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Category Archives for "Networking"

Ferghana Valley IXP – Reducing the Digital Gap in Central Asia

The Internet Society Kyrgyzstan Chapter is implementing one of its first major projects supported by Beyond the Net Funding Programme. The aim of the Ferghana Valley Internet Exchange Point (FVIXP) project is to establish an IXP in the city of Osh in the south of Kyrgyzstan and to bring more affordable Internet for the residents of Ferghana Valley.

Ferghana Valley is located on the crossroads of three countries – Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan –  and is the most populated area in Central Asia with over 14 million residents. Historically, this area has been a source of regional interethnic tensions due to water irrigation and land disputes, poverty and lack of access to communication services.

Internet prices for end users in Ferghana Valley are higher than in other districts of Kyrgyzstan. Residents in the southern cities pay five times more for the same bandwidth than their countrymen in the capital city Bishkek located in the north of Kyrgyzstan. Users in the neighboring countries of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan face even higher prices due to very limited options for international connectivity and to challenging domestic market conditions.

With this project, the Kyrgyzstan Chapter hopes to increase regional cross-border collaboration between stakeholders and communication Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Quantum Computing vs. Encryption

RIP encryption? Quantum computers, cutting-edge machines that promise to be much more powerful than binary PCs, could eventually defeat current encryption schemes, said Jason Matheny, director of the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. The agency is looking for new encryption standards that could stay ahead of quantum computers, he told Federal News Radio.

Taking fake news by surprise: During the SXSW conference, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced plans to add Wikipedia text to videos the service determines to be conspiracy related. YouTube didn’t notify Wikipedia of its proposal to fight fake news and conspiracy theories, however, reports The Verge. While the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t require notice or a licensing deal for other organizations to use its content, it suggested companies that repurpose its articles contribute to the service in the “spirit of sustainability.” Vanity Fair called the YouTube announcement a “Band-Aid” for a much larger problem.

Blockchain the vote: Sierra Leone has used Blockchain technology to assist with a nationwide election this month, according to a story in Quartz. In the country’s most populous district, Swiss foundation Agora offered digital voting services using a permissioned Blockchain. The goal was more system transparency by recording each vote using Continue reading

BrandPost: Being a Catalyst of Industry Change

Ciena’s Blue Planet team have won numerous accolades during this past year’s networking industry’s award season. I’m pleased to share the news about another recent award, won alongside our partner DGIT Systems, that recognizes the business impact our combined work is having on service providers’ business and operational agility. Ciena We earned our latest recognition from the TM Forum at the organization’s TM Forum Live! Asia event held in Singapore this past December. There, the Ciena Blue Planet team and DGIT were awarded Outstanding Catalyst for Business Impact for a collaborative proof-of-concept titled “Partnering Platforms for MEF Services.” The Catalyst demonstration, which was championed by Telstra, Vodafone Group and Orange, showcased the use of open APIs to automate the activation of inter-carrier Ethernet services.To read this article in full, please click here

Prometheus and Grafana

Prometheus is an open source time series database optimized to collect large numbers of metrics from cloud infrastructure. This article will explore how industry standard sFlow telemetry streaming supported by network devices and Host sFlow agents (Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, AIX, Solaris, Docker, Systemd, Hyper-V, KVM, Nutanix AHV, Xen) can be integrated with Prometheus.

The diagram above shows the elements of the solution: sFlow telemetry streams from hosts and switches to an instance of sFlow-RT. The sFlow-RT analytics software converts the raw measurements into metrics that are accessible through a REST API.

The following prometheus.php script mediates between the Prometheus metrics export protocol and the sFlow-RT REST API.  HTTP queries from Prometheus are translated into calls to the sFlow-RT REST API and JSON responses are converted into Prometheus metrics.
<?php
header('Content-Type: text/plain');
if(isset($_GET['labels'])) {
  $keys = htmlspecialchars($_GET["labels"]);
}
$vals = htmlspecialchars($_GET["values"]);
if(isset($keys)) {
  $cols = $keys.','.$vals;
} else {
  $cols = $vals;
}
$key_arr = explode(",",$keys);
$result = file_get_contents('http://localhost:8008/table/ALL/'.$cols.'/json');
$obj = json_decode($result,true);
foreach ($obj as $row) {
  unset($labels);
  foreach ($row as $cell) {
    if(!isset($labels)) {
      $labels = 'agent="'.$cell['agent'].'",datasource="'.$cell['dataSource'].'"';
    }
    $name = $cell['metricName'];
    $val = $cell['metricValue'];
    if(in_array($name,$key_arr)) {
      $labels .=  Continue reading

IETF 101, Day 2: A bit of Rosie Lee (Mobility)

This week is IETF 101 in London, and we’re bringing you daily blog posts highlighting the topics of interest to us in the ISOC Internet Technology Team. After a hectic Monday there’s less dashing around needed today, although there’s a few things to highlight, even if you’ll have to choose between them as they’re unfortunately all scheduled at the same time.

NOTE: If you are unable to attend IETF 101 in person, there are multiple ways to participate remotely.

DNSOP starts its first of two sessions at 15.50 GMT/UTC (it continues on Thursday. Several of the drafts under discussion relate to the Root KSK Rollover and how to better automate and monitor key rollovers.

At the same time, DOTS is also meeting and has a bit of a mixed agenda with four drafts up for discussion, implementation reports, and feedback on the Hackathon.

There are two drafts covering the Distributed Denial-of-Service Open Threat Signaling (DOTS) Signal Channel and Data Channel specifications, one that establishes an architecture for establishing and maintaining signalling within and between domains, with the last one presenting use cases describing the interactions expected between DOTS components and messaging exchanges.

Alternatively, DMM has a very busy agenda with no Continue reading

Review: HPE OfficeConnect network products extremely easy to deploy, manage

The role of Wi-Fi has changed in most companies and is no longer something that’s merely convenient. Rather, it’s critical to a business’s ability to ensure its customer are happy and workers are productive.Given the growing importance of Wi-Fi, it’s essential vendors make products that are easy to set up, particularly for small businesses where the technical acumen of the person setting the product up is likely to be low.HPE had inquires as to the importance of having the product be easy to setup and manage, and I said that I felt it was the most important attribute. In fact, I chose the solution for my house — which includes four indoor access points (APs), one outdoor AP, and a 48 port Ethernet switch — based on how easy the product was to operate.  I'm very technical, but I really can't be bothered to fiddle around with doing things in a CLI.To read this article in full, please click here

Review: HPE OfficeConnect switch, access point easy to deploy, manage

The role of Wi-Fi has changed in most companies and is no longer something that’s merely convenient. Rather, it’s critical to a business’s ability to ensure its customer are happy and workers are productive.Given the growing importance of Wi-Fi, it’s essential vendors make products that are easy to set up, particularly for small businesses where the technical acumen of the person setting the product up is likely to be low.HPE had inquires as to the importance of having the product be easy to setup and manage, and I said that I felt it was the most important attribute. In fact, I chose the solution for my house — which includes four indoor access points (APs), one outdoor AP, and a 48 port Ethernet switch — based on how easy the product was to operate.  I'm very technical, but I really can't be bothered to fiddle around with doing things in a CLI.To read this article in full, please click here

Review: HPE OfficeConnect switch, access point easy to deploy, manage

The role of Wi-Fi has changed in most companies and is no longer something that’s merely convenient. Rather, it’s critical to a business’s ability to ensure its customer are happy and workers are productive.Given the growing importance of Wi-Fi, it’s essential vendors make products that are easy to set up, particularly for small businesses where the technical acumen of the person setting the product up is likely to be low.HPE had inquires as to the importance of having the product be easy to setup and manage, and I said that I felt it was the most important attribute. In fact, I chose the solution for my house — which includes four indoor access points (APs), one outdoor AP, and a 48 port Ethernet switch — based on how easy the product was to operate.  I'm very technical, but I really can't be bothered to fiddle around with doing things in a CLI.To read this article in full, please click here

FPGA maker Xilinx aims range of software-programmable chips at data centers

As data centers are called upon to handle an explosion of unstructured data fed into a variety of cutting-edge applications, the future for FPGAs looks bright.That’s because FPGAs, or field programmable gate arrays, are essentially chips that can be programmed, after manufacturing, to act as custom accelerators for workloads including machine-learning, complex data analysis, video encoding, and genomics – applications that have far-reaching consequences for communications, networking, health care, the entertainment industry and many other businesses.[ Check out REVIEW: VMware’s vSAN 6.6 and hear IDC’s top 10 data center predictions . | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Such applications lend themselves to parallel processing, an important feature of FPGAs, which can also be reconfigured on the fly to handle new features as the nature of these workloads evolve.To read this article in full, please click here

FPGA maker Xilinx aims range of software programmable chips at data centers

As data centers are called upon to handle an explosion of unstructured data fed into a variety of cutting-edge applications, the future for FPGAs looks bright.That’s because FPGAs, or field programmable gate arrays, are essentially chips that can be programmed, after manufacturing, to act as custom accelerators for workloads including machine-learning, complex data analysis, video encoding, and genomics – applications that have far-reaching consequences for communications, networking, health care, the entertainment industry and many other businesses.Such applications lend themselves to parallel processing, an important feature of FPGAs, which can also be reconfigured on the fly to handle new features as the nature of these workloads evolve.To read this article in full, please click here

FPGA maker Xilinx aims range of software-programmable chips at data centers

As data centers are called upon to handle an explosion of unstructured data fed into a variety of cutting-edge applications, the future for FPGAs looks bright.That’s because FPGAs, or field programmable gate arrays, are essentially chips that can be programmed, after manufacturing, to act as custom accelerators for workloads including machine-learning, complex data analysis, video encoding, and genomics – applications that have far-reaching consequences for communications, networking, health care, the entertainment industry and many other businesses.[ Check out REVIEW: VMware’s vSAN 6.6 and hear IDC’s top 10 data center predictions . | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Such applications lend themselves to parallel processing, an important feature of FPGAs, which can also be reconfigured on the fly to handle new features as the nature of these workloads evolve.To read this article in full, please click here

FPGA maker Xilinx aims range of software programmable chips at data centers

As data centers are called upon to handle an explosion of unstructured data fed into a variety of cutting-edge applications, the future for FPGAs looks bright.That’s because FPGAs, or field programmable gate arrays, are essentially chips that can be programmed, after manufacturing, to act as custom accelerators for workloads including machine-learning, complex data analysis, video encoding, and genomics – applications that have far-reaching consequences for communications, networking, health care, the entertainment industry and many other businesses.Such applications lend themselves to parallel processing, an important feature of FPGAs, which can also be reconfigured on the fly to handle new features as the nature of these workloads evolve.To read this article in full, please click here

FPGA maker Xilinx aims range of software-programmable chips at data centers

As data centers are called upon to handle an explosion of unstructured data fed into a variety of cutting-edge applications, the future for FPGAs looks bright.That’s because FPGAs, or field programmable gate arrays, are essentially chips that can be programmed, after manufacturing, to act as custom accelerators for workloads including machine-learning, complex data analysis, video encoding, and genomics – applications that have far-reaching consequences for communications, networking, health care, the entertainment industry and many other businesses.[ Check out REVIEW: VMware’s vSAN 6.6 and hear IDC’s top 10 data center predictions . | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Such applications lend themselves to parallel processing, an important feature of FPGAs, which can also be reconfigured on the fly to handle new features as the nature of these workloads evolve.To read this article in full, please click here

Integration of a Go service with systemd: socket activation

In a previous post, I highlighted some useful features of systemd when writing a service in Go, notably to signal readiness and prove liveness. Another interesting bit is socket activation: systemd listens on behalf of the application and, on incoming traffic, starts the service with a copy of the listening socket. Lennart Poettering details in a blog post:

If a service dies, its listening socket stays around, not losing a single message. After a restart of the crashed service it can continue right where it left off. If a service is upgraded we can restart the service while keeping around its sockets, thus ensuring the service is continously responsive. Not a single connection is lost during the upgrade.

This is one solution to get zero-downtime deployment for your application. Another upside is you can run your daemon with less privileges—loosing rights is a difficult task in Go.1

The basics?

Let’s take back our nifty 404-only web server:

package main

import (
    "log"
    "net"
    "net/http"
 Continue reading

How Do You Get Information from Network Devices?

One of the biggest challenges of network automation is getting usable information from network devices… or as asked by a student in my Building Network Automation Solutions online course in the course Slack team:

How do I get specific information from a specific command from a device without an Ansible Network Module? Is Python the only suggested approach?

I described how hard it is to get structured information from network devices in great details in this section of the Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar and online course. Here are a few more thoughts on the topic:

Read more ...
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