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Xilinx closes SolarFlare purchase, promises high-performance networking

Network acceleration appears to be all the rage these days, what with Nvidia acquiring Mellanox, the advent of High Bandwidth Memory 2E targeting networking chips, and now Xilinx closing of its acquisition of low-latency network provider SolarFlare.SolarFlare makes a high-speed network interface card (NIC) using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to build SmartNICs sold under the X2 brand. These PCI Express network interface cards run network, storage, and compute acceleration, offloading that work from the CPU. SolarFlare also develops application acceleration software to fully utilize the cards.To read this article in full, please click here

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Connection Restored

I was embarrassed to realize recently that it’s been well over two years since my last blog post. Life has a way of getting away from you, I suppose. But I’ve decided to try and reboot the blog, and hopefully get back to writing regularly. Let me kick things off my sharing what I’ve been up to recently.

Goodbye, DigitalOcean!

After nearly five years working at DigitalOcean, I made the difficult decision to part ways with the company. In my time there, I was fortunate to work with an amazing team, and witness the truly amazing evolution of a startup company from niche player to major cloud provider. Most of all, I’m thankful to DigitalOcean for the opportunity my role provided in extending from traditional network engineering into development and automation. I’ll miss working with my DO team, but I’m excited to see where the future will take them.

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Technology Short Take 117

Welcome to Technology Short Take #117! Here’s my latest gathering of links and articles from the around the World Wide Web (an “old school” reference for you right there). I’ve got a little bit of something for most everyone, except for the storage nerds (I’m leaving that to my friend J Metz this time around). Here’s hoping you find something useful!

Networking

• Ronald de Jong sheds some light on a potential “gotcha” with distributed multi-tier routing configuration in NSX. The key takeaway here is that anytime there is firewalling or other stateful services in place, the traffic will route to the (non-distributed) service router instead of just the distributed routers.
• Northbound Networks provides some information on the P4 programming language.
• Via the Packet Pushers blog, Daniel Himes provides a guide to a starting point for enterprise (network) automation.

Servers/Hardware

• AnandTech has a nice article on the future PCIe 6.0 spec, expected in to land in 2021.

Security

• Ronnie Flathers shares how he uses Docker for penetration testing.
• Interested in running Hashcat on AWS EC2? See this article by Ben Mason.
• Another data breach, this time from Capital One, hit the news this past week. Corey Quinn has his Continue reading

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Securing BGP on the host with the RPKI

An increasingly popular design for a data-center network is BGP on the host: each host ships with a BGP daemon to advertise the IPs it handles and receives the routes to its fellow servers. Compared to a L2-based design, it is very scalable, resilient, cross-vendor and safe to operate.¹ Take a look at “L3 routing to the hypervisor with BGP” for a usage example.

While routing on the host eliminates the security problems related to Ethernet networks, a server may announce any IP prefix. In the above picture, two of them are announcing 2001:db8:cc::/64. This could be a legit use of anycast or a prefix hijack. BGP offers several solutions to improve this aspect and one of them is to leverage the features around the RPKI infrastructure.

Short introduction to the RPKI​

On the Internet, BGP is mostly relying on trust. This contributes to various incidents due to operator errors, like the one that affected Cloudflare a few months ago, or to malicious attackers, like the hijack of Amazon Continue reading

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IBM fuses its software with Red Hat’s to launch hybrid-cloud juggernaut

IBM has wasted no time aligning its own software with its newly acquired Red Hat technoloogy,saying its portfolio would be transformed to work cloud natively and augmented to run on Red Hat’s OpenShift platform.IBM in July finalized its $34 billion purchase of Red Hat and says it will use the Linux powerhouse's open-source know-how and Linux expertise to grow larger scale hybrid-cloud customer projects and to create a web of partnerships to simplify carrying them out.To read this article in full, please click here

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Dynatrace Scores $544M IPO, Cloudflare to Follow Suit

Dynatrace raised $544 million in its initial public offering (IPO) today, selling 35.6 million...

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Black Hat 2019 and DEF CON 27: What to expect at hacker summer camp | TECH(talk)

Every year, thousands of hackers arrive in Las Vegas for three large security conferences -- DEF CON, Black Hat and Bsides Las Vegas -- taking place from Monday through Sunday next week. CSO Online's J.M. Porup chats with Juliet about what to expect at the conferences' sessions and what he's looking forward to.

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Accessing the Docker Daemon via an SSH Bastion Host

Today I came across this article, which informed me that (as of the 18.09 release) you can use SSH to connect to a Docker daemon remotely. That’s handy! The article uses docker-machine (a useful but underrated tool, I think) to demonstrate, but the first question in my mind was this: can I do this through an SSH bastion host? Read on for the answer.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of an SSH bastion host, it is a (typically hardened) host through which you, as a user, would proxy your SSH connections to other hosts. For example, you may have a bunch of EC2 instances in an AWS VPC that do not have public IP addresses. (That’s reasonable.) You could use an SSH bastion host—which would require a public IP address—to enable SSH access to otherwise inaccessible hosts. I wrote a post about using SSH bastion hosts back in 2015; give that post a read for more details.

The syntax for connecting to a Docker daemon via SSH looks something like this:

docker -H ssh://user@host <command>

So, if you wanted to run docker container ls to list the containers running on a remote system, you’d Continue reading

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BiB 081: 128 Technology Rethinks The WAN Router

128 Technology takes an interesting approach to WAN routing. In this Brief Briefing Ethan Banks and Drew Conry-Murray skim the surface of 128 Technology's approach, which includes stateful sessions, NAT, and encryption--but no tunneling. We also touch on use cases including SD-WAN and security. We also provide links to Networking Field Day videos that have much more detail.

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BiB 081: 128 Technology Rethinks The WAN Router

128 Technology takes an interesting approach to WAN routing. In this Brief Briefing Ethan Banks and Drew Conry-Murray skim the surface of 128 Technology's approach, which includes stateful sessions, NAT, and encryption--but no tunneling. We also touch on use cases including SD-WAN and security. We also provide links to Networking Field Day videos that have much more detail.

The post BiB 081: 128 Technology Rethinks The WAN Router appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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Self-organizing micro robots may soon swarm the industrial IoT

Miniscule robots that can jump and crawl could soon be added to the industrial internet of things’ arsenal. The devices, a kind of printed circuit board with leg-like appendages, wouldn’t need wide networks to function but would self-organize and communicate efficiently, mainly with one another.Breakthrough inventions announced recently make the likelihood of these ant-like helpers a real possibility.[ Also see: What is edge computing? and How edge networking and IoT will reshape data centers ] Vibration-powered micro robots The first invention is the ability to harness vibration from ultrasound and other sources, such as piezoelectric actuators, to get micro robots to respond to commands. The piezoelectric effect is when some kinds of materials generate an electrical charge in response to mechanical stresses.To read this article in full, please click here

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Cisco pays $8.6M to settle security-software whistleblower lawsuit

Cisco has agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle claims it sold video security software that had a vulnerability that could have opened federal, state and local government agencies to hackers.Under terms of the settlement Cisco will pay $2.6 million to the federal government and up to $6 million to 15 states, certain cities and other entities that purchased the product. The states that settled with Cisco are California, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Massachusetts and Virginia.RELATED: A conversation with a white hat hacker According to Cisco, the software, which was sold between 2008 and 2014 was created by Broadware, a company Cisco bought in 2007 for its surveillance video technology and ultimately named it Video Surveillance Manager.To read this article in full, please click here

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Cisco pays $8.6M to settle security-software whistleblower lawsuit

Cisco has agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle claims it sold video security software that had a vulnerability that could have opened federal, state and local government agencies to hackers.Under terms of the settlement Cisco will pay $2.6 million to the federal government and up to $6 million to 15 states, certain cities and other entities that purchased the product. The states that settled with Cisco are California, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Massachusetts and Virginia.RELATED: A conversation with a white hat hacker According to Cisco, the software, which was sold between 2008 and 2014 was created by Broadware, a company Cisco bought in 2007 for its surveillance video technology and ultimately named it Video Surveillance Manager.To read this article in full, please click here

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Cisco Pays $8.6M in First-Ever Security Software Whistleblower Payout

It’s essentially pocket change for the vendor — Cisco CEO Chuck Robbin’s house sold for...

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IBM Packs Red Hat OpenShift Into Cloud Paks

The Cloud Paks allow IBM software to run across major public cloud providers like Amazon Web...

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Lanner and GTT Leverage uCPE to Bolster SD-WAN Performance

Both companies announced new SD-WAN capabilities leveraging universal customer premises...

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Intel Goes Barefoot As It Leaves The Omni-Path

The handwriting has been on the wall for some time now, but Intel has quietly dropped its 200 Gb/sec Omni-Path networking from its roadmaps and will be using other technology for interconnects going forward. …

Intel Goes Barefoot As It Leaves The Omni-Path was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

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Cisco assesses the top enterprise SD-WAN technology drivers

Cisco this week celebrated the second anniversary of its purchase of SD-WAN vendor Viptela and reiterated its expectation that 2019 will see the technology change enterprise networks in major ways.In a blog outlining trends in the SD-WAN world, Anand Oswal, Cisco senior vice president, engineering, in the company’s Enterprise Networking Business described how SD-WAN technology has changed the network for one of its customers,  test and measurement systems vendor National Instruments. To read this article in full, please click here

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Cisco assesses the top enterprise SD-WAN technology drivers

Cisco this week celebrated the second anniversary of its purchase of SD-WAN vendor Viptela and reiterated its expectation that 2019 will see the technology change enterprise networks in major ways.In a blog outlining trends in the SD-WAN world, Anand Oswal, Cisco senior vice president, engineering, in the company’s Enterprise Networking Business described how SD-WAN technology has changed the network for one of its customers,  test and measurement systems vendor National Instruments. To read this article in full, please click here

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How to enable serverless computing in Kubernetes