Santa Cruz New Tech Meetup
Since moving to Santa Cruz, I’ve attended two meetups for Santa Cruz New Tech Meetup, which is the 8th largest meetup in the United States. The events are held on the first Wednesday of each month and feature pitches from some of the local tech entrepreneurs in the city. While Santa Cruz isn’t technically Silicon Valley … Continue reading Santa Cruz New Tech Meetup
Using Puppet to Configure F5 Network’s LTM via SOAP
You’ll like this, and you won’t; and that reflects on how I’ve felt variously about this task/burden. So, I’ve spent three weeks, almost full-time, on the work necessary to use Puppet to configure F5 Networks LTM via SOAP. Not just a few Pools and Virtual Servers; the whole box, from scratch. I knew this would be […]
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The post Using Puppet to Configure F5 Network’s LTM via SOAP appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Iveson.
APIs Alone Aren’t Enough
Yes, we know: Your product has an API. Yawn. Sorry for not getting excited. That’s just table stakes now. What I’m interested in is the pre-written integrations and code you have that does useful things with that API.
Because sure, an API lets me integrate my various systems however I want. Theoretically. Just the same way that Bunnings probably sells me all the pieces I need to build a complete house.
Random aside: If your “open API” requires signing an NDA to view details, then maybe it’s not so open after all?
If I’m running a small company staffed by developers, then just giving me an API is acceptable. But in a larger company, or one without developer resources, an API alone isn’t enough. I want to see standard, obvious integrations already available, and supported by the vendor.
In this spirit, I’m very pleased to see that ThousandEyes now has a standard integration with PagerDuty:
ThousandEyes appears as a partner integration from which you can receive notifications; and, within ThousandEyes we now have a link to easily add alerts to your PagerDuty account.
You can read more at the ThousandEyes blog.
This is exactly the sort of obvious integration I Continue reading
Chinese Routing Errors Redirect Russian Traffic
In recent weeks, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a plan to enact measures to protect the Internet of Russia. In a speech to the Russian National Security Council he said, “we need to greatly improve the security of domestic communications networks and information resources.” Perhaps he should add Internet routing security to his list because, on a number of occasions in the past year, Russian Internet traffic (including domestic traffic) was re-routed out of the country due to routing errors by China Telecom. When international partners carry a country’s domestic traffic out of the country, only to ultimately return it, there are inevitable security and performance implications.
Last year, Russian mobile provider Vimpelcom and China Telecom signed a network sharing agreement and established a BGP peering relationship. However, as can often happen with these relationships, one party can leak the routes received from the other and effectively insert itself into the path of the other party’s Internet communications. This happened over a dozen times in the past year between these two providers. This is a general phenomenon that occurs with some regularity but isn’t often discussed in BGP security literature. In this blog post, we’ll explore the issue Continue reading
Improving performance and security with a visibility plane in virtual network infrastructures
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.
Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) promise numerous benefits, but adding layers of network abstraction come at a cost: visibility into the traffic traversing the links at the physical layer.
The migration to ever-faster networks is compounding this challenge because virtually no network monitoring, management or security tool today is capable of operating at 40Gbps or 100Gbps. Network packet brokers (NPBs), also known as network visibility controllers, address this challenge by capturing, filtering, aggregating and optimizing traffic. This enables 1Gbps and 10Gbps performance management and security systems to operate in 40/100Gbps networks.
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Node and Link Protection
Node and link protection is a mechanism for protecting LSPs from (you guessed it) the failure of nodes and links. It differs from fast re-route in that you have to specify node and link protection on the interfaces of all the downstream routers as well as on the LSP at its source.
My network looks like this at the moment, with an LSP running from R5 to R1 using the shortest path determined by the IGP:
Path of LSP R5-to-R1
So on R5, I configure node-link-protection on the LSP:
root@R5> show configuration protocols mpls
no-propagate-ttl;
label-switched-path R5-to-R1 {
to 10.0.6.1;
node-link-protection;
}
interface ge-0/0/0.0;
interface ge-0/0/1.0;
This has the effect of signalling to the downstream routers that link and node protection is desired, as you can see here:
root@R5> show mpls lsp name R5-to-R1 detail Ingress LSP: 6 sessions 10.0.6.1 From: 10.0.3.5, State: Up, ActiveRoute: 0, LSPname: R5-to-R1 ActivePath: (primary) Node/Link protection desired <===== Node Link Protection LSPtype: Static Configured, Penultimate hop popping LoadBalance: Random Encoding type: Packet, Switching type: Packet, GPID: IPv4 *Primary State: Up Priorities: 7 0 Continue reading
Monitoring OTV – Overlay Transport Virtualization
If there is anything I find more enjoyable then doing some type of network design or writing on whiteboard, it’s thinking about network management and creating some new alert or poller that let’s me know when something changes that shouldn’t. It would seem over the last few years Data Center technologies have really become popular: […]
The Quanta LB4M – Cheap White Box Switching?
“Hey,” said my friend, “are you interested in buying an Ethernet switch? 48 1Gbps copper ports and two 10Gbps fiber uplinks. Very cheap. Layer 2 only, though.” A few minutes later, we were doing business out of the trunk of … Continue reading
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The Philosophy of Network-as-a-Service
In the world of Anything-as-a-Service (I will leave the acronym to your imagination), Network-as-a-Service is not a new term. In fact, it even has its own wikipedia page which will tell you it has been used for many years now, well before the current set of service related terms in IT have become popular.
Like most high tech industries, we get somewhat carried away when we have some new terminology and quickly overuse and overload them, watering them down to be meaningless or at least highly confusing. But when you cut through the clutter a bit, the as-a-Service terminology most certainly articulates a shift in thought process and behaviors on how we provide and consume IT resources.
The IT organization has always been a service organization, there is nothing much new there. From the days of mainframes and supercomputers, their job was to provide access to these expensive resources and maintain them. They provided environments that allowed the users to conveniently consume these abilities, and the business applications that ran on top of them, whether those were financial systems, email, uucp news (remember those days) or the basic ability to run user created jobs.
With the distribution of compute and Continue reading
So You’re an Open Source Shop? Really?
I carried out an interesting quiz during one of my Interop workshop:
- How many use Linux-based servers? Almost everyone raised their hands;
- How many use Apache or Tomcat web servers? Yet again, almost everyone.
- How many run applications written in PHP, Python, Ruby…? Same crowd (probably even a bit more).
- How many use Nginx, Squid or HAProxy for load balancing? Very few.
Is there a rational explanation for this seemingly nonsensical result?
Read more ...Musing: On Using Cisco ACI and VMware NSX in the same network
So, sure, you COULD run NSX and ACI in the same network. No, you WOULD NOT run NSX and ACI in the same network.
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Show 212 – HP Networking in the Data Centre – Sponsored
In today's sponsored podcast, HP Networking looks to educate network engineers about HP’s data center portfolio and technologies that make it a formidable choice for architecting today’s data center networks. Tune in to learn how HP is helping customers develop Data Center solutions that deal with today and tomorrow’s challenges.
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The post Show 212 – HP Networking in the Data Centre – Sponsored appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Greg Ferro.
The Importance of Knowing Baselines
When observing network utilization (whether that’s bandwidth or some other element you monitor), you have to know your baseline. The big idea is to understand what’s normal for your network, as every network is a little different. Only when you know your network’s baseline does it become possible to detect anomalies. For example, when […]Increased MTTR is Good?
In Episode 167 of The Cloudcast – “Bringing Advanced Analytics to DevOps”, Dave Hayes brings up an interesting point about Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). At about 8:30 in, he states:
“In a counter-intuitive sense, you actually want this to be going up…If you’re removing false alerts, and you’re getting better about the quantity of alerts, you’re going to be solving far fewer, more difficult problems, so you should see a slight trend upwards in Mean Time to Resolution”
This is a really interesting way of looking at things. Obviously you don’t want to set your goal as “Increase our MTTR,” but this could be a positive side-effect of improved processes.
I recommend listening to the whole episode. PagerDuty is a very cool product in itself, but this is a broader discussion about operations, analytics, and best practices.
Subscribe to the podcast while you’re there too. Lots of interesting technology discussed there.
Using ssldump to Decode/Decrypt SSL/TLS Packets
Who needs the Wireshark GUI right; let’s do this at the command line and be grown up about things. This is a straight copy of my popular Using Wireshark to Decode/Decrypt SSL/TLS Packets post, only using ssldump to decode/decrypt SSL/TLS packets at the CLI instead of Wireshark. Aside from the obvious advantages, immediacy and efficiency of a CLI tool, ssldump also […]
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The post Using ssldump to Decode/Decrypt SSL/TLS Packets appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Iveson.
The Quick Way to get f5 Viprion Serials
Ever been asked to list the serial numbers on an f5 Viprion? No? Well stay with me anyway – this is a quick one, and you never know when it will be helpful! Once upon a time, much of the … Continue reading
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DNSSEC: Complexities and Considerations
This blog post is a follow-up to our previous introduction to DNSSEC. Read that first if you are not familiar with DNSSEC.
DNSSEC is an extension to DNS: it provides a system of trust for DNS records. It’s a major change to one of the core components of the Internet. In this post we examine some of the complications of DNSSEC, and what CloudFlare plans to do to reduce any negative impact they might have. The main issues are zone content exposure, key management, and the impact on DNS reflection/amplification attacks.
Zone content exposure
DNS is split into smaller pieces called zones. A zone typically starts at a domain name, and contains all records pertaining to the subdomains. Each zone is managed by a single manager. For example, cloudflare.com is a zone containing all DNS records for cloudflare.com and its subdomains (e.g. www.cloudflare.com, api.cloudflare.com).
There is no directory service for subdomains in DNS so if you want to know if api.cloudflare.com exists, you have to ask a DNS server and that DNS server will end up asking cloudflare.com whether api.cloudflare.com exists. This is not true with DNSSEC. In Continue reading
SDN Job Numbers – 3QCY14
How many SDN jobs are out there so far? If you missed the previous post, well, I’ve been counting them for about five months. Today’s post looks at the numbers for 3QCY14. Check out the previous post for all the picky details about how we gathered the data. This post focuses on the numbers!
SDN in the Job Title, 3QCY14
I’m theorizing that for a term to be in the title of the job posting, that term must be a pretty important part of the job. So, we searched for “SDN” in the title, at Dice.com and Monster.com, did some averaging to keep a week or two spike or drop from skewing the perception, and we’ve created some graphs.
Figure 1 shows the first graph:
- Searches for SDN in the job title
- The data is about new job listings per week
- We use a couple of rolling averages to reduce the bumps in the graph
- The graph shows both Dice and Monster combined, but with the raw numbers as well
Figure 1: SDN in the Job Title, Per-Week New Job Listings, 3QCY14
SDN in the Job Description
When we find “SDN” Continue reading
Mass Customization
I’ve mentioned in past articles about my belief that networking – both as a discipline and a technology – needs to be more consumable to other disciplines. But what does this mean? I was reminded of a few great examples today that I think are relevant to this idea, and might help explain my point a little more clearly.
Mass Production Meets Customization
The assembly line revolutionized the auto industry. Prior to this, vehicle production was very slow, and extremely costly. The introduction of the assembly line for creating automobiles allowed cars to be created in a predictable, repeatable way. However, Ford famously required all Model T’s to be painted black. Even before the introduction of the assembly line, the Model T was available in other colors, but with the move to mass production, this option was taken away.
The term “mass customization” is essentially the idea that mass production can co-habitate with customization, resulting in a customer experience that is personal and custom-built, but that also gets to experience the low unit cost that comes with mass production.
A great example of mass customization is the Moto X phone, whose commercials famously offer all kinds of customization options Continue reading
Response: Black Energy 2 Malware Router Abuse – Kaspersky
Kaspersky published a research note on Black Energy malware that uses backdoors and exploits on Cisco routers to install a TCL file, perform surveillance or destruction of the device configuration. And, they revealed that their Cisco routers with different IOS versions were hacked. They weren’t able to connect to the routers any more by […]
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