History of Networking: An African Perspective of the Internet
Dawit Bekele began his journey with the Internet while at college—but on returning to Africa, he discovered there was very little connectivity. While he was not involved in the initial stages of engineering the Internet in Africa, he began as an early user and proponent of connecting his home continent, and is now part of the Internet Society, helping to grow connectivity.
How open networking can make supply chains more resilient
Supply chains are fragile things. They’re a web of suppliers and distributors, of storage and shipping facilities, and of resellers, all working at just the right speeds and with just the right margin of error to keep things flowing smoothly. But any fragile system is inevitably vulnerable to world events.
With the increasing requirement to support remote work, a robust, adaptable network is a business necessity. But it can be a challenge to source the networking equipment you need when global trade is disrupted. Open networking—where you’re not locked into specific network components—gives you many supplier and platform options to choose from, increasing your flexibility to deal with sudden and substantial change.
The lean supply chain
Lean manufacturing has become a common business practice. An IndustryWeek survey in 2016 ranked lean manufacturing systems as one of the most important technological advancements (second only to quality management systems).
Lean companies prioritize efficiency and work to reduce waste. This often means that they don’t stockpile components or keep a large inventory of completed products, which keeps money from being tied up in excess goods or unused warehouse space.
Companies source parts and labor from across the globe in an effort to trim Continue reading
Knowledge Sharing and Meaningful Conversation at InterCommunity 2020: Securing Global Routing
Recently, five routing security experts shared how they’ve been working to protect the Internet from the most common routing threats – by implementing and promoting the actions called for in Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security, or MANRS. They were all participants in InterCommunity, which gives the Internet Society community a way to connect for meaningful conversations about the issues that matter most to the Internet.
Want to join the InterCommunity conversation? Become an Internet Society member today!
This session of InterCommunity, “Securing Global Routing,” set out to increase awareness of MANRS, share good routing practices, and encourage more network operators to take the MANRS actions to make the Internet more secure for us all.
The speakers shared their network operations and capacity building knowledge while more than 200 participants participated live in the informative conversation.
Special thanks to Melchior Aelmans of Juniper Networks who moderated the discussion skillfully!
Here’s what the panelists had to say:
Abdul Awal, Bangladesh National DataCentre
Awal spoke about his goals in building technical capacity around Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) and raising awareness of MANRS principles in South Asia. He also discussed how we can help networks validate their routing Continue reading
The CloudVision Journey
Traditional networking has been transformed by cloud-networking principles. These principles drive an open, software-first approach to efficient automation, granular telemetry, and proactive analytics that have simplified traditional network operations. At Arista, we align our product strategy to these cloud networking principles and build our products based on modern software approaches. One such approach is the network-wide state and inference-driven architecture to manage networks with CloudVision. Arista’s strategic approach to automation, analytics, and change control has made CloudVision one of the favorite choices in the menu for our enterprise customers.
The CloudVision Journey
Traditional networking has been transformed by cloud-networking principles. These principles drive an open, software-first approach to efficient automation, granular telemetry, and proactive analytics that have simplified traditional network operations. At Arista, we align our product strategy to these cloud networking principles and build our products based on modern software approaches. One such approach is the network-wide state and inference-driven architecture to manage networks with CloudVision. Arista’s strategic approach to automation, analytics, and change control has made CloudVision one of the favorite choices in the menu for our enterprise customers.
Install an Ubuntu 1804 VM on Hyper-V as a Vagrant Server
Readers of my blog will probably have noticed that I like to use Vagrant for development and testing. I recently switched to using Windows and found the Hyper-V provider for Vagrant to be a bit limited. In this post I will install an Ubuntu 1804 VM on Hyper-V for use as a Vagrant...Hyper-V Enable Nested Virtualization in Linux VM
How to enable nested virtualization in a Linux VM on Hyper-V.Network Break 297: Juniper Rolls Out New WiFi 6 APs; Security Spending Is Pointless (Mostly)
The latest Network Break podcast debates whether security spending is worth it, discusses new APs from Juniper, reviews two new startups, analyzes Cisco's latest financial reports, and more tech news.
The post Network Break 297: Juniper Rolls Out New WiFi 6 APs; Security Spending Is Pointless (Mostly) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Network Break 297: Juniper Rolls Out New WiFi 6 APs; Security Spending Is Pointless (Mostly)
The latest Network Break podcast debates whether security spending is worth it, discusses new APs from Juniper, reviews two new startups, analyzes Cisco's latest financial reports, and more tech news.Unsolicited Multicast: Random Thoughts on the LFN White Paper
A short while back, the Linux Foundation (Networking), or LFN, published a white paper about the open source networking ecosystem. Rather than review the paper, or try to find a single theme, I decided to just write down “random thoughts” as I read through it. This is the (rather experimental) result.
The paper lists five goals of the project which can be reduced to three: reducing costs, increasing operator’s control over the network, and increasing security (by increasing code inspection). One interesting bit is the pairing of cost reduction with increasing control. Increasing control over a network generally means treating it less like an opaque box and more like a disaggregated set of components, each of which can be tuned in some way to improve the fit between network services, network performance, and business requirements. The less a network is an opaque box, however, the more time and effort required to manage it. This only makes sense—tuning a network to perform better requires time and talent, both of which cost money.
The offsetting point here is disaggregation and using open source can save money—although in my experience it never does. Again, running disaggregated software and hardware requires time and talent, Continue reading
Tech Bytes: Protecting Remote Workers With NetMotion’s Software-Defined Perimeter (Sponsored)
Today’s Tech Bytes podcast examines the challenge of securing remote workers with sponsor is NetMotion. We explore the difficulties of getting visibility into what remote workers are up to, and striking a balance between security of the organization and employee privacy. Our guest is Joel Windels, Chief Marketing Officer at NetMotion.
The post Tech Bytes: Protecting Remote Workers With NetMotion’s Software-Defined Perimeter (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.
Tech Bytes: Protecting Remote Workers With NetMotion’s Software-Defined Perimeter (Sponsored)
Today’s Tech Bytes podcast examines the challenge of securing remote workers with sponsor is NetMotion. We explore the difficulties of getting visibility into what remote workers are up to, and striking a balance between security of the organization and employee privacy. Our guest is Joel Windels, Chief Marketing Officer at NetMotion.The Week in Internet News: Smart Phones for Online Education
More phones, more access: Chinese smartphone major Xiaomi has announced that its Indian subsidiary will distribute 2,500 phone handsets to support online education of students who are most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, India Times reports. Teach for India says one smart phone can support the education of up to seven children, if they use the device in shifts.
Tracking the pandemic: The U.K. has launched a limited trial of a COVID-19 tracking app, the BBC reports. The app, which will be available on the Apple and Google online stores, will include an alert system that informs users of the coronavirus risk level close to their home. It also has a QR barcode scanner, allowing users to check in when they visit a venue and be told if others there later tested positive.
Weird pandemic effects: Parent company Facebook is blaming COVID-19 for a lapse in its ability to moderate nudity and other content on Instagram, The Independent writes. Facebook sent content reviewers home in March due to COVID-19, and those employees didn’t have adequate work-from-home systems. Facebook relies “heavily” on human intervention to remove offending content, the company said.
Faking it: One guy decided he’s had too many Continue reading
Election Cybersecurity: Preparing for the 2020 U.S. Elections.
At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet. As we look to the upcoming 2020 U.S. elections, we are reminded that having the Internet be trusted, secure, reliable, and accessible for campaigns and citizens alike is critical to our democracy. We rely on the Internet to share and discover pertinent information such as how to register to vote, find polling locations, or learn more about candidates.
Due to the spread of COVID-19, we are seeing a number of election environments shift online, to varying degrees, with political parties conducting virtual fundraisers, campaigns moving town halls to online platforms and election officials using online forms to facilitate voting by mail. As the 2020 U.S. elections approach, we want to ensure that players in the election space have the tools they need to stay online to promote trust and confidence in the democratic system.
We’re keeping an eye on how this shift to online activities affect cyberattacks. From April to June 2020, for example, we saw a trend of increasing DDoS attacks, with double the amount of L3/4 attacks observed over our network compared to the first three months of 2020. In the election space, we are Continue reading