP address is returned.

If you found a bug or want new content to be added, please report it!

Click here to download DNS Cheat Sheet

Openstack Packstack Install

Building an Openstack environment can be a daunting, error riddled process. To help alleviate this pain the RDO project provides an "easy button" to install Openstack in an all in one VM for testing purposes called Packstack. RDO is the community supported distribution of Openstack for...

Say Hello to Zpark, my Cisco Spark Bot

For a long while now I've been brainstorming how I could leverage the API that's present in the Cisco Spark collaboration platform to create a bot. There are lots of goofy and fun examples of bots (ie, Gifbot) that I might be able to draw inspiration from, but I wanted to create something that would provide high value to myself and anyone else that choose to download and use it. The idea finally hit me after I started using Zabbix for system monitoring. Since Zabbix also has a feature-rich API, all the pieces were in place to create a bot that would act as a bit of middle-ware between Zabbix and Spark. I call the bot: Zpark.

Get a $20 Discount If You Buy 3 Echo Dots on Amazon, For A Limited Time – Deal Alert

Echo Dot is designed to work seamlessly in every room of your house, and right now you can get $20 off your order when you buy 3 Dots, or get one Dot free when you buy 6. Echo Dot is a hands-free, voice-controlled device that uses Alexa to play music, control smart home devices, provide information, read the news, set alarms, read audiobooks from Audible, and more. New Alexa "skills" are being created all the time. If you're in the market for a few Dots, jump over to Amazon and claim your discount while it lasts.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: eVPNs for Layer 2

EVPN gives us the ability to deploy VXLAN tunnels without controllers. Plus, it offers a range of other benefits such as reduction of data center traffic through ARP suppression, quick convergence during mobility, one routing protocol for both underlay and overlay and the inherent ability to support multi-tenancy (just to name a few). So EVPN for VXLAN for all of your layer 2 needs, right? Well it’s a little more complicated than that. —Diane Patton @ Cumulus

“Building NSX Powered Clouds and Data Centers for SMBs” is available now

I am honored and humbled to announce my new book “Building NSX Powered Clouds and Data Centers for Small and Medium Businesses”.

 

 

Building VMware NSX Powered Clouds and DCs for SMB Book Cover Page

 

This is a concise book that provides step by step information to design and deploy NSX in Small and Medium size data centers. My aim for writing this book is to give architects and engineers the necessary tools and techniques to transform their data center from legacy architecture to software defined (SDN) architecture. The SDN architecture is the foundation to build the private cloud.

The book has about 90 pages covering following topics:

  • NSX and SMB data center introduction
  • Important vSphere design considerations
  • vSphere cluster design and NSX deployment models
  • NSX individual component design and deployment considerations
  • NSX Operations: monitoring and troubleshooting
  • Growing NSX deployments

Many technology vendors tend to focus efforts in the large data center space, the fact remains that the small/medium business (SMB) space represents a substantial part of the IT marketplace.

The book is available to purchase from NSX Store.
Electronic version of the book can be downloaded from here.

The post “Building NSX Powered Clouds and Data Centers for SMBs” is available now appeared first on Network Virtualization.

An Explanation of the Meltdown/Spectre Bugs for a Non-Technical Audience

Last week the news of two significant computer bugs was announced. They've been dubbed Meltdown and Spectre. These bugs take advantage of very technical systems that modern CPUs have implemented to make computers extremely fast. Even highly technical people can find it difficult to wrap their heads around how these bugs work. But, using some analogies, it's possible to understand exactly what's going on with these bugs. If you've found yourself puzzled by exactly what's going on with these bugs, read on — this blog is for you.

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” — Yogi Berra

Late one afternoon walking through a forest near your home and navigating with the GPS you come to a fork in the path which you’ve taken many times before. Unfortunately, for some mysterious reason your GPS is not working and being a methodical person you like to follow it very carefully.

Cooling your heels waiting for GPS to start working again is annoying because you are losing time when you could be getting home. Instead of waiting, you decide to make an intelligent guess about which path is most likely based on past experience and set Continue reading

An Explanation of the Meltdown/Spectre Bugs for a Non-Technical Audience

Last week the news of two significant computer bugs was announced. They've been dubbed Meltdown and Spectre. These bugs take advantage of very technical systems that modern CPUs have implemented to make computers extremely fast. Even highly technical people can find it difficult to wrap their heads around how these bugs work. But, using some analogies, it's possible to understand exactly what's going on with these bugs. If you've found yourself puzzled by exactly what's going on with these bugs, read on — this blog is for you.

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” — Yogi Berra

Late one afternoon walking through a forest near your home and navigating with the GPS you come to a fork in the path which you’ve taken many times before. Unfortunately, for some mysterious reason your GPS is not working and being a methodical person you like to follow it very carefully.

Cooling your heels waiting for GPS to start working again is annoying because you are losing time when you could be getting home. Instead of waiting, you decide to make an intelligent guess about which path is most likely based on past experience and set Continue reading

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