Network Break 308: AMD Gobbles Xilinx, Marvell Chops Inphi. Its SmartNIC DPU Week

This week Network Break is about silicon companies Marvel and AMD bulking up to fight competition. Cisco ships a SmartNIC, Catchpoint releases new features and Space Networking.

The post Network Break 308: AMD Gobbles Xilinx, Marvell Chops Inphi. Its SmartNIC DPU Week appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Strong Reactions and Complexity

In the realm of network design—especially in the realm of security—we often react so strongly against a perceived threat, or so quickly to solve a perceived problem, that we fail to look for the tradeoffs. If you haven’t found the tradeoffs, you haven’t looked hard enough—or, as Dr. Little says, you have to ask what is gained and what is lost, rather than just what is gained. This failure to look at both sides often results in untold amounts of technical debt and complexity being dumped into network designs (and application implementations), causing outages and failures long after these decisions are made.

A 2018 paper on DDoS attacks, A First Joint Look at DoS Attacks and BGP Blackholing in the Wild provides a good example of causing more damage to an attack than the attack itself. Most networks are configured to allow the operator to quickly configure a remote triggered black hole (RTBH) using BGP. Most often, a community is attached to a BGP route that points the next-hop to a local discard route on each eBGP speaker. If used on the route advertising the destination of the attack—the service under attack—the result is the DDoS attack traffic no longer Continue reading

Nominations Now Open for 2021 Internet Society Board of Trustees Elections

The Internet Society Nominations Committee is now inviting nominations for candidates to serve on the Board of Trustees, effective at the start of the Annual General Meeting which is currently scheduled to be held 31 July-1 August 2021.
 
In 2020-2021, Organization Members and the IETF will each select two Trustees, and Chapters will select one Trustee. Following an orientation program, all new Trustees chosen by the IETF and Chapters will begin three-year terms commencing with the board’s Annual General Meeting. With respect to the two Organizational Members to be chosen, the candidate with the highest weighted vote count will be seated for a three-year term, while the candidate with the second highest weighted vote count will serve the final year of a three-year term initially served by a Trustee who resigned from the board in mid-term.
 
The Board of Trustees provides strategic direction, inspiration, and oversight to advance the Internet Society’s mission of preserving the open, globally-connected, trustworthy and secure Internet for everyone. Trustees also currently serve as members of the Internet Society Foundation’s board.
 
I encourage you and all of your community members to identify appropriate candidates for these positions. Further information regarding the positions, as Continue reading

New Ansible for Networking Engineers Content

When restructuring our online courses we decided to make the video content that was previously part of Ansible online course available with Standard ipSpace.net Subscription.

If you haven’t enrolled into our automation online course (which always included the extra bits) you’ll find the following additional content in our Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar:

The Arista 750 Series

Today we are introducing the Arista 750 Series Modular Campus switch, a next generation modular platform based on merchant silicon that delivers more performance, more security, more visibility and more power capabilities than any other product in its class.

The Arista 750 Series

Today we are introducing the Arista 750 Series Modular Campus switch, a next generation modular platform based on merchant silicon that delivers more performance, more security, more visibility and more power capabilities than any other product in its class.

The Week in Internet News: Tech Giants Face Hostile Lawmakers

Getting hit from both sides: Executives from Google, Twitter, and Facebook faced criticism from all sides when testifying in the U.S. Senate recently, the Washington Post reports. Democratic senators told the companies they should do a better job with moderating their sites for fake news and conspiracy theories, while Republicans called on the companies to take a more hands-off role with political speech.

Your money, or else: A wave of ransomware attacks have hit nearly two dozen hospitals and healthcare organizations in recent weeks, Wired.com reports. Even after those attacks, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Health and Human Services warned that more may be coming, with an “increased and imminent cybercrime threat” to hospitals and healthcare providers.

Safer Zooming: Videoconferencing provider Zoom has added encryption to free accounts, although the new protections come with a catch, TechCrunch says. With end-to-end encryption enabled for every user joining the call, some other features won’t be available. Users on encrypted calls won’t be able to use features like cloud recording and live transcription, and they won’t be able to chat one on one. Also, the encryption feature will only work with the Continue reading

What are the Elements of Effective Communication?

On a good day, there are different people around. The way we converse with them and communicate is completely different. There are ways we talk to those we are older than us, those younger than we are, those we respect, those who lose our respect with time, and it goes on and on. This article aims to talk about the elements of effective communication.

Elements of Effective Communication

Elements of Effective Communication includes the following:

1. Listen

Whenever we converse with people and we say something, we are simply speaking knowledge we already possess. But whenever we listen to others, most times we get the chance to absorb and learn something new.

Speaking and listening work together. As you communicate with other people, these roles are completely fluid. The speaker might not be talking the entire time. One of these important elements of communication is for each of us as speakers to listen with attention.

2. Try to Be Clear

These elements of Simplicity and Clarity are also two beans in a pod. But these aspects cannot be used synonymously. What one means by clarity is that you shouldn’t have any doubt about what you’re talking about. Speaking with confidence Continue reading

Kubernetes Container Runtimes

Running Isso on NixOS in a Docker container

This short article documents how I run Isso, the commenting system used by this blog, inside a Docker container on NixOS, a Linux distribution built on top of Nix. Nix is a declarative package manager for Linux and other Unix systems.

While NixOS 20.09 includes a derivation for Isso, it is unfortunately broken and relies on Python 2. As I am also using a fork of Isso, I have built my own derivation, heavily inspired by the one in master:¹

issoPackage = with pkgs.python3Packages; buildPythonPackage rec {
  pname = "isso";
  version = "custom";

  src = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
    # Use my fork
    owner = "vincentbernat";
    repo = pname;
    rev = "vbe/master";
    sha256 = "0vkkvjcvcjcdzdj73qig32hqgjly8n3ln2djzmhshc04i6g9z07j";
  };

  propagatedBuildInputs = [
    itsdangerous
    jinja2
    misaka
    html5lib
    werkzeug
    bleach
    flask-caching
  ];

  buildInputs = [
    cffi
  ];

  checkInputs = [ nose ];

  checkPhase = ''
    ${python.interpreter} setup.py nosetests
  '';
};

I want to run Isso through Gunicorn. To this effect, I build an environment combining Isso and Gunicorn. Then, I can invoke the latter with "${issoEnv}/bin/gunicorn".

issoEnv = pkgs.python3.buildEnv.override {
    extraLibs = [
      issoPackage
      pkgs.python3Packages. Continue reading

Zero Trust Access Policies for IoT Must be Granular

Python Pieces: Decorators

As some of you know – Im a big believer that we all learn differently. You may read something the first time and immediately grasp the topic whereas I may read it and miss the point entirely. For me, decorators have been one of those things that I felt like I was always close to understanding but still not quite getting it. Sure – some of the examples I read made sense but then I’d find another one that didn’t. In my quest to understand them, I spent a lot of time reviewing a lot of examples and asking a lot of very patient friends for help. At this point, I feel like I know enough to try and explain the topic in a manner that might hopefully help someone else who was having a hard time with the concept. With my learning philosophy out of the way, let’s jump right in….

I want to jump right into a real (albeit not super useful) example of decorators using the full decorator (or shorthand) syntax. Let’s start with this…

def a_decorator(a_function):
    print("You've been decorated!")
    return a_function

@a_decorator
def print_name_string(your_name):
    name_string = "Your name is: " + your_name
    return name_string

print(print_your_name("Jon"))

Continue reading

Vint Cerf’s Mission to Bring the Internet to Outer Space

77-year-old Vint Cerf is credited as the father of the internet — but he’s now tackling an even bigger challenge. He’s joined with the scientists who envision a network that can scale across hundreds of millions of miles, in an airless vacuum, where data transmissions can be blocked by, for example, the planet Jupiter. Cerf’s working with a team whose lofty new dream is an internet which can connect our spacecraft in outer space — to the other spacecraft, and to listeners waiting here on earth. It’s instructive to see how engineers approach a task that stretches endless on an interplanetary scale — and what it took to lead scientists to this galaxy-sized dream. Guide to the Galaxy Back in the 1970s, Cerf co-developed the TCP/IP protocol with Bob Kahn, which became the foundation for all internet communication today. (Though in a recent article in Quanta, Cerf stresses that “A lot of people contributed to the creation of the internet.”) But what’s less known is that Cerf has also held a lifelong interest in outer space. One

DNS XL

Weekend Reads 103020

But amid all this disruption, we have also experienced an incredible digital transformation. In just a few months, we have jumped forward years in our use of advanced digital tools for interacting with one another, running our businesses, sending our kids to school and understanding what is going on in the world.

In 2015, the Internet Society Kolkata Chapter decided to create an Internet Exchange Point (IXP). It had just completed the installation of L-Root Instance, a critical Internet infrastructure to improve security and resiliency of the Web.

We can move towards a future of online education which replicates the artificial scarcity of traditional publishing, or take a path which fosters an abundance of free materials by embracing the principles of open access and open education.

While pop culture and Hollywood productions depict hackers working tirelessly to compromise security systems and break down firewalls, only a handful of attacks require this level of intense work. In reality, the hackers’ work is much simpler.

The cloud is a computer, no different in theory than the device you’re reading this article on, but very different in construction. For instance, you don’t own the cloud.

The long-held skepticism around wafer-scale architectures is deep Continue reading

The Serverlist: Serverless Wasm AI, Building Automatic Platform Optimizations, and more!

Check out our twenty-first edition of The Serverlist below. Get the latest scoop on the serverless space, get your hands dirty with new developer tutorials, engage in conversations with other serverless developers, and find upcoming meetups and conferences to attend.

Sign up below to have The Serverlist sent directly to your mailbox.

Simplify the Modern Network with VMware NSX-T 3.1

Continuing our commitment to helping organizations around the world deliver a public cloud experience in the data center through VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network, we’re excited to announce the general availability of VMware NSX-TTM 3.1. This latest release of our full stack Layer 2 – 7 networking and security platform delivers capabilities that allow you to build modern networks at cloud scale while simplifying operations and strengthening security for east-west traffic inside the data center.  

As we continue to adapt to new realities, organizations need to build modern networks that can deliver any application, to any user, anywhere at any time, over any infrastructure — all while ensuring performance and connectivity objectives are met. And they need to do this at public cloud scale. NSX-T 3.1 gives organizations a way to simplify modern networks and replace legacy appliances that congest data center traffic. The Virtual Cloud Network powered by NSX-T enables you to achieve a stronger security posture and run virtual and containerized workloads anywhere. 

Continue reading

Networking and Infrastructure News Roundup: October 30 Edition

Heavy Networking 547: Building And Monitoring A User-Centric Digital Experience With Catchpoint (Sponsored)

Heavy Networking 547: Building And Monitoring A User-Centric Digital Experience With Catchpoint (Sponsored)

Today’s Heavy Networking show dives into Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) with sponsor Catchpoint. Catchpoint combines synthetic testing with end user device monitoring to provide greater visibility into the end user experience while helping network engineers and IT admins support and troubleshoot a distributed workforce. Our guests from Catchpoint are Nik Koutsoukos, CMO; and Tony Ferelli, VP Operations.

The post Heavy Networking 547: Building And Monitoring A User-Centric Digital Experience With Catchpoint (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.