Technology Short Take 121

Welcome to Technology Short Take #121! This may possibly be the last Tech Short Take of 2019 (not sure if I’ll be able to squeeze in another one), so here’s hoping that you find something useful, helpful, or informative in the links that I’ve collected. Enjoy some light reading over your festive holiday season!

Networking

• Brian Linkletter has a post on how to run the Antidote network emulator on KVM for better performance. Antidote, as I understand it, is the network emulator that runs the labs on the NRELabs web site (which is another cool thing in and of itself). In perusing some of Brian’s content, I see lots of stuff at the intersection of networking and virtualization. That’s a good place to be right now, in my opinion.
• Anders Olsson explains how to map NSX-T UUIDs to the actual logical objects.
• Julien Demierre has three-part series on interfaces and uplinks for ESXi/Edge in NSX-T deployments (part 1, part 2, and part 3).
• This is an old(er) post that I’ve probably mentioned here before, but I think it still has relevance. Brent Salisbury’s post on Golang for Network Ops not only points out why networking pros Continue reading

Aviatrix CEO: SD-WAN Is Dead. AWS Killed It

BiB084 – Public Clouds Are Proprietary and Dont Care About You

BiB084 – Public Clouds Are Proprietary and Dont Care About You

Apparently this is a controversial idea.

The post BiB084 – Public Clouds Are Proprietary and Dont Care About You appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Weekly Wrap: Juniper CTO Bikash Koley Calls It Quits

AWS Pins Enterprise Cloud Success on 4 Initiatives

Cloudflare’s Response to CSAM Online

Responding to incidents of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online has been a priority at Cloudflare from the beginning. The stories of CSAM victims are tragic, and bring to light an appalling corner of the Internet. When it comes to CSAM, our position is simple: We don’t tolerate it. We abhor it. It’s a crime, and we do what we can to support the processes to identify and remove that content.

In 2010, within months of Cloudflare’s launch, we connected with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and started a collaborative process to understand our role and how we could cooperate with them. Over the years, we have been in regular communication with a number of government and advocacy groups to determine what Cloudflare should and can do to respond to reports about CSAM that we receive through our abuse process, or how we can provide information supporting investigations of websites using Cloudflare’s services.

Recently, 36 tech companies, including Cloudflare, received this letter from a group of U.S Senators asking for more information about how we handle CSAM content. The Senators referred to influential New York Times stories published in late September and early November Continue reading

Headcount: Firings, Hirings, and Retirings — November 2019

Replacing Orange Livebox router by a Linux box

A few months ago, I moved back to France and I settled for Orange as an ISP with a bundle combining Internet and mobile subscription. In Switzerland, I was using my own router instead of the box provided by Swisscom. While there is an abundant documentation to replace the box provided by Orange, the instructions around a plain Linux box are kludgy. I am exposing here my own variation. I am only interested in getting IPv4/IPv6 access: no VoIP, no TV.

Hardware​

Orange is using GPON for its FTTH deployment. Therefore, an ONT is needed to encapsulate and decapsulate Ethernet frames into GPON frames. Two form-factors are available. It can be small Huawei HG8010H box also acting as a media converter to Ethernet 1000BASE-T:

With a recent Livebox, Orange usually provides an SFP to be plugged inside the Livebox. For some reason I got the external ONT instead of the SFP version. As I have a Netgear GS110TP with two SFP ports, I have bought an SFP GPON FGS202 on eBay. It is the same model than Orange is providing with its Livebox 4. However, I didn’t get Continue reading

Video: Cloud Models, Layers and Responsibilities

In late spring 2019, Matthias Luft and Florian Barth presented a short webinar on cloud concepts, starting with the obvious topic: cloud models, layers, and responsibilities.

You need Free ipSpace.net Subscription to watch the video, and the Standard ipSpace.net Subscription to register for a deeper dive into cloud security with Matthias Luft (next live session on December 10th: Identity and Access Management).

Benchmarking spreadsheet systems

Benchmarking spreadsheet systems Rahman et al., Preprint

A recent TwThread drew my attention to this pre-print paper. When spreadsheets were originally conceived, data and formula were input by hand and so everything operated at human scale. Increasingly we’re dealing with larger and larger datasets — for example, data imported via csv files — and spreadsheets are creaking. I’m certainly familiar with the sinking feeling on realising I’ve accidentally asked a spreadsheet to open up a file with 10s of thousands of rows, and that my computer is now going to be locked up for an age. Rahman et al. construct a set of benchmarks to try and understand what might be going on under the covers in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice Calc.

Spreadsheets claim to support pretty large datasets these days – e.g. five million cells for Google Sheets, and even more than that for Excel. But in practice, they struggle at sizes well below this.

With increasing data sizes… spreadsheets have started to break down to the point of being unusable, displaying a number of scalability problems. They often freeze during computation, and are unable to import datasets well below the size limits posed by Continue reading

Seagate doubles HDD performance with multi-actuator technology

Seagate has taken the wraps off its Exos 2X14 enterprise hard drive. It's the first to integrate Seagate's MACH.2 multi-actuator technology, which is a method of turning one hard disk into two and doubling performance.The technology is pretty straightforward. Say you have four platters in a disk drive. The actuator controls the drive heads and moves them all in unison over all four platters. Seagate's multi-actuator makes two independent actuators out of one, so in a six-platter drive, the two actuators cover three platters each. READ MORE: SSD vs. HDD: Choosing between solid-state and hard-disk drivesTo read this article in full, please click here

Will Kubernetes Drive Cloud Native Telcos?

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019, Nov. 18-21 in San Diego. Perhaps the most global use case to come for Kubernetes is in the telecommunications industry. It does have about five billion users after all. And it’s inherently a hardware-backed, well-regulated industry. The New Stack founder and publisher Alex Williams sat down at last month’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon to talk about telco’s cloud native future with OPNFV), and Vulk Coop design and development cooperative. The different collaborative, telecom-focused Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation working groups that Kirksey and Carpenter are a part of have witnessed — and sometimes driven — telco’s move over the last five years from monolithic hardware appliances toward what’s now known as the cloud. Subscribe: Fireside.fm | Stitcher | Overcast | TuneIn For telcos, cloud native means software solving the complex problems heavy equipment traditionally did. It all comes down to answering two questions: What are the problems Continue reading

Huawei Slams FCC With Legal Appeal

AWS Chief Minimizes Impact of Declining Growth

Sophos Tracks Kubernetes Vulnerabilities, Adds Threat Intel Platform

CenturyLink Expands Edge Services With Network Storage

Managing the TICK Stack with Docker App

Docker Application eases the packaging and the distribution of a Docker Compose application. The TICK stack – Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf, and Kapacitor – is a good candidate to illustrate how this actually works. In this blog, I’ll show you how to deploy the TICK stack as a Docker App.

About the TICK Stack

This application stack is mainly used to handle time-series data. That makes it a great choice for IoT projects, where devices send data (temperature, weather indicators, water level, etc.) on a regular basis.

Its name comes from its components:

– Telegraf

– InfluxDB

– Chronograf

– Kapacitor

The schema below illustrates the overall architecture, and outlines the role of each component.

Data are sent to Telegraph and stored in an InfluxDB database. Chronograf can query the database through a web interface. Kapacitor can process, monitor, and raise alerts based on the data.

Defining the Application in a Compose File

The tick.yml file below defines the four components of the stack and the way they communicate with each other:

version: '3.7'
services:
  telegraf:
    image: telegraf
    configs:
    - source: telegraf-conf
      target: /etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf
    ports:
    - 8186:8186
  influxdb:
    image: influxdb
  chronograf:
 Continue reading

SD-WAN in 2020: 6 trends to look for

The market for SD-WAN remains white hot with distributed organizations widely deploying the technology to solve WAN bandwidth limitations, provide reliability/resiliency and improve quality of user experience for cloud-based applications.Dozens of suppliers are rapidly innovating and maturing their SD-WAN products with innovations in cloud onramps, support for leading SaaS applications, security and management/automation platforms.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Here are six top issues to evaluate as SD-WAN moves to its 2.0 phase and beyond during 2020.To read this article in full, please click here

Rating 10 top hyperconverged infrastructure products

As enterprises look to reduce data center complexity, many are considering hyperconverged infrastructure platforms. But with major vendors such as Cisco, HPE, VMware and Dell offering products, how do you decide where to invest?