Archive

Category Archives for "Russ White"

Reaction: Mend, don’t end, the IETF

Is it time for the IETF to give up? Over at CircleID, Martin Geddes makes a case that it is, in fact, time for the IETF to “fade out.” The case he lays out is compelling—first, the IETF is not really an engineering organization. There is a lot of running after “success modes,” but very little consideration of failure modes and how they can and should be guarded against. Second, the IETF “the IETF takes on problems for which it lacks an ontological and epistemological framework to resolve.”

In essence, in Martin’s view, the IETF is not about engineering, and hasn’t ever really been.

The first problem is, of course, that Martin is right. The second problem is, though, that while he hints at the larger problem, he incorrectly lays it at the foot of the IETF. The third problem is the solutions Martin proposes will not resolve the problem at hand.

First things first: Martin is right. The IETF is a mess, and is chasing after success, rather than attending to failure. I do not think this is largely a factor of a lack of engineering skill, however—after spending 20 years working in the IETF, there Continue reading

DNS Glitch

Had a DNS glitch mid morning ET in switching some configurations around. It should be back up and running now, and rule11.tech should be coming up as a secondary domain soon’ish.

The post DNS Glitch appeared first on 'net work.

Openfabric: A Short Video of the IETF Presentation

The most current version of the draft can be found here. There is one more comment from Uma that still needs to be addressed, and one more section that needs to be added. There will probably be more changes, as well, over time. These sorts of drafts do not happen through one person; a number of folks have worked on various bits of the draft, including Shawn, Nikos, Ivan, Les, Naiming, Uma, and others—the folks who have added ideas, etc., are included in the contributors section, which is always worth paying attention to!

The post Openfabric: A Short Video of the IETF Presentation appeared first on 'net work.

Distributed Denial of Service Open Threat Signaling (DOTS)

When the inevitable 2AM call happens—”our network is under attack”—what do you do? After running through the OODA loop (1, 2, 3, 4), used communities to distribute the attack as much as possible, mitigated the attack where possible, and now you realist there little you can do locally. What now? You need to wander out on the ‘net and try to figure out how to stop this thing. You could try to use flowspec, but many providers do not like to support flowspec, because it directly impacts the forwarding performance of their edge boxes. Further, flowspec, used in this situation, doesn’t really work to walk the attack back to its source; the provider’s network is still impact by the DDoS attack.

This is where DOTS comes in. There are four components of DOTS, as shown below (taken directly from the relevant draft)—

The best place to start is with the attack target—that’s you, at 6AM, after trying to chase this thing down for a few hours, panicked because the office is about to open, and your network is still down. Within your network there would also be a DOTS client; this would be a small piece of software running Continue reading