Whatever is vOLT-HA?
Many network engineers find the entire world of telecom to be confusing—especially as papers are peppered with a lot of acronyms. If any part of the networking world is more obsessed with acronyms than any other, the telecom world, where the traditional phone line, subscriber access, and network engineering collide, reigns as the “king of the hill.”
Recently, while looking at some documentation for the CORD project, which stands for Central Office Rearchitected as a Data Center, I ran across an acronym I had not seen before—vOLT-HA. An acronym with a dash in the middle—impressive! But what is, exactly? To get there, we must begin in the beginning, with a PON.
There are two kinds of optical networks in the world, Active Optical Networks (AONs), and Passive Optical Networks (PONs). The primary difference between the two is whether the optical gear used to build the network amplifies (or even electronically rebuilds, or repeats) the optical signal as it passes through. In AONs, optical signals are amplified, while ins PONs, optical signals are not amplified. This means that in a PON, the optical equipment can be said to be passive, in that it does not modify the optical signal in Continue reading
The Week in Internet News: AI Could Reshape the Music Industry, in a Good Way
AI Hits the Right Notes: Artificial intelligence-generated music is reshaping the industry, but that’s not such a bad thing, notes Billboard.com. AI won’t replace the artists we love or end creativity, but it could empower creators with new songwriting and other tools, the story suggests.
Drilling for AI: Oil producers are also turning to AI to help them with several tasks, according to an interview with oil executive Philippe Herve of SparkCongnition, published in Houston’s Chron.com. AI can assist oil producers with predictive maintenance of their expensive field equipment and help them make sense of all the data they collect, he said.
Collateral damage for app ban: Russia has attempted to shut down messaging app Telegram, after the service refused to provide authorities encryption keys to its software. It’s not going so well, however. Russian’s attempts to block the app have inadvertently knocked out a bunch of small business websites in the country, reports the New York Times. Telegram attempted to get around the ban by shifting its service to U.S. Web hosts Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, while repeatedly changing its IP address. In response, Russia shut down huge blocks of subnets instead of trying Continue reading
Response: Why is the kernel community replacing iptables with BPF? — Cilium
Because iptables was never meant to do what it does
Network Break 181: Russia Accused Of Infrastructure Attacks; US Targets ZTE
Take a Network Break! The US and British governments have accused Russian state actors of compromising routers and other network infrastructure, the United States forbids American companies from selling components to Chinese telecom firm ZTE, and Huawei rethinks its US strategy.
Cisco releases notes on its 9500 switches and UADP silicon, IBM releases a mainframe that takes the same space as a traditional 19-inch server rack, and VMware shares rise on rumors that Dell won’t reverse-merge with it.
Arista’s share price stumbles, and then recovers; Cisco ditches the Spark brand name; a Cisco security exec says we’re all screwed; and the United States is the leading source of botnet attacks in the world.
Find links to all these stories just after our sponsor message.
Sponsor: InterOptic
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Show Links:
Russian State-Sponsored Cyber Actors Targeting Network Infrastructure Devices – US-CERT
Huawei, Failing to Crack U.S. Market, Signals a Change in Tactics – The New York Times
Networking Gets Entangled in Geo-Political Feuds
ZTE might look to judicial remedies after the U.S. ban; Huawei lays off its Washington, D.C. liason; and Twitter bans ads from Kaspersky Labs.
Will Artificial Intelligence Be Used for Good or Evil?
As AI and ML begin to reach their full potential, the race is on between network administrators and attackers to implement the technologies into their procedures, for better or for worse.
Cisco Live 2018 – The BAG!
Earlier Cisco dropped the band information, and now we have the bag information too! The bag this year is a …
The post Cisco Live 2018 – The BAG! appeared first on Fryguy's Blog.
Book Review – How SRE Relates to Devops
Link – https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/how-sre-relates/9781492030645
Quick Read – Few Pages
Other Books which are related to SRE
-> Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
Few Points that I liked
– Quick read , hardly an hour
– Intro on how Devops got introduced
– what needs to be improved – Key Idea “No More Silos”
– stress on non-localization of knowledge, lack of collaboration
– New Job Role called SRE – Site Reliability Engineering
– Operations is a Software problem and Work to minimize Toil are some best examples of productivity and how we should view
– Key Idea – “Automate This Year’s Job Away” and “It’s Better to fix-it over-selves than blame someone else”
Good Read to understand the over picture of SRE Role and some of the
work Discipline Ideas.
-Rakesh
Up for a House Party? ready to go The Distance? are you Coming home? like Refugee? Wanted Dead or Alive?
I am sure you are asking yourself what is up with that title? Well, as you can tell from the …
The post Up for a House Party? ready to go The Distance? are you Coming home? like Refugee? Wanted Dead or Alive? appeared first on Fryguy's Blog.
Introducing a New MANRS IXP Programme for Routing Security
Today, we are pleased to announce that the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) is getting a new category of members – IXPs. The MANRS IXP Programme introduces a separate membership category for IXPs with a set of security actions to address the unique needs and concerns of IXPs.
The ten founding participants are Asteroid (International), CABASE (Argentina), CRIX (Costa Rica), DE-CIX (Germany), INEX (Ireland), MSK-IX (Russia), Netnod (Sweden), RINEX (Rwanda), TorIX (Canada), and YYCIX (Canada).
Programme participation provides an opportunity for an IXP to demonstrate its attention to the security and sustainability of the Internet ecosystem and, therefore, its dedication to providing high-quality services.
The IXP Action set was developed by a group of IXPs from all around the world and was presented at multiple IXP fora for discussion and feedback. We hope that with IXPs as partners, their ISP members will also join the Network Operator category of MANRS.
Participation in the MANRS IXP Programme requires an IXP to implement and document a majority of the IXP Programme Actions (at least three out of five). Actions 1 and 2 are mandatory, and the IXP must implement at least one additional Action. Here are the five Actions:
- Facilitate Continue reading
Flash Storage Adoption in the Enterprise
Evaluator Group study provides insight into how companies are deploying solid-state storage systems.
Cisco Switch Attacks Represent New Wave of Network Exploits
The widespread attacks exploiting a Cisco flaw illustrate how tools to streamline management of large networks can be targeted by hackers to launch large-scale assaults.
A more privacy-friendy blog
When I started this blog, I embraced some free services, like Disqus or Google Analytics. These services are quite invasive for users’ privacy. Over the years, I have tried to correct this to reach a point where I do not rely on any “privacy-hostile” services.
Analytics?
- Before: Google Analytics
- After: nothing
Google Analytics is an ubiquitous solution to get a powerful analytics solution for free. It’s also a great way to provide data about your visitors to Google—also for free. There are self-hosted solutions like Matomo—previously Piwik.
I opted for a simpler solution: no analytics. It also enables me to think that my blog attracts thousands of visitors every day.
Fonts?
- Before: Google Fonts
- After: self-hosted
Google Fonts is a very popular font library and hosting service,
which relies on the generic Google Privacy Policy. The
google-webfonts-helper service makes it easy to self-host any font
from Google Fonts. Moreover, with help from
pyftsubset, I include only the characters used in this
blog. The font files are lighter and more complete: no problem
spelling “Antonín Dvořák”.
Videos?
- Before: YouTube
- Continue reading
Upcoming Webinars: May and June 2018
Another month has swooshed by and it’s time for a refreshed list of upcoming webinars:
- Mitja Robas will explain the basics of NSX and ACI planning and design on April 24th. He has tons of material on this topic – expect to see him quite often in the autumn/winter timeframe;
- Dinesh Dutt will continue the EVPN Technical Deep Dive saga on May 3rd;
- Christoph Jaggi will run a free webinar on the basics of transport (layer-1/2) and network (layer-3) security on May 10th;
- We’ll run another SDDC webinar on May 22nd. More details later…
- On June 5th Christoph will be back with Ethernet Encryptors Deep Dive;
- The last webinar before the summer break will be Data Center Fabric Troubleshooting with Dinesh Dutt on June 19th.
All you need to have to attend all these live sessions is a current ipSpace.net webinar subscription.
WISP Design – Building Highly Available VPLS for Public Subnets
What is VPLS?
Virtual Private LAN Service or VPLS is a Layer 2 overlay or tunnel that allows for the encapsulation of ethernet frames (with or without VLAN tags) over an MPLS network.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4762
VPLS is often found in Telco networks that rely on PPPoE to create centralized BRAS deployments by bringing all of the end users to a common point via L2.
MikroTik VPLS example (https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Transparently_Bridge_two_Networks_using_MPLS)
Background
The idea for this post came out of a working session (at the bar of course) at WISPAmerica 2018 in Birmingham, Alabama.
There was a discussion about how to create redundancy for VPLS tunnels on multiple routers. I started working on this in EVE-NG as we were talking about it.
The goal is creating highly available endpoints for VPLS when using them to deploy a public subnet that can be delivered to any tower in the WISP. The same idea works for wireline networks as well.
Use Case
As IPv4 becomes harder to get, ISPs like WISPs, without large blocks of public space find it difficult to deploy them in smaller subnets. The idea behind breaking up a /23 or /24 for example, is that every Continue reading