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Category Archives for "Russ White"

Weekend Reads 122420

The easiest way to understand the concept is with an example. Consider a passive optical fiber network where up to 32 homes share the same neighborhood fiber. In the most common GPON technology, the customers on one of these neighborhood nodes (called a PON) share a total of 2.4 gigabits of download data.

The push to develop and deploy applications faster has evolved from simply a goal for developers to a business-level priority that affects every organization’s bottom line. To meet this goal, companies have begun to de-silo development, operations, and security, moving toward a DevSecOps model to deliver

In a survey of 603 free and open source software (FOSS) contributors, the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard University (LISH) discovered that the average FOSS developer only spent 2.3% of their time on improving the security of their code.

Chris Lewis joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they discuss how our access to knowledge is increasingly governed by click-wrap agreements that prevent users from ever owning things like books and music, and how this undermines the legal doctrine of “first sale” – which states that once Continue reading

On Important Things

I tend to be a very private person; I rarely discuss my “real life” with anyone except a few close friends. I thought it appropriate, though, in this season—both the season of the year and this season in my life—to post something a little more personal.

One thing people often remark about my personality is that I seem to be disturbed by very little in life. No matter what curve ball life might throw my way, I take the hit and turn it around, regain my sense of humor, and press forward into the fray more quickly than many expect. This season, combined with a recent curve ball (one of many—few people would suspect the path my life has taken across these 50+ years), and talking to Brian Keys in a recent episode of the Hedge, have given me reason to examine foundational principles once again.

How do I stay “up” when life throws me a curve ball?

Pragmatically, the worst network outage in the world is not likely to equal the stresses I’ve faced in the military, whether on the flight line or in … “other situations.” Life and death were immediately and obviously present in those times. Continue reading

Weekend Reads 121820

This is a rather oversized edition of the weekend reads… because I seem to have saved up a lot more links than usual.

There comes a time in every developer’s life (or daily routine, we’re not here to judge) where they have to go and fix a bug. Back in the days when I used to be a developer, I distinctly remember how each time I would go face to face with a bug, my favorite method to fix it was to add log lines. I mean, why not, right?

Cybersecurity researchers on Thursday disclosed details of a previously undiscovered in-memory Windows backdoor developed by a hacker-for-hire operation that can execute remotely malicious code and steal sensitive information from its targets in Asia, Europe, and the US.

The PC revolution started off life 35 years ago this week. Microsoft launched its first version of Windows on November 20th, 1985, to succeed MS-DOS. It was a huge milestone that paved the way for the modern versions of Windows we use today. While Windows 10 doesn’t look anything like Windows 1.0, it still has many of its original fundamentals like scroll bars, drop-down menus, icons, dialog boxes, and apps like Notepad Continue reading

Upcoming Webinar: How Routers Really Work

Just a gentle reminder that on Monday (just a few days from now) I’m teaching a three hour webinar over at Safari Books on How Routers Really Work. From the course description—

This training will peer into the internal components of a router, starting with an explanation of how a router switches packets. This walk through of a switching path, in turn, will be used as a foundation for explaining the components of a router, including the various tables used to build forwarding tables and the software components used to build these tables.

Register here if you’re interested.

The Hedge Podcast #64: Brian Keys and Burnout

Burnout stalks most network engineers—and most people in the world of information technology—striking at least once in every career, it seems, and often more than once. In this episode, Brian Keys joins Eyvonne Sharp, Tom Ammon, and Russ White to discuss his personal experience with burnout. The discussion then turns to general strategies and ideas for avoiding burnout on a day-to-day basis.

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The History of EARN, RARE, and European Networks (part 2)

European networks from the mid-1980’s to the late 2000’s underwent a lot of change, bolstered by the rise and fall of America Online, the laying of a lot of subsea cables, and the creation of several organizations, including EARN and RARE, to bolster the spread and use of the Internet. Daniele Bovio joins Donald Sharp and Russ White on this episode of the History of Networking to give us a good overall perspective of this history.

You can find more information about the history of EARN at https://earn-history.net.

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Pulling Back the Curtains

One of the major sources of complexity in modern systems is the simple failure to pull back the curtains. From a recent blog post over at the ACM—

The Wizard of Oz was a charlatan. You’d be surprised, too, how many programmers don’t understand what’s going on behind the curtain either. Some years ago, I was talking with the CTO of a company, and he asked me to explain what happens when you type a URL into your browser and hit enter. Do you actually know what happens? Think about it for a moment.

Yegor describes three different reactions when a coder faces something unexpected when solving a problem.

Throw in the towel. Just give up on solving the problem. This is fairly uncommon in the networking and programming fields, so I don’t have much to say here.

Muddle through. Just figure out how to make it work by whatever means necessary.

Open the curtains and build an excellent solution. Learn how the underlying systems work, understand how to interact with them, and create a solution that best takes advantage of them.

The first and third options are rare indeed; it is the second solution that seems to dominate our Continue reading

Weekend Reads 121120

Giant tech companies have come under a great deal of well-deserved criticism from across the political spectrum on a variety of concerns over their actions. On market power, privacy, political bias and disinformation, they are under a microscope. One area where their actions deserve even more scrutiny — and opposition — is their war on the patent rights of inventors and startups.

If we look at previous mobile generations and perhaps start at 3G, we can see that with this technology, it became possible to access the Internet — however that was far from adequate for the technology explosion that happened around smartphones in the late 00s.

The Data Center Frontier Show podcast tells the story of the data center industry and its future. Our podcast is hosted by Rich Miller, editor of Data Center Frontier, who is your guide to the ongoing digital transformation.

Working remotely was growing more common even before the coronavirus pandemic accelerated the trend. As workers increasingly settle into their home offices, they still need access to company networks and office hardware — particularly printers. In fact, the pandemic led to a spike in the sale of home office printers, according to Deloitte.

In a Continue reading

The Hedge Episode 63: Anycast with Andree Toonk

Anycast is a bit of a mystery to a lot of network engineers. What is it, and what is it used for? Andree Toonk joins Tom and Russ on this episode of the Hedge to discuss the many uses of anycast, particularly in the realm of the Domain Name Service (DNS). Andree helped build the OpenDNS network and service, so he has deep experience with anycast routing on the DFZ.

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Current Work in BGP Security

I’ve been chasing BGP security since before the publication of the soBGP drafts, way back in the early 2000’s (that’s almost 20 years for those who are math challenged). The most recent news largely centers on the RPKI, which is used to ensure the AS originating an advertisements is authorized to do so (or rather “owns” the resource or prefix). If you are not “up” on what the RPKI does, or how it works, you might find this old blog post useful—its actually the tenth post in a ten post series on the topic of BGP security.

Recent news in this space largely centers around the ongoing deployment of the RPKI. According to Wired, Google and Facebook have both recently adopted MANRS, and are adopting RPKI. While it might not seem like autonomous systems along the edge adopting BGP security best practices and the RPKI system can make much of a difference, but the “heavy hitters” among the content providers can play a pivotal role here by refusing to accept routes that appear to be hijacked. This not only helps these providers and their customers directly—a point the Wired article makes—this also helps the ‘net in a larger way Continue reading

Weekend Reads 120420

CrowdSec is an open source security engine that analyzes visitor behavior and provides an adapted response to all kinds of attacks. It parses logs from any source and applies heuristic scenarios to identify aggressive behavior and protect against most attack classes.

The “network perimeter” is an increasingly meaningless term; the perimeter is everywhere and the network is constantly interacting with employees, workloads and even the networks of both suppliers and customers. Integration enables success, but it also means that prevention of information security compromise events.

As cryptographic analysis and related technologies advance, the signing algorithms at the heart of DNSSEC have to keep up. Moritz Müller and colleagues take a look at barriers on the road to more secure algorithms and discuss ways to make the journey faster.

When a website you visit asks permission to send notifications and you approve the request, the resulting messages that pop up appear outside of the browser. For example, on Microsoft Windows systems they typically show up in the bottom right corner of the screen — just above the system clock. These so-called “push notifications” rely on an Internet standard designed to work similarly across different operating systems and web browsers.

Open source Continue reading

BGP Training on Ignition

The first hour of material in my new BGP course over at Ignition dropped this week. I’m not going to talk about configuration and other operational things—this is all about understanding how BGP works, why it works that way, and thinking about design. This course will apply to cloud, Internet edge, DC fabric, and other uses of BGP. From the official site:

BGP is one of the fundamental protocols for routing traffic across the Internet. This course, taught by networking expert and network architect Russ White, is designed to take you from BGP basics to understanding BGP at scale. The 6-hour course will be divided into several modules. Each module will contain multiple video courses of approximately 15 minutes each that drill into key concepts. The first module contains four videos that describe how BGP works. They cover basics including reachability, building loop-free paths, BGP convergence, intra-AS models, and route reflectors.

Available here.

The Hedge Podcast #62: Jacob Hess and the Importance of History

At first glance, it would seem like the history of a technology would have little to do with teaching that technology. Jacob Hess of NexGenT joins us in this episode of the Hedge to help us understand why he always includes the history of a technology when teaching it—a conversation that broadened out into why learning history is important for all network engineers.

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You can find the history of networking here.

Data Center Master Classes

I’m doing a series of three master classes through Juniper on various DC fabric topics—

Join Juniper’s Russ White, a widely published 30-year network engineering veteran, in a three-part masterclass exploring the data center. Choose from classes on data center fabric, physical topologies, or data center security.

You can register here.

From the schedule—

  • Class 1: Data Center Fabric, December 2, 12 PM EST
  • Class 2: Physical Topologies, January 13, 12 PM EST
  • Class 3: Security in the Data Center, February 10, 12 PM EST

The EXPERIENCE HAS SHOWN THAT Keyword (RFC2915, Rule 4)

The world of information technology is filled, often to overflowing, with those who “know better.” For instance, I was recently reading an introduction to networking in a very popular orchestration system that began with the declaration that routing was hard, and therefore this system avoided routing. The document then went on to describe a system of moving packets around using multiple levels of Network Address Translation (NAT) and centrally configured policy-based routing (or filter-based forwarding) that was clearly simpler than the distributed protocols used to run large-scale networks. I thought, for a moment, of writing the author and pointing out the system in question had merely reinvented routing in a rather inefficient and probably broken way, but I relented. Why? Because I know RFC2915, rule 4, by heart:

Some things in life can never be fully appreciated nor understood unless experienced firsthand. Some things in networking can never be fully understood by someone who neither builds commercial networking equipment nor runs an operational network.

Ultimately, the people who built this system will likely not listen to me; rather, they are going to have to experience the pain caused by large-scale failures for themselves before they will listen. Many network Continue reading

Innovation Myths

Innovation has gained a sort-of mystical aura in our world. Move fast and break stuff. We recognize and lionize innovators in just about every way possible. The result is a general attitude of innovate or die—if you cannot innovate, then you will not progress in your career or life. Maybe it’s time to take a step back and bust some of the innovation myths created by this near idolization of innovation.

You can’t innovate where you are. Reality: innovation is not tied to a particular place and time. “But I work for an enterprise that only uses vendor gear… Maybe if I worked for a vendor, or was deeply involved in open source…” Innovation isn’t just about building new products! You can innovate by designing a simpler network that meets business needs, or by working with your vendor on testing a potential new product. Ninety percent of innovation is just paying attention to problems, along with a sense of what is “too complex,” or where things might be easier.

You don’t work in open source or open standards? That’s not your company’s problem, that’s your problem. Get involved. It’s not just about protocols, anyway. What about certifications, training, and Continue reading

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There are a lot of factors to consider when investing in a home automation ecosystem. In my first article in this series, I explained why I picked Home Assistant, and in this article, I’ll explain some of the foundational issues and technologies in home automation, which may influence how you approach and configure your Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Speculation in one form of another has an ancient and honorable history. It not only creates entrepreneurial activity but fuels markets for selling wares and offering services, but also generates competition for consumers and wars over loyalty. The commercialization of the Internet in the 1990s, which extended market activity into virtual (cyber) space, has many of the virtues of the actual but also its vices: cheating and fraud, and other skullduggery.

Verizon recently conducted a trial of quantum key distribution technology, which is the first generation of quantum encryption. Quantum cryptography is being developed as the next-generation encryption technique that should protect against hacking from quantum computers.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab security and privacy institute have devised what they say is the world’s fastest open source intrusion detection and prevention system (IDS/IPS).

Case in point: a broken soap dispenser. Continue reading

The Hedge Podcast #61: Pascal Thubert and the RAW Working Group

RAW is a new working group recently chartered by the IETF to work on:

…high reliability and availability for IP connectivity over a wireless medium. RAW extends the DetNet Working Group concepts to provide for high reliability and availability for an IP network utilizing scheduled wireless segments and other media, e.g., frequency/time-sharing physical media resources with stochastic traffic: IEEE Std. 802.15.4 timeslotted channel hopping (TSCH), 3GPP 5G ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC), IEEE 802.11ax/be, and L-band Digital Aeronautical Communications System (LDACS), etc. Similar to DetNet, RAW will stay abstract to the radio layers underneath, addressing the Layer 3 aspects in support of applications requiring high reliability and availability.

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The History of EARN, RARE, and European Networks (part 1)

European networks from the mid-1980’s to the late 2000’s underwent a lot of change, bolstered by the rise and fall of America Online, the laying of a lot of subsea cables, and the creation of several organizations, including EARN and RARE, to bolster the spread and use of the Internet. Daniele Bovio joins Donald Sharp and Russ White on this episode of the History of Networking to give us a good overall perspective of this history.

You can find more information about the history of EARN at https://earn-history.net.

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