Maybe my excuse should be that it was somewhere around two in the morning. Or maybe it was just unclear thinking, and that was that. Sgt P. and I were called out to fix the AN/FPS-77 RADAR system just at the end of our day so we’d been fighting this problem for some seven or eight hours already. For some reason, a particular fuse down in the high voltage power supply kept blowing. Given this is the circuit that fed the magnetron with 250,000 volts at around 10 amps, it made for some interesting discussion with the folks in base weather, who were thus dependent on surrounding weather RADAR systems to continue flight operations.
If this sounds familiar, I’ve told this story before in a different context, but bear with me…
So how did we miss the problem that actually caused the blown fuse, and hence the loss of our site’s weather RADAR system for more than a day? The reason is that it was, in fact, two in the morning, and we’d run out of ideas. If you want a sense of the complexity of the system we were working on, here is the troubleshooting guide, and here is Continue reading
Our last DNS meetup was a packed house with Paul Mockapetris, the original inventor of DNS. We learned why DNS answers have a question count but always only one question, why underscores aren’t allowed in domain names, and the history of how DNS came to be.
Our next meetup is with the infamous Dan Kaminsky –– there’s even a DNS attack named after him, the Kaminsky attack. Dan is known for his work finding a core flaw in the Internet, and then leading the charge to repair it. He is an invited expert to the W3C, the guiding organization for the Web, and co-founded the cybersecurity firm White Ops. He is even one of the seven "key shareholders" able to restore the Internet's Domain Name System if necessary.
We’ll cover how Dan discovered the Kaminsky attack, the future of DNS and privacy, how to secure email with DNS, and what are the policy implications of governments allowing DNS blocking. It’s going to be a really great event - we can’t wait to see you there. The meetup is at Gandi’s headquarters: 121 2nd Street, San Francisco at 6PM PST on Tuesday, May 10th, 2016. To claim your spot, Continue reading
I’m at Interop this week talking all things networking with a great group of people. There are quite a few members of the community here presenting, listening and discussing. There’s a great exchange of ideas flowing back and forth. Yet one thing I keep hearing in quiet corners of the room is a hushed discussion of the continued viability of Interop as a conference. Is it time to write the Interop obituary?
Some of the arguments are as old as tech itself. People claim that getting vendors to interoperate today is an afterthought thanks to protocols like OSPF. All of the important bits in a network are standardized now. Use of APIs and other open technologies are driving vendors to play nice with each other. The need to show up in a faraway place and do the work has long passed.
There’s also the discussion around the bigger conferences out in the world. Vendor conferences like Cisco Live and VMworld draw tens of thousands. New product announcements are dropping left and right during these events. People also want to fracture into tool-specific events like OpenStack Summit or DockerCon. Or the various analyst events or company days that Continue reading
Hear from Cisco's Balaji Sivasubramanian & Vipin Jain on Project Contiv, the benefits of containerization, challenges of container networking, and top concerns and focus area of running containers in production.
The post Worth Reading: Silicon Photonics appeared first on 'net work.
High hopes about for network automation, but what's realistic?