Internet Impacts of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria
Devastation caused by several storms during the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season has been significant, as Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria destroyed property and took lives across a number of Caribbean island nations, as well as Texas and Florida in the United States. The strength of these storms has made timely communication of information all the more important, from evacuation orders, to pleas for help and related coordination among first responders and civilian rescuers, to insight into open shelters, fuel stations, and grocery stores. The Internet has become a critical component of this communication, with mobile weather applications providing real-time insight into storm conditions and locations, social media tools like Facebook and Twitter used to contact loved ones or ask for assistance, “walkie talkie” apps like Zello used to coordinate rescue efforts, and “gas tracker” apps like GasBuddy used to crowdsource information about open fuel stations, gas availability, and current prices.
As the Internet has come to play a more pivotal role here, the availability and performance of Internet services has become more important as well. While some “core” Internet components remained available during these storms thanks to hardened data center infrastructure, backup power generators, and comprehensive disaster planning, local infrastructure Continue reading
Network Break 154: Arista & Cisco Put New Products In The Cloud
The Network Break analyzes the latest tech news, including new cloud products from Arista and Cisco, per-second pricing from Amazon, business moves from Google and Toshiba, and more. The post Network Break 154: Arista & Cisco Put New Products In The Cloud appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Completion of 160Tb Trans-Atlantic Subsea Cable In Two Years – Microsoft
Two years to deploy 160Tb of bandwidth
The post Completion of 160Tb Trans-Atlantic Subsea Cable In Two Years – Microsoft appeared first on EtherealMind.
The Value of Configuration Consistency (Thwack)
It’s one thing to have a stable network, but it’s another to have consistency in device configurations across the network. Does that even matter?
On the Solarwinds Thwack Geek Speak blog I looked at some reasons why it might be important to maintain certain configuration standards across all devices. Please do take a trip to Thwack and check out my post, “The Value of Configuration Consistency“.
Please see my Disclosures page for more information about my role as a Solarwinds Ambassador.
If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at The Value of Configuration Consistency (Thwack) and give me a share/like. Thank you!
Unmetered Mitigation: DDoS Protection Without Limits
This is the week of Cloudflare's seventh birthday. It's become a tradition for us to announce a series of products each day of this week and bring major new benefits to our customers. We're beginning with one I'm especially proud of: Unmetered Mitigation.
CC BY-SA 2.0 image by Vassilis
Cloudflare runs one of the largest networks in the world. One of our key services is DDoS mitigation and we deflect a new DDoS attack aimed at our customers every three minutes. We do this with over 15 terabits per second of DDoS mitigation capacity. That's more than the publicly announced capacity of every other DDoS mitigation service we're aware of combined. And we're continuing to invest in our network to expand capacity at an accelerating rate.
Surge Pricing
Virtually every Cloudflare competitor will send you a bigger bill if you are unlucky enough to get targeted by an attack. We've seen examples of small businesses that survive massive attacks to then be crippled by the bills other DDoS mitigation vendors sent them. From the beginning of Cloudflare's history, it never felt right that you should have to pay more if you came under an attack. That feels barely a Continue reading
No Scrubs: The Architecture That Made Unmetered Mitigation Possible
When building a DDoS mitigation service it’s incredibly tempting to think that the solution is scrubbing centers or scrubbing servers. I, too, thought that was a good idea in the beginning, but experience has shown that there are serious pitfalls to this approach.
A scrubbing server is a dedicated machine that receives all network traffic destined for an IP address and attempts to filter good traffic from bad. Ideally, the scrubbing server will only forward non-DDoS packets to the Internet application being attacked. A scrubbing center is a dedicated location filled with scrubbing servers.
Three Problems With Scrubbers
The three most pressing problems with scrubbing are: bandwidth, cost, knowledge.
The bandwidth problem is easy to see. As DDoS attacks have scaled to >1Tbps having that much network capacity available is problematic. Provisioning and maintaining multiple-Tbps of bandwidth for DDoS mitigation is expensive and complicated. And it needs to be located in the right place on the Internet to receive and absorb an attack. If it’s not then attack traffic will need to be received at one location, scrubbed, and then clean traffic forwarded to the real server: that can introduce enormous delays with a limited number of locations.
Meet Gatebot – a bot that allows us to sleep
In the past, we’ve spoken about how Cloudflare is architected to sustain the largest DDoS attacks. During traffic surges we spread the traffic across a very large number of edge servers. This architecture allows us to avoid having a single choke point because the traffic gets distributed externally across multiple datacenters and internally across multiple servers. We do that by employing Anycast and ECMP.
We don't use separate scrubbing boxes or specialized hardware - every one of our edge servers can perform advanced traffic filtering if the need arises. This allows us to scale up our DDoS capacity as we grow. Each of the new servers we add to our datacenters increases our maximum theoretical DDoS “scrubbing” power. It also scales down nicely - in smaller datacenters we don't have to overinvest in expensive dedicated hardware.
During normal operations our attitude to attacks is rather pragmatic. Since the inbound traffic is distributed across hundreds of servers we can survive periodic spikes and small attacks without doing anything. Vanilla Linux is remarkably resilient against unexpected network events. This is especially true since kernel 4.4 when the performance of SYN cookies was greatly improved.
But at some point, malicious traffic volume Continue reading
Using Wireshark to Test Troubleshooting Tools
In this video, Tony Fortunato demonstrates how he used Wireshark to analyze a traceroute utility.
Gartner: Don’t Fall For the Network Transceiver Scam
Organizations can save money by negotiating better deals on a common piece of network equipment, analysts say.
Introduction to Brocade 6510 Switch
Today I am going to talk about the Brocade 6510 Switch with the specifications and the details. Brocade 6510 switch features up to 48 ports of Gen 5 Fibre Channel technology with specifications suitable for hyper-scale, private cloud, virtualized, and other high-bandwidth Fibre Channel environments.
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| Fig 1.1- Brocade Fiber Switch with Cisco Nexus 5K Switch Testing |
With an aggregate 768Gb/s throughput and an 18-inch deep 1U footprint, the 6510 supports 2, 4, 8, 10, or 16 Gb/s Fibre Channel across 24, 36, or 48 ports of connectivity and with a feature set that can be extended via add-on licenses for a wide variety of usage scenarios.
The Brocade 6510 represents best-of-class Fibre Channel SAN switching, which is an important asset to the Storage Review Enterprise Storage Lab in order to ensure that network components do not bottleneck storage devices during SAN benchmarks.
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| Fig 1.2- Brocade VCS Fabric Extension Over Brocade 6510 Switch |
Let's talk about the Brocade Switch Specifications in detail. Above is the sample diagram showing the use of the Brocade VCS and below is the specifications of the Switch.
Brocade 6510 Switch Specifications
- Fibre Channel ports: Switch mode (default): 24-, 36-, and 48-port configurations Continue reading
Easy and Simple 11 Steps to configure Cisco DSL Router
Today I am going to talk about the easy and the simple 11 steps to configure the DSL configuration. Below is the basic setup of the DSL router in the network.
The above shown diagram is just an example of DSL connection and below is the sample configurations on the cisco routers. Let's talk about the 11 steps to configure the Cisco DSL router now.
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| Fig 1.1- Cisco DSL Topology |
Step 1
Configure service time stamp to properly log and display debug output in the troubleshooting section.
ttlbits_router#configure terminal
ttlbits_router(config)#service timestamps debug datetime msec
ttlbits_router(config)#service timestamps log datetime msec
ttlbits_router(config)#end
ttlbits_router(config)#service timestamps debug datetime msec
ttlbits_router(config)#service timestamps log datetime msec
ttlbits_router(config)#end
Step 2
Disable the logging console on your Cisco DSL Router to suppress console messages that may be triggered while you are configuring the router.
ttlbits_router#configure terminal
ttlbits_router(config)#no logging console
ttlbits_router(config)#end
ttlbits_router(config)#no logging console
ttlbits_router(config)#end
Step 3
Configure IP routing, IP subnet−zero, and ip classless to provide flexibility in routing configuration options.
ttlbits_router#configure terminal
ttlbits_router(config)#ip routing
ttlbits_router(config)#ip subnet−zero
ttlbits_router(config)#ip classless
ttlbits_router(config)#end
ttlbits_router(config)#ip routing
ttlbits_router(config)#ip subnet−zero
ttlbits_router(config)#ip classless
ttlbits_router(config)#end
Step 4
Configure an IP address and subnet mask on the Cisco DSL Router Ethernet interface. Enable NAT inside on the Ethernet interface.
ttlbits_router#configure terminal
ttlbits_router(config)#interface ethernet 0
ttlbits_router Continue reading
ttlbits_router(config)#interface ethernet 0
ttlbits_router Continue reading
The History of Email
This was adapted from a post which originally appeared on the Eager blog. Eager has now become the new Cloudflare Apps.
QWERTYUIOP
— Text of the first email ever sent, 1971
The ARPANET (a precursor to the Internet) was created “to help maintain U.S. technological superiority and guard against unforeseen technological advances by potential adversaries,” in other words, to avert the next Sputnik. Its purpose was to allow scientists to share the products of their work and to make it more likely that the work of any one team could potentially be somewhat usable by others. One thing which was not considered particularly valuable was allowing these scientists to communicate using this network. People were already perfectly capable of communicating by phone, letter, and in-person meeting. The purpose of a computer was to do massive computation, to augment our memories and empower our minds.
Surely we didn’t need a computer, this behemoth of technology and innovation, just to talk to each other.
The computers which sent (and received) the first email.
The history of computing moves from massive data processing mainframes, to time sharing where many people share one computer, to the diverse collection of personal computing devices Continue reading