Worth Reading: You Can’t Buy…

You can’t buy a “routing protocol”. You don’t buy a “security strategy” or a “network management“. You don’t buy a “data centre”. All of these things are built or developed by a team of IT people and various vendor products or open source tools.

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Worth Reading: Routed Access

In this article, we will see what an enterprise deployment of what Cisco calls a “routed access layer” would look like with OSPF as the routing protocol.

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HL: In Theory

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Worth Reading: Open Container Project

One of the most meaningful announcements was the Open Container Project (OCP), a project led by Docker and CoreOS to establish an open standard for container formats. While this might sound boring, that’s also the point.

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Worth Reading: Data Center Efficiency

Remember that perfect efficiency is an unattainable goal; efficiency has to be economical, or else you might as well close up shop now.

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Highlight: Inside Cisco IOS Software Architecture

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Barcelona

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Worth Reading: Crypto Wars

By setting up a system in which it can access a backdoor, the government turns itself into a huge target for foreign governments and other malicious actors. Backdoors would be concerning enough from a civil-liberties perspective if they truly were limited to lawful use by the government. But the government’s own security vulnerabilities, laid bare by years of cyberattacks and leaks, show that even a well-intentioned FBI couldn’t prevent a backdoor from being exploited.

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False Dichotomy

Last week wasn’t a good one for the cause of network engineering. United Airlines grounded flights because of a router failure, the New York Stock Exchange stopped trading for several hours because of a technical problem, and the Wall Street Journal went off line for several hours due to a technical malfunction. How should engineers react to these sorts of large scale public outages? The first option, of course, is to flail our arms and run out of the room screaming. Panic is a lot of fun when you first engage, but over time it tends to get a little boring, so maybe panic isn’t the right solution here.

Another potential reaction is to jump on the “it’s too complex” bandwagon. sure, a lot of these systems are very complex — in fact, they’re probably too complex for the actual work they do. Complexity is required to solve hard problems; elegance is choosing the path with the least amount of complexity that will solve the problem. Far too often, in the engineering world, we choose the more complex path because of some imagined requirement that never actually materializes, or because we imagine a world where the solution we’re putting in Continue reading

Mailing List

I think I’ve finally fixed the mailing list to send an email of the posts here twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) — an attempt at balancing between spamming people and providing information about what’s going on at ‘net Work. Sign up here if you’re interested (the bottom half of the page).

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Review: Being Logical (Logical Thinking)

Being Logical
D. Q. McInerny

This review is a little off the beaten path for most engineering blogs, perhaps — but I consider logic to be one of those “must have skills” for engineers. Being able to pull an argument apart, to understand the concept of a syllogism and the flow of logic, along with the various logical fallacies, adds greatly to your ability to write and process arguments for and against technologies and solutions (as well as in larger life). For some time, I’ve been looking for a concise description of the formal logic system I’ve encountered in philosophy a number of times, and a description of the many logical fallacies I’ve encountered in everyday life. Being Logical comes as close to fulfilling my desire for such a book as any I’ve encountered in my search.

Although this book is a trim 129 pages, it covers logic on a wide scale. The problem space is divided into five part; part one is preparing the mind for logic, which includes learning to observe, matching ideas to facts, matching words to ideas, and being mindful of the origin of ideas. It’s fair to note, at this point, that this first section Continue reading

Worth Reading: Disruption

My point is that the industry is so focused on disrupting, on being first, that I’m not sure people are asking the right questions and considering the trade-offs. I see people repeating a lot of mistakes of the past and not doing their homework properly. They are reinventing the wheel just for the sake of disrupting.

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Don’t Trust Technology

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Worth Reading: Keys under the doormat

The question of strong cryptography appeared to be settled 15 years ago — but it wasn’t. Of late, FBI director James Comey has issued new calls for some sort of mandatory government access to plaintext…

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Worth Reading: Speeding up the Internet

New ideas for transport aren’t limited to protocols. If we could only repeal the laws of physics, we’d eliminate the speed of light as a limitation on electronic communications. Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to eliminate the speed of light limitation.

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Worth Reading: QoE and RAN Networks

To improve overall QoE, a holistic approach to network architecture is vital – one that takes into consider-ation conditions in both radio and transport domains, and that results in the creation of proactive measures for preventing congestion.

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CEF

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Refillable

People who wonder whether the glass is half empty or half full are missing the point. The glass is refillable.

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RP: Abstractions Fail

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Worth Listening: IPv6 Dual Stack on Packet Pushers

By the way, does IPv4 ever go away?

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