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Category Archives for "Networking"

Is Cisco’s Mobility Express right for you?

One of the hottest topics on the minds of our customers for 2018 continues to be their wireless infrastructure. As WLAN 802.11ac wave 2 devices becoming mainstream, Cisco has placed a stake in the ground claiming to be the “value leader.”Cisco's solution to accomplish this is Mobility Express, designed to help companies easily set up wireless LAN (WLAN) networks. What exactly is Mobility Express? And is it right for you?What is Mobility Express? Mobility Express is the ability to use an access point (AP) as a controller. That means a lightweight network without a controller box. Instead one of the APs on the network acts as the controller. Here is how Cisco describes it:To read this article in full, please click here

Is Cisco’s Mobility Express right for you?

One of the hottest topics on the minds of our customers for 2018 continues to be their wireless infrastructure. As WLAN 802.11ac wave 2 devices becoming mainstream, Cisco has placed a stake in the ground claiming to be the “value leader.”Cisco's solution to accomplish this is Mobility Express, designed to help companies easily set up wireless LAN (WLAN) networks. What exactly is Mobility Express? And is it right for you?What is Mobility Express? Mobility Express is the ability to use an access point (AP) as a controller. That means a lightweight network without a controller box. Instead one of the APs on the network acts as the controller. Here is how Cisco describes it:To read this article in full, please click here

Does Hyperconverged Infrastructure Save Money?

Hyperconverged infrastructure vendors always tout the technology's cost efficiency, arguing that HCI reduces costs because it requires less administrative burden. In this video, Keith Townsend, principal at The CTO Advisor and Interop ITX infrastructure chair, examines whether hyperconvergence really costs less than traditional three-tier IT infrastructure.

Fat Fingers Strike Again…

Level3 had a pretty bad bad-hair-day just a day before Pete Lumbis talked about Continuous Integration on the Building Network Automation Solutions online course (yes, it was a great lead-in for Pete).

According to messages circulating on mailing lists it was all caused by a fumbled configuration attempt. My wild guess: someone deleting the wrong route map, causing routes that should have been tagged with no-export escape into the wider Internet.

Read more ...

Deadline of Feb 1 for Nominations for Public Interest Registry (.ORG Operator) Board of Directors

Would you be interested in helping guide the future of the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the non-profit operator of the .ORG, .NGO and .ONG domains? If so, the Internet Society is seeking nominations for three positions on the PIR Board of Directors. The nominations deadline is 23:00 UTC on Thursday, February 1, 2018.

More information about the positions and the required qualifications can be found at: https://www.internetsociety.org/pir/call-for-nominations/

As noted on that page:

The Internet Society is now accepting nominations for the Board of Directors of the Public Interest Registry (PIR). PIR’s business is to manage the international registry of .org, .ngo, and .ong domain names, as well as associated Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).

In 2018 there are three positions opening on the PIR Board. Two directors will serve a 3-year term that begins mid-year 2018 and expires mid-year 2021. One director will fill a vacant seat as soon as practical and serve until mid-year 2020.

If you are interested in being considered as a candidate, please see the form to submit toward the bottom of the call for nominations page.

The post Deadline of Feb 1 for Nominations for Public Interest Registry (.ORG Operator) Board of Directors Continue reading

Forget the CES hype, IoT is all about industry

This week the gadget industry descends up on Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES). And as in the previous few years, 2018’s CES is chock-full of smart devices of every stripe. Some seem very cool, others unutterably silly, and a tiny percentage might be actually useful. A few will find market success, and many more will never actually hit the market at all.In addition to all the new product previews, this year’s CES is full of summits, seminars, presentations and other sessions devoted to helping consumer products companies make, sell, deploy and monetize everything from smart cars and smart homes to smart cities.To read this article in full, please click here

Hyperconverged secondary storage market heats up

There’s no question that the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has had a huge impact on simplifying technology deployments. Nutantix solutions, Cisco HyperFlex and HPE Simplivity have been widely adopted and have changed the face of the data center.HCI was initially considered niche to simplify the deployment of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), but it has seen increased adoption for other workloads. One use case for HCI that has flown under the radar is secondary storage. Late last year, I profiled Cohesity, the vendor that has been leading the emerging hyperconverged secondary storage market.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: Why the Full Time Job is Still Important

The new “rules” of the workplace are being defined as computers are frantically being programmed to take the lead in the workplace, when it comes to judgment and intuition. We humans need to be the idea generators, the motivators, the negotiators, and the trouble-shooters to fix computer errors, if we want to govern our emerging digital environments. In short, we need to get closer to our firms, be more tightly integrated and intimate with work performance than ever before… which means the role and tenure of the much-derided middle-manager in the Dilbert Cartoons could be taking on a whole new potential twist – and a whole new (potential) level of relevance. —Phil Fersht @ The Enterprise Irregulars

Cumulus content roundup: January

Got a New Year’s resolution for a data center revolution? We’ve got your back! The Cumulus content roundup is here to make sure you start out 2018 on the right foot. With a variety of blog posts, videos and networking resources at your disposal, you’ll find that upgrading your networking knowledge is an easily achievable goal (and much easier than starting a diet or going to the gym). Don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone if you’ve already broken your resolution! It’s a time for new beginnings and looking to the future; let’s check out what’s in store.

Cumulus resources

Cumulus in the Cloud overview: What is Cumulus in the Cloud, and what can it do for you? In this video overview, let CTO JR Rivers walk you through the pre-built virtual data center and teach you all about the great Cumulus tech you can play with.

 
NCLU: Network Command Line Utility overview: There’s a new chapter in our how-to video series. This time, our highly qualified instructors will teach you the ins and outs of Cumulus Networks CLI, the Network Command Line Utility. Watch the tutorial to learn more.

 
Open networking drives forward with Cumulus Linux Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: How network verification differs from monitoring, and what it’s good for

In a previous post I discussed network verification, a new area of technology that applies what is known as formal verification – mathematical analysis of a complex system to determine rigorously if it meets the end-to-end goal – to network infrastructure.But what is such verification good for and how is it different from today’s common practice, whereby nearly every organization monitors its network, typically by sampling ongoing flows, events or logs. Isn’t that enough to catch problems as the organization deploys changes?To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: How network verification differs from monitoring, and what it’s good for

In a previous post I discussed network verification, a new area of technology that applies what is known as formal verification – mathematical analysis of a complex system to determine rigorously if it meets the end-to-end goal – to network infrastructure.But what is such verification good for and how is it different from today’s common practice, whereby nearly every organization monitors its network, typically by sampling ongoing flows, events or logs. Isn’t that enough to catch problems as the organization deploys changes?To read this article in full, please click here

Section 10 Routing Loops

A (long) time ago, a reader asked me about RFC4456, section 10, which says:

Care should be taken to make sure that none of the BGP path attributes defined above can be modified through configuration when exchanging internal routing information between RRs and Clients and Non-Clients. Their modification could potentially result in routing loops. In addition, when a RR reflects a route, it SHOULD NOT modify the following path attributes: NEXT_HOP, AS_PATH, LOCAL_PREF, and MED. Their modification could potentially result in routing loops.

On first reading, this seems a little strange—how could modifying the next hop, Local Preference, or MED at a route reflector cause a routing loop? While contrived, the following network illustrates the principle.

Note the best path, from an IGP perspective, from C to E is through B, and the best path, from an IGP perspective, from B to D is through C. In this case, a route is advertised over eBGP from F towards E and D. These two eBGP speakers, in turn, advertise the route to their iBGP neighbors, B and C. Both B and C are route reflectors, so they both reflect the route on to A, which advertises the route to some other Continue reading

14,000 Incidents: a 2017 Routing Security Year in Review

How was the state of the Internet’s routing system in 2017? Let’s take a look back using data from BGPStream. Some highlights:

  • 13,935 total incidents (either outages or attacks like route leaks and hijacks)
  • Over 10% of all Autonomous Systems on the Internet were affected
  • 3,106 Autonomous Systems were a victim of at least one routing incident
  • 1,546 networks caused at least one incident

An ‘incident’ is a suspicious change in the state of the routing system that can be attributed to an outage or a routing attack, like a route leak or hijack (either intentional or due to a configuration mistake).[i] Let’s look at just a few examples of incidents picked up by the media.

March 2017. SECW Telecom in Brazil hijacked prefixes of Cloudflare, Google, and BancoBrazil causing some outage for these services in the region.

April 2017. Large chunks of network traffic belonging to MasterCard, Visa, and more than two dozen other financial services companies were briefly routed through a Russian telecom. For several minutes, Rostelecom was originating 50 prefixes for numerous other Autonomous Systems, hijacking their traffic.

August 2017. Google accidentally leaked BGP prefixes it learned from peering relationships, essentially becoming a transit provider instead Continue reading

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