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Category Archives for "Russ White"

On the Web: Openfabric at IPspace

I was over at ipspace to talk to Ivan and several other folks about openfabric. This is one of those situations where… Well, the algorithm openfabric uses to calculate fabric location has changed slightly in the last week. Welcome to the world of networking technology. ?

As always, we started with the “what’s wrong with what we have right now, like using BGP as a better IGP” question, resulting in “BGP is becoming the trash can of the Internet”. You can probably guess the next set of intro questions: “Do we need policies and traffic engineering in a high-speed data center fabric?” Finally, we got to discussing OpenFabric, starting with how OpenFabric uses link-state database to modify IS-IS flooding behavior and thus reduces the total amount of flooding in a data center fabric. Next step: how do you know where it’s safe to reduce flooding? You have to figure out whether you’re a leaf or spine, and there are two ways in OpenFabric to solve that challenge.

Whatever is vOLT-HA?

Many network engineers find the entire world of telecom to be confusing—especially as papers are peppered with a lot of acronyms. If any part of the networking world is more obsessed with acronyms than any other, the telecom world, where the traditional phone line, subscriber access, and network engineering collide, reigns as the “king of the hill.”

Recently, while looking at some documentation for the CORD project, which stands for Central Office Rearchitected as a Data Center, I ran across an acronym I had not seen before—vOLT-HA. An acronym with a dash in the middle—impressive! But what is, exactly? To get there, we must begin in the beginning, with a PON.

There are two kinds of optical networks in the world, Active Optical Networks (AONs), and Passive Optical Networks (PONs). The primary difference between the two is whether the optical gear used to build the network amplifies (or even electronically rebuilds, or repeats) the optical signal as it passes through. In AONs, optical signals are amplified, while ins PONs, optical signals are not amplified. This means that in a PON, the optical equipment can be said to be passive, in that it does not modify the optical signal in Continue reading

Weekend Reads 042018: Mostly DNS Security Stuff

For many, the conversation about online privacy centers around a few high-profile companies, and rightly so. We consciously engage with their applications and services and want to know who else might access our information and how they might use it. But there are other, less obvious ways that accessing the World Wide Web exposes us. In this post we will look at how one part of the web’s infrastructure, the Domain Name System (DNS), “leaks” your private information and what you can do to better protect your privacy and security. Although DNS has long been a serious compromise in the privacy of the web, we’ll discuss some simple steps you can take to improve your privacy online. —Stan Adams @CDT

Cloudflare, the internet security and performance services company, announced a new service called “Spectrum.” The service gets its name from the fact that Cloudflare aims to offer DDoS protection for the whole “spectrum” of ports and protocols for its enterprise customers. @Tom’s Hardware

Security researchers have been warning about an ongoing malware campaign hijacking Internet routers to distribute Android banking malware that steals users’ sensitive information, login credentials and the secret code for two-factor authentication. In order to trick Continue reading

Worth Reading: DevOps and component chaos

Modern software development is trending more toward a componentized approach because developers would rather assemble something using a variety of well-built pieces of third-party code than reinvent the wheel every time they create something new. The approach has done wonders for speed and agility, but it’s increasing a lot of enterprise attack surfaces because too few organizations are keeping up with the vulnerabilities these components pose. —Ericka Chickowski @Dark Reading

Worth Reading: White box switching

White box switching seems to be all the networking hype. For some in-depth research, check out this podcast from packet pushers about ATT making its move into white box switching. Cisco is also committed to offering a decoupled version of IOS-XR from Cisco hardware to enable running their NOS on OCP (open compute project) compliant hardware aka “white box switching.” Fascinating stuff, but what’s the big deal? Well, I’m going to try and make a comparison. —Javi Isolis

OSPF Topology Transparent Zones

Anyone who has worked with OSPF for any length of time has at least heard of areas—but perhaps before diving into Topology Transparent Zones (TTZs), a short review is in order.

In this diagram, routers A and B are in area 0, routers C and D are Area Border Routers (ABRs), and routers E, F, G, H, and K are all in area 1. The ABRs, C and D, do not advertise the existence of E, F, G, H, or K to the routers in area 0, nor the links to or between any of those routers. Any reachable destinations in area 1 are advertised using a em>summary LSA, or a type 3 LSA, towards A and B. From the perspective of A and B, 100::/64 and 101::/64 would be advertised by C and D as directly connected destinations, using the cost from C and D to each of these two destinations, based on a summary LSA.

What if you wanted to place H and K in their own area, with G as an ABR, behind the existing area 1? You cannot do this in OSPF using any form of a standard flooding domain, or area. There is no way Continue reading

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