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Category Archives for "Networking"

NEWS UPDATE: The impact of COVID-19 on public networks and security

As the coronavirus spreads, public and private companies as well as government entities are requiring employees to work from home, putting unforeseen strain on all manner of networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns.  What follows is a round-up of news and traffic updates that Network World will update as needed to help keep up with the ever-changing situation.  Check back frequently!UPDATE: 3.26 Week over week (ending March 23) Ookla says it has started to see a degradation of mobile and fixed-broadband performance worldwide. More detail on specific locations is available below. Comparing the week of March 16 to the week of March 9, mean download speed over mobile and fixed broadband decreased in Canada and the U.S. while both remained relatively flat in Mexico. What is the impact of the coronavirus on corporate network planning? Depends on how long the work-from-home mandate goes on really. Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. takes an interesting look at the situation saying the shutdown “could eventually produce a major uptick for SD-WAN services, particularly in [managed service provider]    Businesses would be much more likely to embark on an SD-WAN VPN adventure that didn’t involve purchase/licensing, Continue reading

ROLLING UPDATE: The impact of COVID-19 on public networks and security

As the coronavirus spreads, public and private companies as well as government entities are requiring employees to work from home, putting unforeseen strain on all manner of networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns.  What follows is a round-up of news and traffic updates that Network World will update as needed to help keep up with the ever-changing situation.  Check back frequently!UPDATE 3.27Broadband watchers at BroadbandNow say users in most of the cities it analyzed are experiencing normal network conditions, suggesting that ISP’s (and their networks) are holding up to the shifting demand. In a March 25 post the firm wrote: “Encouragingly, many of the areas hit hardest by the spread of the coronavirus are holding up to increased network demand. Cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Brooklyn, and San Francisco have all experienced little or no disruption. New York City,  now the epicenter of the virus in the U.S., has seen a 24% dip out of its previous ten-week range. However, with a new median speed of nearly 52 Mbps, home connections still appear to be holding up overall.”To read this article in full, please click here

How enterprise networking is changing with a work-at-home workforce

As the coronavirus spreads, public and private companies as well as government entities are requiring employees to work from home, putting unforeseen strain on all manner of networking technologies and causing bandwidth and security concerns.  What follows is a round-up of news and traffic updates that Network World will update as needed to help keep up with the ever-changing situation.  Check back frequently!UPDATE 4.3 In an April 2nd call with the Federal Communications Commission chair, the nation’s largest telecom and broadband providers reported network usage during the COVID-19 pandemic had risen about 20-35% for fixed networks and 10-20% for cellular networks in recent weeks. In general, company representatives reported that their networks were holding up quite well, and they expected that resilience to continue. In their conversation with Chairman Ajit Pai, no providers expressed concern about their networks’ ability to hold up to increased and changing demand. To read this article in full, please click here

Global Operators Drive TIP’s Open Optical Transponder

The transponder, which is developed by Deutsche Telekom, NTT, Telefónica, Telia, and Vodafone, is...

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SRG, Dell’Oro: Server Spending Set to Surge

Both firms’ market reports echo similar findings of vendors spending billions to build or expand...

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GSMA MWC Barcelona Compensation Linked to Event’s Future

Individual attendees will get all their money back. Exhibitors will have to choose between less now...

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5G Standards Delayed for Industrial IoT, Low Latency

Release 16 and Release 17 have both been pushed back three months, despite claims from leadership...

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Juniper Security VP: Networks Must Be Threat Aware

Samantha Madrid joined the company with a very specific security strategy: change how we secure...

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Day Two Cloud 041: Practical Automation In The Cloud And On Premises

On today's Day Two Cloud, we discuss practical automation, including tools and tips to make automation work. In particular, we focus on deploying consistent builds for VMs across public cloud providers and on premises. We also examine key issues such as the need to close the loop on automation processes, and how to ensure that one person doesn't become irreplaceable. Our guest is Larry Smith, Senior DevOps Engineer.

Day Two Cloud 041: Practical Automation In The Cloud And On Premises

On today's Day Two Cloud, we discuss practical automation, including tools and tips to make automation work. In particular, we focus on deploying consistent builds for VMs across public cloud providers and on premises. We also examine key issues such as the need to close the loop on automation processes, and how to ensure that one person doesn't become irreplaceable. Our guest is Larry Smith, Senior DevOps Engineer.

The post Day Two Cloud 041: Practical Automation In The Cloud And On Premises appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Working with APRICOT to Improve Routing Security

We’re pleased to announce that the Internet Society and the Asia Pacific Network Operators Group Ltd (APNOG) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to cooperate in supporting the MANRS initiative in the Asia-Pacific region.

APNOG is the non-profit entity that runs the annual APRICOT conference, also called the Asia-Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies. APRICOT is the largest meeting of the technical community in the region.

The agreement will see the two undertake initiatives and activities to promote the security of the Internet’s global routing system and Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS). MANRS is a global initiative, supported by the Internet Society, that provides crucial fixes to reduce the most common routing threats.

We agree to tackle routing-related cybersecurity incidents such as route hijacking, route leaks, IP address spoofing, and other harmful activities that can lead to DDoS attacks, traffic inspection, lost revenue, reputational damage, and more.

APRICOT draws many of the world’s best Internet engineers, operators, researchers, service providers, and policy enthusiasts from around the world to share the technical knowledge needed to run and expand the Internet securely. The partnership will allow MANRS to better leverage the platform to promote routing security to conference participants, Continue reading

Comparing Internet Connection used in AWS and LISP Based Networks


Forewords

This post starts by discussing the Internet connection from the AWS VPC Control Plane operation perspective. The public AWS documentation only describes the basic components, such as an  Internet Gateway (IGW) and a subnet specific Implicit Routers. However, the public AWS documentation does not describe the Control Plane operation related to distributing the default route from IGWs to IMRs. The AWS VPC Control Plane part in this post is based on my assumptions, so be critical of what you read. The second part of this post shortly explains the Control-Plane operation of the Internet connection used in LISP based network. By comparing the AWS VPC to LISP based network I just want to point out that even though some might think that cloud-based networking is much simple than traditional on-premise networking, it is not. People tend to trust network solutions used in clouds (AWS, Azure, etc.) and there is no debate about (a) what hardware is used, (b) how the redundancy works, (c),  are solutions standard-based and so on. Now it is more like, I do not care how it works as long as it works. Good or bad, I do not know.
Continue reading

Speeding up Linux disk encryption

Speeding up Linux disk encryption

Data encryption at rest is a must-have for any modern Internet company. Many companies, however, don't encrypt their disks, because they fear the potential performance penalty caused by encryption overhead.

Encrypting data at rest is vital for Cloudflare with more than 200 data centres across the world. In this post, we will investigate the performance of disk encryption on Linux and explain how we made it at least two times faster for ourselves and our customers!

Encrypting data at rest

When it comes to encrypting data at rest there are several ways it can be implemented on a modern operating system (OS). Available techniques are tightly coupled with a typical OS storage stack. A simplified version of the storage stack and encryption solutions can be found on the diagram below:

Speeding up Linux disk encryption

On the top of the stack are applications, which read and write data in files (or streams). The file system in the OS kernel keeps track of which blocks of the underlying block device belong to which files and translates these file reads and writes into block reads and writes, however the hardware specifics of the underlying storage device is abstracted away from the filesystem. Finally, the block subsystem actually Continue reading

SD-WAN: A Service Provider Perspective

A reader of my blog was “blessed” with hands-on experience with SD-WAN offered by large service providers. Based on that experience he sent me his views on whether that makes sense. Enjoy ;)


We all have less-than-stellar opinion on service providers and their offerings. Its well known that those services are expensive and usually lacking quality, experience, or simply, knowledge. This applies to regular MPLS/BGP techniques as to - currently, the new challenge - SD-WAN.

Cockroach Labs Defends Default Congif of AWS, Azure, GCP Test

“Ultimately, each cloud can’t hide from public, open-source benchmarks,” said Cockroach Labs'...

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How Fortinet and Tigera Protect Kubernetes in the Enterprise

What Problems are We Solving?

Container use continues to grow, and Kubernetes is the most widely adopted container orchestration system, managing nearly half of all container deployments.1 Successful integration of container services within the enterprise depends heavily on access to external resources such as databases, cloud services, third-party application programming interfaces (APIs), and other applications. All this egress activity must be controlled for security and compliance reasons. In a recent container adoption survey, 61% of correspondents, a super-majority, listed data security as their top challenge.2

Kubernetes Requires a Different Approach to Access Control

Traditional IP-based access control doesn’t work in Kubernetes, where workloads are ephemeral, typically stateless, and use short-term IP addresses. While the Calico Enterprise security management interface provides customized control within the Kubernetes environment, using Calico Enterprise security in isolation from existing enterprise network security leaves organizations with disparate policy-enforcement regimes.

Disparate Network Security Systems Introduce Unwanted Complexity

Maintaining two separate network security systems hinders visibility into routing and connectivity within and between Kubernetes clusters. This complicates the process of troubleshooting issues that span Kubernetes and external environments. Because enterprise monitoring tools lack Kubernetes context, the impact of security policy changes are hard to predict, and Continue reading

Daily Roundup: Intel Warns of Financial Hit

Intel warned of financial hit; Attackers exploited remote-code execution vulnerabilities in...

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Tips for cleaning data-center gear in response to coronavirus

People are washing their hands, countertops, and nearly everything else in an effort to stem the spread of the COVID-19 virus. In a recent trip to the supermarket I found plenty of bread and milk, but the cleaning-aisle shelves were bare.While it's easy to keep your desk clean, what about your data center? People go in and out and touch things all the time. Rubber gloves are an option, but they can be a nuisance when working with gear or touch screens. READ MORE: COVID-19 best practices for data-center operatorsTo read this article in full, please click here

Intel Warns Pandemic Could Erode Financials, Halts Stock Buybacks

There remains "considerable uncertainty" as to how measures taken by world governments to control...

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