The Week in Internet News: Mexico, NYC Push for Internet Access for All

Everyone’s invited: Politicians in Mexico and New York City announced plans for universal Internet access in recent days. Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced a plan to bring access to the large swaths of the country that don’t have it, including a government investment of more than $500,000, according to AA News. Meanwhile, New York City Major Bill de Blasio is pushing an “Internet master plan” to improve access. About 18 percent of the city’s residents have neither mobile nor home Internet connections, and about 40 percent have one or the other, but not both, the New York Daily News reports.

New pressure campaign: The U.S. FBI is asking Apple for help to access encrypted communications on an iPhone that belonged to the Saudi military student who killed three people last month at a naval base in Pensacola, Fla., the Washington Post reports. It’s unclear what information the FBI is looking for, given that the shooter is dead, but the request is a new step in the long-running fight between the U.S. government and large tech vendors over the use of encryption on smartphones and other devices.

Cyber retaliation: Many cybersecurity experts expect Iran to retaliate with cyberattacks Continue reading

HPC In 2020: Compute Engine Diversity Gets Real

The choice of processors available for high performance computing has been on growing for a number of years.  …

HPC In 2020: Compute Engine Diversity Gets Real was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.

Vertical Integration Is Eating The Datacenter, Part One

Best of breed and vertical integration are two opposing forces that have been part of the datacenter since mainframes first fired up six decades ago in a room with a glass windows in it so companies could show off their technical prowess and financial might. …

Vertical Integration Is Eating The Datacenter, Part One was written by Paul Teich at The Next Platform.

Dictionary: Human Permafrost

What is Human Permafrost in IT Infrastructure ?

The post Dictionary: Human Permafrost appeared first on EtherealMind.

How to deal with the impact of digital transformation on networks

Digital transformation has increased the importance of the network, particularly the edge, where customers, employees, cloud applications and IoT devices connect to the enterprise. The legacy static and non-differentiated network edge of years past is no longer sufficient for many reasons, so as companies embark on digital-transformation plans, their networks must evolve.Networking pros should be looking at, among other things, improving security and embracing software-defined networking (SDN) that supports propagating changes quickly across the network in order to accommodate the many challenges digital transformation creates.To read this article in full, please click here

How to deal with the impact of digital transformation on networks

Digital transformation has increased the importance of the network, particularly the edge, where customers, employees, cloud applications and IoT devices connect to the enterprise. The legacy static and non-differentiated network edge of years past is no longer sufficient for many reasons, so as companies embark on digital-transformation plans, their networks must evolve.Networking pros should be looking at, among other things, improving security and embracing software-defined networking (SDN) that supports propagating changes quickly across the network in order to accommodate the many challenges digital transformation creates.To read this article in full, please click here

AWS Rarely Kills a Service. What About Your Vendor?

Here’s an interesting tidbit from “Last Week in AWS” blog:

From a philosophical point of view, AWS fundamentally considers an API to be a promise. Services that aren’t promoted anymore are still available […] Think about that for a second - a service launched 13 years ago is still actively supported to the point where you can use it today.

Compare that to Killed By Google graveyard, and you might understand why I’m a bit reluctant to cover GCP in my webinars.

Challenges of real-world reinforcement learning

Challenges of real-world reinforcement learning, Dulac-Arnold et al., ICML’19

Last week we looked at some of the challenges inherent in automation and in building systems where humans and software agents collaborate. When we start talking about agents, policies, and modelling the environment, my thoughts naturally turn to reinforcement learning (RL). Today’s paper choice sets out some of the current (additional) challenges we face getting reinforcement learning to work well in many real-world systems.

We consider control systems grounded in the physical world, optimization of software systems, and systems that interact with users such as recommender systems and smart phones. … RL methods have been shown to be effective on a large set of simulated environments, but uptake in real-world problems has been much slower.

Why is this? The authors posit that there’s a meaningful gap between the tightly-controlled and amenable to simulation research settings where many RL systems do well, and the messy realities and constraints of real-world systems. For example, there may be no good simulator available, exploration may be curtailed by strong safety constraints, and feedback cycles for learning may be slow.

This lack of available simulators means learning must be done using Continue reading

Helping mitigate the Citrix NetScaler CVE with Cloudflare Access

Yesterday, Citrix sent an updated notification to customers warning of a vulnerability in their Application Delivery Controller (ADC) product. If exploited, malicious attackers can bypass the login page of the administrator portal, without authentication, to perform arbitrary code execution.

No patch is available yet. Citrix expects to have a fix for certain versions on January 20 and others at the end of the month.

In the interim, Citrix has asked customers to attempt to mitigate the vulnerability. The recommended steps involve running a number of commands from an administrator command line interface.

The vulnerability relied on by attackers requires that they first be able to reach a login portal hosted by the ADC. Cloudflare can help teams secure that page and the resources protected by the ADC. Teams can place the login page, as well as the administration interface, behind Cloudflare Access’ identity proxy to prevent unauthenticated users from making requests to the portal.

Exploiting URL paths

Citrix ADC, also known as Citrix NetScaler, is an application delivery controller that provides Layer 3 through Layer 7 security for applications and APIs. Once deployed, administrators manage the installation of the ADC through a portal available at a dedicated URL on Continue reading

VXLAN Book Errata 12-January 2020

Must Read: Ironies of Automation

Stumbled upon a 35-year-old article describing the ironies of automation (HT: The Morning Paper). Here’s a teaser…

Unfortunately automatic control can ‘camouflage’ system failure by controlling against the variable changes, so that trends do not become apparent until they are beyond control.

In simpler words: when things fail, they fail really badly because the intermittent failures were kept hidden. Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you how wonderful software-defined AI-assisted networking is going to be.

Weekly Top Posts: 2020-01-12

1. Aruba SD-Branch Update Targets Retail
2. AT&T Clarifies Perplexing, Ambiguous Network Virtualization Goal
3. Veeam Snatched Up by Insight for $5B
4. How SD-Branch Rises to the Next-Gen Demands of Financial Services Networks
5. Equinix CEO Talks Edge: Friend or Foe?

Junos SNMP via Routing Instance

Juniper routing instances are very useful when you need separate routing tables on the one device, for example to separate customers. Junos lets you configure SNMP polling of routing instances, so customers can poll “their” interfaces using 'instance_name'@'community'. All very useful. But it wasn’t obvious to me how to poll the default table via an interface in a routing instance. The trick is to just use @'community'. Here’s an example.

Network Overview

To demo this I have a simple network. I’m using a Virtual QFX plus Vagrant setup, based on the Vagrantfiles in this repo. I’m running one vqfx10k, connected to one server. The key here is that the server has two connections to the vqfx. One interface is in the default instance, one is in a “Customer” routing instance:

Here’s the routing-instance config:

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vagrant@vqfx> show configuration routing-instances
Customer {
    instance-type virtual-router;
    interface xe-0/0/1.0;
}

{master:0}
vagrant@vqfx>

And here’s my SNMP configuration:

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vagrant@vqfx> show  Continue reading

Junos SNMP via Routing Instance

Juniper routing instances are very useful when you need separate routing tables on the one device, for example to separate customers. Junos lets you configure SNMP polling of routing instances, so customers can poll “their” interfaces using 'instance_name'@'community'. All very useful. But it wasn’t obvious to me how to poll the default table via an interface in a routing instance. The trick is to just use @'community'. Here’s an example.

Network Overview

To demo this I have a simple network. I’m using a Virtual QFX plus Vagrant setup, based on the Vagrantfiles in this repo. I’m running one vqfx10k, connected to one server. The key here is that the server has two connections to the vqfx. One interface is in the default instance, one is in a “Customer” routing instance:

Here’s the routing-instance config:

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vagrant@vqfx> show configuration routing-instances
Customer {
    instance-type virtual-router;
    interface xe-0/0/1.0;
}

{master:0}
vagrant@vqfx>

And here’s my SNMP configuration:

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vagrant@vqfx>  Continue reading

Another perspective on "engineering" in IT

Found a nice article about Margaret Hamilton, the lady who coined the term "software engineering".

Engineering—back in 1969 as well as here in 2020—carries a whole set of associated values with it, and one of the most important is the necessity of proofing for disaster before human usage. You don’t “fail fast” when building a bridge: You ensure the bridge works first.

Now be a good "networking engineer" and go and stretch another VLAN around the globe... ;)

Cuckoo Installation and Configuration on Debian 10 Buster

The Supercomputing Efficiency Curve Bends In The Right Direction

Things get a little wonky at exascale and hyperscale. Things that don’t matter quite as much at enterprise scale, such as the cost or the performance per watt or the performance per dollar per watt for a system or a cluster, end up dominating the buying decisions. …

The Supercomputing Efficiency Curve Bends In The Right Direction was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

HPE and Cumulus Networks partner for open storage

Cumulus Networks has announced a partnership with HPE that will see its NetQ management software run on HPE's network storage products.Under the deal, HPE's StoreFabric M-Series Ethernet switches will run Cumulus's Linux operating system and NetQ, a move that Cumulus said in a statement will deliver “a flexible networking fabric that is predictable, scalable, and reliable."[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Combining the M-Series switches with Linux and NetQ will offer enterprises a high-bandwidth, low-latency way to connect primary, secondary, hyperconverged, NAS, or object-storage systems, and is an ideal way to build an Ethernet Storage Fabric (ESF), the company added.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE and Cumulus Networks partner for open storage

Cumulus Networks has announced a partnership with HPE that will see its NetQ management software run on HPE's network storage products.Under the deal, HPE's StoreFabric M-Series Ethernet switches will run Cumulus's Linux operating system and NetQ, a move that Cumulus said in a statement will deliver “a flexible networking fabric that is predictable, scalable, and reliable."[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Combining the M-Series switches with Linux and NetQ will offer enterprises a high-bandwidth, low-latency way to connect primary, secondary, hyperconverged, NAS, or object-storage systems, and is an ideal way to build an Ethernet Storage Fabric (ESF), the company added.To read this article in full, please click here

Heavy Networking 497: Good Reasons To Start Your Tech Blog

If one of your New Year's resolutions is to blog more, or start a blog, this episode is for you. We discuss the benefits of technical blogging including raising your profile, improving your own understanding, contributing to the community, and creating new opportunities in your professional life. Our guests are John Mark Troyer and Stephen Foskett.

The post Heavy Networking 497: Good Reasons To Start Your Tech Blog appeared first on Packet Pushers.