Technology Short Take 123

Welcome to Technology Short Take #123, the first of 2020! I hope that everyone had a wonderful holiday season, but now it’s time to jump back into the fray with a collection of technical articles from around the Internet. Here’s hoping that I found something useful for you!

Networking

• Eric Sloof mentions the NSX-T load balancing encyclopedia (found here), which intends to be an authoritative resource to NSX-T load balancing configuration and management.
• David Gee has an interesting set of articles exploring service function chaining in service mesh environments (part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4).

Servers/Hardware

• Frank Denneman has a nice article aimed at helping readers understand PCIe device to NUMA Node Locality.
• Guiliano Bertello introduces PowerVCF, a PowerCLI module aimed at interacting with the SDDC Manager and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack. (If you’re not familiar with VCF, see here.)
• This is pricey, but I can’t say I don’t want one.
• James Hamilton is back with a post on the AWS Graviton2 ARM processors.

Security

• On January 13, Brian Krebs discussed the critical flaw (a vulnerability in crypt32.dll, a core Windows cryptographic component) that was rumored Continue reading

JetBrains Mono: A free and open source typeface for developers

Looks Lush.

The post JetBrains Mono: A free and open source typeface for developers appeared first on EtherealMind.

Weekly Wrap: Nokia Cuts 180 Jobs With More to Come

Video: Fallacies of Distributed Computing

What better way to start How Networks Really Work webinar than with fallacies of distributed computing… and that’s exactly what I did in late August 2019.

Synthesizing data structure transformations from input-output examples

Synthesizing data structure transformations from input-output examples, Feser et al., PLDI’15

The Programmatically Interpretable Reinforcement Learning paper that we looked at last time out contained this passing comment coupled with a link to today’s paper choice:

It is known from prior work that such [functional] languages offer natural advantages in program synthesis.

That certainly caught my interest. The context for the quote is synthesis of programs by machines, but when I’m programming, I’m also engaged in the activity of program synthesis! So a work that shows functional languages have an advantage for programmatic synthesis might also contain the basis for an argument for natural advantages to the functional style of programming. I didn’t find that here. We can however say that this paper shows “functional languages are well suited to program synthesis.”

Never mind, because the ideas in the paper are still very connected to a question I’m fascinated by at the moment: “how will we be developing software systems over this coming decade?”. There are some major themes to be grappled with: system complexity, the consequences of increasing automation and societal integration, privacy, ethics, security, trust (especially in supply chains), interpretability vs black box models, Continue reading

How to back up Kubernetes and Docker

Yes, your container infrastructure needs some type of backup.  Kubernetes and Docker will not magically build themselves after a disaster. As discussed in a separate article, you don’t need to back up the running state of each container, but you will need to back up the configuration used to run and manage your containers.Here’s a quick reminder of what you’ll need to back up.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Configuration and desired-state information The Dockerfiles used to build your images and all versions of those files The images created from the Dockerfile and used to run each container Kubernetes etcd & other - K8s databases that info on cluster state Deployments - YAML files describing each deployment Persistent data created or changed by containers Persistent volumes Databases Dockerfiles Docker containers are run from images, and images are built from Dockerfiles. A proper Docker configuration would first use some kind of repository such as GitHub as a version-control system for all Dockerfiles. Do not create ad hoc containers using ad hoc images built from ad hoc Dockerfiles. All Dockerfiles should be stored in a repository that allows you to pull historical Continue reading

Cache Is King

The gap between the performance of processors, broadly defined, and the performance of DRAM main memory, also broadly defined, has been an issue for at least three decades when the gap really started to open up. …

Cache Is King was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

McAfee Hires New CEO, Mulls Sale or IPO

Locking and unlocking accounts on Linux systems

If you are administering a Linux system, there will likely be times that you need to lock an account. Maybe someone is changing positions and their continued need for the account is under question; maybe there’s reason to believe that access to the account has been compromised. In any event, knowing how to lock an account and how to unlock it should it be needed again is something you need to be able to do.One important thing to keep in mind is that there are multiple ways to lock an account, and they don't all have the same effect. If the account user is accessing an account using public/private keys instead of a password, some commands you might use to block access to an account will not be effective.To read this article in full, please click here

Daily Roundup: CenturyLink Nabs $1.6B IT Win

HPC In 2020: Acquisitions And Mergers As The New Normal

After a decade of vendor consolidation that saw some of the world’s biggest IT firms acquire first-class HPC providers such as SGI, Cray, and Sun Microsystems, as well as smaller players like Penguin Computing, WhamCloud, Appro, and Isilon, it is natural to wonder who is next. …

HPC In 2020: Acquisitions And Mergers As The New Normal was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.

Why Do You Need NAT66?

It’s hard to believe that it’s been eight years since I wrote my most controversial post ever. I get all kinds of comments on my NAT66 post even to this day. I’ve been told I’m a moron, an elitist, and someone that doesn’t understand how the Internet works. I’ve also had some good comments that highlight a specific need for tools like NAT66. I wanted to catch up with everything and ask a very important question.

WHY?

Every Tool Has A Purpose

APNIC had a great post about NAT66 back in 2018. You should totally read it. I consider it a fair review of the questions surrounding NAT’s use in 2020. Again, NAT has a purpose and when used properly and sparingly for that purpose it works well. In the case of the article, Marco Cilloni (@MCilloni) lays out the need to use NAT66 to use IPv6 at his house due to ISP insanity and the latency overhead of using tunnels with Hurricane Electric. In this specific case, NAT66 was a good tool for him to use to translate his /128 address to something useable in his network.

If you’re brave, you should delve into the comments. A Continue reading

Rogers Breaks Ice on Canada’s First 5G Deployment

Google Cloud Woos Enterprises With Premium Support

CenturyLink Nabs Interior Department’s $1.6B IT Contract

Wi-Fi 6 into 6 GHz = WiFi6E. But not 5G but is 5Ghz.

Remember WiFi6 was making naming easier. Except when it isn't.

The post Wi-Fi 6 into 6 GHz = WiFi6E. But not 5G but is 5Ghz. appeared first on EtherealMind.

Announcing the Cloudflare Access App Launch

Every person joining your team has the same question on Day One: how do I find and connect to the applications I need to do my job?

Since launch, Cloudflare Access has helped improve how users connect to those applications. When you protect an application with Access, users never have to connect to a private network and never have to deal with a clunky VPN client. Instead, they reach on-premise apps as if they were SaaS tools. Behind the scenes, Access evaluates and logs every request to those apps for identity, giving administrators more visibility and security than a traditional VPN.

Administrators need about an hour to deploy Access. End user logins take about 20 ms, and that response time is consistent globally. Unlike VPN appliances, Access runs in every data center in Cloudflare’s network in 200 cities around the world. When Access works well, it should be easy for administrators and invisible to the end user.

However, users still need to locate the applications behind Access, and for internally managed applications, traditional dashboards require constant upkeep. As organizations grow, that roster of links keeps expanding. Department leads and IT administrators can create and publish manual lists, but those become Continue reading

Why multicloud security is your next big challenge

Companies deploy an average of three to five different cloud services. With an increased emphasis on security and regulatory compliance, the capability to manage these disparate systems is crucial.

Why multicloud security is your next big challenge

Companies deploy an average of three to five different cloud services. With an increased emphasis on security and regulatory compliance, the capability to manage these disparate systems is crucial.

Why multicloud security is your next big challenge

Companies deploy an average of three to five different cloud services. With an increased emphasis on security and regulatory compliance, the capability to manage these disparate systems is crucial.