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Intel pulls the plug on Omni-Path networking fabric architecture

Intel’s battle to gain ground in the high-performance computing (HPC) market isn’t going so well. The Omni-Path Architecture it had pinned its hopes on has been scrapped after one generation.An Intel spokesman confirmed to me that the company will no longer offer Intel OmniPath Architecture 200 (OPA200) products to customers, but it will continue to encourage customers, OEMs, and partners to use OPA100 in new designs. “We are continuing to sell, maintain, and support OPA100. We actually announced some new features for OPA100 back at International Supercomputing in June,” the spokesperson said via email.[ Learn who's developing quantum computers. ] Intel said it continues to invest in connectivity solutions for its customers and that the recent acquisition of Barefoot Networks is an example of Intel’s strategy of supporting end-to-end cloud networking and infrastructure. It would not say if Barefoot’s technology would be the replacement for OPA.To read this article in full, please click here

2019 Indigenous Connectivity Summit Training: Empowering Communities to Create Connections on Their Own Terms

Indigenous communities across North America are working to bridge the digital divide.

Each year the Indigenous Connectivity Summit (ICS) brings together community leaders, network operators, policymakers, and others to talk about new and emerging networks and the policies that impact them. During the two-day Summit, people from across the United States, Canada, and the rest of the world share best practices, challenges, and success stories – and learn how they can work together when they return home to solve connectivity challenges in Indigenous communities.

This year, we’ll be in Hilo, Hawaii from November 12-15.

But that’s not nearly enough time to cover everything, especially with close to 1,000 amazing participants (200 in-person and 700 online) ready to share their stories and create new connections.

So we’re trying something new. As we’ve done before, the ICS will still be split into two parts: a two-day training and a two-day event. But this year, participants can also attend a series of two distinct virtual training sessions before the event in Hawaii: Community Networks and Policy and Advocacy.

These sessions will allow participants to spend time over the course of several weeks getting in-depth information about two of the topics we spend Continue reading

Evolution of the internet: Celebrating 50 years since Arpanet

Arpanet carried its first message on October 29, 1969, laying the foundation for today’s networked world. Fifty years later, more than 4 billion people have internet access, and the number of devices connected to IP networks is more than double the global population. Here’s a look at some key milestones in the history of the internet and  projections for its future growth.Arpanet, precursor to the internet The name Arpanet came from the U.S. military arm that funded it, the Advanced Research Projects Agency. When Arpanet was created, it connected five sites: UCLA, Stanford, UC Santa Barbara, the University of Utah and BBN Technologies.To read this article in full, please click here

Network Break 246: Cloudflare Dumps 8chan; Cisco Settles Whistleblower Suit

This week's Network Break examines Cloudflare's decision to drop 8Chan, analyzes Cisco's settlement of a security-related whistleblower suit the company fought for eight years, discusses a new VMware/Google cloud partnership, reviews the latest financial news from tech vendors, and more.

The post Network Break 246: Cloudflare Dumps 8chan; Cisco Settles Whistleblower Suit appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Week in Internet News: Capital One Breach Affects Over 100 Million

Millions and millions served: More than 100 million people were affected by a massive data breach at banking and credit card company Capital One, Krebs on Security says. The stolen data included about 140,000 U.S. Social Security numbers and approximately 80,000 bank account numbers, and about 1 million Social Insurance Numbers for Canadian credit card customers. A former software engineer has been arrested and accused of stealing the data. The breach is one of the 10 largest ever, USA Today says.

Here we go again: The so-called Five Eyes spy agencies are again calling on tech vendors to allow law enforcement agencies access to encrypted material, Reuters reports. Encryption should not come at the expense of the public’s safety, the five countries argued, even though many security experts say encryption backdoors will hurt public safety. Meanwhile, the U.S and U.K. are specifically targeting encryption in WhatsApp, Forbes says.

Expanded access: Cuba has brought Internet access to private homes and businesses, the New York Times reports. The Cuban government has put into effect a new set of regulations that seek to expand Internet access across the country. The regulations permit the creation of private wired and WiFi internet Continue reading

Is your enterprise software committing security malpractice?

Back when this blog was dedicated to all things Microsoft I routinely railed against the spying aspects of Windows 10. Well, apparently that’s nothing compared to what enterprise security, analytics, and hardware management tools are doing.An analytics firm called ExtraHop examined the networks of its customers and found that their security and analytic software was quietly uploading information to servers outside of the customer's network. The company issued a report and warning last week.ExtraHop deliberately chose not to name names in its four examples of enterprise security tools that were sending out data without warning the customer or user. A spokesperson for the company told me via email, “ExtraHop wants the focus of the report to be the trend, which we have observed on multiple occasions and find alarming. Focusing on a specific group would detract from the broader point that this important issue requires more attention from enterprises.”To read this article in full, please click here

Is your enterprise software committing security malpractice?

Back when this blog was dedicated to all things Microsoft I routinely railed against the spying aspects of Windows 10. Well, apparently that’s nothing compared to what enterprise security, analytics, and hardware management tools are doing.An analytics firm called ExtraHop examined the networks of its customers and found that their security and analytic software was quietly uploading information to servers outside of the customer's network. The company issued a report and warning last week.ExtraHop deliberately chose not to name names in its four examples of enterprise security tools that were sending out data without warning the customer or user. A spokesperson for the company told me via email, “ExtraHop wants the focus of the report to be the trend, which we have observed on multiple occasions and find alarming. Focusing on a specific group would detract from the broader point that this important issue requires more attention from enterprises.”To read this article in full, please click here

How to get the most out of network performance-management tools

(Editor’s note: Enterprise Management Associates took a look at how individual organizations use multiple network performance management (NPM) tools and how they try to integrate them to improve efficiency. In this article, EMA’s research director for network management Shamus McGillicuddy presents findings from “Network Performance Management for Today’s Digital Enterprise,” a recent survey of 250 network managers that suggests best practices for dealing with this issue.)The typical IT organization has three to six network performance management (NPM) tools installed today, and if they remain siloed, network operations will be fragmented and inefficient – a persistent challenge for network managers for many years.To read this article in full, please click here

Terminating Service for 8Chan

The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio are horrific tragedies. In the case of the El Paso shooting, the suspected terrorist gunman appears to have been inspired by the forum website known as 8chan. Based on evidence we've seen, it appears that he posted a screed to the site immediately before beginning his terrifying attack on the El Paso Walmart killing 20 people.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Nearly the same thing happened on 8chan before the terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. The El Paso shooter specifically referenced the Christchurch incident and appears to have been inspired by the largely unmoderated discussions on 8chan which glorified the previous massacre. In a separate tragedy, the suspected killer in the Poway, California synagogue shooting also posted a hate-filled “open letter” on 8chan. 8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate.

8chan is among the more than 19 million Internet properties that use Cloudflare's service. We just sent notice that we are terminating 8chan as a customer effective at midnight tonight Pacific Time. The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if Continue reading

Pomodoro Timer with Esp8266 ,micropython and slack – a small weekend project

 

Hi All,

Pomodoro technique is really effective, more than the technique it’s more or less like a good stress buster to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique

There are few problems with the timer management

1.  It’s impractical for me to manually add 25-minute timer every time

2. I can do a small script but again my computer should always be on

3. Use some app or use a timer with sound (both of them are really disturbing for myself and also colleagues around me)

What did I use

  1. With anything involving DIY/IoT, there are two important aspects – It should be small and portable and secondly, cost should below.

Components Used :

  1. ESP8266
  2. 0.96Inch 128×64 OLED display (Pictures below)
  3. Micropython ( I could have gone with C++ but honestly I don’t know the language, hence I had to go through a lot of pain to make it work in microphone)
  4. Slack for daytime notifications about timer stages

Challenges :

  1. How do I make sure I don’t look at the clock every 25 minutes? Sound is not an option, so I used a slack webhook to notify me
  2. Code was big and hence there were memory allocation issues in Continue reading

BrandPost: Managed or DIY SD-WAN? Survey Reveals Lessons from Early Adopters

When IT decision-makers research new technologies or products, the opinions of their peers often carry more weight than recommendations by vendors and industry pundits.  That’s why Frost & Sullivan is sharing the results of our 2018 SD-WAN survey. The survey provides insights from IT leaders across a range of industries and company sizes about their SD-WAN decisions and deployments.To read this article in full, please click here

Heavy Networking 463: Under The Hood Of 400G Ethernet With Cisco (Sponsored)

400G Ethernet switches will ship by the end of 2019. We get under the hood of the fastest-ever version of Ethernet to find out how it works, the challenges of building the gear, differences between QSFP-DD and OSFP optics, and more. Our guests are Ray Nering and Lane Wigley of Cisco, the sponsor for today's podcast.

The post Heavy Networking 463: Under The Hood Of 400G Ethernet With Cisco (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Conference Packing – The Little Things

It seems like conference season never really ends. Between RSA, Cisco Live, Black Hat, and VMworld, I’m always running around to something. I enjoy being able to meet new people and talk to companies at these events but I also find that a little bit of planning ahead helps immensely.

There’s always a lot of discussion from people about what to pack for a conference. There have been some great posts written about it, like this one from Bob McCouch in 2014. He definitely covers all the important stuff that people would want to know, such as comfortable shoes and a bag big enough to carry extra things just in case you come back with enough fidget spinners to sink an aircraft carrier.

However, I’ve found in recent years that the difference between just surviving a conference and really being prepared involves a few extra items I never thought I’d need to bring back when I first started doing this in 2006. Maybe it’s the Scoutmaster in me, but being prepared has gone from being a suggestion to a necessity. And here are a few of those little necessities that I have found I can’t live without.

First? Aid.

I’ve Continue reading

Xilinx closes SolarFlare purchase, promises high-performance networking

Network acceleration appears to be all the rage these days, what with Nvidia acquiring Mellanox, the advent of High Bandwidth Memory 2E targeting networking chips, and now Xilinx closing of its acquisition of low-latency network provider SolarFlare.SolarFlare makes a high-speed network interface card (NIC) using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to build SmartNICs sold under the X2 brand. These PCI Express network interface cards run network, storage, and compute acceleration, offloading that work from the CPU. SolarFlare also develops application acceleration software to fully utilize the cards.To read this article in full, please click here

Connection Restored

I was embarrassed to realize recently that it’s been well over two years since my last blog post. Life has a way of getting away from you, I suppose. But I’ve decided to try and reboot the blog, and hopefully get back to writing regularly. Let me kick things off my sharing what I’ve been up to recently.

Goodbye, DigitalOcean!

After nearly five years working at DigitalOcean, I made the difficult decision to part ways with the company. In my time there, I was fortunate to work with an amazing team, and witness the truly amazing evolution of a startup company from niche player to major cloud provider. Most of all, I’m thankful to DigitalOcean for the opportunity my role provided in extending from traditional network engineering into development and automation. I’ll miss working with my DO team, but I’m excited to see where the future will take them.

Continue reading · 1 comment

Securing BGP on the host with the RPKI

An increasingly popular design for a data-center network is BGP on the host: each host ships with a BGP daemon to advertise the IPs it handles and receives the routes to its fellow servers. Compared to a L2-based design, it is very scalable, resilient, cross-vendor and safe to operate.1 Take a look at “L3 routing to the hypervisor with BGP” for a usage example.

Spine-leaf fabric two spine routers, six leaf routers and nine physical hosts. All links have a BGP session established over them. Some of the servers have a speech balloon expliciting the IP prefix they want to handle.
BGP on the host with a spine-leaf IP fabric. A BGP session is established over each link and each host advertises its own IP prefixes.

While routing on the host eliminates the security problems related to Ethernet networks, a server may announce any IP prefix. In the above picture, two of them are announcing 2001:db8:cc::/64. This could be a legit use of anycast or a prefix hijack. BGP offers several solutions to improve this aspect and one of them is to leverage the features around the RPKI infrastructure.

Short introduction to the RPKI​

On the Internet, BGP is mostly relying on trust. This contributes to various incidents due to operator errors, like the one that affected Cloudflare a few months ago, or to malicious attackers, like the hijack of Amazon Continue reading

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