In January 1996, I entered for the first time in the configuration of a Cisco 2501 router. This was the beginning of my career as a network engineer. That was just 25 years ago! Here’s a quick look back and a few tips for junior engineers who are at the beginning of their careers. 25 years as a Network Engineer! In 25 years, I had the opportunity to change several times my working environment and specialty as a network engineer: I went from network engineer and peering-manager for regional…
The post 25 years as a Network Engineer! appeared first on AboutNetworks.net.
In late 2020, a major Fortune Global 500 company was targeted by a Ransom DDoS (RDDoS) attack by a group claiming to be the Lazarus Group. Cloudflare quickly onboarded them to the Magic Transit service and protected them against the lingering threat. This extortion attempt was part of wider ransom campaigns that have been unfolding throughout the year, targeting thousands of organizations around the world. Extortionists are threatening organizations with crippling DDoS attacks if they do not pay a ransom.
Throughout 2020, Cloudflare onboarded and protected many organizations with Magic Transit, Cloudflare’s DDoS protection service for critical network infrastructure, the WAF service for HTTP applications, and the Spectrum service for TCP/UDP based applications -- ensuring their business’s availability and continuity.
I spoke with Daniel (a pseudonym) and his team, who work at the Incident Response and Forensics team at the aforementioned company. I wanted to learn about their experience, and share it with our readers so they could learn how to better prepare for such an event. The company has requested to stay anonymous and so some details have been omitted to ensure that. In this blog post, I will refer to them as X.
Initially, Continue reading
This is a guest blog post by Matthias Luft, Principal Platform Security Engineer @ Salesforce, and a regular ipSpace.net guest speaker.
A couple of months ago I had the pleasure to publish my first guest post here and, as to be expected from ipspace.net, it triggered some great discussion.
With this input and some open thoughts from the last post, I want to dive into a few more topics.
One trigger for the initial post was the question whether host-based firewalls (HBFs), potentially combined with solutions to learn rulesets based on flows, are intrinsically better than central firewalls. While we discussed the mileage around that already, comments and questions emphasized how often we have to handle a “software engineering vs. network engineering” mentality – which should not involve any blame in either direction as this mindset is usually enforced by organizational structures.
For whatever it is worth, I can only stress the point that a strong collaboration between software and network engineering will resolve way more issues than any technology. I award myself a “Thanks, Captain Obvious” here, but I still want to make the point to try Continue reading
Everyone in networking—and beyond networking, in fact—thinks about what the future of work might look like. Jacquelyn Adams joins Eyvonne Sharp, Tom Ammon, and Russ White on this episode of the Hedge to discuss what work might look like based on this era of rapid change, and how you can prepare for that future.
On Christmas Day 2020, an apparent suicide bomb exploded in Nashville, TN. The explosion happened outside an AT&T network building on Second Avenue in Nashville at 1230 UTC. Damage to the AT&T building and its power supply and generators quickly caused an outage for telephone and Internet service for local people. These outages continued for two days.
Looking at traffic flow data for AT&T in the Nashville area to Cloudflare we can see that services continued operating (on battery power according to reports) for over five hours after the explosion, but at 1748 UTC we saw a dramatic drop in traffic. 1748 UTC is close to noon in Nashville when reports indicate that people lost phone and Internet service.
We saw traffic from Nashville via AT&T start to recover over a 45 minute period on December 27 at 1822 UTC making the total outage 2 days and 34 minutes.
Traffic flows continue to be normal and no further disruption has been seen.
TL&DR: If you run multiple IGP protocols in your network, and add BGP on top of that, you might get the results you deserve. Even better, the results are platform-dependent.
One of my readers sent me a link to an interesting scenario described by Jeremy Filliben that results in totally unexpected behavior when using too many routing protocols in your network (no surprise there).
Imagine a network in which two edge routers advertise the same (external) BGP prefix. All other things being equal, it would make sense that other routers in the same autonomous system should use the better path out of the autonomous system. Welcome to the final tie-breaker in BGP route selection process: IGP metric.
George Sadowsky was a pioneer in recognizing the importance of networking technology for economic development, particularly in developing economies. He has worked in over 50 countries to bring training and networking infrastructure to the local population. In this episode of the History of Networking, George recounts some of the early, pre-Internet, work in computer networking, and the development of many of the organizations that make the Internet work today. His web site can be found here.
Hello my friend,
Continuing our discussion about the network troubleshooting tools we can’t pass by one of the most popular and widely used, which is named SpeedTest.
1
2
3
4
5 No part of this blogpost could be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the
prior permission of the author.
Doing the collection and initial analysis of the information during the troubleshooting could be quite a time-consuming task. On the other hand, the troubleshooting of the live outages should be as quick as possible to minimise the downtime of the affected services. That’s where the automation can help you.
In our network automation training we explain how to use existing open-source tools and create your own with Ansible, Bash and Python. Leveraging them and all possible interfaces (CLI, NETCONF, RESTCONF, gNMI) we teach you how to effectively build, operate and troubleshoot your network.
From the name of the tool, SpeedTest, it is obvious that the main goal is to measure the “speed”. In fact, it measures Continue reading
The Public Interest Registry (PIR) is the non-profit operator of the .ORG, .NGO and .ONG domains. PIR has been a champion for a free and open Internet for more than 15 years with a clear mission to be an exemplary domain name registry, provide a trusted digital identity and help educate those who dedicate themselves to improving our world.
If you or someone you know has the interest and qualifications to help guide the future of PIR, the Internet Society invites you to submit a nomination for a seat on the PIR Board of Directors.
Prior board or senior executive experience is preferred. All directors must have an appreciation for PIR’s Mission and the potential impact of PIR decisions on the customers of PIR and the global community served by .ORG and the other TLDs PIR operates. Directors must be able to read and understand a balance sheet, as well as read and communicate effectively in the English language.
In 2021 there are four positions opening on the PIR Board. The appointed directors will serve staggered terms, with half appointed to two year terms and half to three year terms, with terms beginning mid-year in 2021.
More information about the position, the qualifications, and a link to the Continue reading