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Category Archives for "Networking"

For IT, climate change means preparing for disaster

IT managers understand the hazards of heat inside data centers. But what about outside it?Cordell Schachter, the CTO of the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT), who went through Hurricane Sandy in 2012, says climate trends will increasingly impact IT operations."At one time, you could go through a whole career without facing one of those situations" -- something like a Sandy -- said Cordell. But he now believes if "you have a career spanning more than a decade" you may see one or two major weather events.Scientists are increasingly connecting extreme weather events to man-made climate change. Insurance claims are rising.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Small cell deployment to rapidly grow, says report

Small cells, the low-powered radio access nodes, are being deployed at ever increasing rates, says a study. Sixty-percent of enterprises will have deployed the signal-enhancing devices by the end of 2017, the Small Cell Forum says. It commissioned the study from Nemertes Research. The study, published in February, discovered that 14% of businesses have already introduced the technology. The reason for the growth is to fulfill a need for better mobile coverage in hard to reach spots not covered by regular mobile service. + ALSO: 10 top reasons for integrating Wi-Fi radios in small cellular cells +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

New products of the week 3.28.16

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow. Harmony Breach AnalyticsKey features: The Harmony Breach Analytics platform reads customer log data to provide contextually-aware threat intelligence and retrospective analysis. This reduces SOC and SIEM workloads by providing threat intelligence customer specific. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Petya ransomware overwrites MBRs, locking users out of their computers

It's hard enough for non-technical users to deal with ransomware infections: understanding public-key cryptography, connecting to the Tor anonymity network and paying with Bitcoin cryptocurrency. A new malicious program now makes it even more difficult by completely locking victims out of their computers.The new Petya ransomware overwrites the master boot record (MBR) of the affected PCs, leaving their operating systems in an unbootable state, researchers from antivirus firm Trend Micro said in a blog post.The MBR is the code stored in the first sectors of a hard disk drive. It contains information about the disk's partitions and launches the operating system's boot loader. Without a proper MBR, the computer doesn't know which partitions contain an OS and how to start it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

California Nurds by Katy Sperry

Katy Perry

California Nurds

I know a place
Where the tech is truly awesome
Smart network folks; all clustered
inside CA’s borders

Cablin’ guys and gals
Running fibers to the servers.
We’re all hard core geeks, we are
certified nerf herders.

You may think you are sad,
But nothing comes close
To the silicon coast
Santa Clara’s just mad, you can’t
help your nerd lust
Oooooh Oh Oooooh

California nurds;
we are incredible!
Armed with Flukes,
we’re testing non stop.
Wi Fi smarts
so hot
we’ll melt your antenna
Oooooh Oh Oooooh

California nurds,
we like telemetry;
But we don’t
like SNMP.
West Coast time is lame
so we use UTC
Oooooh Oh Oooooh

We love unicorns, shooting
rainbows from their rear ends.
We’re Software Defined, running
everything in Python.

–John Herbert, with sincere apologies to Katy Perry

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Test-Driving OSPF on RouterOS – Interoperability

So I wrote about OSPF on RouterOS in my previous post. It was a nice experiment to learn about routing protocols. I wanted to take it a little further and test Interoperability of RouterOS with other open source solutions. This post is an update from the previous one and I will add OSPF neighbor nodes … Continue reading Test-Driving OSPF on RouterOS – Interoperability

Test-driving OSPF on RouterOS

I came across RouterOS by MikroTik© which provides advances routing protocol support. What is more amazing is they provide a RouterOS in a virtual form-factor called Cloud Hosted Router (CHR) that can be installed on hypervisors like KVM/VirtualBox/VMware. Please look at licensing model at http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:CHR#CHR_Licensing This is perfect for learning purposes and experimenting at home. … Continue reading Test-driving OSPF on RouterOS

VRF – Virtual Routing and Forwarding

How does Internet work - We know what is networking

Ever needed one extra router? It’s possible to split the router into more logical routers by using VRF. How? Here’s how! Virtual Routing and Forwarding or VRF allows a router to run more that one routing table simultaneously. When running more routing tables in the same time, they are completely independent. For example, you could use same or overlapping IP addresses in both VRFs and it can be used without conflict. It is possible to use same VRF instance on more routers and connect every instance separately using VRF dedicated router port or only a sub-interface. You can find VRFs to be used

VRF – Virtual Routing and Forwarding

DNS Zombies

It seems that some things just never die, and this includes DNS queries. In a five month experiment encompassing the detailed analysis of some 44 billion DNS queries we find that one quarter of these DNS queries are zombies - queries that have no current user awaiting the response, and instead are echoes of previous queries. What is causing these zombies? Are we seeing deranged DNS resolvers that maniacally re-query the same questions and never accept the answer. Or is this something slightly more sinister and are we seeing evidence of widespread DNS stalking and shadowing? Let's find out.

General – How to Build a Network Pt.2

In the previous post I talked about why you should build a network of people to both help you in your career and to improve your own skillset. How does one build this network of people?

There are endless ways of building a network and the ways I describe here are based on my personal experience. That said, I do believe that there are some common factors regardless of what approach you take.

Interacting in Forums – There are a lot of forums available, forums for Cisco Learning Network, Cisco Support Community, training vendor forums, product forums, vendor forums. These are often the best resources for getting help on a product and finding those golden nuggets of information that are not always available from the official documentation. There are often very skilled and experienced people in these forums answering posts and writing posts. Try to contribute to the forums and to learn from them and start interacting with these people. Many forums have some form of ranking which makes it easier to spot the people that are the most active on the forums.

I started writing a lot on CLN several years ago and that has been very benificial for Continue reading

With IBM, you’re licensing at full-capacity if you don’t have ILMT

There is no downside to a licensing model where you only pay for what you’re actually using and have the ability to increase or decrease licensing. This is what makes the IBM sub-capacity licensing model so attractive.

The advantages of IBM’s sub-capacity licensing model are obvious, but the misinterpretations and misunderstanding of how to deploy sub-capacity happens frequently. In fact, I would say three out of five clients we work with start out saying they are using sub-capacity licensing when in reality they are using full-capacity licenses.

Your enterprise is always at full-capacity with IBM unless the appropriate steps are taken to change that status to sub-capacity IBM licensing. With few exceptions, IBM will consider an organization at full-capacity unless IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT) is implemented. What does this mean? If ILMT hasn’t been implemented, IBM doesn’t recognize your right to license at sub-capacity and will, in fact, view the organization’s license metrics as a full-capacity IBM licensing model. Under full-capacity licensing, you must license all active, physical processors in the server versus sub-capacity licensing where you pay for the virtual cores allocated.

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CAP Theorem and Routing

In 2000, Eric Brewer was observing and discussing the various characteristics of database systems. Through this work, he observed that a database generally has three characteristics—

  • Consistency, which means the database will produce the same result for any two readers who happen to read a value at the same moment in time.
  • Availability, which means the database can be read by any reader at any moment in time.
  • Partionability, which means the database can be partitioned.

Brewer, in explaining the relationship between the three in a 2012 article, says—

The easiest way to understand CAP is to think of two nodes on opposite sides of a partition. Allowing at least one node to update state will cause the nodes to become inconsistent, thus forfeiting C (consistency). Likewise, if the choice is to preserve consistency, one side of the partition must act as if it is unavailable, thus forfeiting A (availability).

The CAP theorem, therefore, represents a two out of three situation—yet another two out of three “set” we encounter in the real world, probably grounded someplace in the larger space of complexity. We’ll leave the relationship to complexity on the side for the moment, however, and just look at how Continue reading

New ransomware abuses Windows PowerShell, Word document macros

A new ransomware program written in Windows PowerShell is being used in attacks against enterprises, including health care organizations, researchers warn.PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management framework that's included in Windows and is commonly used by systems administrators. It has its own powerful scripting language that has been used to create sophisticated malware in the past.The new ransomware program, dubbed PowerWare, was discovered by researchers from security firm Carbon Black and is being distributed to victims via phishing emails containing Word documents with malicious macros, an increasingly common attack technique.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here