Archive

Category Archives for "Networking"

Goldman Sachs to invest $500 million in data center development platform

The data center industry continues to grow. Amazon, Google, Equinix, Digital Reality Trust, and numerous other providers can't build their data centers fast enough, spurring investments in startups and a hefty amount of M&A activity. The sector was hot before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the crisis has only increased interest as companies accelerate their migrations to the cloud.Goldman Sachs is the latest to make a big play in the data center market. The firm's Merchant Banking Division is partnering with a management team led by Digital Reality co-founder and former chief investment officer Scott Peterson to form a new company, Global Compute Infrastructure LP.To read this article in full, please click here

IoT and AI boost Volvo Trucks vehicle connectivity

The vehicles manufactured by Volvo Trucks keep getting smarter.More than 350,000 Volvo rigs crossing North American highways each day are outfitted with IoT sensors that monitor conditions and send data for troubleshooting and analysis. Embedded telematics allow for over-the-air updates to engine software. The on-board technology, combined with a back-end analytics platform, enables Volvo Trucks to process millions of data records instantaneously. Using IoT and artificial intelligence, Volvo Trucks has been able to reduce diagnostic time by 70% and truck repair time by 25%. To read this article in full, please click here

Building Secure Layer-2 Data Center Fabric with Cisco Nexus Switches

One of my readers is designing a layer-2-only data center fabric (no SVI interfaces on switches) with stringent security requirements using Cisco Nexus switches, and he wondered whether a host connected to such a fabric could attack a switch, and whether it would be possible to reach the management network in that way.

Do you think it’s possible to reach the MANAGEMENT PLANE from the DATA PLANE? Is it valid to think that there is a potential attack vector that someone can compromise to source traffic from the front of the device (ASIC) through the PCI bus across the CPU to the across the PCI bus to the Platform Controller Hub through the I/O card to spew out the Management Port onto that out-of-band network?

My initial answer was “of course there’s always a conduit from the switching ASIC to the CPU, how would you handle STP/CDP/LLDP otherwise”. I also asked Lukas Krattiger for more details; here’s what he sent me:

DNS Trends

We're now using the Internet's address infrastructure in very different ways than the way we had envisaged in the 1980's. The Internet’s name infrastructure is subject to the same evolutionary pressures, and its these pressures I’d like to look at here. How is the DNS is responding?

OnVue – Get certified from your home

OnVue

One of the positive aspects of this difficult period, if I may say so, is the possibility of taking a Pearson Vue test online, called OnVue. Last Friday, October 23rd, I took a Cisco exam from home and I think it’s interesting to share with you the details of this experience. With OnVue – Get certified from your home! The registration for the exam The registration for the test is almost the same as for a Cisco test done in a Vue test center. Go to the website of Pearson…

The post OnVue – Get certified from your home appeared first on AboutNetworks.net.

The History of Networking: John Chapman and Cable Networks

Before the large cable providers came on the scene, most people accessed the Internet through dial-up MODEMS, connecting to services like America Online, across plain old telephone lines. The entrance of cable providers, and cable MODEMs, allowed the edge of the Internet to explode, causing massive growth. Join Donald Sharp and I on this episode of the History of Networking as John Chapman discusses the origins of the cable MODEM, and the origins of the DOCSIS standards.

The collection of technical papers discussed on the show is here: https://www.nctatechnicalpapers.com.

download/a>

Heavy Networking 546: Making Zero Trust Remote Access Work (Sponsored)

Zero trust network access is ideal for today's distributed workforce, but it can be tricky to put into place. On today's sponsored Heavy Networking podcast, we talk with NetMotion about its remote access product that enable zero trust plus performance monitoring to help troubleshoot problems for remote workers. Our guest is Jay Klauser, VP of Worldwide Sales Engineering & Alliances at NetMotion.

Heavy Networking 546: Making Zero Trust Remote Access Work (Sponsored)

Zero trust network access is ideal for today's distributed workforce, but it can be tricky to put into place. On today's sponsored Heavy Networking podcast, we talk with NetMotion about its remote access product that enable zero trust plus performance monitoring to help troubleshoot problems for remote workers. Our guest is Jay Klauser, VP of Worldwide Sales Engineering & Alliances at NetMotion.

The post Heavy Networking 546: Making Zero Trust Remote Access Work (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Pandemic Accelerates Loss of Internet Freedoms

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only caused more than one million deaths worldwide, but it is also accelerating a decline in Internet freedoms across the globe, according to a new report from Freedom House.

The past year has been “especially dismal” for Internet Freedom, according to the Freedom on the Net 2020 report, sponsored by the Internet Society. Political leaders have used the pandemic as an excuse to limit access to information and to roll out new surveillance measures, the report says.

At the same time, a slow-motion splintering of the Internet has turned into an “all-out race toward ‘cyber sovereignty,’ with each government imposing its own internet regulations in a manner that restricts the flow of information across national borders,” the report says. Authorities in several countries, including the U.S., China, Russia, Brazil, and Turkey have erected new digital borders.

As a result, Internet freedoms have declined for the 10th consecutive year, says the report, which tracks Internet freedom in 65 countries, covering 87 percent of the world’s Internet users. From May 2019 to June 2020, the report found Internet freedom scores dropping in 26 countries, with 22 registering net gains.

The largest declines occurred in  Continue reading

Diving into /proc/[pid]/mem

Diving into /proc/[pid]/mem
Diving into /proc/[pid]/mem

A few months ago, after reading about Cloudflare doubling its intern class size, I quickly dusted off my CV and applied for an internship. Long story short: now, a couple of months later, I found myself staring into Linux kernel code and adding a pretty cool feature to gVisor, a Linux container runtime.

My internship was under the Emerging Technologies and Incubation group on a project involving gVisor. A co-worker contacted my team about not being able to read the debug symbols of stack traces inside the sandbox. For example, when the isolated process crashed, this is what we saw in the logs:

*** Check failure stack trace: ***
    @     0x7ff5f69e50bd  (unknown)
    @     0x7ff5f69e9c9c  (unknown)
    @     0x7ff5f69e4dbd  (unknown)
    @     0x7ff5f69e55a9  (unknown)
    @     0x5564b27912da  (unknown)
    @     0x7ff5f650ecca  (unknown)
    @     0x5564b27910fa  (unknown)

Obviously, this wasn't very useful. I eagerly volunteered to fix this stack unwinding code - how hard could it be?

After some debugging, we found that the logging library used in the project opened /proc/self/mem to look for ELF headers at the start of each memory-mapped region. This was necessary to calculate an offset to find the correct addresses for debug symbols.

It turns out this mechanism is rather Continue reading

Folding@home exascale supercomputer finds potential targets for COVID-19 cure

The Folding@home project has shared new results of its efforts to simulate proteins from the SARS-CoV-2 virus to better understand how they function and how to stop them.Folding@home is a distributed computing effort that uses small clients to run simulations for biomedical research when users' PCs are idle. The clients operate independently of each other to perform their own unique simulation and send in the results to the F@h servers. (Read more about where the Folding@home network is administered and how it broke the exaFLOPS barrier.)To read this article in full, please click here

COVID-19: Weekly internet health check

As COVID-19 continues to spread, forcing employees to work from home, the services of ISPs, cloud providers and conferencing services a.k.a. unified communications as a service (UCaaS) providers are experiencing increased traffic.ThousandEyes is monitoring how these increases affect outages and the performance challenges these providers undergo. It will provide Network World a roundup of interesting events of the week in the delivery of these services, and Network World will provide a summary here. Stop back next week for another update, and see more details here.To read this article in full, please click here

Grasp the Fundamentals before Spreading Opinions

I should have known better, but I got pulled into another stretched VLANs for disaster recovery tweetfest. Surprisingly, most of the tweets were along the lines of you really shouldn’t be doing that and that would never work well, but then I guess I was only exposed to a small curated bubble of common sense… until this gem appeared in my timeline:

Networking Needs ZIP codes

Interestingly, that’s exactly how IP works:

Choosing a Container-Native Network for Kubernetes

Similar to container-native storage, the container-native network abstracts the physical network infrastructure to expose a flat network to containers. It is tightly integrated with Kubernetes to tackle the challenges involved in pod-to-pod, node-to-node, pod-to-service and external communication. Kubernetes can support a host of plugins based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Sponsor Note KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conferences gather adopters and technologists to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. The vendor-neutral events feature domain experts and key maintainers behind popular projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, CoreDNS, containerd and more. Container-native networks go beyond basic connectivity. They provide dynamic enforcement of network security rules. Through a predefined policy, it is possible to configure fine-grained control over communications between containers, pods and nodes. Choosing the right networking stack is critical to maintain and secure the CaaS platform. Customers can select the stack from open source projects including Contiv, Project CalicoTungsten Fabric and

Tech Bytes: Construction Firm Improves Job Site Productivity With Silver Peak SD-WAN (Sponsored)

Today's Tech Bytes, sponsored by Silver Peak, is an SD-WAN conversation with Rogers-O’Brien Construction. We’ll talk about how this construction company relies on SD-WAN to enable fast, high-performance connectivity at remote construction sites, handle massive file transfers, securely segment partner traffic, and more.

The post Tech Bytes: Construction Firm Improves Job Site Productivity With Silver Peak SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.