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Category Archives for "Networking"

Natural Ways to Support Brain Health

June is Alzheimer’s and Brain Awareness Month. And with 50 million people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia worldwide, this sadly common brain health condition is one of the biggest health problems in the world today.

All About Alzheimer’s

Alzheimer’s is a degenerative brain disease. Although its cruel effects are not noticeable at first, doctors believe that brain degeneration begins around 20 years before symptoms first appear, possibly earlier. This means that although younger people may consider that Alzheimer’s only affects “old people” it is important to remember that this disease does not suddenly appear fully formed once you have hit senior age. Alzheimer’s can hit people in their early 50s in some cases, so what you do in your 20s and 30s will certainly have an impact on your long-term brain health.

Nobody fully understands the causes and risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease. There could be a genetic link to the condition, but growing evidence points towards dietary factors. Studies show that a diet rich in antioxidants, with plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables and oily fish – such as the Mediterranean diet does have a neuroprotective effect.

However with the average American diet which is Continue reading

Kernel of Truth season 3 episode 8: Cumulus Linux in action at Cloudscale

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Click here for our previous episode.

If you’ve listened to the podcast before you may have heard us reference our customers from time to time. In this episode we’re switching things up and instead of referencing a customer, you’re going to hear directly from one! Manuel Schweizer, CEO of Cloudscale, joins host Roopa Prabhu, Attilla de Groot and Mark Horsfield to chat about Cloudscale’s first hand experience with open networking and what they hope the near and distant future of open networking will look like.

Guest Bios

Roopa Prabhu: Roopa Prabhu is a Linux Architect at Cumulus Networks, now NVIDIA. At Cumulus she and her team work on all things kernel networking and Linux system infrastructure areas. Her primary focus areas in the Linux kernel are Linux bridge, Netlink, VxLAN, Lightweight tunnels. She is currently focused on building Linux kernel dataplane for E-VPN. She loves working with the Linux kernel networking and debian communities. Her past experience includes Linux clusters, ethernet drivers and Linux KVM virtualization platforms. She has a BS and MS in Computer Science. You can find her on Twitter at Continue reading

Data Is The New Solar Energy

You’ve probably been hearing a lot about analytics and artificial intelligence in the past couple of years. Every software platform under the sun is looking to increase their visibility into the way that networks and systems behave. They can then take that data and plug it into a model and make recommendations about the way things need to be configured or designed.

Using analytics to aid troubleshooting is nothing new. We used to be able to tell when hard disks were about to go bad because of SMART reporting. Today we can use predictive analysis to determine when the disk has passed the point of no return and should be replaced well ahead of the actual failure. We can even plug that data into an AI algorithm to determine which drives on which devices need to be examined first based on a chart of performance data.

The power of this kind of data-driven network and systems operation does help our beleaguered IT departments feel as though they have a handle on things. And the power that data can offer to us has it being tracked like a precious natural resource. More than a few times I’ve heard data referred to Continue reading

Seven Reasons Why Network Automation Is Important

Organizations today constantly seek greater agility and speed in their IT operations. They’re looking to seize market advantage by innovating with new technology and quickly responding to shifting market trends. Meanwhile, IT teams seek higher levels of simplicity and automation – and more efficient allocation of limited resources – in order to support these larger business goals.

Why Businesses Need Network Automation

A major roadblock many organizations face in the drive for efficiency is that their enterprise network is far more difficult to manage than ever before. Distributed workloads and distributed IT resources have led to extremely complex configurations and poor visibility across the environment. To make matters worse, much of the management work on these networks has traditionally been performed manually, via command-line entry. That’s proved to be tedious, costly, unnecessarily rigid, and prone to error. 

Industry reports find as much as 40-80% of network failures are the result of human error

Network outages are of course a large pain point in enterprise networking, but there are certainly others. Complex, hard-to-manage networks are hindering business innovation, making critical security improvements more difficult, and driving up costs. This set of drawbacks has naturally led to a search for better Continue reading

BGP Navel Gazing on Software Gone Wild

This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio, the host of today’s podcast.

As we all know, BGP runs the networked world. It is a protocol that has existed and operated in the vast expanse of the internet in one form or another since early 1990s, and despite the fact that it has been extended, enhanced, twisted, and warped into performing a myriad of tasks that one would never have imagined in the silver era of internetworking, it has remained largely unchanged in its operational core.

The world as we know it would never exist without BGP, and because of the fact that it is such a widely deployed protocol with such a solid track record of “just working”, the transition to a better security model surrounding it has been extraordinarily slow to modernize.

Amateur packet radio walkthrough

An earlier version of this post that did data over D-Star was misleading. This is the new version.

This blog post aims do describe the steps to setting up packet radio on modern hardware with Linux. There’s lots of ham radio documentation out there about various setups, but they’re usually at least 20 years old, and you’ll find recommendations to use software that’s not been updated is just as long.

Specifically here I’ll set up a Kenwood TH-D74 and ICom 9700 to talk to each other over D-Star and AX.25. But for the latter you can also use use cheap Baofengs just as well.

Note that 9600bps AX.25 can only be generated by a compatible radio. 1200bps can be send to a non-supporting radio as audio, but 9600bps cannot. So both D-Star and AX.25 here will give only 1200bps. But with hundreds of watts you can get really far with it, at least.

I’ll assume that you already know how to set up APRS (and therefore KISS) on a D74. If not, get comfortable with that first by reading the manual.

DMR doesn’t seem to have a data mode, and SystemFusion radios don’t give the user access Continue reading

Ripple20 TCP/IP flaws can be patched but still threaten IoT devices

A set of serious network security vulnerabilities collectively known as Ripple20 roiled the IoT landscape when they came to light last week, and the problems they pose for IoT-equipped businesses could be both dangerous and difficult to solve.Ripple20 was originally discovered by Israel-based security company JSOF in September 2019. It affects a lightweight, proprietary TCP/IP library created by a small company in Ohio called Treck, which has issued a patch for the vulnerabilities. Several of those vulnerabilities would allow for remote-code execution, allowing for data theft, malicious takeovers and more, said the security vendor.That, however, isn’t the end of the problem. The TCP/IP library that contains the vulnerabilities has been used in a huge range of connected devices, from medical devices to industrial control systems to printers, and actually delivering and applying the patch is a vast undertaking. JSOF said that “hundreds of millions” of devices could be affected. Many devices don’t have the capacity to receive remote patches, and Terry Dunlap, co-founder of security vendor ReFirm Labs, said that there are numerous hurdles to getting patches onto older equipment in particular.To read this article in full, please click here

The Hedge Episode 41: Centralized Architectures with Jari Arkko

Consolidation is a well-recognized trend in the Internet ecosystem—but what does this centralization mean in terms of distributed systems, such as the DNS? Jari Arkko joins this episode of the Hedge, along with Alvaro Retana, to discuss the import and impact of centralization on the Internet through his draft, draft-arkko-arch-infrastructure-centralisation.

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Day Two Cloud 054: Real Life VMware Cloud On AWS

We discuss the reality of running VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS with Adam Fisher, Cloud & DevOps Engineer at RoundTower. Adam's been deploying VMC on AWS in the real world for customers since the product's early days, and has plenty of insights. VMC on AWS presents a VMware software defined data center (SDDC) hosted on bare metal in AWS data centers. If you're trying to vacate your own data centers or colos, but aren't going to refactor your applications to do it, VMC on AWS presents a compelling technical solution.

The post Day Two Cloud 054: Real Life VMware Cloud On AWS appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Day Two Cloud 054: Real Life VMware Cloud On AWS

We discuss the reality of running VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS with Adam Fisher, Cloud & DevOps Engineer at RoundTower. Adam's been deploying VMC on AWS in the real world for customers since the product's early days, and has plenty of insights. VMC on AWS presents a VMware software defined data center (SDDC) hosted on bare metal in AWS data centers. If you're trying to vacate your own data centers or colos, but aren't going to refactor your applications to do it, VMC on AWS presents a compelling technical solution.

BiB094 – HPE Discover Greenlake and Ezmeral

      HPE Greenlake Common cloud platform – pivot to “edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service company” cloud services, software and customer experiences. Greenlake in numbers: 4B in contract value , 1000 customers, 50 countries, 90% retention rate 700 partners selling Greenlake = next generational partner ecosystem self-served, pay per use     HPE Ezmeral The HPE Ezmeral... Read more »

BiB094 – HPE Discover Greenlake and Ezmeral

      HPE Greenlake Common cloud platform – pivot to “edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service company” cloud services, software and customer experiences. Greenlake in numbers: 4B in contract value , 1000 customers, 50 countries, 90% retention rate 700 partners selling Greenlake = next generational partner ecosystem self-served, pay per use     HPE Ezmeral The HPE Ezmeral […]

The post BiB094 – HPE Discover Greenlake and Ezmeral appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Eighty for Africa: Kenya and Nigeria’s IXP Success

Ten years ago the peering community came up with a vision: We wanted 80 percent of Internet traffic to be localized by 2020. I must admit, over the last decade there were times I wondered if it was possible.

But Kenya and Nigeria have just proven that it is – all thanks to the help of Internet exchange points (IXPs). A new report, Anchoring the African Internet Ecosystem: Lessons from Kenya and Nigeria’s Internet Exchange Points Growth is a case study on how they did it.

What Changed in Kenya and Nigeria

In just eight years a dedicated community helped Kenya and Nigeria to boost the levels of Internet traffic that is locally exchanged from 30% to 70%.

That happened because of a vibrant community of people united around a common cause: bringing faster, cheaper, and better Internet to their neighbours. They did this by focusing on their local Internet ecosystem that is dependent on the IXP.

Building an IXP takes humans and tech. We often say it takes 80% human engineering and 20% network engineering. It certainly is no easy task. Building a strong local Internet community facilitates this collaboration and results in neutral, even, and good local governance Continue reading

Adapting Network Design to Support Automation

This blog post was initially sent to the subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

Adam left a thoughtful comment addressing numerous interesting aspects of network design in the era of booming automation hype on my How Should Network Architects Deal with Network Automation blog post. He started with:

A question I keep tasking myself with addressing but never finding the best answer, is how appropriate is it to reform a network environment into a flattened design such as spine-and-leaf, if that reform is with the sole intent and purpose to enable automation?

A few basic facts first:

Open Call To The Next Generation of Internet Leaders – Apply for the IGF Youth Ambassadors Program

Photo of IGF Youth Ambassadors

We are living in unprecedented times. COVID-19 has disrupted our world and it’s a crucial time for the Internet. We are facing issues related to misinformation, online education and connectivity. Challenges have been posed to encryption. Debates around the trade-off between privacy and contact tracing apps take place around the globe.

The acceleration of digital transformation worldwide has created immense opportunities and at the same time, uncertainty and challenges. Under these circumstances, youth must be represented in these discussions.

Young people know the benefits of connection, sharing and openness. Young engineers and programmers create new tools for the Internet every day, and many proposals about governance of new technologies come from interested people below the age of 30.

We grew up in cyberspace, and it has become an intrinsic part of many of our lives. We care for it, we value its principles, invariants and characteristics. Most of all, we understand how important the Internet is and how much of a force for good (or for evil) it can be.

The voice of youth matters and the Internet Society plays a significant role to empower the next generation of Internet leaders and to provide them with the freedom to voice Continue reading

The History of LINUX and SUSE with Dirk Hohndel

Started as a consulting company, SUSE was one of the first organizations to begin working in the development and commercialization of LINUX. Through the years, LINUX has become the base for much of the IT world, including many of the open source network operating systems. Dirk Hohndel joins the History of Networking to discuss the origins of SUSE LINUX.

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