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Category Archives for "Networking"

Checking Linux system performance with sar

Sar is a system utility that gives us many ways to examine performance on a Linux system. It provides details on all aspects of system performance including system load, CPU usage, memory use, paging, swapping, disk usage, device load, network activity, etc.The name "sar" stands for "system activity report," and it can display current performance, provide reports that are based on log files stored in your system's /var/log/sa (or /var/log/sysstat) folder, or be set up to automatically produce daily reports. It's part of sysstat – a collection of system performance monitoring tools.To check if sar is available on your system, run a command like this:To read this article in full, please click here

Checking Linux system performance with sar

Sar is a system utility that gives us many ways to examine performance on a Linux system. It provides details on all aspects of system performance including system load, CPU usage, memory use, paging, swapping, disk usage, device load, network activity, etc.The name "sar" stands for "system activity report," and it can display current performance, provide reports that are based on log files stored in your system's /var/log/sa (or /var/log/sysstat) folder, or be set up to automatically produce daily reports. It's part of sysstat – a collection of system performance monitoring tools.To check if sar is available on your system, run a command like this:To read this article in full, please click here

Sparking the next cycle of IT spending

Who, in the entire IT space, wouldn’t like to see an uptick in tech spending?  Enterprises would see new purchases easier to make, vendors would make more money, and technologists in general would have a new sense of excitement and mission.  It seems like we’ve been stuck in a do-more-for-less rut, but the past offers us some evidence of how we could get out of it.If you were to plot of the growth in enterprise IT spending versus GDP growth for the US over the entire life of information technology, you’d see not a hockey stick but a series of peaks and valleys.  You would see that there are three clear periods or cycles where IT spending has significantly outstripped GDP growth, and that we’ve been in a trough ever since the last one ended in about 2000.  We’ve never had two decades pass without another cycle, so what’s wrong?  Answer: Nothing’s driving one now.To read this article in full, please click here

Zambia Needs the Internet More than Ever

My country, Zambia, has more than 18 million people. Our new Internet Society chapter wants all of them to be online. Why? Because we need the Internet now more than ever. Globally, UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimate that 1.3 billion children between the ages of 3 and 17 – or two thirds […]

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Announcing WARP for Linux and Proxy Mode

Announcing WARP for Linux and Proxy Mode
Announcing WARP for Linux and Proxy Mode

Last October we released WARP for Desktop, bringing a safer and faster way to use the Internet to billions of devices for free. At the same time, we gave our enterprise customers the ability to use WARP with Cloudflare for Teams. By routing all an enterprise's traffic from devices anywhere on the planet through WARP, we’ve been able to seamlessly power advanced capabilities such as Secure Web Gateway and Browser Isolation and, in the future, our Data Loss Prevention platforms.

Today, we are excited to announce Cloudflare WARP for Linux and, across all desktop platforms, the ability to use WARP with single applications instead of your entire device.

What is WARP?

WARP was built on the philosophy that even people who don’t know what “VPN” stands for should be able to still easily get the protection a VPN offers. It was also built for those of us who are unfortunately all too familiar with traditional corporate VPNs, and need an innovative, seamless solution to meet the challenges of an always-connected world.

Enter our own WireGuard implementation called BoringTun.

The WARP application uses BoringTun to encrypt traffic from your device and send it directly to Cloudflare’s edge, ensuring that no Continue reading

Questions about BGP in the Data Center (with a Whiff of SRv6)

Henk Smit left numerous questions in a comment referring to the Rethinking BGP in the Data Center presentation by Russ White:

In Russ White’s presentation, he listed a few requirements to compare BGP, IS-IS and OSPF. Prefix distribution, filtering, TE, tagging, vendor-support, autoconfig and topology visibility. The one thing I was missing was: scalability.

I noticed the same thing. We kept hearing how BGP scales better than link-state protocols (no doubt about that) and how you couldn’t possibly build a large data center fabric with a link-state protocol… and yet this aspect wasn’t even mentioned.

Questions about BGP in the Data Center (with a Whiff of SRv6)

Henk Smit left numerous questions in a comment referring to the Rethinking BGP in the Data Center presentation by Russ White:

In Russ White’s presentation, he listed a few requirements to compare BGP, IS-IS and OSPF. Prefix distribution, filtering, TE, tagging, vendor-support, autoconfig and topology visibility. The one thing I was missing was: scalability.

I noticed the same thing. We kept hearing how BGP scales better than link-state protocols (no doubt about that) and how you couldn’t possibly build a large data center fabric with a link-state protocol… and yet this aspect wasn’t even mentioned.

DNSSEC with EdDSA

The world of cryptographic algorithms is one that constantly evolves and increasing key sizes in the venerable RSA crypto algorithm is a source of concern for DNSSEC. The response to this escalation in key sizes is to look at alternative forms of public-key algorithms which have a higher cryptographic “density”, using elliptic curve cryptography. Here we will look at the level of Internet support provided for a recent crypto offering, the Edwards curve algorithm Ed25519.

The Hedge 88: Todd Palino and Getting Things Done

I often feel like I’m “behind” on what I need to get done. Being a bit metacognitive, however, I often find this feeling is more related to not organizing things well, which means I often feel like I have so much to do “right now” that I just don’t know what to do next—hence “processor thrashing on process scheduler.” Todd Palino joins this episode of the Hedge to talk about the “Getting Things Done” technique (or system) of, well … getting things done.

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Second Round of Grant Funding Awarded to Researchers Studying the Future of the Internet

From the environment to the economy, the Internet is reshaping several sectors of our society. What might future patterns of disruption look like? How will these changes affect all of us? At the Internet Society Foundation, we believe the answers to these questions and many others can be found in research. That’s why in September […]

The post Second Round of Grant Funding Awarded to Researchers Studying the Future of the Internet appeared first on Internet Society.

Day Two Cloud 102: Edge Cloud Isn’t Magic

Today we're talking Edge Cloud. Guest Alex Marcham has written a book on the subject and we'll get his take on edge infrastructure, what edge cloud is all about, real-world use cases, and how it differs from typical colo facilities or centralized public cloud data centers. We also look at requirements for edge deployments including networking and 5G, and the workloads driving edge infrastructure.

The post Day Two Cloud 102: Edge Cloud Isn’t Magic appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Day Two Cloud 102: Edge Cloud Isn’t Magic

Today we're talking Edge Cloud. Guest Alex Marcham has written a book on the subject and we'll get his take on edge infrastructure, what edge cloud is all about, real-world use cases, and how it differs from typical colo facilities or centralized public cloud data centers. We also look at requirements for edge deployments including networking and 5G, and the workloads driving edge infrastructure.

Building Waiting Room on Workers and Durable Objects

Building Waiting Room on Workers and Durable Objects
Building Waiting Room on Workers and Durable Objects

In January, we announced the Cloudflare Waiting Room, which has been available to select customers through Project Fair Shot to help COVID-19 vaccination web applications handle demand. Back then, we mentioned that our system was built on top of Cloudflare Workers and the then brand new Durable Objects. In the coming days, we are making Waiting Room available to customers on our Business and Enterprise plans. As we are expanding availability, we are taking this opportunity to share how we came up with this design.

What does the Waiting Room do?

You may have seen lines of people queueing in front of stores or other buildings during sales for a new sneaker or phone. That is because stores have restrictions on how many people can be inside at the same time. Every store has its own limit based on the size of the building and other factors. If more people want to get inside than the store can hold, there will be too many people in the store.

The same situation applies to web applications. When you build a web application, you have to budget for the infrastructure to run it. You make that decision according to how many Continue reading

Deploying Plug-and-Pray Software in Large-Scale Networks

One of my readers sent me a sad story describing how Chromium service discovery broke a large multicast-enabled network.


The last couple of weeks found me helping a customer trying to find and resolve a very hard to find “network performance” issue. In the end it turned out to be a combination of ill conceived application nonsense and a setup with a too large blast radius/failure domain/fate sharing. The latter most probably based upon very valid decisions in the past (business needs, uniformity of configuration and management).

Deploying Plug-and-Pray Software in Large-Scale Networks

One of my readers sent me a sad story describing how Chromium service discovery broke a large multicast-enabled network.


The last couple of weeks found me helping a customer trying to find and resolve a very hard to find “network performance” issue. In the end it turned out to be a combination of ill conceived application nonsense and a setup with a too large blast radius/failure domain/fate sharing. The latter most probably based upon very valid decisions in the past (business needs, uniformity of configuration and management).

Post-Pandemic Healthcare Innovations

They say there is always a silver lining in every bad thing that happens. Well for some people 2020 was the worst year of their lives. People lost their loved ones, lost their entire businesses and a lot of bad things happen. However even in such drastic times there was silver lining for the future. The pandemic has forced scientists and doctors to come up with healthcare innovations that would help the work way beyond the time of the pandemic. There were many healthcare innovations that were discussed before the pandemic however they were only put to use in urgency once the pandemic hit.

Let’s take a look at the healthcare innovations that we may keep seeing in the post pandemic times.

Innovative Mindset 

In order to keep the innovations coming, the doctors, scientists and researchers should keep an innovative mindset. Without the right mindset you will never be able to carry on with the innovations after the pandemic. So in order to keep the innovations coming after the pandemic, having an innovative mindset is very important.

Remote Communication

The pandemic has shown us that remote communication can be very helpful. People used to believe that face to face communication Continue reading

Intel unveils new type of network accelerator chip

Intel on Monday expanded its network processor roadmap with the announcement of the Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU). Think of it as the next step in the SmartNIC market, because Intel does.The announcement was made at the Six Five Summit 2021, where Navin Shenoy, the head of Intel's Data Center Group, announced its intention to create the new processor family specifically for cloud workloads.There has been a move toward dedicated networking chips, called SmartNICs, that offload the work of network traffic processing from the CPU, thus freeing up the CPU to do its primary task. Mellanox released one in 2019 and was soon bought by Nvidia. Xilinx released one a year later and will soon be under the ownership of AMD.To read this article in full, please click here