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Category Archives for "Networking"

Nvidia introduces Spectrum-4 platform for AI, HPC over Ethernet

Nvidia is known for its GPUs, but has introduced Spectrum-4, a combination of networking technologies that reinforces its commitment not only to graphics processors, but also to systems designed to handle the demanding network workloads of AI and high-performance computing.The latest Nvidia Spectrum products rely on the new Spectrum-4 Ethernet-switch ASIC that boasts 51.2 Tb/s switching and routing capacity. The chip underpins the latest members of the company’s Spectrum switches, which are available later this year. The switches are part of a larger Spectrum-4 platform that integrates Nvidia’s ConnectX-7 smartNIC, its new BlueField-3 DPU, and its DOCA software-development platform.To read this article in full, please click here

A Modest Proposal for Cisco Interface Naming

If you’re going to be configuring an interface in a switch, which one are you going to use? The interface has a name and a number based on where it is on the device. The numbering part is fairly easy to figure out. The module number comes first, followed by the slot, and finally the port. In the world of Cisco, which is the one I’m the most familiar with, that means a fixed configuration switch usually has interfaces labeled 0/24, with no module and the slot almost always being zero. With a modular switch the interface would be labeled 2/0/28 to indicate the 28th port on the second line card.

The issue arises when you factor in the first part of the interface naming convention. The nomenclature used in the Cisco world since the beginning of time has been the interface speed. If your interface is a 100Mbit Ethernet interface then the interface name is FastEthernet0/48. If you’re using a 1Gbit interface it’s GigabitEthernet0/48. If it’s a 10Gbit interface it becomes TenGigabitEthernet0/48. It’s a progression of interface speeds. Even if the port is capable of using 10/100/1000 the port is referred to at the highest speed. The 10Gbit ports Continue reading

Weekend Reads 032522


A Chinese national was recently caught entering China with 160 Intel processors strapped to his body, an act that customs officials amount to smuggling.


In 2022, Facebook has 2.91 billion active users, making it the most-used social media platform. But to me, it will always pale in comparison to early MySpace.


As a CSIRT consultant, I cannot overemphasize the importance of effectively managing the first hour in a critical incident.


A few weeks ago, $3.6 billion in bitcoin was seized from a Manhattan couple who were arrested and charged with money laundering in connection with a 2016 hack on the Hong Kong cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. It was the largest financial seizure in the Justice Department’s history.


In a low-light Culver City control room, Lily Shaw is getting her pilot mood on.


This is not the first war in the digital age. But the role played by digital technologies and tech companies in the conflict is in many ways unprecedented.


Economic Denial of Sustainability (EDoS) is a cybersecurity threat targeting cloud environments. EDoS attacks exploit the elasticity of clouds, particularly auto-scaling capabilities, to inflate the billing of a cloud user until the account reaches bankruptcy or large-scale service withdrawal.


Continue reading

Heavy Networking 623: Growing From Junior To Senior Engineer

Today's Heavy Networking is a roundtable conversation about career growth. Maybe your title is junior engineer, but you want to be a senior engineer. Be careful what you wish for! Maybe your title is junior but you feel you’re doing the job of a senior. Are you really? How would you justify this to your manager? We address these and other questions and issues including certs vs. experience, paying dues, the importance of communication skills, and more.

The post Heavy Networking 623: Growing From Junior To Senior Engineer appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Heavy Networking 623: Growing From Junior To Senior Engineer

Today's Heavy Networking is a roundtable conversation about career growth. Maybe your title is junior engineer, but you want to be a senior engineer. Be careful what you wish for! Maybe your title is junior but you feel you’re doing the job of a senior. Are you really? How would you justify this to your manager? We address these and other questions and issues including certs vs. experience, paying dues, the importance of communication skills, and more.

Chile takes the crown for fastest broadband in the OECD

A recent study by the UK-based price comparison site Uswitch has found that Chile boasts the fastest average broadband internet connection across the 37 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), followed by Denmark and the United States.At 189.36Mbps, the average Chilean broadband connection can download a 1,500MB movie in just over a minute – that’s about 100Mbps faster than the average connection across the OECD, and seven times faster than the slowest country, which was Turkey, clocking in at 26.34Mbps.The second- and third-slowest average broadband connections belonged to Greece and Mexico, at 33.41Mbps and 38.77Mbps, respectively. Denmark’s 163.60Mbps and the United States’ 143.76Mbps were good for second and third places at the top end, as mentioned.To read this article in full, please click here

Understanding Data Center Fabrics 05: Butterfly Scaling – Video

Episode of this series focuses on the butterfly fabric. While similar to a Clos fabric, the butterfly design is built around pods of switches. In this video, Russ White explains the differences in the butterfly design, physical limitations for ToR switches, how to scale the fabric to thousands of available ports without using chassis switches, […]

The post Understanding Data Center Fabrics 05: Butterfly Scaling – Video appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Ridiculously easy to use Tunnels

Ridiculously easy to use Tunnels
Ridiculously easy to use Tunnels

A little over a decade ago, Cloudflare launched at TechCrunch Disrupt. At the time, we talked about three core principles that differentiated Cloudflare from traditional security vendors: be more secure, more performant, and ridiculously easy to use. Ease of use is at the heart of every decision we make, and this is no different for Cloudflare Tunnel.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce today that creating tunnels, which previously required up to 14 commands in the terminal, can now be accomplished in just three simple steps directly from the Zero Trust dashboard.

If you’ve heard enough, jump over to sign-up/teams to unplug your VPN and start building your private network with Cloudflare. If you’re interested in learning more about our motivations for this release and what we’re building next, keep scrolling.

Our connector

Cloudflare Tunnel is the easiest way to connect your infrastructure to Cloudflare, whether that be a local HTTP server, web services served by a Kubernetes cluster, or a private network segment. This connectivity is made possible through our lightweight, open-source connector, cloudflared. Our connector offers high-availability by design, creating four long-lived connections to two distinct data centers within Cloudflare’s network. This means that whether an individual Continue reading

Video: Managed SD-WAN Services

Should service providers offer managed SD-WAN services? According to Betteridge’s law of headlines, the answer is NO, and that’s exactly what I explained in a short video with the same name.

Turns out there’s not much to explain; even with my usual verbosity I was done in five minutes, so you might want to watch SD-WAN Technical Challenges as well.

Watch the video
Both videos are accessible with the free ipSpace.net subscription

Video: Managed SD-WAN Services

Should service providers offer managed SD-WAN services? According to Betteridge’s law of headlines, the answer is NO, and that’s exactly what I explained in a short video with the same name.

Turns out there’s not much to explain; even with my usual verbosity I was done in five minutes, so you might want to watch SD-WAN Technical Challenges as well.

Watch the video
Both videos are accessible with the free ipSpace.net subscription

What is the Spanning Tree Protocol?

The Spanning Tree Protocol, sometimes just referred to as Spanning Tree, is the Waze or MapQuest of modern Ethernet networks, directing traffic along the most efficient route based on real-time conditions.Based on an algorithm created by American computer scientist Radia Perlman while she was working for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1985, the primary purpose of Spanning Tree is to prevent redundant links and the looping of communication pathways in complex network configurations. As a secondary function, Spanning Tree can route packets around trouble spots to ensure that communications are able to wind through networks that might be experiencing disruptions.To read this article in full, please click here

How to secure Kubernetes at the infrastructure level: 10 best practices

Infrastructure security is something that is important to get right so that attacks can be prevented—or, in the case of a successful attack—damage can be minimized. It is especially important in a Kubernetes environment because, by default, a large number of Kubernetes configurations are not secure.

Securing Kubernetes at the infrastructure level requires a combination of host hardening, cluster hardening, and network security.

  • Host hardening – Secures the servers or virtual machines on which Kubernetes is hosted
  • Cluster hardening – Secures Kubernetes’s control plane components
  • Network security – Ensures secure integration of the cluster with surrounding infrastructure

Let’s dive into each of these and look at best practices for securing both self-hosted and managed Kubernetes clusters.

Host hardening

There are many techniques that can be used to ensure a secure host. Here are three best practices for host hardening.

Use a modern immutable Linux distribution

If you have the flexibility to choose an operating system (i.e. your organization doesn’t standardize on one operating system across all infrastructure), use a modern immutable Linux distribution, such as Flatcar Container Linux or Bottlerocket. This type of operating system is specifically designed for containers and offers several benefits, including:

What is Wi-Fi 6, and why do we need it?

Wi-Fi 6, also known as 802.11ax, was officially certified in 2020 and has quickly become the de facto standard for wireless LAN (WLAN), superseding Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac). Wi-Fi 6 delivers improved performance, extended coverage, and longer battery life compared to Wi-Fi 5.Wi-Fi 6 was originally designed to address bandwidth problems associated with dense, high-traffic environments such as airports, stadiums, trains, and offices. However, the explosion of IoT devices that need to connect wirelessly to edge devices, and the ever-increasing bandwidth needs of new data-thirsty applications has rendered Wi-Fi 6 not exactly obsolete on arrival, but certainly not sufficient for some use cases.To read this article in full, please click here

How to build a high-speed network for the Metaverse of Things

How many people on social media have friends only in their home city?  Probably not very many, so we shouldn’t think that when Meta or others deploy a metaverse, the inhabitants will all be drawn from the same place.To be successful, a metaverse has to support dispersed users, and the more successful it is, the more its users can be expected to be dispersed over a wider geography. Today, metro, but tomorrow the world. If, as the metaverse spreads out, latency issues destroy the synchronized behavior of the avatars, then it will lose realism and at some point that loss would constrain growth. We already know how to control access latency, but how do we control massive-metaverse latency? Answer: With Massive Metaverse Meshing.To read this article in full, please click here

How to build a high-speed network for the metaverse of things

How many people on social media have friends only in their home city? Probably not very many, so we shouldn’t think that when Meta or others deploy a metaverse, the inhabitants will all be drawn from the same place.To be successful, a metaverse has to support dispersed users, and the more successful it is, the more its users can be expected to be dispersed over a wider geography. Today, metro, but tomorrow the world. If, as the metaverse spreads out, latency issues destroy the synchronized behavior of the avatars, then it will lose realism and at some point that loss would constrain growth. We already know how to control access latency, but how do we control massive-metaverse latency? Answer: With Massive Metaverse Meshing.To read this article in full, please click here

Hedge 123: Geoff Huston and the State of BGP

Another year of massive growth in the number and speed of connections to the global Internet—what is the impact on the global routing table? Goeff Huston joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the current state of the BGP table, the changes in the last several years, where things might go, and what all of this means. This is part 1 of a two part episode.

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