Worth Reading: What we lose when we photograph life instead of experiencing it

Increasingly, images have become a crucial part of communicating with others, receiving affirmation and documenting new experiences. And though it may seem that a barrage of colors and pixels and faces and scenery could only enrich our imaginations and enhance our engagement with the world, the opposite seems to be taking place. —Intellectual Takeout

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Chandelier

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Worth Reading: thinking about big data — part two

In Part One of this series of columns we learned about data and how computers can be used for finding meaning in large data sets. We even saw a hint of what we might call Big Data at Amazon.com in the mid-1990s, as that company stretched technology to observe and record in real time everything its tens of thousands of simultaneous users were doing. Pretty impressive, but not really Big Data, more like Bigish Data. —I, Cringely

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Worth Reading: Why the desire to label other opinions as ‘dumb’?

As you’ve by no doubt heard or read, America is becoming increasingly polarized. This polarization brings with it a pressure to circle the wagons with one’s ideological compatriots, and dismiss those on the other side of an issue as “dumb.” —Intellectual Takeout

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Worth Reading: Thinking about bid data

Big Data is Big News, a Big Deal, and Big Business, but what is it, really? What does Big Data even mean? To those in the thick of it, Big Data is obvious and I’m stupid for even asking the question. But those in the thick of Big Data find most people stupid, don’t you? So just for a moment I’ll speak to those readers who are, like me, not in the thick of Big Data. What does it mean? That’s what I am going to explore this week in what I am guessing will be three long columns. —I, Cringely

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Worth Reading: Who’s world is this?

On both sides of the Atlantic, we are witnessing the dramatic expansion of government hacking powers. In the United States, a proposed amendment to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure would permit the government to obtain a warrant, in certain circumstances, to hack unspecified numbers of electronic devices anywhere in the world. Meanwhile, across the pond, the British Parliament is currently debating the Investigatory Powers Bill, which (among many other things) would authorize the government to hack the devices of broad classes of people without geographic limitation. The exercise of these powers will have significant implications for the privacy and security of individuals around the world and therefore commands our attention. —Just Security

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Cisco Live: Midweek Impressions

I’m at Cisco Live this week in Las Vegas; forthwith, some observations, thoughts, and… a long rant.

First, if you’re here, look me up. I normally hang out around the Certification and/or Social areas when I’m not in meetings/etc. I’m pretty easy to find, so drop by and say hi. It’s been like old home week for me—reconnecting with people I’ve not seen in years, catching up and friendships, etc. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the people I’ve worked with over the years in terms of friendships offered and skills learned. Seriously.

Second, I’m speaking on Thursday afternoon about understanding and managing network complexity. I’m pretty certain the session isn’t full yet, so come by and listen. It’s a 90 minute investment that could change the way you think about network design and operation. Seriously.

Third, The content seems to be deep and interesting this year, as always. This brings me to my first contrary point, though—this industry needs a show that compares with Live in depth of technical material, but isn’t tied to a particular vendor. Are you listening, Interop? I know, it’s hard to talk deep technology in the modern networking world—which leads me to Continue reading

Worth Reading: The five styles of workload orchestration

Workload orchestration is what distinguishes the modern way of providing digital services from how it was done even five years ago. Many have asked, what’s so new about this stack compared with all the others? The answer is the orchestration of workloads. We can now think of the functions our servers perform and the services we provide to customers as workloads, rather than applications with brands, or virtual machines with golden masters and overwrite protection. —NewStack

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Worth Reading: Measuring IPv6 from the Internet’s core

Measuring the state of IPv6 deployment is difficult, particularly when there are so many different measurement tools out there offering different stats. APNIC Labs shows global IPv6 deployment at 6% while Google shows it at 12%, why such disparity? The answer is because they are measuring from different vantage points on the network. —APNIC

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BGP Code Dive (3)

This week, I want to do a little more housekeeping before we get into actually asking questions of the bgp code. First there is the little matter of an editor. I use two different editors most of the time, Notepad++ and Atom.

• Notepad++ is a lightweight, general purpose text editor that I use for a lot of different things, from writing things in XML, HTML, CSS, Python Javascript, C, and just about anything else. This is an open source project hosted on the Notepad++ web site with the code hosted at github.
• Atom is a more GUI oriented “programmer’s editor.” This is a more full featured editor, going beyond basic syntax highlighting into projects, plugins that pull diffs in side by side windows, and the like. I don’t really have a build environment set up right now, so I don’t know how it would interact with compiled code, but I assume it would probably have a lot of the tricks I’m used to, like being able to trace calls through the code, etc. Atom is available here.

I haven’t actually chosen one or the other—I tend to use both pretty interchangeably, so you’re likely to see screen shots from Continue reading

Worth Reading: What makes a network architecture or design good?

The defining quality of good network architecture is elegance. Elegance as a word has an ethereal abstract quality that we liken to what makes an artwork beautiful. However the definition of elegance gives us a clue to what the real defining quality of network architecture and design is: Complexity. —route-spf.net

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Worth Reading: IPJ June 2016

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DC Fabric Segment Routing Use Case (1)

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a special segment routing Networking Field Day. This set me to thinking about how I would actually use segment routing in a live data center. As always, I’m not so concerned about the configuration aspects, but rather with what bits and pieces I would (or could) put together to make something useful out of these particular 0’s and 1’s. The fabric below will be used as our example; we’ll work through this in some detail (which is why there is a “first part” marker in the title).

This is a Benes fabric, a larger variation of which which you might find in any number of large scale data center. In this network, there are many paths between A and E; three of them are marked out with red lines to give you the idea. Normally, the specific path taken by any given flow would be selected on a somewhat random basis, using a hash across various packet headers. What if I wanted to pin a particular flow, or set of flows, to the path outlined in green?

Let’s ask a different question first—why would I want to do such a thing? There are Continue reading

Worth Reading: Three questions to ask about DevOps measurement

Measurements and metrics are related ideas, but I make a distinction between the two. I use measurements when I talk about individual items that have numbers or values associated with them and metrics when I talk about measuring results or determining whether or not something is successful. For example, one measurement might be the frequency of releases, which could be used as a performance metric to determine whether you are getting new features to your customers more quickly. —NewStack

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Worth Reading: The lizard brain of lizardstresser

LizardStresser is a botnet originally written by the infamous Lizard Squad DDoS group. The source code was released publicly in early 2015, an act that encouraged aspiring DDoS actors to build their own botnets. Arbor Networks’ ASERT group has been tracking LizardStresser activity and observed two disturbing trends… Utilizing the cumulative bandwidth available to these IOT devices, one group of threat actors has been able to launch attacks as large as 400Gbps targeting gaming sites world-wide, Brazilian financial institutions, ISPs, and government institutions. -Arbor Networks

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Worth Reading: You don’t know as much as you think you do

We live in a world that requires people to know a lot of information. Depending on role we are required to know to varying depths. Shallow and wide or deep and narrow. No matter the combination the teams we are placed in have overlap in skills, knowledge and each person brings something of value. The simple reality is that no one knows everything. If you have an eidetic memory then kudos to you but the mere mortals amongst us do not. -Network Inferno

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Worth Reading: Independence from L2 data centers

We’ve all been there. That “non-disruptive” maintenance window that should “only be a blip”. You sit down at the terminal at 10pm expecting that adding a new server to the MLAG domain or upgrading a single switch will be a simple process, only to lose the rack of dual-attached servers and spend the rest of your Thursday night frantically trying to bring the cluster back online. If I never spend another evening troubleshooting an outage caused by MLAG, I’ll die happy! -Cumulus

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Absorbing DDoS with Communities

Distributed Denial of Service attacks can damage your business—and they can be difficult to manage or counter. While there are a number of tools available to counter DDoS attacks, particularly in the commercial space, and there are a number of widely available DDoS protection services, sometimes it’s useful to know how to counter a DDoS on your own. One option is to absorb attacks across a broader set of inbound nodes. Let’s use the network below to illustrate (though often the scale needs to be quite a bit larger for this solution to be useful in the real world).

Assume, for the moment, that the attacker is injecting a DDoS stream from the black hat, sitting just behind AS65004. There are customers located in AS65001, 2, 3, 4, and 5. For whatever reason, the majority of the attacker’s traffic is coming in to site C, through AS65003. Normally this is a result of an anycast based service (such as active-active data centers, or a web based service, or a DNS service), combined with roughly geographical traffic patterns. Even a DDoS attack from a mid sized or large’ish botnet, or reflection off a set of DNS servers, can end up being Continue reading

Worth Reading: Converged systems hype

Converged systems are a hot commodity in the IT sector these days. But it looks to us like the hype over various kinds of integrated systems that weld servers and storage together into preconfigured stacks including hyperconverged stacks that literally merge the compute and storage layers on the same servers – is just a bit bigger than the appetite for such iron in the datacenters of the world. -The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: What’s the deal with online journalism?

Not very long ago I started answering questions on Quora, the question-and-answer site. My answers are mainly about aviation because that’s my great hobby and one of the few things besides high tech that I really know a lot about. But there was a question last week about Internet news coverage that I felt deserved better answers than it was getting. So I contributed an answer that has been read, so far, only 388 times. I don’t like making a real effort that is so sparsely read. So here, with a little mild editing, is my answer to “What are the flaws in online journalism and media today?” And “How can they be addressed?” -I, Cringely

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