It’s Time for Another Pet Project

More than a decade ago I decided to start a pet project: a blog describing interesting details of networking technologies. The idea quickly morphed into vendor-neutral webinars - the first one took place in February 2010. A year or two later I had my first guest speaker and as of today we had more than 50 industry experts participating in ipSpace.net webinars and online courses.

In the meantime the ipSpace.net team grew: I had video and audio editors for years, Irena Marčetič took over marketing, logistics, and production in 2018, and we got a team of webinar moderators that will help us with guest speaker webinars (last week we ran the first guest speaker webinar where I didn’t have to be involved - hooray ;)

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Dell R610 Ubuntu 1804 Install Error

When attempting to install the Ubuntu 1804 server spin on a Dell R610 I use for labs I encountered an error. The image that is available from the main downloads page links to a live installer. When I tried to install from this image, the installer would crash and restart when trying to...

For ESXi: Realtek NICs Are Awful And Don’t Use Them

OK, this isn’t a really a controversial opinion. This is more as a guide for those who run into these problems when trying to setup their first whitebox/homelab systems for ESXi.

So it goes something like this: You’ve got an old desktop, gaming rig, or workstation. You decide you’ll retire it to your home data center (or basement, or laundry room) as a hypervisor. ESXi by itself (no vSphere controller) is free, and here’s how to download and get the license key.

For most desktop/workstation type of hardware, you can install ESXi from the general ESXi installer except for one aspect: Many of these types of systems use Realtek, Marvell, or other desktop/consumer grade NICs, and there’s not an ESXi driver for these. And for good reasons: They suck.

So you have the choice: Try to use a special custom ISO installer with the Realtek?Marvell/etc. driver loaded, or buy a different NIC. In most of IT, there’s usually more than one right answer, and a heaping dose of “it depends”. However, for this particular question (Realtek or buy another NIC) there’s only right right answer: Buy another NIC.

Realtek NICs suck. They don’t perform well, they’re a pain to Continue reading

Middle East Chapters Advocacy Meeting

Last month, the Chapters Advocacy Workshop for the Middle East, took place in Beirut Lebanon. The two-day event hosted Chapter leaders and representatives from  Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Palestine, Somalia, Syria, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. While the focus was on MANRS (Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security), it also included representatives from the Blockchain SIG (Special Interest Group).

During the two days, we discussed many issues related to the Middle East Chapters and their concerns, the 2019 plan of the Middle East Bureau, the strategic vision for the Internet Society, and the 2020 planning process. We acquired feedback from the delegates on our plans and community facing processes. We had ample staff representation that contributed immensely to the workshop, including, Sally Wentworth, Salam Yamout, Konstantinos Komaitis, Sally Harvey, Nermine El Saadany, and Aftab Siddiqui.

Aftab initiated the workshop with an introductory session on MANRS. He gave a technical breakdown on what MANRS is about before moving onto a hands-on workshop. The second day opened with an introduction to the 2020 Strategic Plan, followed by a PEST analysis led by Sally. Participants gave feedback on what’s important to their Chapters and to themselves as members Continue reading

Weekend Reads 052419

By any metric, the queries and responses that take place in the DNS are highly informative of the Internet and its use. But perhaps the level of interdependencies in this space is richer than we might think. —Geoff Huston

According to our researchers, the attackers either had access to the source code of the victims’ projects or they injected malware at the time of project compilation, meaning they were in the networks of those companies. And this reminds us of an attack that we reported on a year ago… —Kapersky

Endpoint security is a common concern among organizations, but security teams should be thinking more broadly about protecting data wherever it resides. —Kelly Sheridan

Two open source projects that have been instrumental in providing metrics for cloud native operations have merged into a single project. The fusion of Google’s OpenCensus and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s OpenTracing will be known as OpenTelemetry, and will be managed by the CNCF. —Joab Jackson

In a blog post published Tuesday, Google revealed that its G Suite platform mistakenly stored unhashed passwords of some of its enterprise users on internal servers in plaintext for 14 years because of a bug in the password recovery Continue reading

The Serverlist Newsletter: Connecting the Serverless Ecosystem

The Serverlist Newsletter: Connecting the Serverless Ecosystem

Check out our fifth edition of The Serverlist below. Get the latest scoop on the serverless space, get your hands dirty with new developer tutorials, engage in conversations with other serverless developers, and find upcoming meetups and conferences to attend.

Sign up below to have The Serverlist sent directly to your mailbox.

Heavy Networking 451: Intelligent Network Automation And Intent Engineering With Gluware (Sponsored)

On today's Heavy Networking, recorded live at Gluware Intent 19, the Packet Pushers dive into network automation, learn about sponsor Gluware's capability to bring automation into brownfield environments and derive business intent from existing networks, and explore real-world use cases from customers Merck and Terracon.

The post Heavy Networking 451: Intelligent Network Automation And Intent Engineering With Gluware (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Will Spectrum Hunger Kill Weather Forecasting?

If you are a fan of the work we do each week with our Gestalt IT Rundown on Facebook, you probably saw a story in this week’s episode about the race for 5G spectrum causing some potential problems with weather forecasting. I didn’t have the time to dig into the details behind the story on that episode, so I wanted to take a few minutes and explain why it’s such a big deal.

First, you have to know that 5G (and many other) speeds are entirely dependent upon the amount of spectrum they can use to communicate. The more spectrum available to them, the more channels they have available to communicate. Which increases the speed they can exchange information and reduces the amount of interference between devices. Sounds simple right?

Except mobile devices aren’t the only things that are using the spectrum. We have all kinds of other devices out there that use radio waves to communicate. We’ve known for several years that there are a lot of devices in the 5 GHz spectrum used by 802.11 that interfere with wireless devices. Things like ISM radios for industrial and medical applications or government radar systems. The government has instituted Continue reading

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