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In past jobs, when I was responsible for the architecture and engineering of networks, my peers and I would often spend measurable time working in the lab and testing out the setup of new network designs or approaches that we were looking to implement.
As anyone who has had to build a lab themselves will attest, you never have enough gear, power or space to do all of the testing you would like. Between the problems of having to build the network from gear that’s been cast-off from the production network to not being able to run the latest software, you can end up questioning your testing results. From being limited on cooling and power to having to find and run the cables to connect it all together, it can be a lot of work that may not answer everything you need for production.
In the compute space, this has been less of an issue in recent years. With the introduction of accessible virtualization, the application teams could simulate entire solution stacks on their desktop. While you wouldn’t want to run your production environment on many of them, you could at least simulate all of the components in the solution and verify what you were doing different was viable. Continue readingMikroTik unveils new RouterOS development cycle
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As we all patiently await the release of RouterOS (RoS) v7 beta, MikroTik has announced a change in the way RoS development is organized. There will now be three different tracks of development:
Bugfix only – When a current build is released, only fixes to known bugs will be added to this branch of development
Current – Current release will contain bugfixes and new features
Release Candidate – The release candidate will remain the development build for the next “current” release.
Graphical Overview of the new development cycle
Image and notes below are from here
A small addendum: the Bugfix only will only contain verified fixes, and no new features. The Current release contains the same fixes but also new features and other improvements, sometimes also less critical fixes than in Bugfix. And finally the Release Candidate is more likely to a nightly build. We will not to intensive testing before publishing these, only quick check if upgrade can be done and if most features work fine.
Origin
The idea originally came out of this thread and after a flurry of positive commentary, it became a working practice shortly therafter.
We plan to make sub-version releases Continue reading
MikroTik unveils new RouterOS development cycle
[adrotate banner=”4″]
As we all patiently await the release of RouterOS (RoS) v7 beta, MikroTik has announced a change in the way RoS development is organized. There will now be three different tracks of development:
Bugfix only – When a current build is released, only fixes to known bugs will be added to this branch of development
Current – Current release will contain bugfixes and new features
Release Candidate – The release candidate will remain the development build for the next “current” release.
Graphical Overview of the new development cycle
Image and notes below are from here
A small addendum: the Bugfix only will only contain verified fixes, and no new features. The Current release contains the same fixes but also new features and other improvements, sometimes also less critical fixes than in Bugfix. And finally the Release Candidate is more likely to a nightly build. We will not to intensive testing before publishing these, only quick check if upgrade can be done and if most features work fine.
Origin
The idea originally came out of this thread and after a flurry of positive commentary, it became a working practice shortly therafter.
We plan to make sub-version releases Continue reading
Auvik Release Notes – July 29th – Ping Service and Freshdesk/ConnectWise integration!
NEW! Cloud ping and Internet connection checksAuvik now has cloud ping checks that allow you to monitor the reachability of public IPs fromService Provider SDN Webinar — Sign Up & Learn Ericsson’s Core Principles
Ericsson shines a light on service provider SDN and software-defined agility with it's August 26 webinar. Sign up Now!
TECH.unplugged And Being Present
I wanted to let everyone know that I’m going to be taking part in an excellent event being put on by my friend Enrico Signoretti (@ESignoretti) this September. TECH.unplugged is a jam-packed day of presentations from people that cover storage, computing, and in my case networking. We’re getting together to share knowledge and discuss topics of great interest to the IT community. As excited as I am to be taking part, I also wanted to take a few moments to discuss why events like this are important to the technology community.
WORM Food
There’s no doubt that online events are becoming the standard for events in recent years. It’s much more likely to find an event that offers streaming video, virtual meeting rooms, and moderated discussions taking place in a web browser. The costs of travel and lodging are far higher than they were during the recession days of yore. Finding a meeting room that works with your schedule is even harder. It’s much easier to spin up a conference room in the cloud and have people dial in to hear what’s going on.
For factual information, such as teaching courses, this approach works rather well. That’s Continue reading
Highlight: Why Your Presentations Stink
The post Highlight: Why Your Presentations Stink appeared first on 'net work.
Worth Reading: Expert Versus Nonexpert
The post Worth Reading: Expert Versus Nonexpert appeared first on 'net work.
F5 Badger Adds Azure Support, Targets Hybrid Cloud
BIG-IP gets a DevOps twist.
Networking Career: How To Make It To The Big League
Networking pros who want to make the leap from a small shop to a big network environment can learn from how our newest network engineer got the job.10 Leaders In Internet Of Things Infrastructure
The Internet of Things needs a strong backbone for the many billions of connected devices and apps most prognosticators expect. Find out which companies are building the IoT behind the scenes.A deep look at CVE-2015-5477 and how CloudFlare Virtual DNS customers are protected
Last week ISC published a patch for a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability in the BIND9 DNS server capable of causing a crash with a single packet.
CC BY 2.0 image by Ralph Aversen
The public summary tells us that a mistake in handling of queries for the TKEY type causes an assertion to fail, which in turn crashes the server. Since the assertion happens during the query parsing, there is no way to avoid it: it's the first thing that happens on receiving a packet, before any decision is made about what to do with it.
TKEY queries are used in the context of TSIG, a protocol DNS servers can use to authenticate to each other. They are special in that unlike normal DNS queries they include a “meta” record (of type TKEY) in the EXTRA/ADDITIONAL section of the message.
CC BY 2.0 image by Ralph Aversen
Since the exploit packet is now public, I thought we might take a dive and look at the vulnerable code. Let's start by taking a look at the output of a crashing instance:
03-Aug-2015 16:38:55.509 message.c:2352: REQUIRE(*name == ((void*)0)) failed, back trace
03-Aug-2015 16:38:55.510 #0 0x10001510d in Continue readingCan Virtual Routers Compete with Physical Hardware?
One of the participants of the Carrier Ethernet LinkedIn group asked a great question:
When we install a virtual-router of any vendor over an ordinary sever (having general-purpose microprocessor), can it really compete with a physical-router having ASICs, Network Processors…?
Short answer: No … and here’s my longer answer (cross-posted to my blog because not all of my readers participate in that group).
Read more ...