Archive

Category Archives for "Networking"

AWS to invest $8.9 billion across its regions in Australia by 2027

Within months of adding a second region in Melbourne, Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday said it would invest $8.93 billion (AU$13.2 billion) to spruce up infrastructure across its cloud regions in Australia through 2027.The majority share of the investment, about $7.45 billion, will be invested in the company’s cloud region in Sydney through the defined time period. The remaining $1.49 billion will be used to expand data center infrastructure in Melbourne, the company said.The $8.93 billion investment includes a $495 million investment in network infrastructure to extend AWS cloud and edge infrastructure across Australia, including partnerships with telecom partners to facilitate high-speed fiber connectivity between Availability Zones, AWS said.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM targets edge, AI use cases with new z16 mainframes

IBM has significantly reduced the size of some its Big Iron z16 mainframes and given them a new operating system that emphasizes AI and edge computing.The new configurations—which include Telum processor-based, 68-core IBM z16 Single Frame and Rack Mounted models and a new IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 and LinuxONE Rockhopper Rack Mount boxes—are expected to offer customers better data-center configuration options while reducing energy consumption. Both new Rack Mount boxes are 18U compared to the current smallest Single Frame models, which are 42U.To read this article in full, please click here

IBM targets edge, AI use cases with new z16 mainframes

IBM has significantly reduced the size of some its Big Iron z16 mainframes and given them a new operating system that emphasizes AI and edge computing.The new configurations—which include Telum processor-based, 68-core IBM z16 Single Frame and Rack Mounted models and a new IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 and LinuxONE Rockhopper Rack Mount boxes—are expected to offer customers better data-center configuration options while reducing energy consumption. Both new Rack Mount boxes are 18U compared to the current smallest Single Frame models, which are 42U.To read this article in full, please click here

10 things to know about data-center outages

The severity of data-center outages appears to be falling, while the cost of outages continues to climb. Power failures are “the biggest cause of significant site outages.” Network failures and IT system glitches also bring down data centers, and human error often contributes.Those are some of the problems pinpointed in the most recent Uptime Institute data-center outage report, which analyzes types of outages, their frequency, and what they cost both in money and consequences.Unreliable data is an ongoing problem Uptime cautions that data relating to outages should be treated skeptically given the lack of transparency of some outage victims and the quality of reporting mechanisms. “Outage information is opaque and unreliable,” said Andy Lawrence, executive director of research at Uptime, during a briefing about Uptime’s Annual Outages Analysis 2023.To read this article in full, please click here

10 things to know about data-center outages

Data-center outage severity appears to be falling, while the cost of outages continues to climb.Power failures are “the biggest cause of significant site outages”.Network failures and IT system glitches also bring down data centers, and human error often contributes.Those are some of the problems pinpointed in the most recent Uptime Institute data-center outage report that analyzes types of outages, their frequency, and what they cost both in money and consequences.Unreliable data is an ongoing problem Uptime cautions that data relating to outages should be treated skeptically given the lack of transparency of some outage victims and the quality of reporting mechanisms. “Outage information is opaque and unreliable,” said Andy Lawrence, executive director of research at Uptime, during a briefing about Uptime’s Annual Outages Analysis 2023.To read this article in full, please click here

Kubernetes Security And Networking 5: Installing A Service Mesh – Video

This video walks through installing a service mesh. We use Linkerd, but there are many other options. We show how to install Linkerd in your cluster and add sidecars to pods. You can subscribe to the Packet Pushers’ YouTube channel for more videos as they are published. It’s a diverse a mix of content from […]

The post Kubernetes Security And Networking 5: Installing A Service Mesh – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Network Break 424: Amazon Invites Devs To Its Sidewalk Wireless Network; OneWeb Readies Global Satellite Internet Service

On today's Network Break podcast we cover Amazon opening its Sidewalk low-power IoT wireless network to developers, Cisco putting the expiration date on Prime Infrastructure, HAProxy adding QUIC support in its enterprise load balancer, Huawei touting revenue stability, and more IT news.

The post Network Break 424: Amazon Invites Devs To Its Sidewalk Wireless Network; OneWeb Readies Global Satellite Internet Service appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Recording your commands on the Linux command line

Recording the commands that you run on the Linux command line can be useful for two important reasons. For one, the recorded commands provide a way to review your command line activity, which is extremely helpful if something didn't work as expected and you need to take a closer look. In addition, capturing commands can make it easy to repeat the commands or to turn them into scripts or aliases for long-term reuse. This post examines two ways that you can easily record and reuse commands.Using history to record Linux commands The history command makes it extremely easy to record commands that you enter on the command line because it happens automatically. The only thing you might want to check is the setting that determines how many commands are retained and, therefore, how long they're going to stay around for viewing and reusing. The command below will display your command history buffer size. If it's 1,000 like that shown, it will retain the last 1,000 commands that you entered.To read this article in full, please click here

Recording your commands on the Linux command line

Recording the commands that you run on the Linux command line can be useful for two important reasons. For one, the recorded commands provide a way to review your command line activity, which is extremely helpful if something didn't work as expected and you need to take a closer look. In addition, capturing commands can make it easy to repeat the commands or to turn them into scripts or aliases for long-term reuse. This post examines two ways that you can easily record and reuse commands.Using history to record Linux commands The history command makes it extremely easy to record commands that you enter on the command line because it happens automatically. The only thing you might want to check is the setting that determines how many commands are retained and, therefore, how long they're going to stay around for viewing and reusing. The command below will display your command history buffer size. If it's 1,000 like that shown, it will retain the last 1,000 commands that you entered.To read this article in full, please click here

Dropped packet reason codes in VyOS

The article VyOS with Host sFlow agent describes how to use industry standard sFlow telemetry to monitor network traffic flows and statistics in the latest VyOS rolling releases. VyOS dropped packet notifications describes how sFlow also provides visibility into network packet drops and Dropped packet reason codes in Linux 6+ kernels describes how newer kernels are able to provide specific reasons for dropping packets. 
vyos@vyos:~$ uname -r
6.1.22-amd64-vyos

The latest VyOS rolling release runs on a Linux 6.1 kernel and the latest release of VyOS now provides enhanced visibility into dropped packets using kernel reason codes.

vyos@vyos:~$ show version
Version:          VyOS 1.4-rolling-202303310716
Release train:    current

Built by:         [email protected]
Built on:         Fri 31 Mar 2023 07:16 UTC
Build UUID:       1a7448d9-d53c-48a0-8644-ed1970c1abb8
Build commit ID:  75c9311fba375e

Architecture:     x86_64
Boot via:         installed image
System type:       guest

Hardware vendor:  innotek GmbH
Hardware model:   VirtualBox
Hardware S/N:     0
Hardware UUID:    da75808d-ff60-1d4c-babd-84a7fa341053

Copyright:        VyOS maintainers and contributors
Verify that the version of of VyOS is VyOS 1.4-rolling-202303310716 or later.

In the previous article, VyOS dropped packet notifications,  two tests were performed, the first a failed attempt to connect to the VyOS router using telnet (telnet has been disabled in Continue reading

Routing in Azure Subnets

Introduction

Subnets, aka Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) in traditional networking, are Layer-2 broadcast domains that enable attached workloads to communicate without crossing a Layer-3 boundary, the subnet Gateway. Hosts sharing the same subnet resolve each other’s MAC-IP address binding using Address Resolution Protocol, which relays on Broadcast messages. That is why we often use the Failure domain definition with subnets. We can spread subnets between physical devices over Layer-2 links using VLAN tagging, defined in the IEEE 802.1Q standard. Besides, tunnel encapsulation solutions supporting tenant/context identifier enables us to extend subnets over Layer-3 infrastructure. Virtual eXtensible LAN (VXLAN) using VXLAN Network Identifier (VNI) and Network Virtualization using Generic Route Encapsulation (NVGRE) using Tenant Network ID (TNI) are examples of Network Virtualization Over Layer 3 (NVO) solutions. If you have to spread the subnet over MPLS enabled network, you can choose to implement Virtual Private LAN (VPLS) Service or Virtual Private Wire Service (VPWS), among the other solutions.  

In Azure, the concept of a subnet is different. You can think about it as a logical domain within a Virtual Network (VNet), where attached VMs share the same IP address space and use the same shared routing policies. Broadcast and Multicast traffic is not natively supported in Azure VNet. However, you can use a cloudSwXtch VM image from swXtch.io to build a Multicast-enabled overlay network within VNet. 

Default Routing in Virtual Network

This section demonstrates how the routing between subnets within the same Virtual Network (VNet) works by default. Figure 2-1 illustrates our example Azure VNet setup where we have deployed two subnets. The interface eth0 of vm-west and interface eth1 of vm-nva-fw are attached to subnet snet-west (10.0.0.0/24), while interface eth2 of vm-nva-fw and interface eth0 of vm-west is connected to subnet snet-east (10.0.1.0/24). All three VMs use the VNet default routing policy, which routes Intra-VNet data flows directly between the source and destination endpoint, regardless of which subnets they are connected to. Besides, the Network Security Groups (NSGs) associated with vNICs share the same default security policies, which allow inbound and outbound Intra-VNet data flows, InBound flows from the Load Balancer, and OutBound Internet connections. 

Now let’s look at what happens when vm-west (DIP: 10.0.0.4) pings vm-west (DIP: 10.0.1.4), recapping the operation of VFP. Note that Accelerated Networking (AccelNet) is enabled in neither VMs.

  1. The VM vm-west sends an ICMP Request message to vm-east. The packet arrives at the Virtual Filtering Platform (VFP) for processing. Since this is the first packet of the flow, the Flow Identifier and associated Actions are not in the Unified Flow Table (UFT). The Parser component extracts the 5-tuple header information (source IP, source port, destination IP, destination port, and transport protocol) as metadata from the original packet. The metadata is then processed in each VFP layer to generate a flow-based entry in the UFT.
  2. The destination IP address matches the Network Security Group's (NSG) default outbound rule, which allows Intra-VNet flows. Then the metadata is passed on to the routing process. Since we haven't yet deployed subnet-specific route tables, the result of the next-hop route lookup is 3.3.3.3, the Provider Address (PA) of Host-C.
  3. Intra-VNet connections use private IP addresses (DIP-Direct IP), and the VFP process bypasses the NAT layer. The VNet layer, responsible for encapsulation/decapsulation, constructs tunnel headers (IP/UDP/VXLAN). It creates the outer IP address with the source IP 1.1.1.1 (Host-A) and destination IP 3.3.3.3 (Host-C), resolved by the Routing layer. Besides, it adds Virtual Network Identifier (VNI) into the VXLAN header.
  4. After each layer has processed the metadata, the result is encoded to Unified Flow Table (UFT) with Flow-Id with push action (Encapsulation). 
  5. The Header Transposition engine (HT) modifies the original packet based on the UFT actions. It adds tunnel headers leaving all original header information intact. Finally, the modified packet is transmitted to the upstream switch. The subsequent packets are forwarded based on the UFT.
  6. The Azure switching infra forwards the packet based on the destination IP address on the outer IP header (tunnel header).
  7. The VFP on Host-C processes the ingress ICMP Request message in the same manner as VFP in Host-A but in reversed order starting with decapsulation in the VNet layer.

Figure 2-1: Example Topology Diagram.
Continue reading

mTLS client certificate revocation vulnerability with TLS Session Resumption

mTLS client certificate revocation vulnerability with TLS Session Resumption
mTLS client certificate revocation vulnerability with TLS Session Resumption

On December 16, 2022, Cloudflare discovered a bug where, in limited circumstances, some users with revoked certificates may not have been blocked by Cloudflare firewall settings. Specifically, Cloudflare’s Firewall Rules solution did not block some users with revoked certificates from resuming a session via mutual transport layer security (mTLS), even if the customer had configured Firewall Rules to do so. This bug has been mitigated, and we have no evidence of this being exploited. We notified any customers that may have been impacted in an abundance of caution, so they can check their own logs to determine if an mTLS protected resource was accessed by entities holding a revoked certificate.

What happened?

One of Cloudflare Firewall Rules’ features, introduced in March 2021, lets customers revoke or block a client certificate, preventing it from being used to authenticate and establish a session. For example, a customer may use Firewall Rules to protect a service by requiring clients to provide a client certificate through the mTLS authentication protocol. Customers could also revoke or disable a client certificate, after which it would no longer be able to be used to authenticate a party initiating an encrypted session via mTLS.

When Cloudflare receives Continue reading

Introducing Rollbacks for Workers Deployments

Introducing Rollbacks for Workers Deployments
Introducing Rollbacks for Workers Deployments

In November, 2022, we introduced deployments for Workers. Deployments are created as you make changes to a Worker. Each one is unique. These let you track changes to your Workers over time, seeing who made the changes, and where they came from.

Introducing Rollbacks for Workers Deployments

When we made the announcement, we also said our intention was to build more functionality on top of deployments.

Today, we’re proud to release rollbacks for deployments.

Rollbacks

As nice as it would be to know that every deployment is perfect, it’s not always possible - for various reasons. Rollbacks provide a quick way to deploy past versions of a Worker - providing another layer of confidence when developing and deploying with Workers.

Via the dashboard

In the dashboard, you can navigate to the Deployments tab. For each deployment that’s not the most recent, you should see a new icon on the far right of the deployment. Hovering over that icon will display the option to rollback to the specified deployment.

Introducing Rollbacks for Workers Deployments

Clicking on that will bring up a confirmation dialog, where you can enter a reason for rollback. This provides another mechanism of record-keeping and helps give more context for why the rollback was necessary.

Introducing Rollbacks for Workers Deployments

Once you enter Continue reading

DHCP Relaying in EVPN VRFs

After figuring out how DHCP relaying works and testing it with VRFs and in VXLAN segments, it seems like a no-brainer to make it work with EVPN.

TL&DR: It works, at least when using Arista vEOS as the relay and Cisco CSR 1000v as the DHCP server.

Lab Topology

We’ll keep using the exact same “physical” topology we used in the VXLAN DHCP relaying lab, add EVPN and BGP to the control-plane cocktail, and put the VXLAN segment into a VRF. We’ll use CSR 1000v as the DHCP server because Cisco IOSv doesn’t support some of the DHCP option-82 sub-options we need.

New Juniper Rack Mount Kit

Juniper has a new enhanced four-post rack mount kit “JNP-4PST-RMK-1U-E” for their 1RU datacenter devices. It works with devices like the QFX5120 and PTX10001-36MR. It is much improved over the legacy rack mount kit. It are not as good as some competitors, but it is backwards compatible. It makes switch installation quicker and safer.

Background: Current 4-post rail kit

Juniper has used the same 4-post kit for their 1RU datacenter switches and routers for many years. The same kit works on QFX5100, QFX5110 and QFX5120-48Y switches. The MX204 uses a slight variation, but is almost identical. Oddly, the QFX5120-32C uses something completely different. Devices are secured to the front and rear posts. 2-post mounting is unwise for modern deep devices with heavy PSUs. You can still get away with 2-post mounting for lighter, shallower access switches. Modern servers and deep switches/routers need 4-post mounting, or some sort of shelf.

The current kit “EX-4PST-RMK” has 2 parts per side:

Legacy rail kit

One piece screws in to each side of the switch. Note that there are 8 holes per side, but Juniper supplies a total of 12 very small screws. As you can imagine, installing 12 very small screws per switch is no fun Continue reading