Cumulus Linux: First Impressions
Typically, when you buy a network router or switch, it comes bundled with some version of the manufacturer's operating system. Cisco routers come with IOS (or some derivative), Juniper routers come with Junos, and so on. But with the recent proliferation of merchant silicon, there seem to be fewer and fewer differences between competing devices under the hood. For instance, the Juniper QFX3500, the Cisco Nexus 3064, and the Arista 7050S are all powered by an off-the-shelf Broadcom chipset rather than custom ASICs developed in-house. Among such similar hardware platforms, the remaining differentiator is the software.
One company looking to benefit from this trend is Cumulus Networks. Cumulus does not produce or sell hardware, only a network operating system: Cumulus Linux. The Debian-based OS is built to run on whitebox hardware you can purchase from a number of partner Original Device Manufacturers (ODMs). (Their hardware compatability list includes a number of 10GE and 40GE switch models from different vendors.)
Cumulus Linux is, as the name implies, Linux. There is no "front end" CLI as on, for example, Arista platforms. Upon login you are presented with a Bash terminal and all the standard Linux utilities (plus a number of Continue reading
Rome Wasn’t Software Defined In A Day
Everywhere you turn, people are talking about software defined networking. The influence can be felt in every facet of the industry. Major players are trying to come to grips with the shift in power. Small vendors are ramping up around ideas and looking to the future. Professionals are simultaneously excited for change and fearful of upsetting the status quo. But will all of these things happen overnight?
Not Built In A Day, But Laying Bricks Every Hour
The truth of SDN is that it’s going to take some time for all the pieces to fall into place. Take a look at the recent Apple Pay launch. Inside of a week, it has risen to become a very significant part of the mobile payment industry, even if the installed base of users is exclusive to iPhone [6,6+] owners. But did this revolution happen in the span of a couple of days?
Apple Pay works because Apple spent months, if not years, designing the best way to provide transactions from a phone. It leverages TouchID for security, a concept introduced last year. It uses Near Field Communication (NFC) readers, which have been in place for a couple of Continue reading
Inside Shellshock: How hackers are using it to exploit systems
On Wednesday of last week details, of the Shellshock bash bug emerged. This bug started a scramble to patch computers, servers, routers, firewalls, and other computing appliances using vulnerable versions of bash.
CloudFlare immediately rolled out protection for Pro, Business, and Enterprise customers through our Web Application Firewall. On Sunday, after studying the extent of the problem, and looking at logs of attacks stopped by our WAF, we decided to roll out protection for our Free plan customers as well.
Since then we've been monitoring attacks we've stopped in order to understand what they look like, and where they come from. Based on our observations, it's clear that hackers are exploiting Shellshock worldwide.
(CC BY 2.0 aussiegall)
Eject
The Shellshock problem is an example of an arbitrary code execution (ACE) vulnerability. Typically, ACE vulnerability attacks are executed on programs that are running, and require a highly sophisticated understanding the internals of code execution, memory layout, and assembly language—in short, this type of attack requires an expert.
Attacker will also use an ACE vulnerability to upload or run a program that gives them a simple way of controlling the targeted machine. This is often achieved by running a "shell". Continue reading
What The Heck Is SPDY?
A10‘s presentation at NFD8 seemed to generate a bit of interest (dare I say excitement) and many a question around the SPDY (pronounced ‘speedy’) protocol. I promised Lindsey Hill (@northlandboy) on Twitter that I’d write a blog post about it and here it is. It took me rather longer to write than I thought and […]
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The post What The Heck Is SPDY? appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Iveson.
The Atomic Weight of Policy
The OpenDaylight project put out a new element this week with their Helium release. The second release is usually the most important, as it shows that you have a real project on your hands and not just a bunch of people coding in the back room to no avail. Not that something like that was going to happen to ODL. The group of people involved in the project have the force of will to change the networking world.
Helium is already having an effect on the market. Brocade announced their Vyatta Controller last week, which is based on Helium code. Here’s a handy video as well. The other thing that Helium has brought forth is the ongoing debate about network policy. And I think that little gem is going to have more weight in the long run than anything else.
The Best Policy
Helium contains group-based policies for making groups of network objects talk to each other. It’s a crucial step to bring ODL from an engineering hobby project to a full-fledged product that can be installed by someone that isn’t a code wizard. That’s because most of the rest of the world, including IT people, don’t speak in specific Continue reading
What’s so special about 512?
The 12th August 2014 was widely reported as a day when the Internet collapsed. Despite the sensational media reports the following day, the condition was not fatal, and perhaps it could be more reasonably reported that some parts of the Internet were having a bad hair day. What was happening was that the Internet’s growth had just exceeded the default configuration limits of certain models of network switching equipment. In this article I'll look at how the growth of the routing table and the scaling in the size of transmission circuits impacts on the internal components of network routing equipment.Replacing a Central Firewall
During one of my ExpertExpress engagements I got an interesting question: “could we replace a pair of central firewalls with iptables on the Linux server?”
Short answer: Maybe (depending on your security policy), but I’d still love to see some baseline scrubbing before the traffic hits the server – after all, if someone pwns your server, he’ll quickly turn off iptables.
Read more ...Using frameworks for effective sales presos
Anyone who has ever delivered a presentation or even listened to one knows that the key to an effective presentation is telling a story. If you peruse even a few pages of any of the books about how to deliver a solid presentation, you will find references to storytelling and its role in passing along information throughout history. Yes, we must tell stories. But not all stories work.
So how do you pick a story or a framework for a presentation that will be effective?
Stories vs frameworks
Let me start off by saying that you need both stories and frameworks. When you think about the structure of the points you want to convey, think about frameworks. When you want to make a point real, use a story. When you are delivering a technical presentation especially, you are very unlikely to find a single story that can weave in all the points you want to make. You are, after all, a presenter not a comedian. Don’t try to force all of your points into a long story.
So that leaves you searching for a framework. A framework is simply a way of organizing your points. It is ultimately the framework Continue reading
Network Automation & Controller Questionnaire
With all of the current trends coming in to the industry around policy based network configuration, network automation and controller value add, do you understand why and where the trends are coming from? With organisations, consultancy outfits and independents struggling to see where things are going in the industry, it’s imperative that as an industry we steer eduation and awareness. Sure, the big players are steering things, but you, the fraternity drive the demand. Have your say and the results will be published at the end of the year once there are enough submissions to represent a varying set of opinions.
Do you actually have a customer dying to move to a policy based operations model? Do you know what policy based configuration is and where the industry is going with it?
Does your organisation have a rigid change management stucture? How would your company handle automatic network configuration generation? Would you still need to manually execute the deployment and email with a “green tick” to the change board?
Do you automate your build configuration already? How do you do that? Are you comfortable with it?
Do you have ideas on what value a controller could bring to your organisation? Continue reading
Software Defined Networking – SDN
Software defined networking (SDN) is an approach to computer networking that allows network administrators to manage network services through abstraction of lower level functionality. This is done by decoupling the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent (the control plane) from the underlying systems that forward traffic to the selected destination (the data […]
The post Software Defined Networking – SDN appeared first on Roger Perkin - Networking Articles.
CCIE RFC List for Routing & Switching Lab Exam
In computer network engineering, a Request for Comments (RFC) is a memorandum published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems. The list below details all RFC’s relevant to the CCIE Routing and Switching track. CCIE RFC List OSPF RFC […]
The post CCIE RFC List for Routing & Switching Lab Exam appeared first on Roger Perkin - Networking Articles.
Universal SSL: Be just a bit more patient
It turns out it takes a while to deploy SSL certificates for 2 million websites. :-) Even longer when you get a flood of new sign ups. While we'd hoped to have the deployment complete within 24 hours of the announcement, it now looks like it's going to take a bit longer. We now expect that the full deployment will be complete about 48 hours from now (0700 UTC). Beyond that, nothing about the plan for Universal SSL has changed and hundreds of thousands of sites are already active.
Errors you may see
In order to get through the highest priority sites first, we've prioritized provisioning the sites with the most traffic.
While you wait for your site to get provisioned, you may see a certificate mismatch error if you try and visit it over HTTPS. (Rest assured, there are no errors if you visit over HTTP.) The errors over HTTPS are expected and normal during the provisioning process. Examples of what these error looks like in various browsers )Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer) are below:
Tracking our progress
To give you a sense of our progress provisioning Universal SSL for your sites, we've updated the alert that Continue reading
Duty for Reporting: Is IT a Servant or a Steward
Duty for Reporting: Is IT a Servant or a Steward?
by Brian Boyko, Contributor - September 30, 2014
There’s an interesting “Ask Slashdot” thread from Slashdot user “MrWHO,” an IT guy who wonders why his clients preferred to receive PDF reports delivered via e-mail instead of signing into the dashboard. After all, dashboards are useful for up-to-the-minute, at-a-glance information (if they’re designed well), and they can also be used to sift through historical data. A report becomes obsolete soon after it is created (though it is far easier to show a PDF-based report to a person who does not have access to the dashboard), so it’s fair to ask why some business people prefer it.
The strange thing that I found was that many, many people were telling MrWHO, essentially, to shut up and stop complaining about the state of affairs. That IT is supposed to serve the clients and if they want reports, they get reports.
And I get that IT’s job is to support the business – or the client – but here’s my question: Does IT serve the business, or is it a steward of the business?
This is getting into some splitting of linguistic hairs, but Continue reading
Origin Server Connection Security with Universal SSL
Earlier today, CloudFlare enabled Universal SSL: HTTPS support for all sites by default. Universal SSL provides state-of-the-art encryption between browsers and CloudFlare’s edge servers keeping web traffic private and secure from tampering.
CloudFlare’s Flexible SSL mode is the default for CloudFlare sites on the Free plan. Flexible SSL mode means that traffic from browsers to CloudFlare will be encrypted, but traffic from CloudFlare to a site's origin server will not be. To take advantage of our Full and Strict SSL mode—which encrypts the connection between CloudFlare and the origin server—it’s necessary to install a certificate on the origin server.
We made Universal SSL free so that everyone can use modern, strong encryption tools to protect their web traffic. More encrypted traffic helps build a safer, better Internet. In keeping with CloudFlare’s goal to help build a better Internet, we have some tips on how to upgrade your site from Flexible SSL to Full or Strict SSL.
Option 1: Full SSL: create a self-signed certificate
Dealing with Certificate Authorities (CAs) can be frustrating, and the process of obtaining a certificate can be time consuming. In the meantime, you can get started by installing a self-signed certificate on your origin server. This Continue reading
CWNP Conference Presentations
If it wasn’t Twitter I probably would not have known there was a CWNP conference going on, but luckily we have Twitter. Looks like it was a 3-day conference about all things wireless, I really will try and go next year. It also looks like they posted the presentations on their website found here, I’ve […]
Fryguy.Net – IMPROVED!
My hosting provider, Digital Ocean, has added IPv6 to one of their NY Data centers. Over this weekend, and thanks to Shellshock BASH vulnerability, I finally got around to migrating the server to a new host that is IPv6 enabled. So as of this morning, there is a now a AAAA record for www.fryguy.net! IPv6 Ping […]SDN Skills Prerequisites Per Vendor Certifications
In the previous post, which kicked off a new series, I discussed the need to make some basic choices when building your SDN development plan. Today’s post begins to look more closely at the prerequisites, by examining what vendors tell us through the perquisites included for their SDN certifications. To that end, this post looks at HP, VMWare, and Cisco.
The Big Picture
To learn about SDN, and learn deeply, you will need to invest more than a little time. So you need a plan. That plan will include filling in the prerequisite skills that you may need before learning SDN well, some SDN skills common to most all SDN solutions, and some skills related to particular approaches to SDN that differ quite a bit.
Figure 1: Prerequisites, Foundation, and SDN Silos
Today’s post begins to look at prerequisites. This post focuses on three vendor’s SDN certifications. Cisco, VMWare, and HP all have thriving certification programs, and all three have been rolling out SDN-related certifications. All three programs have a clear vendor focus, which is not surprising. But what do they ask of us a prerequisite?
Follow-up posts will look at the specific topics, what I personally think people Continue reading
Managing the Network as a Fabric — About Time!
Earlier this September, I attended the Tech Field Day Networking Field Day 8 event. Over the course of three days, we saw presentations from many very interesting vendors including a mix of startups and established market leaders. One trend that really stuck out to me more this time around than at any previous NFD event was a nearly ubiquitous emphasis on data center network fabric management. In other words, truly managing an entire data center network (or at least a sub-block of it) as a single unit.
Just of the NFD8 presenters who were providing this option, we had Cisco with their ACI model (but it stands to reason that even the now-well-established FEX model has very similar capabilities), Big Switch Networks with their Big Cloud Fabric, Pluribus Networks’ Netvisor Software Defined Fabric, and Nuage Networks Virtual Services Platform. Each of these products has unique value propositions, so I’m not suggesting they’re all the same but rather pointing out that this concept of fabric-level management is clearly at the forefront of most, if not all, leading-edge data center solutions at this point. The concept has been building for a couple years, and other vendors are also pursuing this model Continue reading
Show 206 – Brocade’s OpenDaylight-Based Vyatta Controller – Sponsored
If you watch the software defined networking space, you might have noticed that Brocade has been quietly hiring a sharp group of actual (not self-proclaimed) thought leaders and developers. The question has been, “To what end? What’s Brocade going to do with all of these capable folks?” Today, we can answer that question. Brocade has built an […]
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The post Show 206 – Brocade’s OpenDaylight-Based Vyatta Controller – Sponsored appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.