Archive

Category Archives for "Networking"

Factorials and unscrambling words with bash on Linux

In this post, we examine a bash script that takes a string of letters, rearranges them in every possible way and checks each permutation to identify those that are English words. In the process, we'll take a close look at the script and calculate how hard it might have to work.Note that, in the algorithm used, each letter arrangement must use all of the letters in the string provided. Words formed by substrings are not considered.How to loop forever in bash on Linux First, the script expects the scrambled string to be provided as an argument and prompts for it if none is provided. It then checks out each arrangement of letters to find those that exist in the system's words file – in this case, that's /usr/share/dict/words. Here are the first lines in the script:To read this article in full, please click here

Rant: Broadcom and Network Operating System Vendors

Minh Ha left the following rant as a comment on my 5-year-old What Are The Problems with Broadcom Tomahawk? blog post. It’s too good to be left gathering dust there. Counterarguments and other perspectives are highly welcome.


So basically a lot of vendors these days are just glorified Broadcom resellers :p. It’s funny how some of them try to up themselves by saying they differentiate their offerings with their Network OS.

Rant: Broadcom and Network Operating System Vendors

Minh Ha left the following rant as a comment on my 5-year-old What Are The Problems with Broadcom Tomahawk? blog post. It’s too good to be left gathering dust there. Counterarguments and other perspectives are highly welcome.


So basically a lot of vendors these days are just glorified Broadcom resellers :p. It’s funny how some of them try to up themselves by saying they differentiate their offerings with their Network OS.

Kubernetes Observability Challenges: The Need for an AI-Driven Solution

Kubernetes provides abstraction and simplicity with a declarative model to program complex deployments. However, this abstraction and simplicity create complexity when debugging microservices in this abstract layer. The following four vectors make it challenging to troubleshoot microservices.

  1. The first vector is the Kubernetes microservices architecture, where tens to hundreds of microservices communicate. Debugging such a componentized application is challenging and requires specialized tools.
  2. The second vector is the distributed infrastructure spread across heterogeneous on-premises and cloud environments.
  3. The third vector of complexity is the dynamic nature of Kubernetes infrastructure. The platform spins up required resources and provides an ephemeral infrastructure environment to scale the application based on demand.
  4. Lastly, in such a distributed environment, Kubernetes deployments need fine-grained security and an observability model with defense-in-depth to keep them secure. While modern security controls effectively protect your workloads, they can have unintended consequences by preventing applications from running smoothly and creating an additional layer of complexity when debugging applications.

Today, DevOps and SRE teams must stitch together an enormous amount of data from multiple, disparate systems that monitor infrastructure and services layers in order to troubleshoot Kubernetes microservices issues. Not only is it overwhelming to stitch this data, but troubleshooting using Continue reading

The Dystopian Reality Of Human Data Trafficking

Amazon Alexa wants me to know that they celebrate International Data Privacy Day. I’m awestruck at the chutzpah of this claim.

Reviews of a Samsung smart television I’m considering express frustration at the crapware loaded onto the system because it is difficult to navigate and tracks viewing habits.

An app I need for my Mac immediately requests access to my Documents and Downloads folders for no obvious reason. Denying the request has no impact on the functioning of the app.

A phone app I use to help me track strength exercises wants me to share my data with the Health app. It won’t stop asking me about it, even though I’ve repeatedly denied the request. Why? It’s not just for my own well-being, I’m certain.

Garmin shares my workout data, all highly personal containing health & location information, with various third parties, and there’s no way to opt out if you want to use their hardware.

Twitter delivers customized ads, even though I had at one time opted out, at a rate of 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 tweets to my timeline.

Facebook rages against Apple for daring to require that apps hosted in the Apple store contain Continue reading

Tech Bytes: Aruba Fabric Composer Automates And Orchestrates Leaf-Spine Network Provisioning (Sponsored)

Today’s Tech Bytes dives into the Aruba Fabric Composer. This is data center software that can automate the provisioning of your network underlay and overlay, plus capabilities for orchestration, visibility, and troubleshooting. Aruba Networks is our sponsor. We're joined by Simon McCormack, Senior Manager, Product Management, at Aruba Networks.

The post Tech Bytes: Aruba Fabric Composer Automates And Orchestrates Leaf-Spine Network Provisioning (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Tech Bytes: Aruba Fabric Composer Automates And Orchestrates Leaf-Spine Network Provisioning (Sponsored)

Today’s Tech Bytes dives into the Aruba Fabric Composer. This is data center software that can automate the provisioning of your network underlay and overlay, plus capabilities for orchestration, visibility, and troubleshooting. Aruba Networks is our sponsor. We're joined by Simon McCormack, Senior Manager, Product Management, at Aruba Networks.

Rethinking BGP on the DC Fabric

Everyone uses BGP for DC underlays now because … well, just because everyone does. After all, there’s an RFC explaining the idea, every tool in the world supports BGP for the underlay, and every vendor out there recommends some form of BGP in their design documents.

I’m going to swim against the current for the moment and spend a couple of weeks here discussing the case against BGP as a DC underlay protocol. I’m not the only one swimming against this particular current, of course—there are at least three proposals in the IETF (more, if you count things that will probably never be deployed) proposing link-state alternatives to BGP. If BGP is so ideal for DC fabric underlays, then why are so many smart people (at least they seem to be smart) working on finding another solution?

But before I get into my reasoning, it’s probably best to define a few things.

In a properly design data center, there are at least three control planes. The first of these I’ll call the application overlay. This control plane generally runs host-to-host, providing routing between applications, containers, or virtual machines. Kubernetes networking would be an example of an application overlay control plane.

Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Cook Blasts Social Media Algorithms

"In the news" text on yellow background

Disinformation bots: Apple CEO Tim Cook raised concerns about social media algorithms promoting disinformation during a speech at an international privacy conference, ZDNet reports. “At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement – the longer the better – and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible,” he said.

Gaming the stock market: In a rebellion against large Wall Street short sellers, a group of individual investors centered around a Reddit forum have been driving up the price of GameStop stock, even as the company faces questions about its long-term viability. One founder of the Reddit community called the effort “a train wreck happening in real time,” CNet reports. GameStop’s stock has shot up by more than 2700 percent since the beginning of the year, even as the bricks-and-mortar game software vendor is facing business challenges.

The power of Big Tech: The head of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is raising concerns about the huge influence of large tech firms, Arabian Business says. The fund is worried about “how some of these technology Continue reading

Network Break 318: Cisco Unveils New Catalyst Hardware; Internet Sleuth Uncovers Global IPv4 Misuse

Today's Network Break explores new Catalyst hardware and micro switches from Cisco, a new security offering from Fortinet that combines endpoint security with cloud analytics, an Internet sleuth tracking IPv4 shenanigans, financial results from Juniper and F5, and a whopping big investment for routing startup DriveNets.

The post Network Break 318: Cisco Unveils New Catalyst Hardware; Internet Sleuth Uncovers Global IPv4 Misuse appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Study finds Google has the fastest overall cloud platform

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is the best hyperscale performer across all areas of throughput while Microsoft Azure has the best storage systems and Amazon Web Services (AWS) has the lowest network latency.Those are the findings of a series of benchmarks performed by the atrociously named Cockroach Labs, maker of a scalable, resilient database called CockroachDB that runs on all three services. The study, part of the company’s third annual Cloud Report, evaluated the performance of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud in online transaction processing (OLTP) applications.In total, 54 machines were assessed and almost 1,000 benchmark runs were conducted to measure CPU, network, storage I/O, and TPC-C performance, among others.To read this article in full, please click here

How-to improve Wi-Fi roaming

User satisfaction with Wi-Fi relies in part on whether the network supports smooth handoffs between access points as users and their devices roam about, and if the APs don’t do their job well, users will complain. Wi-Fi resources How-to measure enterprise Wi-Fi speeds How to determine if Wi-Fi 6 is right for you Five questions to answer before deploying Wi-Fi 6 Wi-Fi 6E: When it’s coming and what it’s good for The initial tendency may be to install more APs in hopes of finding an easy fix, but doing so without careful analysis can make the situation even worse. Proper roaming requires more than just good signal strength throughout coverage areas; it takes a careful balance between the coverage of each AP on both 2.4 and 5GHz bands to make roaming work right.To read this article in full, please click here

Thank You for All the Great Work Miha

Almost exactly a year ago Miha Markočič joined the ipSpace.net team. He was fresh out of university, fluent in Python, but with no networking or automation background… so I decided to try my traditional method of getting new team members up to speed: throw them into the deep water, observe how quickly they learn to swim, and give them a few tips if it seems like they might be drowning.

It worked out amazingly well. Miha quickly mastered the intricacies of AWS and Azure, and created full-stack automation solutions in Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager to support the AWS and Azure webinars, and the public cloud networking online course.

Thank You for All the Great Work Miha

Almost exactly a year ago Miha Markočič joined the ipSpace.net team. He was fresh out of university, fluent in Python, but with no networking or automation background… so I decided to try my traditional method of getting new team members up to speed: throw them into the deep water, observe how quickly they learn to swim, and give them a few tips if it seems like they might be drowning.

It worked out amazingly well. Miha quickly mastered the intricacies of AWS and Azure, and created full-stack automation solutions in Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager to support the AWS and Azure webinars, and the public cloud networking online course.

Juniper To MikroTik – OSPF Commands

About the Juniper to MikroTik Series

In the world of network engineering, learning a new syntax for a NOS can be daunting if you need a specific config quickly.  Juniper is a popular option for service providers/data centers and is widely deployed across the world. 

This is a continuation of the Rosetta stone for network operating systems series.  In this portion of the series we will be covering Open Shortest Path First, OSPF, version 2 which is a popular interior gateway protocol (IGP).

You can find the first article of the series Juniper to Mikrotik – BGP Commands here.

While many commands have almost the exact same information, others are as close as possible.  Since there isn’t always an exact match, sometimes you may have to run two or three commands to get the information needed. 

Using EVE-NG for testing

We conducted all testing on EVE-NG utilizing the topology seen below.

JunOS CommandMikroTik Command
show ospf neighborrouting ospf neighbor print
show ospf interfacerouting ospf interface print
show ospf overview briefrouting ospf instance print detail
show ospf databaserouting ospf lsa print
show route protocol ospfip route print where ospf=yes
show Continue reading