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Category Archives for "Networking"

Hosted bare metal emerges as alternative to IaaS cloud

AppLovin is a 4-year old marketing platform that places advertisements in mobile apps. And it’s a data-intensive business to say the least.When AppLovin learns of an advertising opportunity in an app, the company has 100 milliseconds to decide if it will bid on the spot in a real-time auction. If it wins the bid, it consults a database storing billions of user preferences to serve an ad personalized to that user. AppLovin processes about 30 billion to 50 billion actions per day, all of which need to happen in millisecond timeframes and on a global basis.The company started as a customer of Amazon Web Services' IaaS public cloud. But in the past few years CTO John Krystynak – an early VMware employee - has moved AppLovin’s operations to another platform: Hosted bare metal infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sometimes It’s Not the Network

Marek Majkowski published an awesome real-life story on CloudFlare blog: users experienced occasional short-term sluggish performance and while everything pointed to a network problem, it turned out to be a garbage collection problem in Linux kernel.

Takeaway: It might not be the network's fault.

Also: How many people would be able to troubleshoot that problem and fix it? Technology is becoming way too complex, and I don’t think software-defined-whatever is the answer.

US, China take first steps toward cybersecurity cooperation

The U.S. and China have reached an agreement on how to begin cooperating on cybersecurity, an issue that has caused high tension between the two nations over the last few years.The agreement, reached in the first high-level meeting of its kind, calls for guidelines on sharing computer security information, a hotline to discuss issues, a so-called tabletop cybersecurity exercise and further dialog on concerns such as the theft of trade secrets. The U.S. and China have had a combative relationship on cybersecurity, which escalated in 2010 when Google directly accused China-based hackers of stealing its intellectual property.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Encrypted messaging app Signal available for desktops

The much-lauded encryption app Signal has launched a beta program for a desktop version of the app, which will run through Google's Chrome browser.Signal Desktop is Chrome app that will sync messages transmitted between it and an Android device, wrote Moxie Marlinspike, a cryptography expert who had helped develop Signal, in a blog post on Wednesday.The app comes from Open Whisper Systems, which developed Signal's predecessors, Redphone and TextSecure, which were two Android applications that encrypt calls and messages. Both have been consolidated into Signal.Signal Desktop won't be able to sync messages with iPhone just yet, although there are plans for iOS compatibility, Marlinspike wrote. It also won't support voice initially.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Interface naming in Linux – Choose the name you want for your interfaces using udev

Have you tried the recent CentOS7.X flavor or the latest of the Redhat versions? If you have then you would have noticed the change in nomenclature of network interfaces. While the traditional approach was to use "eth" shortened from "Ethernet" as a precursor word followed by a sequence of numbers starting at 0 to name network interfaces in a system and now from the v197 scheme we have the udev rules choose names automatically for interfaces using naming schemes dependent on either the firmware/BIOS indexes for on board NICs or slot numbers for add-on nics or the mac of the nic or the physical/geo location.
Although this intuitively sounds complicated it makes life much more easier and reliable. The older scheme worked in a way that could make naming unpredictable. When a nic interface driver gets initialized udev allocates the next available number to that nic and if a host has more than one nic card (either on board or external-extended) there is a possibility of the driver load order to change thus changing the name for the NICs. A power user could add rules to udev scripts to fix a name for a particular mac address in order Continue reading

Dropbox to add European data storage next year

Dropbox on Wednesday became the latest major cloud provider to announce new storage options in the European Union.Not only will the San Francisco-based company add two new European offices next year to its current roster of three, but it will also build new infrastructure for storing data within the EU.Customer requirements in the region have evolved, explained Thomas Hansen, the company's global vice president of sales and channel, in a post on the Dropbox for Business blog."This will not only build on the technical lead we have over competitors," Hansen wrote, but "will also give our customers more options about where their data is stored."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DDoS Blackhole

DDoS Blackhole has been released on GitHub, https://github.com/sflow-rt/ddos-blackhole. The application detects Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) flood attacks in real-time and can automatically install a null / blackhole route to drop the attack traffic and maintain Internet connectivity. See DDoS for additional background.

The screen capture above shows a simulated DNS amplification attack. The Top Targets chart is a real-time view of external traffic to on-site IP addresses. The red line indicates the threshold that has been set at 10,000 packets per second and it is clear that traffic to address 192.168.151.4 exceeds the threshold. The Top Protocols chart below shows that the increase in traffic is predominantly DNS. The Controls chart shows that a control was added the instant the traffic crossed the threshold.
The Controls tab shows a table of the currently active controls. In this case, the controller is running in Manual mode and is listed with a pending status as it awaits manual confirmation (which is why the attack traffic persists in the Charts page). Clicking on the entry brings up a form that can be used to apply the control.
The chart above from the DDoS article shows an actual attack Continue reading

Juniper’s Conscious Uncoupling Of Junos & The QFX5200

Juniper plans to disaggregate its Junos switch OS from the new QFX5200 switches. The QFX5200 line will be the first from Juniper that lets customers choose to run Junos or a third-party network OS. Junos will also run on non-Juniper hardware. Juniper hasn't yet announced third-party partners.

The post Juniper’s Conscious Uncoupling Of Junos & The QFX5200 appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Juniper’s Conscious Uncoupling Of Junos & The QFX5200

Juniper plans to disaggregate its Junos switch OS from the new QFX5200 switches. The QFX5200 line will be the first from Juniper that lets customers choose to run Junos or a third-party network OS. Junos will also run on non-Juniper hardware. Juniper hasn't yet announced third-party partners.

The post Juniper’s Conscious Uncoupling Of Junos & The QFX5200 appeared first on Packet Pushers.

China blamed for ‘massive’ hack of Australia’s weather bureau

Whoa, Five Eyes, you're slipping again with your almighty surveillance machine, as Australia's Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) was the victim of a "massive" cyberattack.Whodunit and how? The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) first reported BoM being hacked, which was immediately blamed on China. Unsurprisingly, China denied the "groundless accusations." Oh what fun it must be at the global climate talks, as the nations' head honchos must play nice.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Quantum dots could bridge gap between electronic and quantum computers

An intriguing type of quantum computing is one step closer to practicality with the announcement today that experts at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Stanford University and the Technical University of Munich have managed to solve one of the technology’s major problems using common semiconductor materials.The idea behind quantum computing, in the broadest possible strokes, is to use the quantum state of a small particle to store information. The advantage is that each of these particles, called qubits, can store a large range of values, while the regular bits at the core of electronic computers can only represent zero or one. Consequently, the theory goes, certain kinds of computation could be performed at vastly superior speeds.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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