Exaggerating the End of NetEng

The argument around learning to code, it seems, always runs something like this:

We don’t need network engineers any longer, or we won’t in five years. Everything is going to be automated. All we’ll really need is coders who can write a python script to make it all work. Forget those expert level certifications. Just go to a coding boot camp, or get a good solid degree in coding, and you’ll be set for the rest of your life!

It certainly seems plausible on the surface. The market is pretty clearly splitting into definite camps—cloud, disaggregated, and hyperconverged—and this split is certainly going to drive a lot of change in what network engineers do every day. But is this idea of abandoning network engineering skills and replacing them wholesale with coding skills really viable?

To think this question through, it’s best to start with another one. Assume everyone in the world decides to become a coder tomorrow. Every automotive engineer and mechanic, every civil engineer and architect, every chef, and every grocer moves into coding. The question that should rise just at this moment is: what is it that’s being coded? Back end coders code database systems and business logic. Continue reading

Worth Reading: The economic model of Marai

Several media outlets have reported that a botnet based on the TR-064/TR-069 Mirai variant is being used to provide DDoS as a Service. These so-called Booter/Stresser or DDoS-for-hire services allow anyone willing to pay the price the ability to mount a DDoS attack against targets of their choice. Of course the fact that a botnet, Mirai-based or otherwise, is being used to make money should not come as a shock to anyone. Indeed, that is the whole purpose of this botnet. The economic model roughly mimics that of a mobile virtual network operator or MVNO. —Arbor

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Worth Reading: The bandwidth paradox

If consumers are always on, so is the data center. From mobile applications to wearables, the number of devices that are always connected continues to grow. Surprisingly, many consumers don’t understand that behind wicked-fast music downloads, YouTube video streaming or an instantaneous ride from Uber, data centers are at the forefront of this always-on movement. Without the compute capacity and agile power-management options, these services would simply be impossible. —Data Center Journal

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Green Doors

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Worth Reading: Broadcom’s two ASIC lines

Just like every kind of compute job cannot be handled by a single type of microprocessor, the diversity of networking tasks in the datacenters of the world require a variety of different switch and router ASICs to best manage those tasks. As the volume leader in the switching arena, Broadcom comes under intense competitive pressure and has to keep on its toes to provide enough variety in its switch chips to keep its rivals at bay. One way that Broadcom does this is by having two distinct switch ASIC lines. —The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: The new security normal

Today, the industry average time for finding an active attacker is about five months, reflecting the colossal failure of conventional security. The state of the union for federal security is that few if any non-defense agencies can find an active attacker on their network. Most cannot find a network intruder or a malicious insider, such as a rogue employee or contractor, working to steal or damage information or assets. Consider that the National Security Agency, the Office of Personnel Management and the FBI were breached along top security vendors and agencies. —MarketWatch

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Worth Reading: Sledgehammer DDoS

Monetization of DDoS attacks has been core to online crime way before the term cybercrime was ever coined. For the first half of the Internet’s life, DDoS was primarily a mechanism to extort money from targeted organizations. As with just about every Internet threat over time, it has evolved and broadened in scope and objectives. The new report by Forcepoint Security Labs covering their investigation of the Sledgehammer gamification of DDoS attacks is a beautiful example of that evolution. —CircleID

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Worth Reading: The private path to censorship

Governments have a legitimate objective in preventing the commission of terrorist acts, but security concerns can also motivate policies that jeopardize fundamental rights. Yesterday’s announcement comes after several years of demands from governments in the EU, the US, and around the world for these companies to do more to stop the spread of messages from terrorist organizations that seek to recruit individuals and inspire violent acts. Under this intense pressure, these companies have started a dangerous slide down the slippery slope to centralized censorship of speech online. —Center for Democracy and Technology

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On the ‘net: Looking at Openflow

Openflow is the “father of software defined networks” in the minds of many engineers. To understand Openflow, however, you cannot just look at the protocol itself; rather you must go back to the beginning, in the mists of old networking. It is important to start here: in the “old days,” when I was still taking network cases in the routing protocols team at a major vendor, when we wanted to understand how routing worked, we looked at the code. What is the point? Networking has always been about software control planes. So networks have always been built on software; hence the “software” in software defined networking (SDN) cannot have ever meant “building control planes in software,” because that is the way it has always been done. —ECI

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Worth Reading: DevOps and what’s in a name

As is normal in engineering endeavors, we often forget the purpose or the problem we are trying to solve and instead get mired in the details of the process or the tool. We tend to lose site that bringing DevOps together has the purpose of solving how to more rapidly deliver higher-quality, more secure products to our customers, so they can solve their problems and we stay ahead of our competitors. —Cloud Security Alliance

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Worth Reading: Hype driven development

HDD happens when a development team picks the “newest, hottest technology” to use on a project, based on how the technology is trending on Twitter, or on a number of enthusiastic blog posts or conference talks. A key symptom of HDD is that contrary to the hype, progress doesn’t speed up when the new tech is developed but just the opposite: work slows to a crawl. —The New Stack

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IPv6, DHCP, and Unintended Consequences

I ran into an interesting paper on the wide variety of options for assigning addresses, and providing DNS information, in IPv6, over at ERNW. As always, with this sort of thing, it started me thinking about the power of unintended consequences, particularly in the world of standardization. The authors of this paper noticed there are a lot of different options available in the realm of assigning addresses, and providing DNS information, through IPv6.

Alongside these various options, there are a number of different flags that are supposed to tell the host which of these options should, and which shouldn’t, be used, prioritized, etc. The problem is, of course, that many of these flags, and many of the options, are, well, optional, which means they may or may not be implemented across different versions of code and vendor products. Hence, combining various flags with various bits of information can have a seemingly random impact on the IPv6 addresses and DNS information different hosts actually use. Perhaps the most illustrative chart is this one—

Each operating system tested seems to act somewhat differently when presented with all possible flags, and all possible sources of information. As the paper notes, this can cause Continue reading

Worth Reading: W3C at the crossroads

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a hard decision to make: a coalition including the world’s top research institutions; organizations supporting blind users on three continents; security firms; blockchain startups; browser vendors and user rights groups have asked it not to hand control over web video to some of the biggest companies in the world. For their part, those multinational companies have asked the W3C to hand them a legal weapon they can use to shut down any use of online video they don’t like, even lawful fair use. —EFF

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Worth Reading: Network Time Protocol

Of these most important Internet protocols, NTP (Network Time Protocol) is the likely least understood and has the least attention and support. Until very recently, it was supported (part-time) by just one person — Harlen Stenn — “who had lost the root passwords to the machine where the source code was maintained (so that machine hadn’t received security updates in many years), and that machine ran a proprietary source-control system that almost no one had access to, so it was very hard to contribute to”. —CircleID

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snaproute Go BGP Code Dive (14): First Steps in Processing an Update

In the last post on this topic, we found the tail of the update chain. The actual event appears to be processed here—

case BGPEventUpdateMsg:
  st.fsm.StartHoldTimer()
  bgpMsg := data.(*packet.BGPMessage)
  st.fsm.ProcessUpdateMessage(bgpMsg)

—which is found around line 734 of fsm.go. The second line of code in this snippet is interesting; it’s a little difficult to understand what it’s actually doing. There are three crucial elements to figuring out what is going on here—

:=, in go, is a way of appending the information in a data structure with more information. So, for instance, if you do something like this—

a-string = "this is a"
a-string := " string"

The result, in a-string, is this is a string. Whatever else this snippet is doing, then, it is taking something out of the data structure, and appending it to the bgpMsg structure. What, precisely, is it taking from the data structure?

The * (asterisk) is a way to reference a pointer within a structure. We’ve not talked about pointers before, so it’s worth spending just a moment with them. The illustration below will help a bit.

Each letter in the string “this is a string” Continue reading

Worth Reading: Stacking software to support FPGA’s in the data center

Any substantial change requires a big payoff to be implemented because change is inherently risky. It doesn’t help that the method of programming FPGAs efficiently using VHDL and Verilog are so alien to Java and C programmers, and that the tools for porting code from such high level programming languages, often through an OpenCL parallel framework, down to the logic gates on an FPGA are not as efficient as doing the VHDL and Verilog by hand, from scratch, but these tools are getting better. And finally, the application development and runtime stacks common in the enterprise do not know what to do with FPGAs. —The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: FPGA Accelerated Cloud

FPGAs have been an emerging topic on the application acceleration front over the last couple of years, but despite increased attention around use cases in machine learning and other hot areas, hands have been tied due to simply on-boarding with both the hardware and software. —The Next Platform

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Sunset Over Salt Marsh

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Worth Reading: Car Makers Align with 5G

5G wireless technology has become a little like fully automated cars. Nearly every day some new study is forecasting an earlier than previously anticipated arrival of fully autonomous cars, while some respected expert is claiming full automation is decades away. With 19 automated fleets already plying controlled-use areas, I am inclined to buy the early onset assessment of automation vs. the over-the-horizon outlook from skeptics. —ITU Blog

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Worth Reading: Binge Watching Makes You Stupid

Binge is the new black. That’s what Netflix, and other media outlets tell us as they rev up for the holiday season. Are your in-laws too much? Kids driving you nuts? Had enough holiday cooking, cleaning, and entertaining? Well, take a break from real life and the stresses of the holidays and focus on something less confrontational: television. —Acculturated

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