The Case for Complementary Local Access Networks by the Community, for the Community

Back in 2010, I conceptualised and started a pilot project to see how we could introduce Internet connectivity to unserved and underserved rural areas. The ICT4D community – along with a number of international organisations – had been talking about how getting people online could transform lives, but most of the solutions appeared to be either top-down or boiler-plated.

My idea was simple – work together with a local partner to find a rural location where getting people online could make a difference, ensure people from the community were trained to operate and maintain the network (rather than being dependent on outsiders), use cheap easy-to-find WiFi equipment (so if things break down, the nearest town would have spares), and then train the community, empowering them to create and use various digital services. Essentially, this was a network for the people, by the people.

Thus was born our award-winning Wireless For Communities (W4C) initiative. We have had a tremendous amount of success with the programme – having deployed and inspired literally hundreds of networks in South Asia and helped connect the most marginalised of communities. This has also become a global programme for the Internet Society Continue reading

REST API 3. Basics cheat sheet (Ansible, Bash, Postman, and Python) for PATCH/PUT using NetBox

Hello my friend,

This is the third and the last article about REST API basics. In the previous articles, you have learned how to collect information and create/delete new entries. Today you will learn how to modify existing entries.

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means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, 

or otherwise, for commercial purposes without the 

prior permission of the author.

Disclaimer

This article is a continuation of the two previous: GET and POST/DELETE. You should start with that to get the full picture.

What are we going to test?

You will learn how to use two requests:

1. PATCH for modifying information for existing entries
2. PUT for modifying information for existing entries

As you might remember, the interaction with the REST API is described by CRUD model, what stands for Create, Read, Update, and Delete. In this concept, Update operation is represented by PATCH and PUT HTTP methods. Later in this article you will figure out what is the difference between PATCH and PUT. It is significant.

To put the context, we will Continue reading

Interactive checks for coordination avoidance

Interactive checks for coordination avoidance Whittaker & Hellerstein et al., VLDB’19

I am so pleased to see a database systems paper addressing the concerns of the application developer!

To the developer, a strongly consistent system behaves exactly like a single-threaded system running on a single node, so reasoning about the behaviour of the system is simple¹. Unfortunately strong consistency is at odds with performance… On the other hand weak consistency models… put a tremendous burden on the application designer to reason about the complex interleavings of operations that are allowed by these weak consistency models.

To be able to reason effectively about a system, it’s tremendously helpful to be able to rely on some things that we know will always be true. The fancy word for those is invariants, because whatever happens they never vary. A example class of application invariants is database integrity constraints. Unfortunately, under weak consistency models finding solid ground to reason about invariants is really hard:

Even if every transaction executing in a weakly consistent system individually maintains an application invariant, the system as a whole can produce invariant-violating states.

In a distributed setting with weak consistency, an object is replicated across a Continue reading

Updated: Never-Ending Story of IP Fragmentation

In mid 2000s I wrote a number of articles describing various TCP/IP features. Most of them are a bit outdated, so I decided to clean up, update and repost the most interesting ones on ipSpace.net, starting with Never-Ending Story of IP Fragmentation.

The first part of that article is already online, covering MTU basics and drawbacks of IP fragmentation.

VMware boosts load balancing, security intelligence, analytics

SAN FRANCISCO – VMware has added new features to its core networking software that will let customers more securely control cloud application traffic running on virtual machines, containers or bare metal. At its VMworld event, the company announced a new version of the company’s NSX networking software with support for the cloud-based advanced load balancer technology it recently acquired from Avi Networks.[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] The load balancer is included in VMware vRealize Network Insight 5.0 and tied to NSX Intelligence software that lets customers optimize network performance and availability in virtual and physical networks. The load balancer includes a web application firewall and analytics features to help customers securely control and manage traffic. To read this article in full, please click here

VMware boosts load balancing, security intelligence, analytics

SAN FRANCISCO – VMware has added new features to its core networking software that will let customers more securely control cloud application traffic running on virtual machines, containers or bare metal. At its VMworld event, the company announced a new version of the company’s NSX networking software with support for the cloud-based advanced load balancer technology it recently acquired from Avi Networks.[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] The load balancer is included in VMware vRealize Network Insight 5.0 and tied to NSX Intelligence software that lets customers optimize network performance and availability in virtual and physical networks. The load balancer includes a web application firewall and analytics features to help customers securely control and manage traffic. To read this article in full, please click here

VMware boosts load-balancing, security intelligence, analytics

SAN FRANCISCO – VMware has added new features to its core networking software that will let customers more securely control cloud application traffic running on virtual machines, containers or bare metal. At its VMworld event, the company announced a new version of the company’s NSX networking software with support for the cloud-based advanced load balancer technology it recently acquired from Avi Networks.[ Also see How to plan a software-defined data-center network and Efficient container use requires data-center software networking.] The load balancer is included in VMware vRealize Network Insight 5.0 and tied to NSX Intelligence software that lets customers optimize network performance and availability in virtual and physical networks. The load balancer includes a web application firewall and analytics features to help customers securely control and manage traffic. To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: SD-WAN Offers Unprecedented Deployment Flexibility on the WAN

Deployment flexibility is one of the most interesting aspects of software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) technology. Some solution providers offer total flexibility, while others are quite prescriptive. EMA has studied SD-WAN deployment flexibility and found a wide variety of enterprise strategies in practice today. Individual network teams will have to decide for themselves what works for them. EMA identified several aspects of SD-WAN deployment flexibility that enterprises should consider when selecting a solution. Procurement Flexibility: Selecting Your Solution Provider First, there is the question of procurement strategy. Like many classes of technology, enterprises have many options for buying and installing SD-WAN technology. EMA found that the most popular approach (34%) is to buy SD-WAN from a WAN service provider or internet service provider. Many network providers offer managed SD-WAN services or simply resell SD-WAN technology.To read this article in full, please click here

Dell, VMware Unveil SD-WAN Hardware, SmartFabric Director

Customizing your network

Open networking is based on open standards, interoperability, and open source software such as Linux. One of the things that has made Linux so ubiquitous is the unparalleled control it offers to users in terms of customization and building intelligence into the network. Much of this advantage comes in the form of the automation and orchestration possible with Linux-based networking.

First adopted by hobbyists, widespread use of Linux in production environments only started to take off in the mid-1990s in the supercomputing field, where organizations such as NASA started to replace their overly expensive hardware with clusters of inexpensive commodity computers running Linux. Today, Linux systems are used throughout computing.

Linux can be found in servers, clouds, and network equipment. Linux is ubiquitous in the embedded systems space, and is the operating system upon which virtually all modern supercomputers are built. Even Microsoft (which once derided Linux as “a cancer”) now champions Linux, building its own Linux distributions for its Azure cloud networking and making it possible to run Linux on top of Windows.

Linux offers organizations numerous ways to automate devices and workloads. This includes task scheduling, scripting, automation, and policy management. Because Linux is used widely in so Continue reading

Improving Internet Trust: Ironing out the Details

We all can make some pretty rash decisions under stress. I once burned a hole through my undershirt instead of ironing my button-down shirt because I was so nervous before a presentation.

The Internet has its challenges and sometimes can seem like a scary place. In the 2019 survey, the CIGI-Ipsos Global Survey on Internet Security and Trust, 62% of respondents who said they distrust the Internet cited a lack of Internet security as a reason why.

When it comes to facing challenges on the Internet, everyone, from average Internet users to government officials, tends to act the same way I do before presentations – frantically and with questionable results.

In pursuit of security, some governments are making decisions that could harm the Internet as we know it. They’ve taken actions that could weaken digital security, have the potential to fracture the Internet, and some have even shut the Internet down in their country. Like burning a hole through an undershirt and having to wear a wrinkled button-down shirt to a presentation, these actions do little, and make things worse.

The survey results highlighted in our report, “The State of User Privacy and Trust Online,” tell a Continue reading

VMware Adds Load Balancer, Analytics Engine to NSX

Rackspace Targets Hybrid-Cloud Adoption With New Services

AnsibleFest Atlanta – Security Automation

Security Automation seems to be a growing topic of interest. This year at AnsibleFest we will have a track for Security Automation. We talked with Track Lead Massimo Ferrari to learn more about the Security Automation track and the sessions within it. 

Who is this track best for? 

This track is intended for professionals in security operations and vulnerability management who want to learn how Ansible can support and simplify their activities, and automation experts tasked to expand the footprint of their automation practice and support security teams in their organization.

What topics will this track cover? 

Sessions included in this track cover how to introduce and consume Ansible Automation in different stages of maturity of a security or cross-functional organization. They include guidance from Red Hat subject matter experts, customer stories and technical deep downs from partners that are suitable for both automation veterans and security professionals looking at automation for the first time.

What should attendees expect to learn from this track? 

People attending the sessions in this track will learn how Ansible can be leveraged in security environments to support activities like incident investigation and response, compliance enforcement and Continue reading

How to build a startup evaluation toolkit

In the first installment of our startup evaluation guide, we cover five essential tools you need to ensure you are heading in the right direction.

Qualcomm Links WiFi 6 to 5G in New Products

Bootstrapping a Kubernetes Cluster on AWS with Cluster API

Yesterday I published a high-level overview of Cluster API (CAPI) that provides an introduction to some of the concepts and terminology in CAPI. In this post, I’d like to walk readers through actually using CAPI to bootstrap a Kubernetes cluster on AWS.

It’s important to note that all of the information shared here is also found in the “Getting Started” guide in the AWS provider’s GitHub repository. My purpose here is provide an additional walkthrough that supplements that official documentation, not to supplant the official documentation, and to spread the word about how the process works.

Four basic steps are involved in bootstrapping a Kubernetes cluster on AWS using CAPI:

1. Installing the necessary tools (a one-time task)
2. Preparing the AWS account with the correct IAM roles and policies (this is a one-time task)
3. Creating a management cluster (not required every single time)
4. Creating a workload cluster

The following sections take a look at each of these steps in a bit more detail. First, though, I think it’s important to mention that CAPI is still in its early days (it’s currently at v1alpha1). As such, it’s possible that commands may (will) change, and API specifications may (will) change as further development Continue reading

5 Things That Happen When You Get Locked In to an Application Platform

The Consequences of Application Platform Lock-in 

If you’ve worked in IT for a few years, you’ve seen it happen. You select an application framework, operating system, database platform, or other infrastructure because it meets the checklist, the price is right, or sometimes because of internal politics. You quickly discover that it doesn’t play well with other solutions or across platforms — except of course it’s “easy and seamless” when used with offerings from the same vendor.

But try telling your developers that they can’t use their favorite framework, development toolset, or have to use a specific operating system for everything they do. If developers feel like they don’t have flexibility, they quickly adopt their own tools, creating a second wave of shadow IT.

And it doesn’t just affect developers. IT operations and security get bogged down in managing multiple systems and software sprawl. The business suffers because efficiency and innovation lag when teams get caught up in fighting fires.

Below are 5 things that can go wrong when you get locked in to an infrastructure platform:

#1 Other Platforms Become Inaccessible

Will the platform you pick work with any combination of public and private clouds? Will you get cornered into Continue reading

How “Fresh” is That Privacy Statement?

One of the best practices we advocate and measure in our Online Trust Audit is that privacy statements should have a date stamp visible at the top of the page. This is an issue of transparency and lets readers know when the statement was last updated. Combined with another advocated best practice – access to prior versions of the privacy statement, which unfortunately is offered by only 3% of sites – readers get a sense of what changed between versions and when those changes happened.

For the first time this year, we captured the actual date stamps of more than 1,000 privacy statements across the audited sectors, and though we made some high level comments in the Audit, we thought it would be insightful to show another layer of detail. One of the reasons we captured specific dates was the fact that many privacy statements were updated in the months prior to (or shortly after) May 25, 2018, when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in the European Union.

The graph below shows the date stamps from most to least recent (ending with those that have no date stamp) across the audited sectors. The green bars represent Continue reading

Microsoft’s Albert Greenberg, Fellow Networking Wizards Unite at Future:Net