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Category Archives for "Networking"

Kicking the Tires With the NATS Go Client

I am doing some prototyping for a project and part of this includes becoming more familiar with the NATS project, including its Go client (since all of the components in my project that will be talking to NATS are written in Go). In short, I have a bunch of little services that need to talk to each other, and a message broker like NATS fits the bill. One thing that drew me to NATS specifically is that it is unapologetically - nay, proudly - simple.

Kicking the Tires With the NATS Go Client

I am doing some prototyping for a project and part of this includes becoming more familiar with the NATS project, including its Go client (since all of the components in my project that will be talking to NATS are written in Go). In short, I have a bunch of little services that need to talk to each other, and a message broker like NATS fits the bill. One thing that drew me to NATS specifically is that it is unapologetically - nay, proudly - simple.

Worth Following: Explaining Computer Things

People who can explain complex topics in simple terms, or focus on the essentials of a particular topic are exceedingly rare… and two of the best are Randall Munroe of the XKCD fame and Julia Evans, the mastermind behind WizardZines. I loved her recent curl and git exercises, and I’m guessing a lot of people in this industry would benefit from her latest HTTP zine.

Similarly to what I did a long time ago with ipSpace.net, Julia recently decided to go all-in, leaving her job and focusing on explaining things. I hope it will work out and we’ll keep enjoying her tidbits of wisdom for years to come.

MEF19 Preview: Accelerate Your Digital Transformation

Communications leaders from around the world will gather at MEF19 to focus on accelerating the...

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Samsung introduces SSDs it claims will ‘never die’

Solid-state drives (SSDs) operate by writing to cells within the chip, and after so many writes, the cell eventually dies off and can no longer be written to. For that reason, SSDs have more actual capacity than listed. A 1TB drive, for example, has about 1.2TB of capacity, and as chips die off from repeated writes, new ones are brought online to keep the 1TB capacity.But that's for gradual wear. Sometimes SSDs just up and die completely, and without warning after a whole chip fails, not just a few cells. So Samsung is trying to address that with a new generation of SSD memory chips with a technology it calls fail-in-place (FIP).To read this article in full, please click here

Huawei Invests $1.5B in Developers, Teases AI Cloud

Huawei plans to invest $1.5 billion in developer tools and teased a bevy of AI cloud services and...

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Heavy Networking 472: Grappling With Wireless QoS

If you are deploying an enterprise QoS scheme, wireless QoS matters to you. On today's episode, we go through the basics of wireless QoS, covering some of the standards, terminology, and thinking required to get your head around how we can prioritize packets over a shared medium. Our guest is Ryan Adzima.

The post Heavy Networking 472: Grappling With Wireless QoS appeared first on Packet Pushers.

BrandPost: Sharpen Your Edge for Digital Transformation 2.0

In an age when every company is a technology business, digital transformation becomes imperative for enterprises to remain competitive. The first wave of digital transformation focused on moving workloads to the cloud. Enterprises undergoing large-scale digital transformations centralized data processing and storage by migrating entire operations to public or private cloud services. The recent influx of connected devices and the resulting data explosion is putting a strain on this model, and now companies are looking toward the next wave of transformation that will move them closer to the edge and their customers.Today, the explosion of IoT devices, autonomous vehicles, robotic systems, and other digital platforms has resulted in a deluge of data and a vast expansion at the edge of the network. This is putting a strain on the network and requires new ways of processing, analyzing, and acting on this data in real time. This intersection of new technologies and the massive amounts of data they produce put us at an inflection point when we consider the architectures that will help us manage the global economy.To read this article in full, please click here

When TCP sockets refuse to die

When TCP sockets refuse to die

While working on our Spectrum server, we noticed something weird: the TCP sockets which we thought should have been closed were lingering around. We realized we don't really understand when TCP sockets are supposed to time out!

When TCP sockets refuse to die

Image by Sergiodc2 CC BY SA 3.0

In our code, we wanted to make sure we don't hold connections to dead hosts. In our early code we naively thought enabling TCP keepalives would be enough... but it isn't. It turns out a fairly modern TCP_USER_TIMEOUT socket option is equally as important. Furthermore it interacts with TCP keepalives in subtle ways. Many people are confused by this.

In this blog post, we'll try to show how these options work. We'll show how a TCP socket can timeout during various stages of its lifetime, and how TCP keepalives and user timeout influence that. To better illustrate the internals of TCP connections, we'll mix the outputs of the tcpdump and the ss -o commands. This nicely shows the transmitted packets and the changing parameters of the TCP connections.

SYN-SENT

Let's start from the simplest case - what happens when one attempts to establish a connection to a server which discards inbound SYN packets?

$  Continue reading

Weekly Wrap: VMware CEO States IBM Paid Too Much for Red Hat

Weekly Wrap for Sept. 20, 2019: Kubernetes is central to the VMware-IBM rivalry; Cloudflare's IPO...

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© SDxCentral, LLC. Use of this feed is limited to personal, non-commercial use and is governed by SDxCentral's Terms of Use (https://www.sdxcentral.com/legal/terms-of-service/). Publishing this feed for public or commercial use and/or misrepresentation by a third party is prohibited.

Community Spotlight – Terry Slattery

Terry Slattery has a distinguished career in networking and is well known for his contributions to the Cisco CLI, being the second person to obtain the CCIE, providing consultation to many organizations, and the list goes on. If it’s happened in networking, there’s a very good chance that Terry has experience in it. Today Terry joins us to to talk about how he got started into networking and how he’s navigated a very successful career in networking.

Terry Slattery
Guest
Jordan Martin
Host

The post Community Spotlight – Terry Slattery appeared first on Network Collective.

It’s A Wireless Problem, Right?

How many times have your users come to your office and told you the wireless was down? Or maybe you get a phone call or a text message sent from their phone. If there’s a way for people to figure out that the wireless isn’t working they will not hesitate to tell you about it. But is it always the wireless?

Path of Destruction

During CWNP Wi-Fi Trek 2019, Keith Parsons (@KeithRParsons) gave a great talk about Tips, Techniques, and Tools for Troubleshooting Wireless LAN. It went into a lot of detail about how many things you have to look at when you start troubleshooting wireless issues. It makes your head spin when you try and figure out exactly where the issues all lie.

However, I did have to put up a point that I didn’t necessarily agree with Keith on:

Cascadia Code | Windows Command Line Tools For Developers

Another free and open monospaced font for code development this time from Microsoft. A key differentiator is the inclusion of ligatures for programming symbols (see below). Ligature support is rare among text editors and very rare for TTF encoded fonts. Its more common to see OTF ligatures supported. Also, no italics support yet. Creating fonts […]

The post Cascadia Code | Windows Command Line Tools For Developers appeared first on EtherealMind.

Opinionated Automation: Packaged, Extensible & Closed Systems

Network engineers for the last twenty years have created networks from composable logical constructs, which result in a network of some structure. We call these constructs “OSPF” and “MPLS”, but they all inter-work to some degree to give us a desired outcome. Network vendors have contributed to this composability and network engineers have come to expect it by default. It is absolute power from both a design and an implementation perspective, but it’s also opinionated. For instance, spanning-tree has node level opinions on how it should participate in a spanning-tree and thus how a spanning-tree forms, but it might not be the one you desire without some tweaks to the tie-breaker conditions for the root bridge persona.

Moving to the automated world primarily means carrying your existing understanding forward, adding a sprinkle of APIs to gain access to those features programmatically and then running a workflow, task or business process engine to compose a graph of those features to build your desired networks in a deterministic way.

This is where things get interesting in my opinion. Take Cisco’s ACI platform. It’s closed and proprietary in the sense of you can’t change the way it works internally. You’re lumped with a Continue reading

Privacy Regulations Are Evolving: Are Organizations Ready?

Privacy statements are both a point of contact to inform users about their data and a way to show governments the organization is committed to following regulations. On September 17, the Internet Society’s Online Trust Alliance (OTA) released Are Organizations Ready for New Privacy Regulations? The report, using data collected from the 2018 Online Trust Audit, analyzes the privacy statements of 1,200 organizations using 29 variables and then maps them to overarching principles from three privacy laws around the world: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States, and Personal Information Protection and Electronics Document Act (PIPEDA) in Canada. 

In many cases, organizations lack key concepts covering data sharing in their statements. Just 1% of organizations in our Audit disclose the types of third parties they share data with. This is a common requirement across privacy legislation. It is not as onerous as having to list all of the organizations; simply listing broad categories like “payment vendors” would suffice. 

Data retention is another area where many organizations are lacking. Just 2% had language about how long and why they would retain data. Many organizations have Continue reading

How to decommission a data center

About the only thing harder than building a data center is dismantling one, because the potential for disruption of business is much greater when shutting down a data center than constructing one.The recent decommissioning of the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) reveals just how complicated the process can be. More than 40 people were involved with the project, including staff from ORNL, supercomputer manufacturer Cray, and external subcontractors. Electricians were required to safely shut down the 9 megawatt-capacity system, and Cray staff was on hand to disassemble and recycle Titan’s electronics and its metal components and cabinets. A separate crew handled the cooling system. In the end, 350 tons of equipment and 10,800 pounds of refrigerant were removed from the site.To read this article in full, please click here

How to decommission a data center

About the only thing harder than building a data center is dismantling one, because the potential for disruption of business is much greater when shutting down a data center than constructing one.The recent decommissioning of the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) reveals just how complicated the process can be. More than 40 people were involved with the project, including staff from ORNL, supercomputer manufacturer Cray, and external subcontractors. Electricians were required to safely shut down the 9 megawatt-capacity system, and Cray staff was on hand to disassemble and recycle Titan’s electronics and its metal components and cabinets. A separate crew handled the cooling system. In the end, 350 tons of equipment and 10,800 pounds of refrigerant were removed from the site.To read this article in full, please click here

Video: The Need for Network Layers

After identifying some of the challenges every network solution must address (part 1, part 2, part 3) we tried to tackle an interesting question: “how do you implement this whole spaghetti mess in a somewhat-reliable and structured way?

The Roman Empire had an answer more than 2000 years ago: divide-and-conquer (aka “eating the elephant one bite at a time”). These days we call it layering and abstractions.

In the Need for Network Layers video I listed all the challenges we have to address, and then described how you could group them in meaningful modules (called networking layers).

You need free ipSpace.net subscription to watch the video, or a paid ipSpace.net subscriptions to watch the whole webinar.

Backup the data in AWS Elastic Block Store

A recent Amazon outage resulted in a small number of customers losing production data stored in their accounts. This, of course, led to typical anti-cloud comments that follows such events. The reality is that these customers data loss had nothing to do with cloud and everything to do with them not understanding the storage they were using and backing it up.Over Labor Day weekend there was a power outage in one of the availability zones in the AWS US-East-1 region.  Backup generators came on, but quickly failed for unknown reasons. Customers’ Elastic Block Store (EBS) data is replicated among multiple servers, but the outage affected multiple servers. While the bulk of data stored in EBS was fine or was able to be easily recovered after outage, .5 percent of the data could not be recovered. Customers among the .5 percent who did not have a backup of their EBS data actually lost data.To read this article in full, please click here