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Category Archives for "Networking"

Community Week: Share Ideas to Help Make the Internet Stronger

The role people play in our community is vital for an open and trustworthy Internet for everyone. We know that without the knowledge, experience, and contributions of our members the Internet Society wouldn’t be complete.

Chapters Leaders Training in Latin America and the Caribbean

The Chapters of the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region have come together to implement a training program that allows members to work with their local Chapter, contributing to the four focus areas of the Internet Society’s Action Plan 2019. The first LAC Capacity Building Program for Chapters was successfully launched last week, with the participation of 182 people out of almost 1000 applicants.

This initiative started at the beginning of the year as a result of a working session held with LAC Chapters leaders. During the session, it was determined that capacity building was an important leverage point for Chapter development and it would be a tool to achieve the Chapters’ local goals during 2019. In the process, three important phases were defined for the program:

  • Capacity Building: Training in our different focus areas
  • Community engagement: Allocation of trained members in Chapters to support local initiatives
  • 2020-2025 Planning: LAC Chapters Workshop to define LAC Community Continue reading

Happy Birthday BGP

The first RFC describing BGP, RFC 1105, was published in June 1989, thirty years ago. That makes BGP a venerable protocol in the internet context and considering that it holds the Internet together it's still a central piece of the Internet's infrastructure. How has this critically important routing protocol fared over these thirty years and what are its future prospects? It BGP approaching its dotage or will it be a feature of the Internet for decades to come?

On the 7th World IPv6 Launchiversary, How About Listening to a Podcast About IPv6?

photo of a bee

On this 7th “launchiversary” of World IPv6 Launch, I thought I’d share a way I’ve enjoyed learning more about IPv6 over the past year. I like listening to podcasts while I’m running or driving, and a show that’s in my playlist is “IPv6 Buzz” where IPv6 veterans Ed Horley, Scott Hogg, and Tom Coffeen “dive into the 128-bit address space wormhole.

IPv6 buzz podcast logo

Anyone working with IPv6 for any amount of time, and particularly IPv6 advocacy, has probably read or heard something from Ed, Scott, or Tom. They’ve been explaining and promoting IPv6 for a long time in their own individual endeavors.

This podcast, which launched one year ago today, brings the three of them together with a wide range of guests from across the industry. Even with all my own years of IPv6 activity, I’ve learned a great amount about IPv6 security, recent drivers of deployment (including state task forces), tools and suggestions for promoting IPv6 growth. They dove deeply into IPv6 inside the IETF with Fred Baker, talked about going IPv6-only with Veronika McKillop of Microsoft, got into Happy Eyeballs with Dan Wing, and most recently explored enterprise IPv6 issues with Enno Rey.

Part Continue reading

Can Huawei survive, and what should customers do?

Chinese IT hardware giant Huawei is in a very tough position now, cut off from most western technology partners following the Trump administration’s declaration of the firm as a national security risk. The question now becomes what do its customers do.The Trump administration issued an order that effectively bars American firms from selling components and software to the company, and very quickly Huawei was cut off from Intel, ARM, Infineon, Samsung, and Google. The SD Association and Wi-Fi Alliance have also cut ties with Huawei.However, Huawei got a temporary break last month when the Commerce Department gave the company a reprieve after it added Huawei to a list of companies it considered a national security risk. Instead, the department posted a notice to the Federal Register that it would grant 90-day permissions for transactions necessary to maintain and support existing cellular networks and handsets.To read this article in full, please click here

How Linux can help with your spelling

Linux provides all sorts of tools for data analysis and automation, but it also helps with an issue that we all struggle with from time to time – spelling! Whether you're grappling with the spelling of a single word while you’re writing your weekly report or you want a set of computerized "eyes" to find your typos before you submit a business proposal, maybe it’s time to check out how it can help.look One tool is look. If you know how a word begins, you can ask the look command for provide a list of words that start with those letters. Unless an alternate word source is provided, look uses /usr/share/dict/words to identify the words for you. This file with its hundreds of thousands of words will suffice for most of the English words that we routinely use, but it might not have some of the more obscure words that some of us in the computing field tend to use — such as zettabyte.To read this article in full, please click here

NSX-T Infrastructure Deployment Using Ansible

VMware NSX-T Data Center 2.4 was a major release adding new functionality for virtualized network and security for public, private and hybrid clouds. The release includes a rich set of features including IPv6 support, context-aware firewall, network introspection features, a new intent-based networking user interface and many more.

Along with these features, another important infrastructure change is the ability to deploy highly-available clustered management and control plane.

NSX-T 2.4 Unified Appliance Cluster

What is the Highly-Available Cluster?

The highly-avilable cluster consists of three NSX nodes where each node contains the management plane and control plane services. The three nodes form a cluster to give a highly-available management plane and control plane. It provides application programming interface (API) and graphical user interface (GUI) for clients. It can be accessed from any of the manager or a single VIP associated with the cluster. The VIP can be provided by NSX or can be created using an external Load Balancer. It makes operations easier with less systems to monitor, maintain and upgrade.

Besides a NSX cluster, you will have to create Transport Zones, Host and Edge Transport Nodes to consume NSX-T Data Center.

  • A Transport Zone defines the scope of hosts and virtual machines (VMs) for participation Continue reading

A10 Networks ACOS Critical Insecure Cookie Vulnerability 2 of 2

The following summarizes an HTTP persistence cookie vulnerability that I identified in A10 ACOS ADC software. This was disclosed to A10 Networks in June 2016 and has now been resolved.

A10 Networks Cookie Vulnerability

As noted in a previous post, ACOS uses insecure HTTP/HTTPS persistence cookies which can allow a malicious user to craft a cookie determining the server and port to which a persistent session should be sent. In addition, for vports using the default “port-based” HTTP cookie persistence, it was discovered that when using the default persistence cookie type, ACOS does not perform a check to ensure that the server/port defined in the cookie is within the configured service-group for that VIP.

The only sanity check appears to be to ensure that the server IP read from the cookie has been configured on the A10 within the same partition. If that constraint is met, packets will be forwarded by ACOS to the real server based solely on the value contained in the cookie. This is extremely serious as it allows a malicious user to connect, for example, through a public VIP and access back end servers used by other VIPs, including those only accessible via internal IPs.

SUMMARY OF VULNERABILITY

When using Continue reading

Cisco to buy IoT security, management firm Sentryo

Looking to expand its IoT security and management offerings Cisco plans to acquire Sentryo, a company based in France that offers anomaly detection and real-time threat detection for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks.Founded in 2014 Sentryo products include ICS CyberVision – an asset inventory, network monitoring and threat intelligence platform – and CyberVision network edge sensors, which analyze network flows. More on IoT:To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco to buy IoT security, management firm Sentryo

Looking to expand its IoT security and management offerings Cisco plans to acquire Sentryo, a company based in France that offers anomaly detection and real-time threat detection for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks.Founded in 2014 Sentryo products include ICS CyberVision – an asset inventory, network monitoring and threat intelligence platform – and CyberVision network edge sensors, which analyze network flows. More on IoT:To read this article in full, please click here

For enterprise storage, persistent memory is here to stay

It's hard to remember a time when semiconductor vendors haven't promised a fast, cost-effective and reliable persistent memory technology to anxious data center operators. Now, after many years of waiting and disappointment, technology may have finally caught up with the hype to make persistent memory a practical proposition.High-capacity persistent memory, also known as storage class memory (SCM), is fast and directly addressable like dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), yet is able to retain stored data even after its power has been switched off—intentionally or unintentionally. The technology can be used in data centers to replace cheaper, yet far slower traditional persistent storage components, such as hard disk drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD).To read this article in full, please click here

For enterprise storage, persistent memory is here to stay

It's hard to remember a time when semiconductor vendors haven't promised a fast, cost-effective and reliable persistent memory technology to anxious data center operators. Now, after many years of waiting and disappointment, technology may have finally caught up with the hype to make persistent memory a practical proposition.High-capacity persistent memory, also known as storage class memory (SCM), is fast and directly addressable like dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), yet is able to retain stored data even after its power has been switched off—intentionally or unintentionally. The technology can be used in data centers to replace cheaper, yet far slower traditional persistent storage components, such as hard disk drives (HDD) and solid-state drives (SSD).To read this article in full, please click here

Cloud adoption drives the evolution of application delivery controllers

Migrating to a cloud computing model will obviously have an impact on the infrastructure that’s deployed. This shift has already been seen in the areas of servers, storage, and networking, as those technologies have evolved to a “software-defined” model. And it appears that application delivery controllers (ADCs) are on the precipice of a similar shift.In fact, a new ZK Research study about cloud computing adoption and the impact on ADCs found that, when looking at the deployment model, hardware appliances are the most widely deployed — with 55% having fully deployed or are currently testing and only 15% currently researching hardware. (Note: I am an employee of ZK Research.)To read this article in full, please click here

Self-learning sensor chips won’t need networks

Tiny, intelligent microelectronics should be used to perform as much sensor processing as possible on-chip rather than wasting resources by sending often un-needed, duplicated raw data to the cloud or computers. So say scientists behind new, machine-learning networks that aim to embed everything needed for artificial intelligence (AI) onto a processor.“This opens the door for many new applications, starting from real-time evaluation of sensor data,” says Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems on its website. No delays sending unnecessary data onwards, along with speedy processing, means theoretically there is zero latency.To read this article in full, please click here