PQ 144: Engineer Roundtable: Encryption, Code Style, Tech Over 40
Today on the Priority Queue we have a roundtable show. We’ve gathered a few engineers around the microphone to talk about their experiences and what’s on their minds.
We often hear this format is an audience favorite, so we plan to record more of these in the Priority Queue and Weekly channels, so keep an eye out.
Today we welcome Alex Clipper, Eric Gullickson, Matt Elliott, and Stafford Rau to the podcast. We discuss encryption, code styles to ensure that code written by networkers is up to snuff, and what it’s like to work in technology after a certain age.
Sponsor: Paessler AG
Paessler AG is the maker of PRTG Network Monitor. PRTG monitors your entire IT infrastructure 24/7 and alerts you to problems before users notice. Find out more about the monitoring software that helps system administrators work smarter, faster, better by visiting paessler.com today.
Show Links:
Understanding Media Access Control Security (MACsec) – Technical Documentation – Support – Juniper Networks
Layer 2-Encryptors For Metro And Carrier Ethernet WANs And MANs – Inside-IT (PDF)
Thales L2 Encryption – Thales
Senetas – Senetas.com
What Is Optical Encryption? – Ciena
Google Style Guides – GitHub
Reclaiming 1.1.1.1 For The Internet
Hopefully by now you’ve seen the announcement that CloudFlare has opened a new DNS service at the address of 1.1.1.1. We covered a bit of it on this week’s episode of the Gestalt IT Rundown. Next to Gmail, it’s probably the best April Fool’s announcement I’ve seen. However, it would seem that the Internet isn’t quite ready for a DNS resolver service that’s easy to remember. And that’s thanks in part to the accumulation of bad address hygiene.
Not So Random Numbers
The address range of 1/8 is owned by APNIC. They’ve had it for many years now but have never announced it publicly. Nor have they ever made any assignments of addresses in that space to clients or customers. In a world where IPv4 space is at a premium, why would a RIR choose to lose 16 million addresses?
As it turns out, 1/8 is a pretty bad address space for two reasons. 1.1.1.1 and 1.2.3.4. These two addresses are responsible for most of the inadvertent announcements in the entire 1/8 space. 1.2.3.4 is easy to figure out. It’s the most common example IP address Continue reading
RSA Adds Security Orchestration, Automation to SIEM Platform
RSA today rolled out an orchestration and automation tool for its SIEM product. It also reached a deal to acquire Fortscale, a behavioral analytics startup.
Argo Tunnel: A Private Link to the Public Internet
Photo from Wikimedia Commons
Today we’re introducing Argo Tunnel, a private connection between your web server and Cloudflare. Tunnel makes it so that only traffic that routes through Cloudflare can reach your server.
You can think of Argo Tunnel as a virtual P.O. box. It lets someone send you packets without knowing your real address. In other words, it’s a private link. Only Cloudflare can see the server and communicate with it, and for the rest of the internet, it’s unroutable, as if the server is not even there.
How this used to be done
This type of private deployment used to be accomplished with GRE tunnels. But GRE tunnels are expensive and slow, they don’t really make sense in a 2018 internet.
GRE is a tunneling protocol for sending data between two servers by simulating a physical link. Configuring a GRE tunnel requires coordination between network administrators from both sides of the connection. It is an expensive service that is usually only available for large corporations with dedicated budgets. The GRE protocol encapsulates packets inside other packets, which means that you will have to either lower the MTU of your origin servers, or have your router do Continue reading
How the Lenca are Restoring the Past to Build their Future
The Internet has the potential to enable Indigenous communities to continue living on remote traditional lands without diminishing their access to services and information. The potential can go a long way towards closing the digital divide and offers new opportunities while preserving Indigenous culture.
In the ongoing debate about what difference the digital makes to the concept of Indigeneity itself, the voices of Indigenous people are what has been missing. It should be left up to community members to be caught up in this age of information and build the future on their own terms.
This is the story of Lenca people of Azacualpa, an Indigenous community of Yamaranguila in Intibucá, Honduras. In June 2017 they decided to start their relationship with technology by creating Radio Azacualpa, a radio station run by women, with the support of Cultural Survival’s Community Media Grants Project. It was a dream come true.
The radio tagline “La voz de las Mujeres” – the voice of women – says it all. “One of our goals as a radio station is to achieve recognition of our rights as women and to achieve equality,” explains Maria Santos, leader of the Azacualpa community.
In 2018, the Lenca decided Continue reading
Building Your Own Network Monitoring Sensor
You can create a sensor to monitor wired and WiFi networks and gain insight into how networks are performing for remote end users.
Building Your Own Network Monitoring Sensor
You can create a sensor to monitor wired and WiFi networks and gain insight into how networks are performing for remote end users.
VMware NSX Manager Deployment Guide
In this excerpt from "Learning VMware NSX, Second Edition" see the steps involved in setting up the network virtualization software.
VMware NSX Manager Deployment Guide
In this excerpt from "Learning VMware NSX, Second Edition" see the steps involved in setting up the network virtualization software.
Don’t Get Obsessed with REST API
REST API is the way of the world and all network devices should support it, right? Well, Ken Duda (Arista) disagreed with this idea during his Networking Field Day presentation, but unfortunately there wasn’t enough time to go into the details that would totally derail the presentation anyway.
Fixing that omission: should we have REST API on network devices or not?
Read more ...VMware Cloud on AWS with Direct Connect: NSX Networking and vMotion to the Cloud with Demo
Check out my prior below blogs here on VMware Network Virtualization blog on how NSX is leveraged in VMware Cloud on AWS to provide all the networking and security features. These prior blogs provide a foundation that this blog post builds on. In this blog post I discuss how AWS Direct Connect can be leveraged with VMware Cloud on AWS to provide high bandwidth, low latency connectivity to a SDDC deployed in VMware Cloud on AWS. This is one of my favorite features as it provides high bandwidth, low latency connectivity from on-prem directly into the customer’s VMware Cloud on AWS VPC enabling better and consistent connectivity/performance while also enabling live migration/vMotion from on-prem to cloud! I want to to thank my colleague, Venky Deshpande, who helped with some of the details in this post. Continue reading
Stackery Is Served New Funds, Adds Health Monitor for Serverless Apps
The company maintains close ties to AWS' Lambda serverless platform, but it is working more closely with Microsoft Azure.
Where Is My Feature Request?
Getting a feature request implemented by your vendor can be a long and painful process. In this post we will take a look at some of the reasons feature request processes take so long and what a customer can do to avoid some of the pain and suffering.Combating Ransomware in Multi-Cloud Environments
The rapidly evolving threat environment, coupled with a more vulnerable enterprise network signals a paradigm shift in how organizations will protect data residing on multi-cloud systems.
Innaput Actors Utilize Remote Access Trojan Since 2016, Presumably Targeting Victim Files
Overview ASERT recently identified a campaign targeting commercial manufacturing in the US and potentially Europe in late 2017. The threat actors used phishing and downloader(s) to install a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) ASERT calls InnaputRAT on the target’s machine. The RAT contained a series of […]Sigfox USA President Says Executive Departures Are Typical of Startups
Can the IoT market support both LPWA and cellular? Yes, says Sigfox, but forming partnerships with other IoT firms may be the best option.