During the recent Virtualization Field Day 4, I was located at a vendor building and jumped on their guest wireless network. There are a few things that I need to get accomplished before the magic happens at a Tech Field Day event, so I’m always on the guest network quickly. It’s only after I take care of a few website related items that I settle down into a routine of catching up on email and other items. That’s when I discovered that this particular location blocked access to IMAP on their guest network. My mail client stalled out when trying to fetch messages and clear my outbox. I could log into Gmail just fine and send and receive while I was on-site. But my workflow depends on my mail client. That made me think about guest WiFi and usability.
Guest WiFi is a huge deal for visitors to an office. We live in a society where ever-present connectivity is necessary. Email notifications, social media updates, and the capability to look up necessary information instantly have pervaded our lives. For those of us fortunate enough to still have an unlimited cellular data plan, our connectivity craving Continue reading
On January 15th, France’s chief information systems defense official, Adm. Arnaud Coustilliere, announced a sharp rise in online attacks against French web sites:
“Calling it an unprecedented surge, Adm. Arnaud Coustilliere, head of cyberdefense for the French military, said about 19,000 French websites had faced cyberattacks in recent days, …” [1].
As we’ve done in the recent past for North Korea [2], Hong-Kong [3], and Israel [4], we can leverage Arbor’s ATLAS initiative to observe how real world conflict is reflected in the digital realm. ATLAS receives anonymized Internet traffic and DDoS event data from over 330 participating Internet Service Providers worldwide. In particular, we are interested in DDoS attacks before and after Sunday, January 11th. As reported in [1],
“Coustilliere called the attacks a response to the massive demonstrations against terrorism that drew 3.7 million people into the streets Sunday across France.”
In order to gauge this response, we compare the DDoS attacks that took place between January 3rd and January 10th to the DDoS attacks that took place between January 11th and January 18th inclusive.
Between January 3rd and January 18th, a total of 11,342 Continue reading
December 2014 found me in Barcelona as a guest of HP at the “HP Discover” event. Nominally I went to see what was up in the world of networking, but as you can imagine with the breadth of products that HP produces, I found myself looking at all sorts of things. I’ll cover a few fun things in other posts, but I’ll start with a bit of networking because, well, this is MovingPackets after all.
I mentioned the HP SDN App Store in a previous post about HP Openflow. One of the fears I raised was how an App Store would work in terms of support. Talking to a contact at HP made things a little clearer, and there’s actually quite a nice – and perhaps obvious – support plan for the Apps you can download. Effectively, there are three tiers of supported applications as I understand it, and a glance at the App Store shows that these are now called “Apps Circles”:
This is a follow-up on the recently published Packet Pushers Show 221 – Marriott, Wifi, + the FCC with Glenn Fleishman & Lee Badman. Let me begin by stating my role in the ecospace: I am currently overseeing the expansion of broadband into Indianfield Co-operative Campground (indianfieldcampground.com) in the town of Salem (A less populous […]
Brocade VCS fabric has one of the most flexible multichassis link aggregation group (LAG) implementation – you can terminate member links of an individual LAG on any four switches in the VCS fabric. Using that flexibility is not always a good idea.
2015-01-23: Added a few caveats on load distribution
Read more ...We’ve talked about docker in a few of my more recent posts but we haven’t really tackled how docker does networking. We know that docker can expose container services through port mapping, but that brings some interesting challenges along with it.
As with anything related to networking, our first challenge is to understand the basics. Moreover, to understand what our connectivity options are for the devices we want to connect to the network (docker(containers)). So the goal of this post is going to be to review docker networking defaults. Once we know what our host connectivity options are, we can spread quickly into advanced container networking.
So let’s start with the basics. In this post, I’m going to be working with two docker hosts, docker1 and docker2. They sit on the network like this…
So nothing too complicated here. Two basic hosts with a very basic network configuration. So let’s assume that you’ve installed docker and are running with a default configuration. If you need instructions for the install see this. At this point, all I’ve done is configured a static IP on each host, configured a Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, a CLN Member Posted a question with the heading Does ASA drop active session.
The specific question was as follows–
I have a time based ACL configured on a Cisco ASA. I need to know if the active sessions are dropped by the ASA when the time limit is over.
For example, users are allowed to connect between 12 and 1 PM. If there are any active connections just before 1 PM then will they be dropped at 1 PM?
Many network and security administrators would blindly assume that a time-based ACL would block or allow traffic based on the time-range attached to the individual ACE. Having quite a lot of experience with the ASA, I was skeptical and assumed that any ongoing connections would continue to allow the flow of traffic. I decided to do a little testing and here is what I found.
When I was in the USAF, a long, long, time ago, there was a guy in my shop — Armand — who, no matter what we did around the shop, would ask, “but does it work?” For instance, when I was working on redoing the tool cabinet, with nice painted slots for each tool, he walked by — “Nice. But does it work?” I remember showing him where each tool fit, and how it would all be organized so we the pager went off at 2AM because the localizer was down (yet again), it would be easy to find that one tool you needed to fix the problem. He just shook his head and walked away. Again, later, I was working on the status board in the Group Readiness Center — the big white metal board that showed the current status of every piece of comm equipment on the Base — Armand walked by and said, “looks nice, but does it work?” Again, I showed him how the new arrangement was better than the old one. And again Armand just shook his head and walked away. It took me a long time to “get it” — to Continue reading
Every time I write about unequal traffic distribution across a link aggregation group (LAG, aka Etherchannel or Port Channel) or ECMP fabric, someone asks a simple question “is there no way to reshuffle the traffic to make it more balanced?”
TL&DR summary: there are ways to do it, and some vendors already implemented them.
Read more ...This sponsored podcast is another in our series of recordings made at HP Discover 2014 in Barcelona, Spain. Once again, our special thanks to Chris Young for bringing us technical guests and not just fluffy marketing folks. Technical Marketing Engineer at HP Networking Yarnin Israel and Senior Research Scientist at HP Labs Souvik Sen join Packet […]
The post PQ Show 42 – HP Networking – Location Aware Wireless appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Ethan Banks.