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Category Archives for "Russ White"

Troubleshooting: Models

How well can you know each of these four systems? Can you actually know them in fine detail, down to the last packet transmitted and the last bit in each packet? Can you know the flow of every packet through the network, and every piece of information any particular application pushes into a packet, or the complete set of ever changing business requirements?

Obviously the answer to these questions is no. As these four components of the network combine, they create a system that suffers from combinatorial explosion. There are far too many combinations, and far too many possible states, for any one person to actually know all of them.

How can you reduce the amount of information to some amount a reasonable human can keep in their minds? The answer—as it is with most problems related to having too much information—is abstraction. In turn, what does abstraction really mean? It really means you build a model of the system, interacting with the system through the model, rather than trying to keep all the information about every subsystem, and how the subsystems interact, in your head. So for each subsystem of the entire system, you have a model you are Continue reading

Worth Reading: Who really has fast lanes?

Internet Association members sometimes say that they could actually afford to pay more for fast lanes but they are worried about the little guys, the startup, who may not be able to pay more and whose websites, therefore, won’t be as zippy as they need to be. They’re worried about innovation. They’re worried about you. In fact, however, the web giants like Google and Amazon have private networks which connect to the Internet in many locations. They have data caches (think of them as content warehouses) around the world. Their websites DO pop up faster than yours because their bits travel mostly on their private networks and avoid Internet backbone and interchange congestion. In other words, they have private fast lanes. You can’t achieve this speed for your website unless you A) build a private network of your own (unlikely); B) host your website on Amazon or Google in which case they MAY share some of their private access network. —CircleID

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Worth Reading: Be careful what you wish for

After a few minutes of hyperventilating into an empty Dunkin Donuts bag, though, I calmed down enough to appreciate that the guy is trying to provide exactly what I’ve been complaining about the lack of for quite some time now: some kind of logical progression, a path to follow to go from Point BootCamp to Point GotAJob. It’s a helpful roadmap that lays clearly lays out the (many, oh so many) technologies we should be aware of as we work toward professional web dev status. —The New Stack

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Worth Reading: Coding is hard

Of course, sitting in front of a computer writing code isn’t going to improve your physical health. JavaScript is great for building apps, not abs. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch, though, to suggest that learning how to program is healthy for your brain. Healthier, at least, than bingeing Iron Fist or thumbing through celebrity Instagram accounts. —Free Code Camp

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Worth Reading: Commodifying words

Words (and by extension their constituent letters) are as free to utter and use as is the air sustaining life. No one owns them. There is no toll fee to be paid to dictionary makers who curate them. There are, however, two carve-outs from this public domain, namely words and letters businesses use as designations of origin for their marketplace presence, protected by trademark law; and words and letters arranged expressively by authors, protected by copyright law. The rights accruing to persons under these carve-outs — trademark more ancient than copyright (circa 1610) — have their roots in statutory and common law. —CircleID

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Worth Reading: Hackers use drones and lasers to bypass air gap

When hackers infect computers with malware, they generally communicate with their code over the internet via a command-and-control server. But firewalls and intrusion detection systems can block communication going to and from suspicious domains and IP addresses. To bypass these normal detection methods, researchers in Israel have devised a novel way to communicate covertly with malware. The technique uses a flatbed scanner as the gateway through which an attacker can send commands to their malware on a victim’s network. —Motherboard

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Worth Reading: Domain names fade

The internet has changed and evolved ever since it’s ancestors first came to life in the late 1960’s. Some technology fades away and is forgotten; other aspects continue but are overlaid, like geological sediments, so that they are now longer visible but are still present under the surface. The Domain Name System — both the technology of DNS and the deployed naming hierarchy we all use — are among those aspects of the internet that, although they feel solid and immutable, are slowly changing underneath our feet. —CircleID

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Design Resource: Shared Workspace Infrastructure

This white paper outlines solutions that can provide secure connectivity for Public Sector agencies over shared wired and wireless network infrastructures. This guide is targeted at network professionals and other personnel who assist in the design of Public Sector office networks and compliments the design patterns and principles issued by GDS Common Technology Services (CTS).

This design guide includes—

  • DMVPN
  • MPLS over DMVPN
  • Wireless and wired access control
  • 802.1x
  • Federated RADIUS

note to readers: From time to time I like to highlight solid case studies and design guides in the network engineering space; you can find past highlighted resources under design/resources in the menu.

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Worth Reading: Test Strategy for Samza/Kafka Services

Over a decade ago, test strategies invested heavily in UI-driven tests. Backend and mid-tier services were tested using automated UI-based tests. While UI-based tests have certain merits, such as testing user flows, they are also time-consuming and fragile. The strong coupling of tests with UI caused several problems … —LinkedIn Engineering Blog

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Upcoming Webinar: Open Networking

I’m doing a webinar over at IP Space next week—

Most modern data centers are still using vendor-driven “future proof” routers and switches with offering lots of (often unnecessary) capabilities. To build large, however, it is often better to build simple—radically simple. This webinar will cover the design components involved in building a data center or cloud fabric using a single, disaggregated device—the way some hyperscale and web scale operators build their networks. The first live session of the webinar will consider the benefits of disaggregated switch, focusing on the components, sources, and challenges in using disaggregated hardware and software in data center fabrics. The second live session will focus on the topologies and design concepts used in large scale data center fabrics using a single switching device as a leaf, spine and superspine switch.

This should be a fun time, and a good introduction to the disaggregation space.

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Worth Reading: A trillion edge graph on a single node

Efficiently and quickly chewing through one trillion edges of a complex graph is no longer in itself a standalone achievement, but doing so on a single node, albeit with some acceleration and ultra-fast storage, is definitely worth noting. There are many paths to processing trillions of edges efficiently and with high performance as demonstrated by companies like Facebook with its distributed trillion-edge scaling effort across 200 nodes in 2015 and Microsoft with a similar feat as well. —The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: A bleak picture of internet trust

The 2017 CIGI-Ipsos Global Survey on Internet Security and Trust paints a bleak picture of the current state of trust online. A majority of those surveyed said they are more concerned about their privacy than the year before, with an almost even split between those “much more concerned” and those only “somewhat more concerned”. When asked whether they agree with the statement “overall, I trust the Internet”, only 12% of respondents strongly agreed and a further 43% somewhat agreed. This means only a little more than half agreed that they trust the Internet, and some even expressed some reservation by choosing to respond “somewhat agree”. —The Internet Society

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Worth Reading: Avoid falling into the hybrid cloud hype

Despite the many cloud benefits, most IT departments have yet to figure out how to manage their cloud usage effectively. DevOps is often still in control of cloud deployments and, in many cases, costs are spiraling out of control. A reaction has been to treat cloud management primarily as financial management by focusing on bills. To truly optimize cloud decisions and build an effective hybrid-cloud strategy, however, organizations must ignore the hype and take a methodical, data-driven approach to evaluating the options against the business requirements and the associated applications. —Data Center Journal

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Troubleshooting: Basics

It’s 2AM, the network is down, and the CEO is on the phone asking when it is going to be back up—the overnight job crucial to the business opening in the morning has failed, and the company stands to lose millions of dollars if the network is not fixed in the next hour or so. Almost every network engineer has faced this problem at least once in their career, often involving intense bouts of troubleshooting.

And yet—troubleshooting is a skill that is hardly ever taught. There are a number of computer science programs that do include classes in troubleshooting, but these tend to be mostly focused on tools, rather than technique, or focused on practical skill application. I was also trained in troubleshooting many years ago as a young recruit into the United States Air Force—but the training was, again, practical in bent, with very few theoretical components.

Note to readers: I wrote a short piece on troubleshooting here on rule11, but I have taken that piece down and replaced it with this short series on the topic. I did start writing a book on this topic many years ago, but my co-authors and I soon discovered troubleshooting was going Continue reading

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