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Category Archives for "Networking"

Tracking Internet Shutdowns

Internet shutdowns harm societies, economies, and the global Internet infrastructure – that’s why we’re tracking disruptions on the Internet Society Pulse platform. There are thousands of disruptions to Internet access every day all over the world, but not all of them are the result of deliberate shutdowns. Lengthy outages are usually the result of technical errors, routing misconfigurations, or infrastructure failures. […]

The post Tracking Internet Shutdowns appeared first on Internet Society.

The Effectiveness of AS Path Prepending (1)

Just about everyone prepends AS’ to shift inbound traffic from one provider to another—but does this really work? First, a short review on prepending, and then a look at some recent research in this area.

What is prepending meant to do?

Looking at this network diagram, the idea is for AS6500 (each router is in its own AS) to steer traffic through AS65001, rather than AS65002, for 100::/64. The most common method to trying to accomplish this is AS65000 can prepend its own AS number on the AS Path Multiple times. Increasing the length of the AS Path will, in theory, cause a route to be less preferred.

In this case, suppose AS65000 prepends its own AS number on the AS Path once before advertising the route towards AS65001, and not towards AS65002. Assuming there is no link between AS65001 and AS65002, what would we expect to happen? What we would expect is AS65001 will receive one route towards 100::/64 with an AS Path of 2 and use this route. AS65002 will, likewise, receive one route towards 100::/64 with an AS Path of 1 and use this route.

AS65003, however, will receive two routes towards 100::/64, one with an AS Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Many U.S. Residents Support Community Broadband

From the community: A new poll from Morning Consult finds that more than half of U.S. residents trust local governments to provide broadband services, and just 14 percent believe local governments should be prohibited from providing broadband. Currently, 18 states limit or outright prohibit local governments from providing their own broadband. In those states, “these […]

The post The Week in Internet News: Many U.S. Residents Support Community Broadband appeared first on Internet Society.

Nvidia competitor Graphcore preps US initiative

A UK-based AI-chip startup is making its first moves into North American to take on Nvidia on its home turf in the enterprise with new channel and reseller partners.Founded in 2016, Graphcore makes what it calls Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) and shipped its first product—the Colossus GC2 “massively parallel, mixed-precision floating point processor”—in 2018. In July 2020, it released its second-generation processor called GC200, but news of that was drowned out by all the disruption caused by COVID-19.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" In addition to chips, the company sells cards and racks. The IPU-M2000 is a 1U blade built around four Colossus GC200 IPU processors, capable of one petaFlop of AI compute. The IPU-POD64 is designed for large-scale deployments and offers the ability to run very large models across as many as 64 IPU processors in parallel.To read this article in full, please click here

10 features of Windows Admin Center to streamline server administration

A lot of the value built into Windows Admin Center has to do with it being a remote-management tool that can have a lot of upside in a modern IT shop, including implementing best practices by not logging directly into servers, bringing flexibility to the management architecture, and performing admin tasks from high-DPI or touchscreen devices.Considered a complement to System Center, Admin Center is a free app, downloadable here, that runs in a browser and can manage Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows 10, Azure Stack HCI through Windows Admin Center Gateway, software installed on Windows Server or domain-joined Windows 10.To read this article in full, please click here

Nvidia competitor Graphcore preps US initiative

A UK-based AI-chip startup is making its first moves into North American to take on Nvidia on its home turf in the enterprise with new channel and reseller partners.Founded in 2016, Graphcore makes what it calls Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) and shipped its first product—the Colossus GC2 “massively parallel, mixed-precision floating point processor”—in 2018. In July 2020, it released its second-generation processor called GC200, but news of that was drowned out by all the disruption caused by COVID-19.Now see "How to manage your power bill while adopting AI" In addition to chips, the company sells cards and racks. The IPU-M2000 is a 1U blade built around four Colossus GC200 IPU processors, capable of one petaFlop of AI compute. The IPU-POD64 is designed for large-scale deployments and offers the ability to run very large models across as many as 64 IPU processors in parallel.To read this article in full, please click here

10 features of Windows Admin Center to streamline server administration

A lot of the value built into Windows Admin Center has to do with it being a remote-management tool that can have a lot of upside in a modern IT shop, including implementing best practices by not logging directly into servers, bringing flexibility to the management architecture, and performing admin tasks from high-DPI or touchscreen devices.Considered a complement to System Center, Admin Center is a free app, downloadable here, that runs in a browser and can manage Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows 10, Azure Stack HCI through Windows Admin Center Gateway, software installed on Windows Server or domain-joined Windows 10.To read this article in full, please click here

Response: There’s No Recipe for Success

Minh Ha left a lengthy comment to my There’s No Recipe for Success blog post, adding an interesting perspective of someone who had to work really hard to overcome coming from a third-world country.


Ivan, I happened to read “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” recently so I can attest that it does provide some valuable advices on how to do things well. Some of the overarching themes are stay focused and cut off unnecessary noise/drain the shallow. The author also suggests removing your social media account if you can’t see how it add values to your work/business, as social media can create attention disorder, seen in many young kids these days.

How to Survive a Toxic Workplace

If you wake up every morning stressed about going to work, chances are that you are working in a toxic environment. There are many signs of a toxic workplace including having rude coworkers, but things that you may be experiencing include depression, loss of focus, reduction in confidence, and even constant headaches. 

The psychological explanation behind feeling depressed due to a toxic workplace is related to the fight or flight response of the body. When you put yourself under constantly stressful conditions, your body produces cortisol, testosterone, and norepinephrine in unhealthy quantities. As a result, you may find yourself wanting to burst into tears by 2pm at work. 

While working in a toxic environment can be difficult, it is certainly not impossible. Until you find a suitable alternative for yourself, there are many ways to survive a toxic workplace – regardless of how bad the situation may be. 

1. Find the Good in the Bad

The biggest reason why your workplace is toxic is probably due to the coworkers. You may find yourself surrounded by selfish, judgmental, and manipulative individuals that you do not resonate with. But while a majority of your coworkers may be toxic, there Continue reading

Transport vs Network

According to the OSI Reference Model for network protocols it should not matter in the slightest what value you put in the IP protocol field in IP packet headers. It’s really none of the network's business! but in today’s public Internet it appears to matter a lot that the transport protocol header is visible to the network. Why?

Worth Reading: When Stretching Layer Two, Separate Your Fate

Ethan Banks wrote the best one-line description of the crazy stuff we have to deal with in his When Stretching Layer Two, Separate Your Fate blog post:

No application should be tightly coupled to an IP address. This common issue should really be solved by application architects rebuilding the app properly instead of continuing like it’s 1999 while screaming YOLO.

Not that his (or my) take on indisputable facts would change anything… At least we can still enjoy a good rant ;)

Heavy Networking 577: A Customer View On Cloud-Delivered Security For Streamlining Distributed Workforces (Sponsored)

Today's Heavy Networking gets into cloud-delivered security for user access. We're sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, and we'll talk about its Prisma Access service with a customer: Josh Dye, SVP at Jefferies Group. We discuss how Josh pivoted to Prisma Access during the pandemic, how he meets strict security and regulatory requirements for financial services, and more.

The post Heavy Networking 577: A Customer View On Cloud-Delivered Security For Streamlining Distributed Workforces (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Heavy Networking 577: A Customer View On Cloud-Delivered Security For Streamlining Distributed Workforces (Sponsored)

Today's Heavy Networking gets into cloud-delivered security for user access. We're sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, and we'll talk about its Prisma Access service with a customer: Josh Dye, SVP at Jefferies Group. We discuss how Josh pivoted to Prisma Access during the pandemic, how he meets strict security and regulatory requirements for financial services, and more.