Testing in the Open

“Automation is not testing”

I recently attended a webinar where the speaker made this comment and it started me thinking about testing in general and what some of the challenges that can present.

We all know that we should be testing, but there are a lot of potential pit falls that one can fall into when starting down this journey. I’m going to jump into the deep end of the pool here and deal with one of the struggles that it took me a while to deal with.

Imagine the following:

• You have a local device with a REST API
• You write a library that accesses that REST API
• You write tests for that library so that it runs against the local devices REST API
• You push the library to GITHUB so that other people can leverage your work. ( You are a good person, right?)
• You configure TravisCI or CircleCI for integration testing.
• You realize all your tests fail because Travis/Circle doesn’t have access to your internal device.

And now your GITHUB badges all show red and no one trusts your code. Which brings us to vcrpy

What’s vcrpy?

Wow! So glad you asked! vcrpy is a REST Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Apple Backs Away from Encryption Plan

Under pressure: Apple has scrapped plans to allow iPhone users to fully encrypt backups of their devices in iCloud after the U.S. FBI complained it would hinder investigations, Reuters reports. About two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, but its plans seem to have changed. Meanwhile, U.S. Attorney General William Barr and President Donald Trump have continued their pressure for tech vendors to build backdoors in encrypted devices, Politico says.

One high-profile phone: Two United Nations rights experts have accused Saudi Arabia of hacking the phone owned by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and owner of the Washington Post, the New York Times says. The hack appears to be an attempt to influence the Post’s coverage of the kingdom, the U.N. people say. The hack of Bezos’ phone appears to have bypassed encryption through spyware, adds a Fortune story.

If it’s good for smartphones: Swiss cryptography firm Teserakt has introduced E4, “a sort of cryptographic implant that Internet of Things manufacturers can integrate into their servers,” Wired reports. The open source tool aims to be a comprehensive encryption solution for IoT.

Continue reading

IBM Power-based cloud instances available… from Google

IBM and Google may be competitors in the cloud platform business, but that doesn't prevent them from working together. Google is partnering with IBM to offer "Power Systems as a service" on its Google Cloud platform.IBM’s Power processor line is the last man standing in the RISC/Unix war, surviving Sun Microsystems’ SPARC and HP’s PA-RISC. Along with mainframes it’s the last server hardware business IBM has, having divested its x86 server line in 2014.IBM already sells cloud instances of Power to its IBM Cloud customers, so this is just an expansion of existing offerings to a competitor with a considerable data center footprint. Google said that customers can run Power-based workloads on GCP on all of its operating systems save mainframes — AIX, IBM i, and Linux on IBM Power.To read this article in full, please click here

Fast Failover in SD-WAN Networks

It’s amazing how quickly you get “must have feature Y or it should not be called X” comments coming from vendor engineers the moment you mention something vaguely-defined like SD-WAN.

Here are just two of the claims I got as a response to “BGP with IP-SLA is SD-WAN” trolling I started on LinkedIn based on this blog post:

Key missing features [of your solution]:

• real time circuit failover (100ms is not real-time)
• traffic steering (again, 100ms is not real-time)

Let’s get the facts straight: it seems Cisco IOS evaluates route-map statements using track objects in periodic BGP table scan process, so the failover time is on order of 30 seconds plus however long it takes IP SLA to detect the decreased link quality.

Congress fights for additional Wi-Fi spectrum

A Congressional committee is weighing in on a spat between the FCC and parts of the automotive industry over a plan to appropriate a piece of wireless spectrum set aside for connected cars and instead designate it for Wi-Fi.The dispute centers on Dedicated Short Range Communications or DSRC, a point-to-point communication standard designated to let vehicles close to each other on roadways share information to improve safety. The go-to example is using it to warn a driver near-instantly if the car ahead suddenly slams on its brakes.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] DSR and its 75MHz of spectrum in the 5.9GHz band has been a relatively obscure technology until late last year when the FCC started considering that 45MHz of that spectrum should be made available for unlicensed wireless use such as Wi-FiTo read this article in full, please click here

Congress weighs in on additional Wi-Fi spectrum

A Congressional committee is weighing in on a spat between the FCC and parts of the automotive industry over a plan to appropriate a piece of wireless spectrum set aside for connected-cars and instead designate it for Wi-Fi.The dispute centers on Dedicated Short Range Communications or DSRC, a point-to-point communication standard designated to let vehicles close to each other on roadways share information to improve safety. The go-to example is using it to warn a driver near-instantly if the car ahead suddenly slams on its brakes.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] DSR and its 75MHz of spectrum in the 5.9GHz band has been a relatively obscure technology until late last year when the FCC started considering that 45MHz of that spectrum should be made available for unlicensed wireless use such as Wi-FiTo read this article in full, please click here

5G Strategies of T-Mobile US, Sprint Hinge on Merger

ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2014: 5 years later

I have recently replaced my ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2014 (second generation). I have kept it for more than five years, using it every day and carrying it everywhere. The expected lifetime of a laptop is always an unknown. Let me share my feedback.

My configuration embeds an Intel vPro Core i7-4600U, 8 Gib of RAM, a 256 Gib SATA SSD, a matte WQHD display and a WWAN LTE card. I got it in June 2014. It has spent these years running Debian Sid, starting from Linux 3.14 to Linux 5.4.

This generation of ThinkPad X1 Carbon has been subject to a variety of experiences around the keyboard. We are still hunting the culprits. The layout is totally messed up, with many keys displaced.¹ I have remapped most of them. It also lacks physical function keys: they have been replaced by a non-customizable touch bar. I do not like it due to absence of tactile feedback and it is quite easy to hit a key by mistake. I would recommend to Continue reading

ExtraHop CEO: We’ve Doubling Down on Cloud

Worth Reading: Machine Learning Explained

I hope you're familiar with Clarke's third law (and leave it to your imagination to explain how it relates to SDN ;). In case you want to look beyond the Machine Learning curtain, you might find the Machine Learning Explained article highly interesting. Spoiler: it all started in 1960s with over 2000 matchboxes.

Daily Roundup: Microsoft Exposes 250M Customer Records

Cisco and IBM offer a managed private-cloud service

Cisco and IBM have rolled out a pair of managed private-cloud services aimed at customers looking for the utility of a public cloud delivered on premises. Cisco and IBM Services have partnered to offer a Managed Private Cloud-as-a-service powered by Cisco's Unified Computing System and available in two varieties, one for VMware and one for RedHat OpenShift environments. Cisco’s UCS combines x86 servers with networking and storage access into a single packaged system.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] IBM installs and manages the compute environment and delivers tools for support and enhancement requests. In addition, the offering places a high priority on security, proactive monitoring, and reporting. Cisco’s cloud-based Intersight system helps to manage the environment, according to a blog post about the services from Keith Dyer, a vice president in the Global Partner Organization at Cisco.To read this article in full, please click here

Data Center Revenue Drives Intel to Record Q4

Heavy Networking 499: Introducing Cisco IOS XR7 (Sponsored)

Cisco IOS XR version 7 is the topic of Heavy Networking in this sponsored episode. We dig into what's new in this latest network OS release, the hardware platforms it runs on (including whitebox), key security features, and more. Our guests from Cisco are Bhavna Prasad, Product Manager; and Reda Haddad, Distinguished Engineer.

The post Heavy Networking 499: Introducing Cisco IOS XR7 (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Ericsson Returns to Profit Amid Rising 5G Costs

Really Late Company Christmas Shopping

I’m headed out to Cisco Live Europe today, so I’m trying to get everything packed before I head to the airport. I also realize I need to go buy a few things for my suitcase. Which must be the same thing that a bunch of companies thought this week as they went on a buying spree! Seriously:

• VMware buys Nyansa for the VeloCloud unit
• Arista is going buy Big Switch Networks, as first reported by SDxCentral but pretty much what’s happening for sure.

I don’t think we’re quite done yet, either. An oblique tweet from a friend with some inside sources leads me to believe that the reason why this is happening right now is because some of the venture funds are getting antsy and are calling in their markers. Maybe they need the funds to cash out investors? Maybe they’re looking to reduce their exposure to other things? Maybe they’re ready to jump on a plane to an uncharted island somewhere?

This is one of the challenges when you’re beholden to investors. Sure, not all of us are independently wealthy and capable of bootstrapping our own startup. We need some kind of funding to make that happen. But Continue reading

A Look Back, Some Predictions, And Learning As Engineers

In this episode we sit down with Jed Casey and Bruno Wollmann to have a conversation about what’s top of mind. We take a quick look back at predominant trends in 2019, pull out the crystal ball and make some predictions for 2020, and discuss certifications and learning as engineers.

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post A Look Back, Some Predictions, And Learning As Engineers appeared first on Network Collective.

Weekly Wrap: Arista Networks Buys Big Switch

Response: Manual Work is a Bug – ACM Queue

Its possible to do bad automation

The post Response: Manual Work is a Bug – ACM Queue appeared first on EtherealMind.

Video: FRRouting Architecture

After a brief overview of FRRouting suite Donald Sharp continued with a deep dive into FRR architecture, including the various routing daemons, role of Zebra and ZAPI, interface between RIB (Zebra) and FIB (Linux Kernel), sample data flow for route installation, and multi-threading in Zebra and BGP daemons.