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Worth Reading: God-like powers

In short, the intersection of the real world and the virtual one is constant, powerful and dangerous. Equipped with the latest in phones smarter than we are, we have all become the media. But we lack the common sense to sort through what we’ve learned. We’re going to uncover every flaw of one another – probably with accompanying video. Let’s just hope we learn to forgive … and forget. via townhall

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Using Raspberry Pi for holiday light shows

Depending upon your line of work, you might be looking at a long holiday weekend. If you like to tinker with code and hardware, and also like holiday light shows, then instead of purchasing some pre-made kit, you might consider LightShow Pi.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Passenger puts black powder in checked bag: How’d that decision play out?

Let’s say for the sake of discussion that the guy – anyone think it’s a woman? – did not place the 10 tubes of black powder in his checked luggage as part of a terrorist plot or amateur sting operation against TSA screeners. The TSA mentions neither in its blog post that notes the incident.Instead, this adult human being awakened one morning recently, began packing for a trip, realized he needed to transport 10 tubes of an explosive from his home in Utah through Salt Lake City International Airport, and decided the best way to do that would be to place the tubes in his suitcase alongside his shaving kit and underwear.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading Roundup: Security and Privacy

“If I haven’t done anything wrong, then I don’t have anything to hide.” This is one of those bits of nonsense that never seems to lose it’s power regardless of how many times it’s been proven wrong in history. Privacy is one of the most important freedoms we enjoy — the privacy to try, the privacy to work things out among friends, and even the privacy to fail.

So what does the ‘net say about privacy this week?

One of the most disturbing things is the growing tendency to engineer people for greater efficiency. This trend started more than a hundred years ago — remember this?

But there is something fundamentally dehumanizing about people like machines out of whom you can squeeze infinite amounts of bandwidth — but it seems to be something we’re pushing towards almost as fast as we can, in both the corporate world and in government.

Digging into personal information in order to manipulate the environment for greater profit and productivity just seems a bit slimy. And I used the word manipulate (and slimy) on purpose. fistful of talent

Many countries are in the throes of a debate about the amount of surveillance a government Continue reading

New products of the week 11.23.15

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.Actiance Supervisory Capabilities for Alcatraz Key features: Actiance released expanded supervisory review capabilities for Alcatraz, its cloud-based archive. The expanded supervisory capabilities employ advanced analytics to enable greater insight into conversations occurring across 70+ communication channels. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Can You Afford to Reformat Your Data Center?

I love listening to the Datanauts podcast (Ethan and Chris are fantastic hosts), starting from the very first episode (hyper-converged infrastructure) in which Chris made a very valid comment along the lines of “with the hyper-converged infrastructure it’s possible to get so many things done without knowing too much about any individual thing…” and I immediately thought “… and what happens when it fails?”

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RIPE 71 Meeting Report

The RIPE 71 meeting took place in Bucharest, Romania in November. Here are my impressions from a number of the sessions I attended that I thought were of interest. It was a relatively packed meeting held over 5 days so this is by no means all that was presented through the week.

IWAN: Why EIGRP or BGP Over the DMVPN Tunnel?

IWAN (Intelligent Wide Area Network) and Why EIGRP or BGP over the DMVPN Tunnel.

In this YouTube “playing in the lab” IWAN fun we are going to drill down between 2 sites – Branch 3 and the Hub site.   Branch 3 will be in “hybrid” mode (1 MPLS link and 1 Internet Link) – in the past using the MPLS link as a primary and the internet link as backup only.  Now, however, taking advantage of IWAN’s Intelligent Path Control.

We will design the implementation such that should we need to fall back from Intelligent Path Control to normal routing…  we fallback to what is (for many customers’) today’s norm in this situation – MPLS as the Primary and Internet as the backup.  For this to happen….there will only be 1 entry in the RIB (via the MPLS)  How, then you ask, would you ever send any traffic at all out of the Internet link (tunnel 20) if that path is not in the routing table?  :)

PfRv3 can read the EIGRP topo table and the BGP table…. we can still do intelligent decision making at the WAN edge and only send out the Internet path Continue reading

IPv6 Performance

Every so often I hear the claim that some service or other does not support IPv6 not because of some technical issue, or some cost or business issue, but simply because the service operator is of the view that IPv6 offers an inferior level service as compared to IPv4, and by offering the service over IPv6 they would be exposing their clients to an inferior level of performance of the service. But is this really the case? Is IPv6 an inferior cousin of IPv4 in terms of service performance? In this article I'll report on the results of a large scale measurement of IPv4 and IPv6 performance, looking at the relativities of IPv6 and IPv4 performance.

Many embedded devices ship without adequate security tests, analysis shows

An analysis of hundreds of publicly available firmware images for routers, DSL modems, VoIP phones, IP cameras and other embedded devices uncovered high-risk vulnerabilities in a significant number of them, pointing to poor security testing by manufactuers.The study was performed by researchers from the Eurecom research center in France and Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany, who built an automated platform capable of unpacking firmware images, running them in an emulated environment and starting the embedded Web servers that host their management interfaces.The researchers started out with a collection of 1,925 Linux-based firmware images for embedded devices from 54 manufacturers, but they only managed to start the Web server on 246 of them. They believe that with additional work and tweaks to their platform that number could increase.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FlexVPN configuration

In this post we’ll have a look at the process of configuring a FlexVPN network (unofficially known as DMVPN phase 4). I’ll show what components are involved in configuration and how they all tie together. For most patient readers there’s a bonus at the end of this post. FlexVPN network topology The network we’ll be looking at is […]

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OVN service injection demonstration

Enabling extensibility in OVN, by Gal Sagie, Huawei and Liran Schour, IBM, Open vSwitch 2015 Fall Conference describes a method for composing actions from an external application with actions installed by the Open Network Virtualization (OVN) controller.


An API allows services to be attached to logical topology elements in the OVN logical topology, resulting in a table in the OVN logical flow table that is under the controller of the external service. Changes to the logical table are then automatically instantiated as concrete flows in the Open vSwitch instances responsible for handling the packets in the flow.

The demo presented involves detecting large "Elephant" flows using sFlow instrumentation embedded in Open vSwitch. Once a large flow is detected, logical flows are instantiated in the OVN controller to mark the packets. The concrete marking rules are inserted in the Open vSwitch packet processing pipelines handling the logical flow's packets. In the demo, the marked packets are then diverted by the physical network to a dedicated optical circuit.

There are a number of interesting traffic control use cases described on this blog that could leverage the capabilities of Open vSwitch using this approach:
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