Reverb: speculative debugging for web applications

Congress fights for additional Wi-Fi spectrum

A Congressional committee is weighing in on a spat between the FCC and parts of the automotive industry over a plan to appropriate a piece of wireless spectrum set aside for connected cars and instead designate it for Wi-Fi.The dispute centers on Dedicated Short Range Communications or DSRC, a point-to-point communication standard designated to let vehicles close to each other on roadways share information to improve safety. The go-to example is using it to warn a driver near-instantly if the car ahead suddenly slams on its brakes.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] DSR and its 75MHz of spectrum in the 5.9GHz band has been a relatively obscure technology until late last year when the FCC started considering that 45MHz of that spectrum should be made available for unlicensed wireless use such as Wi-FiTo read this article in full, please click here

Congress weighs in on additional Wi-Fi spectrum

A Congressional committee is weighing in on a spat between the FCC and parts of the automotive industry over a plan to appropriate a piece of wireless spectrum set aside for connected-cars and instead designate it for Wi-Fi.The dispute centers on Dedicated Short Range Communications or DSRC, a point-to-point communication standard designated to let vehicles close to each other on roadways share information to improve safety. The go-to example is using it to warn a driver near-instantly if the car ahead suddenly slams on its brakes.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] DSR and its 75MHz of spectrum in the 5.9GHz band has been a relatively obscure technology until late last year when the FCC started considering that 45MHz of that spectrum should be made available for unlicensed wireless use such as Wi-FiTo read this article in full, please click here

5G Strategies of T-Mobile US, Sprint Hinge on Merger

ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2014: 5 years later

I have recently replaced my ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2014 (second generation). I have kept it for more than five years, using it every day and carrying it everywhere. The expected lifetime of a laptop is always an unknown. Let me share my feedback.

My configuration embeds an Intel vPro Core i7-4600U, 8 Gib of RAM, a 256 Gib SATA SSD, a matte WQHD display and a WWAN LTE card. I got it in June 2014. It has spent these years running Debian Sid, starting from Linux 3.14 to Linux 5.4.

This generation of ThinkPad X1 Carbon has been subject to a variety of experiences around the keyboard. We are still hunting the culprits. The layout is totally messed up, with many keys displaced.¹ I have remapped most of them. It also lacks physical function keys: they have been replaced by a non-customizable touch bar. I do not like it due to absence of tactile feedback and it is quite easy to hit a key by mistake. I would recommend to Continue reading

Creating an AWS VPC Endpoint with Pulumi

In this post, I’d like to show readers how to use Pulumi to create a VPC endpoint on AWS. Until recently, I’d heard of VPC endpoints but hadn’t really taken the time to fully understand what they were or how they might be used. That changed when I was presented with a requirement for the AWS EC2 APIs to be available within a VPC that did not have Internet access. As it turns out—and as many readers are probably already aware—this is one of the key use cases for a VPC endpoint (see the VPC endpoint docs). The sample code I’ll share below shows how to programmatically create a VPC endpoint for use in infrastructure-as-code use cases.

For those that aren’t familiar, Pulumi allows users to use one of a number of different general-purpose programming languages and apply them to infrastructure-as-code scenarios. In this example, I’ll be using TypeScript, but Pulumi also supports JavaScript and Python (and Go is in the works). (Side note: I intend to start working with the Go support in Pulumi when it becomes generally available as a means of helping accelerate my own Go learning.)

Here’s a snippet of TypeScript code that Continue reading

Manually Loading Container Images with containerD

I recently had a need to manually load some container images into a Linux system running containerd (instead of Docker) as the container runtime. I say “manually load some images” because this system was isolated from the Internet, and so simply running a container and having containerd automatically pull the image from an image registry wasn’t going to work. The process for working around the lack of Internet access isn’t difficult, but didn’t seem to be documented anywhere that I could readily find using a general web search. I thought publishing it here may help individuals seeking this information in the future.

For an administrator/operations-minded user, the primary means of interacting with containerd is via the ctr command-line tool. This tool uses a command syntax very similar to Docker, so users familiar with Docker should be able to be productive with ctr pretty easily.

In my specific example, I had a bastion host with Internet access, and a couple of hosts behind the bastion that did not have Internet access. It was the hosts behind the bastion that needed the container images preloaded. So, I used the ctr tool to fetch and prepare the images on the bastion, then Continue reading

ExtraHop CEO: We’ve Doubling Down on Cloud

Worth Reading: Machine Learning Explained

I hope you're familiar with Clarke's third law (and leave it to your imagination to explain how it relates to SDN ;). In case you want to look beyond the Machine Learning curtain, you might find the Machine Learning Explained article highly interesting. Spoiler: it all started in 1960s with over 2000 matchboxes.

Intel Fills In The First Half Server Pothole – And Then Some

Let’s face it. As far as we knew, given how poorly the server market was doing in the final quarter of 2018 and the first two quarters of 2019, we had no idea how well or poorly it might end up. …

Intel Fills In The First Half Server Pothole – And Then Some was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Daily Roundup: Microsoft Exposes 250M Customer Records

Thinking and Learning About API Design

In July of 2018 I talked about Polyglot, a very simple project I’d launched whose only purpose was simply to bolster my software development skills. Work on Polyglot has been sporadic at best, coming in fits and spurts, and thus far focused on building a model for the APIs that would be found in the project. Since I am not a software engineer by training (I have no formal training in software development), all of this is new to me, and I’ve found myself encountering lots of questions about API design along the way. In the interest of helping others who may be in a similar situation, I thought I’d share a bit here.

I initially approached the API in terms of how I would encode (serialize?) data on the wire using JSON (I’d decided on using a RESTful API with JSON over HTTP). Starting with how I anticipated storing the data in the back-end database, I created a representation of how a customer’s information would be encoded (serialized) in JSON:

{
    "customers": [
        {
            "customerID": "5678",
            "streetAddress": "123 Main Street",
            "unitNumber": "Suite 123",
            "city": "Anywhere",
            "state": "CO",
            "postalCode": "80108",
            "telephone": "3035551212",
            "primaryContactFirstName": "Scott",
            "primaryContactLastName": "Lowe"
        }
    ]
 Continue reading

Cisco and IBM offer a managed private-cloud service

Cisco and IBM have rolled out a pair of managed private-cloud services aimed at customers looking for the utility of a public cloud delivered on premises. Cisco and IBM Services have partnered to offer a Managed Private Cloud-as-a-service powered by Cisco's Unified Computing System and available in two varieties, one for VMware and one for RedHat OpenShift environments. Cisco’s UCS combines x86 servers with networking and storage access into a single packaged system.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] IBM installs and manages the compute environment and delivers tools for support and enhancement requests. In addition, the offering places a high priority on security, proactive monitoring, and reporting. Cisco’s cloud-based Intersight system helps to manage the environment, according to a blog post about the services from Keith Dyer, a vice president in the Global Partner Organization at Cisco.To read this article in full, please click here

Data Center Revenue Drives Intel to Record Q4

Heavy Networking 499: Introducing Cisco IOS XR7 (Sponsored)

Cisco IOS XR version 7 is the topic of Heavy Networking in this sponsored episode. We dig into what's new in this latest network OS release, the hardware platforms it runs on (including whitebox), key security features, and more. Our guests from Cisco are Bhavna Prasad, Product Manager; and Reda Haddad, Distinguished Engineer.

The post Heavy Networking 499: Introducing Cisco IOS XR7 (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Ericsson Returns to Profit Amid Rising 5G Costs

Dallara Races To The Future Of HPC

When talking about auto racing, everything eventually boils down to speed. …

Dallara Races To The Future Of HPC was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For January 24th, 2020

 Wake up! It's HighScalability time:

 

Instead of turning every car into rolling sensor studded supercomputers, roads could be festooned with stationary edge command and control pods for offloading compute, sensing and managing traffic. Cars become mostly remote controlled pleasure palaces. Solves compute, latency, and interop.

Number Stuff:

HPC In 2020: The Cloud’s Growth Spurt Begins in Earnest

As we roll into 2020, it’s shaping up to be a banner year for cloud-based high performance computing. …

HPC In 2020: The Cloud’s Growth Spurt Begins in Earnest was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.

Really Late Company Christmas Shopping

I’m headed out to Cisco Live Europe today, so I’m trying to get everything packed before I head to the airport. I also realize I need to go buy a few things for my suitcase. Which must be the same thing that a bunch of companies thought this week as they went on a buying spree! Seriously:

• VMware buys Nyansa for the VeloCloud unit
• Arista is going buy Big Switch Networks, as first reported by SDxCentral but pretty much what’s happening for sure.

I don’t think we’re quite done yet, either. An oblique tweet from a friend with some inside sources leads me to believe that the reason why this is happening right now is because some of the venture funds are getting antsy and are calling in their markers. Maybe they need the funds to cash out investors? Maybe they’re looking to reduce their exposure to other things? Maybe they’re ready to jump on a plane to an uncharted island somewhere?

This is one of the challenges when you’re beholden to investors. Sure, not all of us are independently wealthy and capable of bootstrapping our own startup. We need some kind of funding to make that happen. But Continue reading