Leaders of the G7: A Safer World Means Strong, Secure Communication

In the recent G7 outcome document “Combating the use of the Internet for Terrorism and Violent Extremist Purposes“, Ministers of the Interior made commitments on content filtering and “lawful access solutions” for encrypted content, which, if implemented, would greatly weaken the security of the Internet, G7 economies and their citizens.

While there is an urgent need to prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting Internet platforms, facing down terrorist threats and cybercrime requires strong, secure communications. Not the opposite.

We find the commitments in the document cause for alarm.

Rather than encouraging Internet companies to weaken their security, global leaders should be discussing how to increase the use of encryption, make it easier to use, and harder to thwart.

Here’s why:

Encryption: What it is and why it is key to your security

As online threats of cybercrime, mass surveillance, data breaches have grown so has the use of encryption – to protect the confidentiality and the integrity of data that we all depend on.

Every responsible citizen wants to stop terrorism, and “lawful access” sounds like a reasonable way to access potentially crucial intel. The idea is that, under the appropriate legal authorization, legitimate law enforcement agencies Continue reading

Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking

Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking Michael et al., EuroSys’19

On the surface you might think today’s paper selection an odd pick. It describes the labs environment, DSLabs, developed at the University of Washington to accompany a course in distributed systems. During the ten week course, students implement four different assignments: an exactly-once RPC protocol; a primary-backup system; Paxos; and a scalable, transactional key-value storage system. 175 undergraduates a year currently go through this course. Enabling students to build running performant versions of all of those systems in the time available is one challenge. Testing and grading their solutions is another!

Although we added tests to catch specific issues as we learned of them, we found it difficult to keep up with the diversity of possible student errors.

What I like about the paper is that (a) the DSLabs framework and all assignments are available in open source, and it looks like it would be a lot of fun to play with, and (b) the challenges students have to face in building reliable, testable, distributed systems under time pressure look pretty much like the challenges many practitioners have to face to me! So by focusing Continue reading

How to Advertise a Route from ACI Layer2 BD Outside the Fabric?

Sometimes you will have some L2 domains (Bridge Domains – BD) in your datacenter that will be used with hardware appliances like F5 NLB or something like an additional firewall, WAF or something similar. That is the case where ACI will not route or bridge but the only L3 point of exit from that kind of segment would be on actual hardware appliance outside ACI Fabric – connected to the Leaf port. We will take an example here and use it throughout the article where BIG IP F5 NLB is used as an L3 termination of L2 BD 10.10.10.0/24. F5

The post How to Advertise a Route from ACI Layer2 BD Outside the Fabric? appeared first on How Does Internet Work.

Heavy Networking 442: The Source Of Truth Shall Set You Free (To Automate)

On today's Heavy Networking we explore how to build a source of truth for networking devices as a foundation for automation. Our guests Damien Garros and Adam Mills of Roblox share their real-world experiences developing sources of truth using Netbox and Git as part of a company-wide automation effort.

The post Heavy Networking 442: The Source Of Truth Shall Set You Free (To Automate) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Announcing AMP Real URL

Announcing AMP Real URL
Announcing AMP Real URL

The promise of the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project was that it would make the web, and, in particular, the mobile web, much more pleasant to surf. The AMP HTML framework was designed to make web pages load quickly, and not distract the user with extraneous content that took them away from focusing on the web page’s content.

It was particularly aimed at publishers (such as news organizations) that wanted to provide the best, fastest web experience for readers catching up on news stories and in depth articles while on the move. It later became valuable for any site which values their mobile performance including e-commerce stores, job boards, and media sites.

As well as the AMP HTML framework, AMP also made use of caches that store copies of AMP content close to end users so that they load as quickly as possible. Although this cache make loading web pages much, much faster they introduce a problem: An AMP page served from Google’s cache has a URL starting with https://google.com/amp/. This can be incredibly confusing for end users.

Users have become used to looking at the navigation bar in a web browser to see what web site Continue reading

40 – DCNM 11.1 and VRF-Lite connection to an external Layer 3 Network

Another great feature supported by DCNM concerns the extension of Layer 3 connection across an external Layer 3 network using VRF-Lite hand-off from the Border leaf node toward the external Edge router.

There are different options to deploy a VRF-Lite connection to the outside of the VXLAN fabric. Either using a manual deployment or leveraging the auto-configuration process that will configure automatically the VRF-lite toward the Layer 3 network.

One of the key reasons for configuring the interfaces manually is when the Layer 3 network is managed by an external service provider, thus the Network team has no control on the configuration which is imposed by the Layer 3 service operator.

The first demo illustrates an end-to-end manual configuration of VRF-Lite connections from the Border leaf node to an external Edge router.

The Border leaf nodes being a vPC domain, the recommendation is to configure a interface per vPC peer device connecting the external Layer 3 network. As a result, I configured 1 “inter-fabric” type link per Border Gateway.

Prior to deploy the external VRF-lite, an external fabric must be created in which the concerned Edge router should be imported. For this particular scenario, because the Network team is not Continue reading

Campus design feature set-up : Part 1

Shared knowledge makes for a stronger ecosystem and with this in mind, I’m going to show you how to set up the CL 3.7.5 campus feature: Multi-Domain Authentication in a 6-part blog series. 

We’ll cover it all: Wired MAC Authentication using Aruba ClearPass, Multi-Domain Authentication using Aruba ClearPass, Wired 802.1x using Cisco ISE, Wired MAC Authentication using Cisco ISE, and Multi-Domain Authentication using Cisco ISE. 

The first guide I’ll be sharing is how to enable wired 802.1X authentication in Cumulus Linux 3.7.5+ using Aruba ClearPass 6.7.x. 

Keep in mind that this step-by-step guide assumes that you have already performed an initial setup of Aruba ClearPass.

Aruba ClearPass Configuration:

1. Add the Cumulus Switch to ClearPass

First, we are going to add this specific Cumulus Network switch to ClearPass. Go to the following:

Configuration > Network > Devices. Click “+Add” in the top right-hand corner

Fill in the appropriate IP Address, Description, and Shared Secrets. For simplicity sake, set the “Vendor Name” to “Cisco.”

2. Adding the Cumulus Switch to a Device Group

Configuration > Network  > Device Groups. Click “+Add” in the top right-hand corner

We are Continue reading

MySQL High Availability Framework Explained – Part III: Failover Scenarios

MySQL High Availability Framework Explained – Part III: Failover Scenarios

In this three-part blog series, we introduced a High Availability (HA) Framework for MySQL hosting in Part I, and discussed the details of MySQL semisynchronous replication in Part II. Now in Part III, we review how the framework handles some of the important MySQL failure scenarios and recovers to ensure high availability.

MySQL Failover Scenarios

Scenario 1 – Master MySQL Goes Down

  • The Corosync and Pacemaker framework detects that the master MySQL is no longer available. Pacemaker demotes the master resource and tries to recover with a restart of the MySQL service, if possible.
  • At this point, due to the semisynchronous nature of the replication, all transactions committed on the master have been received by at least one of the slaves.
  • Pacemaker waits until all the received transactions are applied on the slaves and lets the slaves report their promotion scores. The score calculation is done in such a way that the score is ‘0’ if a slave is completely in sync with the master, and is a negative number otherwise.
  • Pacemaker picks the slave that has reported the 0 score and promotes that slave which now assumes the role of master MySQL on which writes are allowed.
  • After Continue reading

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BrandPost: Two tools to help visualize and simplify your data-driven operations

Build the picture: Visualize your dataThe Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, smart technology, virtual reality – all these applications guarantee one thing for communications service providers (CSPs): more data.  As networks become increasingly overwhelmed by mounds of data, CSPs are on the hunt for ways to make the most of the intelligence collected and are looking for ways to monetize their services, provide more customizable offerings, and enhance their network performance.Customer analytics has gone some way towards fulfilling this need for greater insights, but with the rise in the volume and variety of consumer and IoT applications, the influx of data will increase at a phenomenal rate. The data includes not only customer-related data, but also device and network data, adding complexity to the picture. CSPs must harness this information to understand the relationships between any two things, to understand the connections within their data and to ultimately, leverage it for a better customer experience.To read this article in full, please click here

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