Worth Reading: The Costs and Concerns of Cloud

Moving large-scale enterprise operations into the cloud is not a decision to be made lightly. There are engineering and financial considerations, and the process of determining the costs pros and cons of such a move is significantly more complex than simply comparing the expense of running a workload on-premises or in a public cloud. —Jeffrey Burt @ The Next Platform

Worth Reading: Dim Fiber

Perhaps you have not yet heard the term “dim fiber services”. If so, allow me to introduce you to a concept that is growing in popularity among fiber network owners. Dim services fall in between lit services and dark fiber services (hence the name) and provide network operators with an additional revenue stream while providing end users a more transparent and flexible service choice. &#8212s;Scott Wilkinson @ ECI

Reaction: AT&T’s Paper on dNOS

The AT&T White Paper: What they get Right, what they get Wrong

AT&T recently published a paper on dNOS, an open, disaggregated, Network Operating System for any kind of hardware. They list three primary purposes for their effort at helping the networking industry build an open source dNOS:

• To improve the rate of innovation and introduction of new features
• To provide more flexibility in network design
• To reduce costs where possible by taking advantage of purchasing “at scale”

How could disaggregation help with these three goals? The first of these, the rate of innovation, is really about packaging and perception, but we often forget that perception is a large part of innovation. If software developers always believe they must wait on the hardware, and hardware developers always feel like they must wait on the software, then the two teams develop an interlocking system that can slow down the pace at which either team can operate. One certain way to drive innovation is to break up such interconnected systems, allowing each one to use the features of the other in ways not originally intended, or drive the other team to create new features through competition. For instance, if the software team Continue reading

Worth Reading: Battle of the Infinibands

When it comes to HPC, compute is like the singers in a rock band, making all of the noise and soaking up most of the attention. But the network that lashes the compute together is literally the beat of the drums and the thump of the bass that keeps everything in synch and allows for the harmonies of the singers to come together at all. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

Worth Reading: Big Data and Social Change

Our authors will argue the big data challenge is the not technical problem of moving the maximum amount of bits in the minimum amount of time, but the scientific challenge of formulating methods to represent the complex and entangled systems that we must design and manage to run the modern world. This goes beyond “computational analytics” that abstract statistics from large data sets; “data mining” that discovers useful structures in combined data streams; and “visual analytics” that display multisource data as ingenious maps, color-coded images, and multidimensional videos to aid understanding and inform decisionmaking. —David Sousa-Rodrigues @ ACM

Do What You Love?

Worth Reading: VXLAN Designs

With VXLAN design, the easiest thing to overlook is how communication occurs between subnets. I think many times, network engineers take for granted that our traffic will flow in a VXLAN environment. And it’s also easy to get confused when trying to figure out traffic routing path between your overlay and underlay. —Rama Darbha @ Cumulus

Computer Networking Problems and Solutions on Sale

For anyone who would like to pick up a copy of Ethan and I’s latest work, it’s currently on prepublication special over at InformIT. Click on the image below for the sale price.

Pre-Order My Computer Networking Problems & Solutions Book And Save 40%

I co-authored Computer Networking Problems And Solutions with Russ White. The nice folks at InformIT.com are accepting pre-orders of the book and ebook at 40% off until December 16, 2017. Go get yourself a copy of this short 832 page read via this link containing all of InformIT’s titles coming soon.

Or, if you use the book’s product page instead of the “coming soon” link above, use code PREORDER to get the discount.

All “coming soon” titles on sale at InformIT: http://informit.com/comingsoon

Product Page for Computer Networking Problems & Solutions: http://www.informit.com/store/computer-networking-problems-and-solutions-an-innovative-9781587145049

Pre-Order My Computer Networking Problems & Solutions Book And Save 40%

I co-authored Computer Networking Problems And Solutions with Russ White. The nice folks at InformIT.com are accepting pre-orders of the book and ebook at 40% off until December 16, 2017. Go get yourself a copy of this short 832 page read via this link containing all of InformIT’s titles coming soon.

Or, if you use the book’s product page instead of the “coming soon” link above, use code PREORDER to get the discount.

All “coming soon” titles on sale at InformIT: http://informit.com/comingsoon

Product Page for Computer Networking Problems & Solutions: http://www.informit.com/store/computer-networking-problems-and-solutions-an-innovative-9781587145049

Weekend Reads: The Relay Box Attack

West Midlands Police believe it is the first time the high-tech crime has been caught on camera. Relay boxes can receive signals through walls, doors and windows but not metal. The theft took just one minute and the Mercedes car, stolen from the Elmdon area of Solihull on 24 September, has not been recovered. @BBCWest Midlands Police believe it is the first time the high-tech crime has been caught on camera. Relay boxes can receive signals through walls, doors and windows but not metal. The theft took just one minute and the Mercedes car, stolen from the Elmdon area of Solihull on 24 September, has not been recovered. @BBC

There’s rising worry that corporations are taking over America. But after reviewing a slew of the bids by cities and states wooing Amazon’s massive second headquarters, I don’t think “takeover” quite captures what’s going on. More like “surrender.” Last month Amazon announced it got 238 offers for its new, proposed 50,000-employee HQ2. I set out to see what’s in them, but only about 30 have been released so far under public-record acts. @The Seattle Times

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Carpenter v. United States on November Continue reading

Church

Worth Reading: Are you a genius or a fraud?

One time, when I was a small child, I saw Hank Aaron go to bat. He had already hit his 500th home run. I was looking forward to seeing this genius do his thing. I was devastated when he struck out. Some genius, I recall thinking. As an eight-year-old, my first thought was that I could have done exactly what he did. Of course, Hank knew something that I, at the time, did not. Genius is about averages, not every time at bat. If every time you strike out, you imagine that you might be a fraud, you will make yourself insane. —Jeffery Tucker @ The Stream

Worth Reading: The Future is Conversational Systems

It’d be difficult to downplay the impact Amazon Web Services has had on the computing industry over the past decade. Since launching in 2006, Amazon’s cloud computing division has become the set the pace in the public cloud market, rapidly growing out its capabilities from the first service – Simple Storage Service (S3) – it rolled out to now offering thousands of services that touch on everything from compute instances to databases, storage, application development and emerging technologies like machine learning and data analytics. —Jeffery Burt @ The Next Platform

Worth Reading: Let’s talk about RFC6980

Following my work with the FreeBSD implementation of RFC 6980 I was happy to present my work at last week’s DENOG 9 meeting.
To make it available to anyone who did not meet me there and go into some more detail that would have exceeded the boundaries of the talk, I will cover the topic here. After the preceding work on Windows Server 2016 and the FreeBSD testing, as a Linux user, lover and administrator, I of course wanted to take a look at how different Linux systems complied with the RFC 6980 standard. —Jacky Hammer @ Insinuator

Worth Reading: Debating Exascale Commodity Hardware

Building the first exascale systems continues to be a high-profile endeavor, with efforts underway worldwide in the United States, the European Union, and Asia – notably China and Japan – that focus on competition between regional powers, the technologies that are going into the architectures, and the promises that these supercomputers hold for everything from research and government to business and commerce. —Jeffery Burt @ The Next Platform

Reaction: Science and Engineering

Are you a scientist, or an engineer? This question does not seem to occur to most engineers, but it does seem science has “taken the lead role” in recent history, with engineers being sometimes (or perhaps often) seen as “the folks who figure out how to make use of what scientists are discovering.” There are few fields where this seems closer to the truth than computing. Peter Denning has written an insightful article over at the ACM on this topic; a few reactions are in order.

Denning separates engineers from scientists by saying:

The first concerns the nature of their work. Engineers design and build technologies that serve useful purposes, whereas scientists search for laws explaining phenomena.

While this does seem like a useful starting point, I’m not at all certain the two fields can be cleanly separated in this way. The reality is there is probably a continuum starting from what might be called “meta-engineers,” those who’s primary goal is to implement a technology designed by someone else by mentally reverse engineering what this “someone else” has done, to the deeply focused “pure scientist,” who really does not care about the practical application, but is rather simply searching Continue reading

Worth Reading: The Dead DRM Canary

EFF has been fighting against DRM and the laws behind it for a decade and a half, intervening in the US Broadcast Flag, the UN Broadcasting Treaty, the European DVB CPCM standard, the W3C EME standard and many other skirmishes, battles and even wars over the years. With that long history behind us, there are two things we want you to know about DRM… —Cory Doctorow @ Deep LinksEFF has been fighting against DRM and the laws behind it for a decade and a half, intervening in the US Broadcast Flag, the UN Broadcasting Treaty, the European DVB CPCM standard, the W3C EME standard and many other skirmishes, battles and even wars over the years. With that long history behind us, there are two things we want you to know about DRM… —Cory Doctorow @ Deep Links

DDOS and The DNS

The Mirai DDOS attack happened just over a year ago, on the 21st October 2016. The attack was certainly a major landmark regarding the sorry history of “landmark” DDOS attacks on the Internet. It’s up there with the Morris Worm of 1988, Slammer of 2002, Sapphine/Slammer of 2009 and of course Conficker in 2008. What made the Mirai attack so special? It was the largest we have seen so far, with an attack that amassed around 1Tb of attack traffic, which is a volume that creates not only a direct impact on the intended victim but wipes out much of the network infrastructure surrounding the attack point as well. Secondly, it used a bot army of co-opted webcams and other connected devices, which is perhaps a rather forbidding portent of the ugly side of the over-hyped Internet of Things. Thirdly, the target of the attack was aimed at the Internet’s DNS infrastructure. —Geoff Huston @ CircleID

SLAAC and DHCPv6

When deploying IPv6, one of the fundamental questions the network engineer needs to ask is: DHCPv6, or SLAAC? As the argument between these two has reached almost political dimensions, perhaps a quick look at the positive and negative attributes of each solution are. Originally, the idea was that IPv6 addresses would be created using stateless configuration (SLAAC). The network parts of the address would be obtained by listening for a Router Advertisement (RA), and the host part would be built using a local (presumably unique) physical (MAC) address. In this way, a host can be connected to the network, and come up and run, without any manual configuration. Of course, there is still the problem of DNS—how should a host discover which server it should contact to resolve domain names? To resolve this part, the DHCPv6 protocol would be used. So in IPv6 configuration, as initially conceived, the information obtained from RA would be combined with DNS information from DHCPv6 to fully configure an IPv6 host when it is attached to the network.

There are several problems with this scheme, as you might expect. The most obvious is that most network operators do not want to deploy two protocols to Continue reading